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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Winds Of Doctrine, by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Winds Of Doctrine
+       Studies in Contemporary Opinion
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: February 16, 2006 [EBook #17771]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDS OF DOCTRINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          WINDS OF DOCTRINE
+
+                             STUDIES IN
+                        CONTEMPORARY OPINION
+
+
+
+                                 BY
+
+                            G. SANTAYANA
+
+          LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+                  NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+                        FIRST PRINTED IN 1913
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+I. THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE
+
+II. MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
+
+III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON
+
+IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL--
+
+     i. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM
+
+     ii. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
+
+     iii. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM
+
+     iv. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS
+
+V. SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
+
+VI. THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+
+WINDS OF DOCTRINE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE
+
+
+The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The
+civilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet
+another civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand
+the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of
+our forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,
+sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and
+aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which
+rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of
+the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,
+cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the
+other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind
+of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future
+confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is
+saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an
+emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.
+
+These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is
+something positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our
+animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every
+vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we
+deprecate it; it has possession of us already through our
+propensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs
+are at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries
+are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they
+devote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has
+hold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as
+disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our
+day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what
+Goethe said of his successive love affairs--that it is sweet to see
+the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.
+
+Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often
+comfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labours
+long enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not
+particularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama
+and (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. The
+nations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known
+history. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fight
+and believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;
+the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,
+and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few
+demands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge
+together, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.
+The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the
+observer. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality and
+hearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.
+
+A chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is not
+limited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,
+but that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the average
+individual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so divided
+within themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, different
+classes of men have stood at different levels of culture, with a
+magnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for their
+respective principles. These militant believers have been keenly
+conscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers to
+them, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank
+negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life
+difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to
+understand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless
+under compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against
+their will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy
+blows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his
+side, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and
+exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that
+his faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a
+clear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or
+incompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his
+garden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.
+
+When men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and to
+count them. During the Reformation, when external confusion was at
+its height, you might have ascertained almost statistically what
+persons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was not
+doubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories
+and defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth
+century it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau
+might be alienating from Bossuet and Fénelon. But how shall we satisfy
+ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?
+Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself
+Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical
+theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,
+too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for
+philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,
+and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its
+accredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterly
+conventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to be
+as impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy in
+acquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have not
+been lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage their
+science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological
+scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid
+speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to
+abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been
+supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still
+call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over
+property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,
+and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and
+religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore
+eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who
+speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how
+many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is
+the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather
+lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and
+better men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now
+preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,
+to the instincts of the majority--the most cruel and unprogressive of
+masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatest
+happiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just or
+generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the
+largest possible population.
+
+Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It
+had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,
+an age whose real achievements were of international application, was
+destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.
+The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there
+is an extreme socialistic party that--when a wave of national passion
+does not carry it the other way--believes in international
+brotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally
+excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and
+political ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of
+late an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be
+everywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be
+galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,
+religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and
+denounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,
+when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to
+occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and
+hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and
+discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that
+the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part
+is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal
+business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.
+It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I
+mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for
+of course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language
+and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own
+is spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to
+which they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of
+shocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
+people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to
+them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural
+for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without
+a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to
+feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
+But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;
+like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis
+of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a
+flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
+Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
+perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.
+
+Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
+accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
+deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:
+namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,
+collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may
+therefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the
+principles that seem to rule their conduct, may be belated, or
+irrelevant, or premonitory; for the living organism has many strata,
+on any of which, at a given moment, activities may exist perfect
+enough to involve consciousness, yet too weak and isolated to control
+the organs of outer expression; so that (to speak geologically) our
+practice may be historic, our manners glacial, and our religion
+palæozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century may be said to have
+been all belated; the age still yearned with Rousseau or speculated
+with Kant, while it moved with Darwin, Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and
+to-day, in the half-educated classes, among the religious or
+revolutionary sects, we may observe quite modern methods of work
+allied with a somewhat antiquated mentality. The whole nineteenth
+century might well cry with Faust: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my
+bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it
+fall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because
+they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were
+historical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote
+forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,
+and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This
+sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
+sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking
+ahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and
+bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several
+incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in
+the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic
+sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an
+adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with
+dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the
+philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least
+idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)
+were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like
+Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and
+Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double
+preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know
+what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to
+hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived
+immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The
+imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was
+intent on reform.
+
+Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
+means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
+the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
+Usually the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and
+people break down some established form, without any qualms about the
+capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
+be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
+intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
+forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
+and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be
+laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
+creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that
+diffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should
+render it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust
+Mr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,
+or at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort
+to organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of
+barbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a
+danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an
+organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not
+buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised
+world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its
+existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different
+scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble
+within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped
+intellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the
+harmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and
+life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of
+reason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral order, or
+moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves
+unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.
+
+Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution
+the pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction
+of negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
+reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
+political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a
+clear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love
+of nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical
+attitude towards all the passions.
+
+In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
+still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
+thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have
+penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous
+constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and
+mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little
+sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and
+sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each
+naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half
+lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,
+and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism
+had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and
+despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a
+display of archaeological lore or for exotic _motifs_; others gave all
+their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of
+execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been
+abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they
+have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be
+some danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the
+artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
+religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to
+barbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic
+climaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better
+convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful
+observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,
+and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the
+crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think
+their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;
+no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any
+moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less
+talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often
+interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in
+their works.
+
+In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are
+always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and
+both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.
+Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and
+endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh
+movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its
+various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or
+pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of
+any organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic
+anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle
+upon which modern philosophy has been building--or unbuilding--for
+these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.
+Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that
+experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself
+the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the
+second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even
+those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had
+inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present
+experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our
+mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
+prophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental
+principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our
+imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and
+the ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have
+nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in
+the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
+enriching the flying moment æsthetically, or helping it to slip
+prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
+is the only reality, the only _fact_: if notions which do not
+reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they
+evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the
+word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of
+reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the
+letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor
+the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they
+lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.
+Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
+scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
+form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
+of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
+which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
+the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
+discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
+imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
+must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
+are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
+denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
+human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
+Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
+practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
+live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
+those of the universe.
+
+With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
+and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything
+in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious
+theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that
+goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of
+its pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
+knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.
+There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
+memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you
+will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
+alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the
+evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted
+with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never
+been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the
+uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave
+of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to
+be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,
+that oneself cannot be the absolute because the _idea_ of oneself, to
+arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well
+have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the _idea_ of
+yourself.
+
+[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
+not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
+anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify
+a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
+actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they
+existed, could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did
+not appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless
+both were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,
+idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences
+lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,
+according to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a
+human method of approach into a charter for existence and
+non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.
+When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the
+stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy
+consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of
+activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite
+proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he
+knows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars
+except his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It
+is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me
+and say his _higher_ self; but as his lower self is only the idea of
+himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
+himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really
+the higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]
+
+This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
+and confirms it; for all these _cans_ and _musts_ touch only your idea
+of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world
+that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded
+to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of
+the lady has to be changed.
+
+Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
+possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
+philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
+pole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
+action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had
+ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in
+general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
+contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
+the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
+there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
+consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
+good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
+the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
+creation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the
+unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its
+justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is
+the thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the
+passions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new
+sensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and
+words; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or love.
+The passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be
+said to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their
+objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or
+cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are
+rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,
+things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,
+by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that
+are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of
+a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral
+materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
+possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
+however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of
+blocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are
+capable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to
+take possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears
+under the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and
+evolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason
+could ever be.
+
+Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
+wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
+respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
+behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
+inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
+consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
+religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
+traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success
+by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really
+inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no
+difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end
+if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
+worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power
+is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and
+philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb
+religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or
+life are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is
+mighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival,
+however, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not
+afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life,
+according to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic;
+but according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and
+credulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate
+the individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary
+to declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh.
+In Italy, the mind seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute
+creator, evoking at will, at each moment, a new past, a new future, a
+new earth, and a new God. In America, however, the mind is recommended
+rather as an unpatented device for oiling the engine of the body and
+making it do double work.
+
+Trustful faith in evolution and a longing for intense life are
+characteristic of contemporary sentiment; but they do not appear to be
+consistent with that contempt for the intellect which is no less
+characteristic of it. Human intelligence is certainly a product, and
+a late and highly organised product, of evolution; it ought apparently
+to be as much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the antennae of ants.
+And if life is better the more intense and concentrated it is,
+intelligence would seem to be the best form of life. But the degree of
+intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable
+that, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs
+for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly
+distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as
+theology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_. It was only, M. Bergson
+tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to
+become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it
+touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would find it
+sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom
+in some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy is an
+effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and
+stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which
+it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion
+has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business
+and society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a
+mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their
+intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is
+essentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not
+free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety
+and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
+contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;
+they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct
+or dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the
+ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the longing
+to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To
+be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was
+really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one
+seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by
+the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.
+Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to
+enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of
+living consisted in dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was
+loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its
+beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own
+fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a
+substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in
+sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more
+indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to
+which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be meaner than the
+anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with
+any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit
+with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days men
+recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
+those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
+Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive
+and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life,
+and more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking
+of the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged
+to regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us
+from somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must
+bathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives
+in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the
+mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince
+us that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of
+being alive.
+
+When chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they
+can hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be
+virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a
+distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things,
+something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he
+clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in
+the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we
+were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in
+humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a
+mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation
+admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it
+conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as
+when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when
+nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. Or
+perhaps it makes an unprecedented harmony out of things existing
+before, but jangled and detached. The first man was a great man for
+this latter reason; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his
+multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by
+harnessing all those instincts together, through memory and
+imagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is
+what we call being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you
+have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that
+sway you in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to
+one attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do
+the same thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr
+destroys the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the
+rest of us; and although his private inspiration may be irrational,
+the tendency of it is not, but reduces the public conscience to act
+before any one else has had the courage to do so. Greatness is
+spontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are
+essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the
+direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave
+behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there
+be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in
+an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason,
+in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness
+has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and
+perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.
+
+There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of
+mind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current
+phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth
+of a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But
+such largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,
+comprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany
+were not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of
+things the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted,
+and by no means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his
+part. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of
+everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not
+disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are
+chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the
+Babel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may
+be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in
+their places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without
+feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths
+are obscure. Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they
+might merely make him blind, and it may be a sufficient understanding
+of them to know that they are not worth investigating. In this way the
+most chaotic age and the most motley horrors might be mirrored
+limpidly in a great mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works
+of Raphael and Shakespeare; but the master's eye itself must be
+single, his style unmistakable, his visionary interest in what he
+depicts frank and supreme. Hence this comprehensive sort of greatness
+too is impossible in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when
+characters are complex, undecided, troubled by the mere existence of
+what is not congenial to them, eager to be not themselves; when, in a
+word, thought is weak and the flux of things overwhelms it.
+
+Without great men and without clear convictions this age is
+nevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical,
+inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite
+openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has
+gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these
+circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive
+achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are
+the _Wanderjahre_ of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face,
+which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after
+any engaging stranger; it even turns up again from time to time at
+home, full of a new tenderness for all it had abandoned there. But to
+settle down would be impossible now. The intellect, the judgment are
+in abeyance. Life is running turbid and full; and it is no marvel that
+reason, after vainly supposing that it ruled the world, should
+abdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously the
+sport of cruder powers--vested interests, tribal passions, stock
+sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no responsibility laid upon
+it, reason has become irresponsible. Many critics and philosophers
+seem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes
+reason tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters, by
+proving how superior they are to itself; it worships evolution,
+instinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism, pragmatism, and
+the philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires into the
+freehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised, the
+region of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable
+conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way
+which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)
+although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to
+perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals
+and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,
+perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the
+sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb
+all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to
+clearness and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its
+own moral and intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.
+
+These are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not
+dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows
+which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the
+coming age steadily before it?
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
+
+
+Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the
+cloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of
+history and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the
+present age; and under the name of modernism they have made their
+appearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most
+stable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective
+memory or established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after
+this church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by
+the gradual exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than
+explicit orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or
+spirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics
+to share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to
+reconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these
+cross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was
+changed frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;
+but even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds
+of each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the
+_Zeitgeist_. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of
+foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with
+the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the
+system of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric
+and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was
+accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;
+but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet
+lodged in the flesh. In more recent times we have heard of liberal
+Catholicism, the attitude assumed by some generous but divided minds,
+too much attached to their traditional religion to abandon it, but too
+weak and too hopeful not to glow also with enthusiasm for modern
+liberty and progress. Had those minds been, I will not say
+intelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt
+that this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress
+not an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless
+and heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its essence and origin,
+was an urgent summons to repent and come out of just such a worldly
+life as modern liberty and progress hold up as an ideal to the
+nations. In the Roman empire, as in the promised land of liberalism,
+each man sought to get and to enjoy as much as he could, and supported
+a ponderous government neutral as to religion and moral traditions,
+but favourable to the accumulation of riches; so that a certain
+enlightenment and cosmopolitanism were made possible, and private
+passions and tastes could be gratified without encountering
+persecution or public obloquy, though not without a general relaxation
+of society and a vulgarising of arts and manners. That something so
+self-indulgent and worldly as this ideal of liberalism could have been
+thought compatible with Christianity, the first initiation into which,
+in baptism, involves renouncing the world, might well astonish us,
+had we not been rendered deaf to moral discords by the very din which
+from our birth they have been making in our ears.
+
+But this is not all. Primitive Christianity was not only a summons to
+turn one's heart and mind away from a corrupt world; it was a summons
+to do so under pain of instant and terrible punishment. It was the
+conviction of pious Jews since the days of the Prophets that
+mercilessness, avarice, and disobedience to revealed law were the
+direct path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against
+which St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of
+destruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the
+ancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend
+on it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be
+overthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the
+remnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life
+in the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to
+fast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the
+kingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take
+thought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a
+new earth--far more worthy of study--would be unrolled before that
+very generation.
+
+There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,
+and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism
+possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,
+pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.
+But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and
+governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,
+and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some
+of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and
+moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the
+church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the
+English church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply
+aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should
+remain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable
+measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were
+liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such
+persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from
+the tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they
+were nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of
+any sort was most painful to their minds. They longed rather for a
+sweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost
+everything. A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for
+nationality glorious and holy. No wonder that their work in
+nation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are
+scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were
+willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its
+vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent
+before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism
+which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of
+national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is
+fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less
+power to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan
+society in which they are forced to live.
+
+The question what is true or essential Christianity is a thorny one,
+because each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it
+happens to believe. Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less
+distinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity
+coincide--what a miracle!--with his own Lutheran and Kantian
+sentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is
+the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well
+expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by
+what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the
+modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a
+matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.
+Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less
+intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most
+primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole
+man--intellect, habits, and affections--from the life of the world to
+a new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about
+destiny. The moral summons was to renounce home, kindred, possessions,
+the respect of men, the hypocrisies of the synagogue, and to devote
+oneself to a wandering and begging life, healing, praying, and
+preaching. And preaching what? Preaching the prophecy about destiny
+which justified that conversion and renunciation; preaching that the
+world, in its present constitution, was about to be destroyed on
+account of its wickedness, and that the ignorant, the poor, and the
+down-trodden, if they trusted this prophecy, and turned their backs at
+once on all the world pursues, would be saved in the new deluge, and
+would form a new society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be
+raised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called,
+but the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there
+was in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of
+speculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of
+goodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched
+and depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of
+goodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous incubus
+of circumstance that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly
+as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could
+bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and
+diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice
+of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the
+interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a
+cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world--such was
+Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled
+with the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a
+special hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye
+fixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as
+of serving the state; he despised or ignored everything for which the
+state exists, labour, wealth, power, felicity, splendour, and
+learning. With Christ the natural man in him had been crucified, and
+in Christ he had risen again a spiritual man, to walk the earth, as a
+messenger from heaven, for a few more years. His whole life was an
+experience of perpetual graces and miracles.
+
+The prophecy about the speedy end of this wicked world was not
+fulfilled as the early Christians expected; but this fact is less
+disconcerting to the Christian than one would suppose. The spontaneous
+or instinctive Christian--and there is such a type of mind, quite
+apart from any affiliation to historic Christianity--takes a personal
+and dramatic view of the world; its values and even its reality are
+the values and reality which it may have for him. It would profit him
+nothing to win it, if he lost his own soul. That prophecy about the
+destruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be
+subservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the
+prophet and vindicate the saints. That the years should pass and
+nothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this
+prophecy for those whose imagination it excites. This world must
+actually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of
+view that counts with the Christian mind. Even if we consider
+posterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are
+short lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their
+substance. The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being
+fulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved,
+is truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an
+operation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the
+experience of each soul, is to follow upon it. Thus the summons to
+repent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of
+Christianity, can fully retain their spirit when for "this wicked
+world" we read "this transitory life" and for "the coming of the
+Kingdom" we read "life everlasting." The change is important, but it
+affects the application rather than the nature of the gospel. Morally
+there is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns
+another life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other
+hand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations
+and millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation
+of the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there
+will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling
+that the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in
+store.
+
+What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would
+be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has
+happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in
+another. A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of
+events to be actually experienced, and of their causes. The whole
+inspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that. It was not
+metaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. The promised
+land was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was
+not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it
+returned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah
+was to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;
+prophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too
+is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too
+is a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that
+speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in
+the religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one
+which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may
+extend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical
+science should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin
+which Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what
+brings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,
+idle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then
+physical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with
+this or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or
+the dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ
+himself, with John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. James, and St. John,
+preached to the world.
+
+Even the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it
+for a fact. What really lent some truth--moral truth only--to their
+imaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or
+the groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether
+millstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their
+pictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the
+unseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
+experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult
+existences, how much more must this have been the case among a more
+ignorant and a more intense nation like the Jews? Indeed, _events_ are
+what the Jews have always remembered and hoped for; if their religion
+was not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive and
+experimental salvation, it was nothing. Their theology was meagre in
+the description of the Lord's nature, but rich in the description of
+his ways. Indeed, their belief in the existence and power of the Lord,
+if we take it pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the
+belief in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency of
+conduct of a certain sort to secure success and good fortune, both
+national and personal. This faith was partly an experience and partly
+a demand; it turned on history and prophecy. History was interpreted
+by a prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to govern
+it; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration of the same
+principles, at work in the catastrophes of the day or of the morrow.
+
+There is no doubt a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal
+apart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into
+the life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they
+were, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the
+Platonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in
+attributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and
+imaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because
+it is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the
+world from the story of salvation, and God's government and the
+sanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a _fundamental
+apostasy_ from Christianity. Christianity, being a practical and
+living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the
+punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most
+brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a
+faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind,
+within, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the
+destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that
+failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble
+faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our
+point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical,
+physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in
+our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but
+were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite
+for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and
+the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the
+intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It
+flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all
+existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at
+the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by
+the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the
+cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread,
+from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for
+prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly
+comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.
+
+It is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort, which might
+wholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can never wholly inspire human
+society. Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its
+Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted into paganism.
+The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger; not
+his kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who is in heaven
+is his brother and sister and mother and his real compatriot. In a
+nation that calls itself Christian every child may be pledged, at
+baptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the
+flesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,
+and the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a
+family, will form an integral part of that very world which he will
+pledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the
+font. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the
+Christian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite
+another. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
+only superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element
+can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for
+instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what
+seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?
+Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless
+rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
+regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a
+dawning of all sorts of scientific and æsthetic passions, in
+themselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel.
+Christendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it
+was a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or
+less Christian. We may see the same thing under different
+circumstances in the Spain of Philip II. Here was a government
+consciously labouring in the service of the church, to resist Turks,
+convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants. Yet the very
+forces engaged in defending the church, the army and the Inquisition,
+were alien to the Christian life; they were fit embodiments rather of
+chivalry and greed, or of policy and jealous dominion. The
+ecclesiastical forces also, theology, ritual, and hierarchy, employed
+in spreading the gospel were themselves alien to the gospel. An
+anti-worldly religion finds itself in fact in this dilemma: if it
+remains merely spiritual, developing no material organs, it cannot
+affect the world; while if it develops organs with which to operate on
+the world, these organs become a part of the world from which it is
+trying to wean the individual spirit, so that the moment it is armed
+for conflict such a religion has two enemies on its hands. It is
+stifled by its necessary armour, and adds treason in its members to
+hostility in its foes. The passions and arts it uses against its
+opponents are as fatal to itself as those which its opponents array
+against it.
+
+In every age in which a supernaturalistic system is preached we must
+accordingly expect to find the world standing up stubbornly against
+it, essentially unconverted and hostile, whatever name it may have
+been christened with; and we may expect the spirit of the world to
+find expression, not only in overt opposition to the supernaturalistic
+system, but also in the surviving or supervening worldliness of the
+faithful. Such an insidious revulsion of the natural man against a
+religion he does not openly discard is what, in modern Christendom, we
+call the Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the later
+open rebellion against the same traditions) the Renaissance is
+radically inimical to Christianity. To say that Christianity survives,
+even if weakened or disestablished, is to say that the Renaissance and
+the Revolution are still incomplete, Far from being past events they
+are living programmes. The ideal of the Renaissance is to restore
+pagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy, in sentiment, and
+in morals. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.
+Instead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance
+accept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;
+they believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
+perfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect
+it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the
+flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty
+and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil--if we understand
+by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its
+autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart
+and will in morals--the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the
+devil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in
+nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical
+and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
+religion of the gospel.
+
+"I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet
+so wonderfully strange--Cæsar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
+Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing
+to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche
+goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,
+which was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its
+mellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid
+Christianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than
+Nietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic or
+neo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have
+worked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual
+rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have
+been insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles
+nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure
+literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative
+convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function
+simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance.
+The Reformation prevented this euthanasia of Christianity. It
+re-expressed the unenlightened absolutism of the old religion; it
+insisted that dogma was scientifically true, that salvation was urgent
+and fearfully doubtful, that the world, and the worldly paganised
+church, were as Sodom and Gomorrah, and that sin, though natural to
+man, was to God an abomination. In fighting this movement, which soon
+became heretical, the Catholic church had to fight it with its own
+weapons, and thereby reawakened in its own bosom the same sinister
+convictions. It did not have to dig deep to find them. Even without
+Luther, convinced Catholics would have appeared in plenty to prevent
+Cæsar Borgia, had he secured the tiara, from being pope in any novel
+fashion or with any revolutionary result. The supernaturalism, the
+literal realism, the other-worldliness of the Catholic church are too
+much the soul of it to depart without causing its dissolution. While
+the church lives at all, it must live on the strength which these
+principles can lend it. And they are not altogether weak. Persons who
+feel themselves to be exiles in this world--and what noble mind, from
+Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?--are mightily inclined to
+believe themselves citizens of another. There will always be
+spontaneous, instinctive Christians; and when, under the oppression of
+sin, salvation is looked for and miracles are expected, the
+supernatural scheme of salvation which historical Christianity offers
+will not always be despised. The modernists think the church is doomed
+if it turns a deaf ear to the higher criticism or ignores the
+philosophy of M. Bergson. But it has outlived greater storms. A moment
+when any exotic superstition can find excitable minds to welcome it,
+when new and grotesque forms of faith can spread among the people,
+when the ultimate impotence of science is the theme of every cheap
+philosopher, when constructive philology is reefing its sails, when
+the judicious grieve at the portentous metaphysical shams of yesterday
+and smile at those of to-day--such a moment is rather ill chosen for
+prophesying the extinction of a deep-rooted system of religion because
+your own studies make it seem to you incredible; especially if you
+hold a theory of knowledge that regards all opinions as arbitrary
+postulates, which it may become convenient to abandon at any moment.
+
+Modernism is the infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic
+and wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the
+rationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other
+modern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms.
+The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is
+creditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as
+Catholics; for what makes them adopt the views of rationalistic
+historians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance,
+convincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental
+speculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their
+faith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may
+lead them. A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of
+history, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these are the
+motives, creditable to any spiritual man, that have made modernists of
+so many. But these excellent things appear in the modernists under
+rather unfortunate circumstances. For the modernists to begin with are
+Catholics, and usually priests; they are pledged to a fixed creed,
+touching matters both of history and of philosophy; and it would be a
+marvel if rationalistic criticism of the Bible and rationalistic
+church history confirmed that creed on its historical side, or if
+irresponsible personal speculations, in the manner of Ritschl or of M.
+Bergson, confirmed its metaphysics.
+
+I am far from wishing to suggest that an orthodox Christian cannot be
+scrupulously honest in admitting the probable facts, or cannot have a
+fresh spiritual experience, or frame an original philosophy. But what
+we think probable hangs on our standard of probability and of
+evidence; the spiritual experiences that come to us are according to
+our disposition and affections; and any new philosophy we frame will
+be an answer to the particular problems that beset us, and an
+expression of the solutions we hope for. Now this standard of
+probability, this disposition, and these problems and hopes may be
+those of a Christian or they may not. The true Christian, for
+instance, will begin by regarding miracles as probable; he will either
+believe he has experienced them in his own person, or hope for them
+earnestly; nothing will seem to him more natural, more in consonance
+with the actual texture of life, than that they should have occurred
+abundantly and continuously in the past. When he finds the record of
+one he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record
+could have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,
+in spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed
+assurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps
+could be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We
+might say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its
+origin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by
+our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
+miracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
+can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
+movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
+is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
+fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
+cannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but
+we could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then
+expect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism
+are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his
+Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add
+that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that
+practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make
+instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond
+the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,
+machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the
+love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
+
+Similarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new
+philosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems
+in them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh
+intuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign
+of originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid
+or on heaven like Mohammed, or stop discoursing on them at all; it
+would be a sign of apostasy.
+
+Now the modernists' criterion of probability in history or of
+worthiness in philosophy is not the Christian criterion. It is that of
+their contemporaries outside the church, who are rationalists in
+history and egotists or voluntarists in philosophy. The biblical
+criticism and mystical speculations of the modernists call for no
+special remark; they are such as any studious or spiritual person,
+with no inherited religion, might compose in our day. But what is
+remarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they
+should have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this
+non-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to
+the Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are
+particularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of
+history, of theology, and of the world.
+
+Everything, however, has its explanation. In a Catholic seminary, as
+the modernists bitterly complain, very little is heard of the views
+held in the learned world outside. It is not taught there that the
+Christian religion is only one of many, some of them older and
+superior to it in certain respects; that it itself is eclectic and
+contains inward contradictions; that it is and always has been divided
+into rancorous sects; that its position in the world is precarious and
+its future hopeless. On the contrary, everything is so presented as to
+persuade the innocent student that all that is good or true anywhere
+is founded on the faith he is preparing to preach, that the historical
+evidences of its truth are irrefragable, that it is logically perfect
+and spiritually all-sufficing. These convictions, which no breath from
+the outside is allowed to ruffle, are deepened in the case of pensive
+and studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own
+religious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,
+perhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas
+originated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.
+This (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of
+disillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider
+basis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing
+here; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be
+enlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself
+many diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of
+thought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and
+other types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be
+progressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.
+
+This insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No doubt it gives him
+a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the
+acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton
+information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,
+expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national
+hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy
+of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,
+render these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal
+expressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,
+provided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that
+the world is made for man, and that even God is just such a God as man
+would have wished him to be, the existent ideal of human nature and
+the foregone solution to all human problems. Nevertheless, Christian
+dogmas are definite,[2] while human inspirations are potentially
+limitless; and if the object of the two is identical either the dogmas
+must be stretched and ultimately abandoned, or inspiration which does
+not conform to them must be denounced as illusory or diabolical.
+
+[Footnote 2: At least in their devotional and moral import. I suggest
+this qualification in deference to M. Le Roy's interesting theory of
+dogma, viz., that the verbal or intellectual definition of a dogma may
+be changed without changing the dogma itself (as a sentence might be
+translated into a new language without altering the meaning) provided
+the suggested conduct and feeling in the presence of the mystery
+remained the same. Thus the definition of transubstantiation might be
+modified to suit an idealistic philosophy, but the new definition
+would be no less orthodox than the old if it did not discourage the
+worship of the consecrated elements or the sense of mystical union
+with Christ in the sacrament.]
+
+At this point the modernist first chooses the path which must lead him
+away, steadily and for ever, from the church which he did not think to
+desert. He chooses a personal, psychological, variable standard of
+inspiration; he becomes, in principle, a Protestant. Why does he not
+become one in name also? Because, as one of the most distinguished
+modernists has said, the age of partial heresy is past. It is suicidal
+to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking
+another part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand
+firmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what
+you challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the
+pope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and
+then the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against
+the New Testament, or God revealed in nature against God revealed in
+the Bible, or God revealed in your own conscience or transcendental
+self against God revealed in nature; and you will be lucky if your
+conscience and transcendental self can long hold their own against the
+flux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be
+taken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol
+for the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace
+and express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and
+follow it on all sides in its vital development. But if the age of
+partial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?
+What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience
+interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would
+embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in
+religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes
+him a strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is
+the prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that
+all human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by
+trusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular
+religion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,
+together with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound
+ignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,
+only in grotesque caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted
+in them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a
+derivation from it--a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have
+wholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of
+professors of philosophy. I need not observe how completely the secret
+of each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent
+outraged: the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this
+unconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of
+what, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is. He feels
+himself full of love--except for the pope--of mysticism, and of a sort
+of archaeological piety. He is learned and eloquent and wistful. Why
+should he not remain in the church? Why should he not bring all its
+cold and recalcitrant members up to his own level of insight?
+
+The modernist, like the Protestants before him, is certainly justified
+in contrasting a certain essence or true life of religion with the
+formulas and practices, not all equally well-chosen, which have
+crystallised round it. In the routine of Catholic teaching and worship
+there is notoriously a deal of mummery: phrases and ceremonies abound
+that have lost their meaning, and that people run through without even
+that general devout attitude and unction which, after all, is all that
+can be asked for in the presence of mysteries. Not only is all sense
+of the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma
+itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock
+phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium.
+Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would
+be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is
+that "Scholasticism" and "Mediævalism" against which the modernists
+inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness
+may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice
+which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and
+pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for
+historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists
+to contrast with the official religion what was pure and vital in the
+religion of their fathers. Like the early Protestants, they wish to
+revert to a more genuine Christianity; but while their historical
+imagination is much more accurate and well-fed than that of any one in
+the sixteenth century could be, they have no hold on the Protestant
+principle of faith. The Protestants, taking the Bible as an oracle
+which personal inspiration was to interpret, could reform tradition in
+any way and to any extent which their reason or feeling happened to
+prompt. But so long as their Christianity was a positive faith, the
+residue, when all the dross had been criticised and burned away, was
+of divine authority. The Bible never became for them merely an
+ancient Jewish encyclopædia, often eloquent, often curious, and often
+barbarous. God never became a literary symbol, covering some
+problematical cosmic force, or some ideal of the conscience. But for
+the modernist this total transformation takes place at once. He keeps
+the whole Catholic system, but he believes in no part of it as it
+demands to be believed. He understands and shares the moral experience
+that it enshrines; but the bubble has been pricked, the painted world
+has been discovered to be but painted. He has ceased to be a Christian
+to become an amateur, or if you will a connoisseur, of Christianity.
+He believes--and this unquestioningly, for he is a child of his
+age--in history, in philology, in evolution, perhaps in German
+idealism; he does not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in
+revelation. His study of history has disclosed Christianity to him in
+its evolution and in its character of a myth; he wishes to keep it in
+its entirety precisely because he regards it as a convention, like a
+language or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the
+contrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly
+supposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.
+Modernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing. It is the
+love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.
+It is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has
+discovered that he is a pagan.
+
+When the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double
+allegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological
+criticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while
+the Christian dogmas touching these things--the incarnation and
+resurrection of Christ, for instance--must be taken in a purely
+symbolic or moral sense. In saying this they may be entirely right; it
+seems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of
+meaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth
+there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of
+little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of
+all religions, is to be found in its _moral idealism_, I mean, in the
+expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries,
+of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a
+moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what
+it is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic
+rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity
+is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the
+pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of
+salvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment,
+from hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the
+Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons
+and the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have
+lost all force for it and become fables.
+
+The modernist, then, starts with the orthodox but untenable persuasion
+that Catholicism comprehends all that is good; he adds the heterodox
+though amiable sentiment that any well-meaning ambition of the mind,
+any hope, any illumination, any science, must be good, and therefore
+compatible with Catholicism. He bathes himself in idealistic
+philosophy, he dabbles in liberal politics, he accepts and emulates
+rationalistic exegesis and anti-clerical church history. Soon he finds
+himself, on every particular point, out of sympathy with the acts and
+tendencies of the church to which he belongs; and then he yields to
+the most pathetic of his many illusions--he sets about to purge this
+church, so as not to be compelled to abandon it; to purge it of its
+first principles, of its whole history, and of its sublime if
+chimerical ideal.
+
+The modernist wishes to reconcile the church and the world. Therein he
+forgets what Christianity came into the world to announce and why its
+message was believed. It came to announce salvation from the world;
+there should be no more need of just those things which the modernist
+so deeply loves and respects and blushes that his church should not be
+adorned with--emancipated science, free poetic religion, optimistic
+politics, and dissolute art. These things, according to the Christian
+conscience, were all vanity and vexation of spirit, and the pagan
+world itself almost confessed as much. They were vexatious and vain
+because they were bred out of sin, out of ignoring the inward and the
+revealed law of God; and they would lead surely and quickly to
+destruction. The needful salvation from these follies, Christianity
+went on to announce, had come through the cross of Christ; whose
+grace, together with admission to his future heavenly kingdom, was
+offered freely to such as believed in him, separated themselves from
+the world, and lived in charity, humility, and innocence, waiting lamp
+in hand for the celestial bridegroom. These abstracted and elected
+spirits were the true disciples of Christ and the church itself.
+
+Having no ears for this essential message of Christianity, the
+modernist also has no eyes for its history. The church converted the
+world only partially and inessentially; yet Christianity was outwardly
+established as the traditional religion of many nations. And why?
+Because, although the prophecies it relied on were strained and its
+miracles dubious, it furnished a needful sanctuary from the shames,
+sorrows, injustices, violence, and gathering darkness of earth; and
+not only a sanctuary one might fly to, but a holy precinct where one
+might live, where there was sacred learning, based on revelation and
+tradition, to occupy the inquisitive, and sacred philosophy to occupy
+the speculative; where there might be religious art, ministering to
+the faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister,
+transformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness,
+and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become
+those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an
+ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the
+Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and
+they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect
+development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
+Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
+apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give
+out the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,
+but nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of
+it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolution. It is
+not a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of
+something latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
+instruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there
+was an immense development of Christianity during the first three
+centuries, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever
+since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have
+refused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches
+have eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the
+preservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst
+of so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands
+the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in
+another world. The _mise-en-scène_ has changed immensely. The gospel
+has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
+in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a
+gilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel
+has been preserved by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated
+fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater
+resemblance to the apostles in his outer situation than the pope does;
+but what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the
+natural world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the
+blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the inferiority of natural
+human bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full
+of pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this. It is here, and
+certainly not among the modernists, that the gospel is still believed.
+
+Of course, it is open to any one to say that there is a nobler
+religion possible without these trammels and this officialdom, that
+there is a deeper philosophy than this supernaturalistic rationalism,
+that there is a sweeter life than this legal piety. Perhaps: I think
+the pagan Greeks, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans would have much to
+say for themselves before the impartial tribunal of human nature and
+reason. But they are not Christians and do not wish to be. No more, in
+their hearts, are the modernists, and they should feel it beneath
+their dignity to pose as such; indeed the more sensitive of them
+already feel it. To say they are not Christians at heart, but
+diametrically opposed to the fundamental faith and purpose of
+Christianity, is not to say they may not be profound mystics (as many
+Hindus, Jews, and pagan Greeks have been), or excellent scholars, or
+generous philanthropists. But the very motive that attaches them to
+Christianity is worldly and un-Christian. They wish to preserve the
+continuity of moral traditions; they wish the poetry of life to flow
+down to them uninterruptedly and copiously from all the ages. It is an
+amiable and wise desire; but it shows that they are men of the
+Renaissance, pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiment, to
+whom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive
+just because it presupposes that Christianity is true.
+
+Yet even in this historical and poetical allegiance to Christianity I
+suspect the modernists suffer from a serious illusion. They think the
+weakness of the church lies in its not following the inspirations of
+the age. But when this age is past, might not that weakness be a
+source of strength again? For an idea ever to be fashionable is
+ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. No doubt it
+would be dishonest in any of us now, who see clearly that Noah surely
+did not lead all the animals two by two into the Ark, to say that we
+believe he did so, on the ground that stories of that kind are rather
+favourable to the spread of religion. No doubt such a story, and even
+the fables essential to Christian theology, are now incredible to most
+of us. But on the other hand it would be stupid to assume that what is
+incredible to you or me now must always be incredible to mankind. What
+was foolishness to the Greeks of St. Paul's day spread mightily among
+them one or two hundred years later; and what is foolishness to the
+modernist of to-day may edify future generations. The imagination is
+suggestible and there is nothing men will not believe in matters of
+religion. These rational persuasions by which we are swayed, the
+conventions of unbelieving science and unbelieving history, are
+superficial growths; yesterday they did not exist, to-morrow they may
+have disappeared. This is a doctrine which the modernist philosophers
+themselves emphasise, as does M. Bergson, whom some of them follow,
+and say the Catholic church itself ought to follow in order to be
+saved--for prophets are constitutionally without a sense of humour.
+These philosophers maintain that intelligence is merely a convenient
+method of picking one's way through the world of matter, that it is a
+falsification of life, and wholly unfit to grasp the roots of it. We
+may well be of another opinion, if we think the roots of life are not
+in consciousness but in nature, which intelligence alone can reveal;
+but we must agree that in life itself intelligence is a superficial
+growth, and easily blighted, and that the experience of the vanity of
+the world, of sin, of salvation, of miracles, of strange revelations,
+and of mystic loves is a far deeper, more primitive, and therefore
+probably more lasting human possession than is that of clear
+historical or scientific ideas.
+
+Now religious experience, as I have said, may take other forms than
+the Christian, and within Christianity it may take other forms than
+the Catholic; but the Catholic form is as good as any intrinsically
+for the devotee himself, and it has immense advantages over its
+probable rivals in charm, in comprehensiveness, in maturity, in
+internal rationality, in external adaptability; so much so that a
+strong anti-clerical government, like the French, cannot safely leave
+the church to be overwhelmed by the forces of science, good sense,
+ridicule, frivolity, and avarice (all strong forces in France), but
+must use violence as well to do it. In the English church, too, it is
+not those who accept the deluge, the resurrection, and the sacraments
+only as symbols that are the vital party, but those who accept them
+literally; for only these have anything to say to the poor, or to the
+rich, that can refresh them. In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight
+clericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of
+the church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the
+world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying
+in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will
+be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the
+past. As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those
+concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and
+double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a
+mortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that
+everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON
+
+
+The most representative and remarkable of living philosophers is M.
+Henri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract
+universal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in
+form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and
+mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of
+science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be
+secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems
+to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is
+eloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has
+received and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent
+than he is. He uses the French language (and little else is French
+about him) in the manner of the more recent artists in words,
+retaining the precision of phrase and the measured judgments which are
+traditional in French literature, yet managing to envelop everything
+in a penumbra of emotional suggestion. Each expression of an idea is
+complete in itself; yet these expressions are often varied and
+constantly metaphorical, so that we are led to feel that much in that
+idea has remained unexpressed and is indeed inexpressible.
+
+Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less
+elaborate in his learning. In the history of philosophy, in
+mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has
+taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and
+spirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an
+expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality
+and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine
+historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the
+views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in
+interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever
+thought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as
+persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian
+insight. The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to
+exercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things. First
+the evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which
+is true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values;
+as modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does
+not exactly crown it. The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume
+that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out
+of: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very
+unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own
+opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when
+it is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be
+established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had
+the last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for
+instance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the
+dramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of
+reconstructing history was, on the surface, very sympathetic. He too,
+like M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at
+every turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially
+if this was a philosophical attitude or temper. Yet in reality his
+historical judgments were forced and brutal: Greece was but a
+stepping-stone to Prussia, Plato and Spinoza found their higher
+synthesis in himself, and (though he may not say so frankly) Jesus
+Christ and St. Francis realised their better selves in Luther. Actual
+spiritual life, the thoughts, affections, and pleasures of
+individuals, passed with Hegel for so much moonshine; the true spirit
+was "objective," it was simply the movement of those circumstances in
+which actual spirit arose. He was accordingly contemptuous of
+everything intrinsically good, and his idealism consisted in forcing
+the natural world into a formula of evolution and then worshipping it
+as the embodiment of the living God. But under the guise of optimism
+and belief in a cosmic reason this is mere idolatry of success--a
+malign superstition, by which all moral independence is crushed out
+and conscience enslaved to chronology; and it is no marvel if,
+somewhat to relieve this subjection, history in turn was expurgated,
+marshalled, and distorted, that it might pass muster for the work of
+the Holy Ghost.
+
+In truth the value of spiritual life is intrinsic and centred at every
+point. It is never wholly recoverable. To recover it at all, an
+historian must have a certain detachment and ingenuousness; knowing
+the dignity and simplicity of his own mind, he must courteously
+attribute the same dignity and simplicity to others, unless their
+avowed attitude prevents; this is to be an intelligent critic and to
+write history like a gentleman. The truth, which all philosophers
+alike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to
+another; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the
+better. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;
+else nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and
+ultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and
+excellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that
+tests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving
+upward or downward or in a circle.
+
+M. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order
+utterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be
+open to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it
+"_retardent sur Kant;_" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,
+and he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was
+a hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a
+great many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of
+departure, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of
+progress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,
+Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric
+and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,
+which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,
+thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one
+might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English
+malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that
+the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of
+being the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of
+Protestantism that, in groping after that moral freedom which is so
+ineradicable a need of a pure spirit, thought to find it in a revision
+of revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to
+these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental,
+and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all
+humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits
+are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted
+bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which
+his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of
+time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that
+all previous systems empty into it, which is hardly true, and that all
+future systems must flow out of it, which is hardly necessary.
+
+The embarrassment that qualifies M. Bergson's attainments in
+mathematics and physics has another and more personal source. He
+understands, but he trembles. Non-human immensities frighten him, as
+they did Pascal. He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We
+might think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity
+to move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.
+But M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy
+deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,
+that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is
+that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He
+dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous
+and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in
+_Auseinandersein_. This would be a real death and petrifaction of
+consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite
+void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and
+succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or
+hearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,
+with the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards
+through time, in a word, the more personal and historical the
+apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to
+what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find
+they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human
+prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a
+plea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have
+stolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a
+certain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and
+sting the hated oppressor, as if some desperate small being were at
+bay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of
+mathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the
+intellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of
+nothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a
+philosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen
+his sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman
+of many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity and animal illusion are
+deep in the heart of all of us. Practice may compel us to bow to the
+conventions of the intellect, as to those of polite society; but
+secretly, in our moments of immersion in ourselves, we may find them
+a great nuisance, even a vain nightmare. Could we only listen
+undisturbed to the beat of protoplasm in our hearts, would not that
+oracle solve all the riddles of the universe, or at least avoid them?
+
+To protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the
+mystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground. If he
+refuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might
+be accused of ignorance of the subject. He will therefore study it
+conscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done
+with it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology. Such a
+student, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free
+inquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed
+of its form, but of its nature and value. Why, for instance, has M.
+Bergson such a horror of mechanical physics? He seems to think it a
+black art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to
+salvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes
+always at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul. But
+physical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly
+absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must
+worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a
+mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor
+does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the
+whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its
+sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the
+calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that
+events have other aspects--the psychic and the moral, for
+instance--no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation
+would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable
+elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
+given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
+it is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our
+life. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine
+any man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that
+true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible
+statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this
+freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme
+of relation between events.
+
+The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to
+that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it
+arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported
+inopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions
+mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it
+exercises--one of Kant's confusions--over the empirical world, and
+trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should
+somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But
+nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity
+to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and
+to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery
+over things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the
+hypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in
+that. Moreover, M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use
+of mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business
+world; whereas its inherent use is emancipating and Platonic, in that
+it shows us the possibility of other worlds, less contingent and
+perturbed than this one. If he allows himself any excursus from his
+beloved immediacy, it is only in the interests of practice; he little
+knows the pleasures of a liberal mind, ranging over the congenial
+realm of internal accuracy and ideal truth, where it can possess
+itself of what treasures it likes in perfect security and freedom. An
+artist in his workmanship, M. Bergson is not an artist in his
+allegiance; he has no respect for what is merely ideal.
+
+For this very reason, perhaps, he is more at home in natural history
+than in the exact sciences. He has the gift of observation, and can
+suggest vividly the actual appearance of natural processes, in
+contrast to the verbal paraphrase of these processes which is
+sometimes taken to explain them. He is content to stop at habit
+without formulating laws; he refuses to assume that the large obvious
+cycles of change in things can be reduced to mechanism, that is, to
+minute included cycles repeated _ad libitum_. He may sometimes defend
+this refusal by sophistical arguments, as when he says that mechanism
+would require the last stage of the universe to be simultaneous with
+the first, forgetting that the unit of mechanism is not a mathematical
+equation but some observed typical event. The refusal itself, however,
+would be honest scepticism enough were it made with no _arrière
+pensée_, but simply in view of the immense complexity of the facts and
+the extreme simplicity of the mechanical hypothesis. In such a
+situation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true
+naturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and
+the human passion for system and simplification. At the first reading,
+M. Bergson's _Evolution Créatrice_ may well dazzle the professional
+naturalist and seem to him an illuminating confession of the nature
+and limits of his science; yet a second reading, I have good authority
+for saying, may as easily reverse that impression. M. Bergson never
+reviews his facts in order to understand them, but only if possible to
+discredit others who may have fancied they understood. He raises
+difficulties, he marks the problems that confront the naturalist, and
+the inadequacy of explanations that may have been suggested. Such
+criticism would be a valuable beginning if it were followed by the
+suggestion of some new solution; but the suggestion only is that no
+solution is possible, that the phenomena of life are simply
+miraculous, and that it is in the tendency or vocation of the animal,
+not in its body or its past, that we must see the ground of what goes
+on before us.
+
+With such a philosophy of science, it is evident that all progress in
+the understanding of nature would cease, as it ceased after Aristotle.
+The attempt would again be abandoned to reduce gross and obvious
+cycles of change, such as generation, growth, and death, to minute
+latent cycles, so that natural history should offer a picturesque
+approach to universal physics. If for the magic power of types,
+invoked by Aristotle, we substituted with M. Bergson the magic power
+of the _élan vital_, that is, of evolution in general, we should be
+referring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive
+processes, but to one all-embracing process, unique and always
+incomplete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and
+looser than what our observation began with. Aristotle at least could
+refer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social
+science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in
+making a learned show before the public. But if divination and
+eloquence--for science is out of the question--were to invoke nothing
+but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of
+phenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All
+knowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps
+enlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery
+of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world
+would be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere
+novel-readers.
+
+Nothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism
+of knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from
+which science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,
+whilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those
+appearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is
+through hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before
+the mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been
+straightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the
+fact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,
+with the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;
+that if we were not intelligent our sensations would exist for us
+without meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of
+knowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense
+that it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any
+interpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience
+may have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have
+expressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.
+Intelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no
+penetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent
+exists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations
+and the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for
+striding over the surface of sentience.
+
+This negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and
+futile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the
+same time that everything happens exactly _as if_ the intellect were a
+true instrument of discovery, and _as if_ a material world underlay
+our experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley
+were scientific at heart, and full of the intelligence they dissected;
+they seemed to cry to nature: Though thou dost not exist, yet will I
+trust in thee. Their idealism was a theoretical scruple rather than a
+passionate superstition. Not so M. Bergson; he is not so simple as to
+invoke the malicious criticism of knowledge in order to go on thinking
+rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable.
+His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis,
+but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism
+brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a
+magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving them
+on.
+
+Thus M. Bergson introduces metaphysics into natural history; he
+invokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power,
+called the _élan vital,_ on a level with the "Will" of Schopenhauer or
+the "Unknowable Force" of Herbert Spencer. But there is a scientific
+vitalism also, which it is well to distinguish from the metaphysical
+sort. The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is
+whether the living processes in nature can be resolved into a
+combination of the material. The material processes will always remain
+vital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for
+they will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking
+a certain time, like the fall of an apple. The movement of nature is
+never dialectical; the first part of any event does not logically
+imply the last part of it. Physics is descriptive, historical,
+reporting after the fact what are found to be the habits of matter.
+But if these habits are constant and calculable we call the vitality
+of them mechanical. Thus the larger processes of nature, no matter how
+vital they may be and whatever consciousness may accompany them, will
+always be mechanical if they can be calculated and predicted, being a
+combination of the more minute and widespread processes which they
+contain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as
+nutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as
+the fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of
+mechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science.
+Both possibilities will always remain open, because however far
+mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension
+presents them, will always remain irreducible to any common
+denominator with the rest; and on the other hand, wherever the actual
+reduction of the habits of animals to those of matter may have
+stopped, we can never know that a further reduction is impossible.
+
+The balance of reasonable presumption, however, is not even. The most
+inclusive movements known to us in nature, the astronomical, are
+calculable, and so are the most minute and pervasive processes, the
+chemical. These are also, if evolution is to be accepted, the earliest
+processes upon which all others have supervened and out of which, as
+it were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention,
+therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate
+processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The
+appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is
+easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in
+terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous
+to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them
+is hidden from us, as is that of our bodies, we suppose that these
+passions which we find on the surface in ourselves, or read into other
+creatures, are the substantial and only forces that carry on our part
+of the world. Penetrating this illusion, dispassionate observers in
+all ages have received the general impression that nature is one and
+mechanical. This was, and still remains, a general impression only;
+but I suspect no one who walks the earth with his eyes open would be
+concerned to resist it, were it not for certain fond human conceits
+which such a view would rebuke and, if accepted, would tend to
+obliterate. The psychological illusion that our ideas and purposes are
+original facts and forces (instead of expressions in consciousness of
+facts and forces which are material) and the practical and optical
+illusion that everything wheels about us in this world--these are the
+primitive persuasions which the enemies of naturalism have always been
+concerned to protect.
+
+One might indeed be a vitalist in biology, out of pure caution and
+conscientiousness, without sharing those prejudices; and many a
+speculative philosopher has been free from them who has been a
+vitalist in metaphysics. Schopenhauer, for instance, observed that the
+cannon-ball which, if self-conscious, would think it moved freely,
+would be quite right in thinking so. The "Will" was as evident to him
+in mechanism as in animal life. M. Bergson, in the more hidden reaches
+of his thought, seems to be a universal vitalist; apparently an _élan
+vital_ must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the
+energy stored there, and to set mechanism going. But he relies on
+biology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort
+to live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could
+never do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism
+does. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar
+requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses
+the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to
+believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but
+an alien and ghostly madness descending into it--I say a ghostly
+madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should
+live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal
+than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far
+less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough
+mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest
+to an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on
+a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick
+and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,
+but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its
+movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and
+requires a disinterested mind. M. Bergson would have us believe that
+mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,
+for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are
+fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely
+Israel.
+
+In spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye
+for the facts--things Aristotle also possessed--he is like Aristotle
+profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from
+nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a
+disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a
+logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite
+different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very
+arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the
+imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres
+of passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is
+practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly
+executed it demands a minute and extended observation of life. Unless
+your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of
+the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his
+psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them
+circumstantial and convincing. Just so M. Bergson's achievements in
+psychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are,
+required all his learning. The history of philosophy, mathematics, and
+physics, and above all natural history, had to supply him first with
+suggestions; and if he is not really a master in any of those fields,
+that is not to be wondered at. His heart is elsewhere. To write a
+universal biological romance, such as he has sketched for us in his
+system, he would ideally have required all scientific knowledge, but
+only as Homer required the knowledge of seamanship, generalship,
+statecraft, augury, and charioteering, in order to turn the aspects of
+them into poetry, and not with that technical solidity which Plato
+unjustly blames him for not possessing. Just so M. Bergson's proper
+achievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies
+entirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical
+probabilities. In essence, it is myth or fable; but in the texture and
+degree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of
+previous metaphysicians. Primitive poets, even ancient philosophers,
+were not psychologists; their fables were compacted out of elements
+found in practical life, and they reckoned in the units in which
+language and passion reckon--wooing, feasting, fighting, vice, virtue,
+happiness, justice. Above all, they talked about persons or about
+ideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was
+what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not
+so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what
+he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but
+something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory,
+or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these
+elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so
+his anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and
+theologians, though no less real.
+
+This peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable
+extension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human
+life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain
+conscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;
+their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be
+puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant
+moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the
+mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally
+interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.
+If Æsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,
+really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to
+the public; and they would have had no human value except that of
+illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible
+variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.
+Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
+in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
+Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
+absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
+them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
+_élan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew
+by intuition the _élan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.
+
+The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
+which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
+and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
+organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
+and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
+intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
+contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
+feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
+subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
+when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
+been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
+are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
+equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
+indications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
+traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
+and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
+such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
+the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
+latter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have
+found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
+plausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
+Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
+pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
+entertainment.
+
+Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
+to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
+whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and
+subjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between
+the observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic
+evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
+feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
+always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
+there were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul
+has of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less
+than it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the
+consciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather
+than the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be
+worth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may
+lead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower
+depths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the
+psychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the
+universe, which he has built out of that introspection, is his
+metaphysics.
+
+Many a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and
+obscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected
+metaphysically; but not one will be found to be arbitrary; not one
+but is based on attentive introspection and perception of the
+immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his
+somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel
+oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (_i.e._ immediately
+felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the
+present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present
+sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like
+a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;
+all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without
+surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear
+in such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that
+preceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation itself
+modifies them, and what develops is in no way deducible or predictable
+out of what exists. This situation is perfectly explicable
+scientifically. The movement of consciousness will be self-congruous
+and sustained when it rests on continuous processes in the same
+tissues, and yet quite unpredictable from within, because the direct
+sensuous report of bodily processes (in nausea, for instance, or in
+hunger) contains no picture of their actual mechanism. Even wholly new
+features, due to little crises in bodily life, may appear in a dream
+to flow out of what already exists, yet freely develop it; because in
+dreams comparison, the attempt to be consistent, is wholly in
+abeyance, and also because the new feature will come imbedded in
+others which are not new, but have dramatic relevance in the story. So
+immediate consciousness yields the two factors of Bergsonian freedom,
+continuity and indetermination.
+
+Again, take the somewhat disconcerting assertion that movement exists
+when there is nothing that moves, and no space that it moves through.
+In vision, perhaps, it is not easy to imagine a consciousness of
+motion without some presentation of a field, and of a distinguishable
+something in it; but if we descend to somatic feelings (and the more
+we descend, with M. Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in
+shooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a
+change and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea
+of a _mobile_ or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)
+through which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,
+and the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred
+out of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our
+philosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of
+motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
+riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
+infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
+Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
+may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
+apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
+taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
+call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
+had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
+would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
+consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
+æsthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
+never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.
+
+When a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in
+this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
+will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
+psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
+has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
+intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
+stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
+confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
+in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
+psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
+both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
+terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
+have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
+appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
+imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
+are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless
+bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate
+are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is
+much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start
+safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn
+to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and
+feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
+prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
+sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
+character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
+so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
+love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
+poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
+accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
+itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
+persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
+wonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems
+no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the
+story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the
+siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves
+of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as
+the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare
+and say:
+
+    "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
+     So do _their spirits_ hasten to their end."
+
+Some reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious
+introspection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that
+lead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface
+appearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part
+of the internal rumble of this great engine of the world. How should
+it loosen or dissolve that engine, as your philosophy evidently
+professes that it must? That nature exists we perceive whenever we
+resume our intellectual and practical life, interrupted for a moment
+by this interesting reversion to the immediate. The consciousness
+which in introspection we treat as an object is, in operation, a
+cognitive activity: it demonstrates the world. You would never
+yourself have conceived the minds of ethereal vibrations, or of birds,
+or of ants, or of men suspending their intelligence, if you had known
+of no men, ants, birds, or ether. It is the material objects that
+suggest to you their souls, and teach you how to conceive them. How
+then should the souls be substituted for the bodies, and abolish them?
+
+Poor guileless reader! If philosophers were straightforward men of
+science, adding each his mite to the general store of knowledge, they
+would all substantially agree, and while they might make interesting
+discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the
+whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or
+apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the
+interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising
+inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common
+apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by
+poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not
+require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you
+will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement
+begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your
+boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is
+instead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that the immediate, as he
+describes it, is the sole reality; all else is unreal, artificial, and a
+more or less convenient symbol in discourse--discourse itself being
+taken, of course, for a movement in immediate sensibility, which is what
+it is existentially, but never for an excursion into an independent
+logical realm, which is what it is spiritually and in intent. So we must
+revise all our psychological observations, and turn them into
+metaphysical dogmas. It would be nothing to say simply: _For immediate
+feeling_ the past is contained in the present, movement is prior to that
+which moves, spaces are many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events
+are indivisible wholes, perception is in its object and identical with
+it, the future is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple,
+and evolution is creative, its course being obedient to a general
+tendency or groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say
+instead: _In the universe at large_ the whole past is preserved bodily
+in the present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is
+motion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are
+incommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of
+them (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of
+these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an
+absolute Effort which exists _in vacuo_ and is simplicity itself; and
+this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless
+produces it out of nothing.
+
+The accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as
+we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will
+appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,[3]
+"who has ever practised literary composition knows very well that,
+after he has devoted long study to the subject, collected all the
+documents, and taken all his notes, one thing more is needful before
+he can actually embark on the work of composition; namely, an effort,
+often a very painful one, to plant himself all at once in the very
+heart of the subject, and to fetch from as profound a depth as
+possible the momentum by which he need simply let himself be borne
+along in the sequel. This momentum, as soon as it is acquired, carries
+the mind forward along a path where it recovers all the facts it had
+gathered together, and a thousand other details besides. The momentum
+develops and breaks up of itself into particulars that might be
+retailed _ad infinitum._ The more he advances the more he finds; he
+will never have exhausted the subject; and nevertheless if he turns
+round suddenly to face the momentum he feels at his back and see what
+it is, it eludes him; for it is not a thing but a direction of
+movement, and though capable of being extended indefinitely, it is
+simplicity itself."
+
+[Footnote 3: "Introduction a la Métaphysique." _Revue de Métaphysique
+et de Morale_, Janvier, 1903.]
+
+This is evidently well observed: heighten the tone a little, and you
+might have a poem on those joyful pangs of gestation and parturition
+which are not denied to a male animal. It is a description of the
+_sensation_ of literary composition, of the _immediate experience_ of
+a writer as words and images rise into his mind. He cannot summon his
+memories explicitly, for he would first have to remember them to do
+so; his consciousness of inspiration, of literary creation, is nothing
+but a consciousness of pregnancy and of a certain "direction of
+movement," as if he were being wafted in a balloon; and just in its
+moments of highest tension his mind is filled with mere expectancy and
+mere excitement, without images, plans, or motives; and what guides it
+is inwardly, as M. Bergson says, simplicity itself. Yet excellent as
+such a description is psychologically, it is a literary confession
+rather than a piece of science; for scientific psychology is a part of
+natural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable
+phenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we
+should at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which
+this occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what
+variations in the result follow upon variations in the situation. At
+once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those
+data of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that
+painful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as
+he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?
+Not at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is
+overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the
+spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and
+overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,
+and joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether _all_
+the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and
+what relation the "thousand other details" have to them; and we should
+find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous
+endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general
+circumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the
+momentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the
+discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system
+(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and
+crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the
+past, and creation also, are closely attached. Thus we should utterly
+refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended
+indefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of
+literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it
+precedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and
+flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is
+regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is
+simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions
+outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
+that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
+introspection might yield in others.
+
+There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer
+is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
+general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
+quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
+its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
+experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
+memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
+knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
+_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very
+heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
+Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
+was, according to M. Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
+reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
+part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
+suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
+bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
+facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
+them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
+consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum
+which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
+adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
+thousand other details which he may add to the picture.
+
+Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
+immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
+projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.
+Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
+characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
+passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
+words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
+framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
+pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
+from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
+This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose
+metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's
+own heart and draw _from oneself_ impulses as profound as possible
+with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.
+Yet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be found to
+involve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and
+spiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he
+conceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things
+are made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its
+several objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by
+becoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies
+where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past
+experience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and
+Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of
+Cleopatra herself--in those moments when she spoke English.
+
+It is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can
+never do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual
+Cleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the
+cause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of
+such criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly
+blind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not
+far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
+literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
+sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
+knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
+literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
+it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
+discerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those
+aspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the
+same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's
+consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
+over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
+things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
+more or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be
+once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
+you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,
+mind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
+who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
+a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
+calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
+life, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,
+æsthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,
+the life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I
+am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
+reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
+perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
+sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
+to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
+enough.
+
+Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
+the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
+evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
+the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
+seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
+maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
+part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we
+may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
+of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
+speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;
+while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of
+ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would
+deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature
+is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far
+rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple
+than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. M.
+Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously
+examining the egg on every side--for he would do more than taste
+it--and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his
+intuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and
+then he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without
+parts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that
+it was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the
+essence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better
+than it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know
+how it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really
+create or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,
+now with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.
+Doubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new
+philosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than
+they, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be
+ignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?
+
+Let us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly
+inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,
+shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that
+evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the
+homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of
+pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is
+what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and
+rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the
+facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of
+nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are
+really without structure, the true causes of the formation of birds
+are the last conditions, whatever they may be, that introduce that
+phenomenon and determine its character--the type of the parents, the
+act of fertilisation, the temperature, or whatever else observation
+might find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.
+These facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,
+would be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.
+They would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature
+were no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper
+than that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose
+that nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,
+and has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a
+stopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied
+with some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their
+collisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts
+discoverable, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the
+only sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If
+somebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of
+the atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God
+that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
+thrown a bright light on the subject.
+
+Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
+vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
+two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
+molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
+vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
+propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
+developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
+coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
+by a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in
+a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
+Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
+then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
+other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
+just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
+puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
+heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
+not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
+the presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in
+inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
+insight when he proclaims in her a _tendency to vision._ If those
+words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
+if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
+discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
+substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
+constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
+understand the weather; but Neptune and Æolus are not thereby proved
+to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
+be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
+efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
+contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
+matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
+arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
+"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
+things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
+beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
+existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
+did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
+conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
+which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
+effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
+transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
+it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
+answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
+Yet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature
+is actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers
+raises all the others, artificially and without occasion. This side
+of M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar
+vices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to
+investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this
+name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This
+is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would
+be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.
+
+The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern
+Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We
+find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too
+obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is
+unmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other
+words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to
+discover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence
+would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a
+modification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and
+discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge
+(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have
+discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has
+taken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on
+the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you
+mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of
+what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it
+substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your
+description. This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if
+the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative
+dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible
+and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.
+Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has
+got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest
+schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism
+is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a
+difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to
+idealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with
+self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you
+started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The
+fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an
+existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view
+should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's
+solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
+exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
+of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
+and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
+foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
+and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
+the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
+identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
+into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
+all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4]
+To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
+shut out the others, is to be a mind.
+
+[Footnote 4: _Matière et Mémoire_, p. 38.]
+
+This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
+things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
+talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
+himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
+and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
+between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
+thing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is
+to offer us a history, _on the assumption of idealism,_ of the idea of
+mind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough
+psychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might
+possibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question
+concerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it
+occurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these
+hereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out _a priori,_ and
+the life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole
+universe. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than
+realism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection
+from other objects, the mind has come to be distinguished: but the
+subterfuge is vain, because by "mind" they mean simply the idea of
+mind, and they give no name, except perhaps experience, to the mind
+that forms that idea. Matter and mind, for these transcendentalists
+posing as realists, merge and flow so easily together only because
+both are images or groups of images in an original mind presupposed
+but never honestly posited. It is in this forgotten mind, also, as
+the professed idealists urge, that the relations of proximity and
+simultaneity between various lives can alone subsist, if to subsist is
+to be experienced.
+
+There is, however, one point of real difference, at least initially,
+between the idealism of M. Bergson and that of his predecessors. The
+universal mind, for M. Bergson, is in process of actual
+transformation. It is not an omniscient God but a cosmic sensibility.
+In this sensibility matter, with all its vibrations felt in detail,
+forms one moving panorama together with all minds, which are patterns
+visible at will from various points of view in that same woof of
+matter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of
+a giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,
+shuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a
+labyrinth of cross-purposes.
+
+Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the
+prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it
+would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy
+with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing
+comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,
+are inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his
+pupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for
+themselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,
+as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have
+just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect
+that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far
+more orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not
+compatible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in
+representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you
+posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,
+instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of
+change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a
+moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre
+and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is
+simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived
+through. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but
+have no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on
+immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable
+freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given _feeling_
+of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a
+given image of the future--all these terms being contained in the
+present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute
+immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and
+Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.
+
+Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a
+while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a
+familiar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of
+creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For apparently
+creative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be
+explained away idealistically) has to submit to the following
+conditions: first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to
+create some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side
+by side; and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the
+additions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no
+sequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all
+effort would be wasted. These are compulsions; but it may also, I
+suppose, be thought a _duty_ on the part of the vital impulse to be
+true to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like
+the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of
+its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty
+and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these
+conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to
+a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition;
+and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in
+reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system,
+such, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself,
+of equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and
+of spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when
+there is no nature to predetermine it.
+
+It has been said that M. Bergson's system precludes ethics: I cannot
+think that observation just. Apart from the moral inspiration which
+appears throughout his philosophy, which is indeed a passionate
+attempt to exalt (or debase) values into powers, it offers, I should
+say, two starting-points for ethics. In the first place, the _élan
+vital_ ought not to falter, although it can do so: therefore to
+persevere, labour, experiment, propagate, must be duties, and the
+opposite must be sins. In the second place, freedom, in adding
+uncaused increments to life, ought to do so in continuation of the
+whole past, though it might do so frivolously: therefore it is a duty
+to be studious, consecutive, loyal; you may move in any direction but
+you must carry the whole past with you. I will not say this suggests a
+sound system of ethics, because it would be extracted from dogmas
+which are physical and incidentally incredible; nor would it represent
+a mature and disillusioned morality, because it would look to the
+future and not to the eternal; nevertheless it would be deeply
+ethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic
+morality.
+
+A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it
+thinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or
+rather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live
+disembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the
+first provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of
+this subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that
+it might occupy in his system.[5] Life, according to him, is the
+original and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a
+potentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to
+emphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,
+special possibilities of living; and where these special lives have
+their chosen boundary (if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)
+they posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each
+life takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of
+living. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be
+carried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or
+material things about it; it would not show how death could ever
+overtake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which
+life has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter
+could never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of
+the arena can never abolish the show for which they have been
+prepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist
+is served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.
+
+[Footnote 5: M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea
+of non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of
+existence, and posterior to it. He evidently thinks this disposes of
+the reality of non-existence also: for it is the reality that he
+wishes to exorcise by his words. If, however, non-existence and the
+idea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible
+for me not to exist before I was born: my non-existence then would be
+more complex than my existence now, and posterior to it. The initiated
+would not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of
+some catechumens. It is a good test of the malicious theory of
+knowledge.]
+
+Yet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and
+failure. M. Bergson even thinks that the facing of increased dangers
+is one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were
+an equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of
+death, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the
+higher organisms and the finer arts.[6] Yet if life is the only
+substance, how is such a risk of death possible at all? I suppose the
+special life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by
+emphasising some of the relations which that feeling has in the
+world, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another
+set of its relations, starting from some other nucleus. We must
+remember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not
+apperceptions merely. They are creative efforts. The future
+constitution of the flux will vary in response to them. Each mind
+sucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex. A cross
+apperception will then amount to a contrary force. Two souls will not
+be able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship. Being
+forces, they will pull that matter in different ways. Each soul will
+tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by
+the other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will
+live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not
+like that painful word. He says the lower organisms store energy for
+the higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy
+stored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if
+the grass and the sheep had perished. Their _élan vital_ is no longer
+theirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill. Nothing arises in
+nature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.
+Of course, this is no defeat for the _élan vital_ in general; for
+according to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has
+been making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who
+eats the mutton, now possesses. The sheep and the grass were only
+things by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity. But would
+it not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not
+requiring abstract intellect nor artificial weapons, but endowed with
+instinct and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by
+radiating electricity? And might not men then turn out to have been
+mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion
+by that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the
+thought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is
+the pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies. Yet I
+can see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not
+crediting the _élan vital_ with some such digestive intention. M.
+Bergson's system would hardly be more speculative if it entertained
+this possibility, and it would seem more honest.
+
+[Footnote 6: This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the
+difficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily
+into science. An equilibrium would not displace itself! But an
+equilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity. It is
+continually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal
+movements or external agencies; and while many a time the equilibrium
+is thereby destroyed altogether, sometimes it is replaced by a more
+elaborate and perilous equilibrium; as glaciers carry many rocks down,
+but leave some, here and there, piled in the most unlikely pinnacles
+and pagodas.]
+
+The vital impulse is certainly immortal; for if we take it in the
+naturalistic exoteric sense, for a force discovered in biology, it is
+an independent agent coming down into matter, organising it against
+its will, and stirring it like the angel the pool of Bethesda. Though
+the ripples die down, the angel is not affected. He has merely flown
+away. And if we take the vital impulse mystically and esoterically, as
+the _only_ primal force, creating matter in order to play with it, the
+immortality of life is even more obvious; for there is then nothing
+else in being that could possibly abolish it. But when we come to
+immortality for the individual, all grows obscure and ambiguous. The
+original tendency of life was certainly cosmic and not distinguished
+into persons: we are told it was like a wireless message sent at the
+creation which is being read off at last by the humanity of to-day. In
+the naturalistic view, the diversity of persons would seem to be due
+to the different material conditions under which one and the same
+spiritual purpose must fight its way towards realisation in different
+times and places. It is quite conceivable, however, that in the
+mystical view the very sense of the original message should comport
+this variety of interpretations, and that the purpose should always
+have been to produce diverse individuals.
+
+The first view, as usual, is the one which M. Bergson has prevailingly
+in mind, and communicates most plausibly; while he holds to it he is
+still talking about the natural world, and so we still know what he is
+talking about. On this view, however, personal immortality would be
+impossible; it would be, if it were aimed at, a self-contradiction in
+the aim of life; for the diversity of persons would be due to
+impediments only, and souls would differ simply in so far as they
+mutilated the message which they were all alike trying to repeat. They
+would necessarily, when the spirit was victorious, be reabsorbed and
+identified in the universal spirit. This view also seems most
+consonant with M. Bergson's theory of primitive reality, as a flux of
+fused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is
+attributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the
+flux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises
+reality. Of course the destiny of spirit would not be to revert to
+that diffused materiality; for the original mind lost in matter had a
+very short memory; it was a sort of cosmic trepidation only, whereas
+the ultimate mind would remember all that, in its efforts after
+freedom, it had ever super added to that trepidation or made it turn
+into. Even the abstract views of things taken by the practical
+intellect would, I fear, have to burden the universal memory to the
+end. We should be remembered, even if we could no longer exist.
+
+On the other more profound view, however, might not personal
+immortality be secured? Suppose the original message said: Translate
+me into a thousand tongues! In fulfilling its duty, the universe would
+then continue to divide its dream into phantom individuals; as it had
+to insulate its parts in the beginning in order to dominate and
+transform them freely, so it would always continue to insulate them,
+so as not to lose its cross-vistas and its mobility. There is no
+reason, then, why individuals should not live for ever. But a
+condition seems to be involved which may well make belief stagger. It
+would be impossible for the universe to divide its images into
+particular minds unless it preserved the images of their particular
+bodies also. Particular minds arise, according to this philosophy, in
+the interests of practice: which means, biologically, to secure a
+better adjustment of the body to its environment, so that it may
+survive. Mystically, too, the fundamental force is a half-conscious
+purpose that practice, or freedom, should come to be; or rather, that
+an apparition or experience of practice and freedom should arise; for
+in this philosophy appearance is all. To secure this desirable
+apparition of practice special tasks are set to various nuclei in felt
+space (such, for instance, as the task to see), and the image of a
+body (in this case that of an eye) is gradually formed, in order to
+execute that task; for evidently the Absolute can see only if it
+looks, and to look it must first choose a point of view and an optical
+method. This point of view and this method posit the individual; they
+fix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his
+passive experience: they are his body. If the Absolute, then, wishes
+to retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one
+of its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image
+of his body. His body must continue to figure in that landscape of
+nature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing
+and recomposing. Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made
+from the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be
+preserved.
+
+M. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are
+going to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to
+understand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot
+venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed
+generation; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too
+amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of
+immortality. He asks if we are not "led to suppose" that consciousness
+passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute
+distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other
+animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I
+wonder?) are "capable of remembering all and willing all and
+controlling their past and their future," so that "we shall have no
+repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,
+consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." Elsewhere he
+says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be
+famous, that in man the spirit can "spurn every kind of resistance and
+break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death." Here the tenor
+has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.
+But was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not
+sung it in falsetto?
+
+The immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to
+conceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about
+it, and that little so far from serious. But he talks a great deal
+about life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet
+death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.
+What is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set
+it in motion? What is this life, that in any individual can be
+suddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this _elan-vital_, that a
+little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?
+The study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of
+season. The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom
+from philosophy, warns us that in M. Bergson's thought we have
+something occasional and partial, the work of an astute apologist, a
+party man, driven to desperate speculation by a timid attachment to
+prejudice. Like other terrified idealisms, the system of M. Bergson
+has neither good sense, nor rigour, nor candour, nor solidity. It is a
+brilliant attempt to confuse the lessons of experience by refining
+upon its texture, an attempt to make us halt, for the love of
+primitive illusions, in the path of discipline and reason. It is
+likely to prove a successful attempt, because it flatters the
+weaknesses of the moment, expresses them with emotion, and covers
+them with a feint at scientific speculation. It is not, however, a
+powerful system, like that of Hegel, capable of bewildering and
+obsessing many who have no natural love for shams. M. Bergson will
+hardly bewilder; his style is too clear, the field where his just
+observations lie--the immediate--is too well defined, and the
+mythology which results from projecting the terms of the immediate
+into the absolute, and turning them into powers, is too obviously
+verbal. He will not long impose on any save those who enjoy being
+imposed upon; but for a long time he may increase their number. His
+doctrine is indeed alluring. Instead of telling us, as a stern and
+contrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and
+almost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and
+unfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our
+better selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather
+tells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary
+consciousness, with its vague instincts and premonitions, that
+everything ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at heart, is as
+palpitating and irrational as ourselves. Why then strain the inquiry?
+Why seek to dominate passion by understanding it? Rather live on;
+work, it matters little at what, and grow, it matters nothing in what
+direction. Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion;
+let your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the
+roar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of
+your living soul, not a stark adoration of things reputed eternal.
+
+So the intellectual faithlessness and the material servility of the
+age are flattered together and taught to justify themselves
+theoretically. They cry joyfully, _non peccavi_, which is the modern
+formula for confession. M. Bergson's philosophy itself is a confession
+of a certain mystical rebellion and atavism in the contemporary mind.
+It will remain a beautiful monument to the passing moment, a capital
+film for the cinematography of history, full of psychological truth
+and of a kind of restrained sentimental piety. His thought has all the
+charm that can go without strength and all the competence that can go
+without mastery. This is not an age of mastery; it is confused with
+too much business; it has no brave simplicity. The mind has forgotten
+its proper function, which is to crown life by quickening it into
+intelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that it accelerated
+life, that might perhaps justify its existence; like a philosopher at
+sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL
+
+I. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM
+
+
+In its chase after idols this age has not wholly forgotten the gods,
+and reason and faith in reason are not left without advocates. Some
+years ago, at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. G.E. Moore began to
+produce a very deep impression amongst the younger spirits by his
+powerful and luminous dialectic. Like Socrates, he used all the sharp
+arts of a disputant in the interests of common sense and of an almost
+archaic dogmatism. Those who heard him felt how superior his position
+was, both in rigour and in force, to the prevailing inversions and
+idealisms. The abuse of psychology, rampant for two hundred years,
+seemed at last to be detected and challenged; and the impressionistic
+rhetoric that philosophy was saturated with began to be squeezed out
+by clear questions, and by a disconcerting demand for literal
+sincerity. German idealism, when we study it as a product of its own
+age and country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of
+afflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of heart; but it is essentially
+romantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere
+system-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic
+people _ex cathedra,_ in stentorian tones, and represented as the
+rational foundation of science and religion, with neither of which it
+has any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious--one of the
+worst imposture and blights to which a youthful imagination could be
+subjected. It is chiefly against the incubus of this celestial monster
+that Mr. Moore dared to lift up his eyes; and many a less courageous
+or less clear-sighted person was thankful to him for it. But a man
+with such a mission requires a certain narrowness and concentration of
+mind; he has to be intolerant and to pound a good deal on the same
+notes. We need not wonder if Mr. Moore has written rather meagerly,
+and with a certain vehemence and want of imagination.
+
+All this, however, was more than made up by the powerful ally who soon
+came to his aid. Mr. Bertrand Russell began by adopting Mr. Moore's
+metaphysics, but he has given as much as he has received. Apart from
+his well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance
+the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to
+pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written
+abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity,
+candour, and charm. Especially his _Philosophical Essays_ and his
+little book on _The Problems of Philosophy_ can be read with pleasure
+by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the
+tenets of the school. Yet it must be remembered that Mr. Russell, like
+Mr. Moore, is still young and his thoughts have not assumed their
+ultimate form. Moreover, he lives in an atmosphere of academic
+disputation which makes one technical point after another acquire a
+preponderating influence in his thoughts. His book on _The Problems
+of Philosophy_ is admirable in style, temper, and insight, but it
+hardly deserves its title; it treats principally, in a somewhat
+personal and partial way, of the relation of knowledge to its objects,
+and it might rather have been called "The problems which Moore and I
+have been agitating lately." Indeed, his philosophy is so little
+settled as yet that every new article and every fresh conversation
+revokes some of his former opinions, and places the crux of
+philosophical controversy at a new point. We are soon made aware that
+exact thinking and true thinking are not synonymous, but that one
+exact thought, in the same mind, may be the exact opposite of the
+next. This inconstancy, which after all does not go very deep, is a
+sign of sincerity and pure love of truth; it marks the freshness, the
+vivacity, the self-forgetfulness, the logical ardour belonging to this
+delightful reformer. It may seem a paradox, but at bottom it is not,
+that the vitalists should be oppressed, womanish, and mystical, and
+only the intellectualists keen, argumentative, fearless, and full of
+life. I mention this casualness and inconstancy in Mr. Russell's
+utterances not to deride them, but to show the reader how impossible
+it is, at this juncture, to give a comprehensive account of his
+philosophy, much less a final judgment upon it.
+
+The principles most fundamental and dominant in his thought are
+perhaps the following: That the objects the mind deals with, whether
+material or ideal, are what and where the mind says they are, and
+independent of it; that some general principles and ideas have to be
+assumed to be valid not merely for thought but for things; that
+relations may subsist, arise, and disappear between things without at
+all affecting these things internally; and that the nature of
+everything is just what it is, and not to be confused either with its
+origin or with any opinion about it. These principles, joined with an
+obvious predilection for Plato and Leibnitz among philosophers, lead
+to the following doctrines, among others: that the mind or soul is an
+entity separate from its thoughts and pre-existent; that a material
+world exists in space and time; that its substantial elements may be
+infinite in number, having position and quality, but no extension, so
+that each mind or soul might well be one of them; that both the
+existent and the ideal worlds may be infinite, while the ideal world
+contains an infinity of things not realised in the actual world; and
+that this ideal world is knowable by a separate mental consideration,
+a consideration which is, however, empirical in spirit, since the
+ideal world of ethics, logic, and mathematics has a special and
+surprising constitution, which we do not make but must attentively
+discover.
+
+The reader will perceive, perhaps, that if the function of philosophy
+is really, as the saying goes, to give us assurance of God, freedom,
+and immortality, Mr. Russell's philosophy is a dire failure. In fact,
+its author sometimes gives vent to a rather emphatic pessimism about
+this world; he has a keen sense for the manifold absurdities of
+existence. But the sense for absurdities is not without its delights,
+and Mr. Russell's satirical wit is more constant and better grounded
+than his despair. I should be inclined to say of his philosophy what
+he himself has said of that of Leibnitz, that it is at its best in
+those subjects which are most remote from human life. It needs to be
+very largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can
+be called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments,
+and meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest
+degree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian
+looseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head
+again, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine:
+and this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in
+the most emancipated and unflinchingly radical quarter. It is
+refreshing and reassuring, after the confused, melodramatic ways of
+philosophising to which the idealists and the pragmatists have
+accustomed us, to breathe again the crisp air of scholastic common
+sense. It is good for us to be held down, as the Platonic Socrates
+would have held us, to saying what we really believe, and sticking to
+what we say. We seem to regain our intellectual birthright when we are
+allowed to declare our genuine intent, even in philosophy, instead of
+begging some kind psychologist to investigate our "meaning" for us, or
+even waiting for the flux of events to endow us with what "meaning" it
+will. It is also instructive to have the ethical attitude purified of
+all that is not ethical and turned explicitly into what, in its moral
+capacity, it essentially is: a groundless pronouncement upon the
+better and the worse.
+
+Here a certain one-sidedness begins to make itself felt in Mr.
+Russell's views. The ethical attitude doubtless has no _ethical_
+ground, but that fact does not prevent it from having a _natural_
+ground; and the observer of the animate creation need not have much
+difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell,
+however, refuses to look also in that direction. He insists, rightly
+enough, that good is predicated categorically by the conscience; he
+will not remember that all life is not moral bias merely, and that, in
+the very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance
+back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,
+and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward
+look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical
+self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to
+deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all
+their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard
+more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic
+entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be
+more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of
+Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a
+logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,
+though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing
+outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.
+We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full
+image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that
+perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is
+moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and
+fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for
+the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the
+doctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance
+of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any
+pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like
+that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a
+moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the
+function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we
+wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly
+the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with
+what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false
+place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.
+However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
+confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
+mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
+us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.
+
+In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
+doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
+comprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own
+interspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him
+three subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the
+inspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young
+philosophy.
+
+
+II. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
+
+
+"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the
+mathematical infinite is probably," says Mr. Russell, "the greatest
+achievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as
+self-evident, until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,
+that if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the
+number of things left must always be less than the original number of
+things. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite
+collections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,
+has been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled
+human reason in this matter." And he adds in another place: "To
+reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of
+Fate ... is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still
+further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to
+which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must
+conform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a
+habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied
+and our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly
+understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this
+world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound
+importance of its beauty."
+
+Mathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of
+religion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a
+heaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar
+sweetness and consolation. "Real life," he writes, "is to most men a
+long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the
+possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
+practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying
+in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from
+which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even
+from the pitiful laws of nature, the generations have gradually
+created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its
+natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can
+escape from the dreary exile of the actual world." This study is one
+of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The
+true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than
+man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found
+in mathematics as surely as in poetry."
+
+This enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite
+effect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might
+make them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,
+so satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by
+the same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to
+know absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary
+relations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over
+them; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to
+haul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of
+fishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and
+it would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into
+the mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to
+his bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as
+dreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values
+which the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for
+different minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal
+necessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or
+good. The case is not such as if we were dealing with existence.
+Existence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing
+justification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by
+taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.
+Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing
+good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance
+thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may
+chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the
+same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
+since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
+the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
+adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
+presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
+an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
+eternal necessity.
+
+The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
+possible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and
+consisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment
+of feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact
+occurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred
+remains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or
+for consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the
+realm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in
+tracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm
+of essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies
+there eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his
+human nature and circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in
+so exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition
+and of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four
+if I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to
+do so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not
+to combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I
+happen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,
+and the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in
+contrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to
+my idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be
+congenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have
+affinity to them.
+
+And how, may I ask, has it become a part of my genius? Simply because
+nature, of which I am a part, and to which all my ideas must refer if
+they are to be relevant to my destiny, happens to have mathematical
+form. Nature had to have some form or other, if it was to exist at
+all; and whatever form it had happened to take would have had its
+prior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical
+relations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which
+nature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be
+revealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my
+admirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take
+on existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all
+essence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, it cannot
+undertake to examine exhaustively; for there are many features
+nestling in them, and many relations radiating from them, which no
+one needs or cares to attend to. The implications which logicians and
+mathematicians actually observe in the terms they use are a small
+selection from all those that really obtain, even in their chosen
+field; so that, for instance, as Mr. Russell was telling us, it was
+only the other day that Cantor and Dedekind observed that although
+time continually eats up the days and years, the possible future
+always remains as long as it was before. This happens to be a fact
+interesting to mankind. Apart from the mathematical puzzles it may
+help to solve, it opens before existence a vista of perpetual youth,
+and the vital stress in us leaps up in recognition of its inmost
+ambition. Many other things are doubtless implied in infinity which,
+if we noticed them, would leave us quite cold; and still others, no
+doubt, are inapprehensible with our sort and degree of intellect.
+There is of course nothing in essence which an intellect postulated
+_ad hoc_ would not be able to apprehend; but the kind of intellect we
+know of and possess is an expression of vital adjustments, and is
+tethered to nature.
+
+That a few eternal essences, then, with a few of their necessary
+relations to one another, do actually appear to us, and do fascinate
+our attention and excite our wonder, is nothing paradoxical. This is
+merely what was bound to happen, if we became aware of anything at
+all; for the essence embodied in anything is eternal and has necessary
+relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there
+might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to
+be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that
+everything that is true of any essence is true of it always and
+everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and
+eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement
+than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is eternal and
+necessary.
+
+This fact will be more clearly recognised, perhaps, if we remember
+that the cogency of our ideal knowledge follows upon our intent in
+fixing its object. It hangs on a virtual definition, and explicates
+it. We cannot oblige anybody or anything to reproduce the idea which
+we have chosen; but that idea will remain the idea it is whether
+forgotten or remembered, exemplified or not exemplified in things. To
+penetrate to the foundation of being is possible for us only because
+the foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set
+of differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing
+might appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm
+of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental
+possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any
+experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the
+light of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you
+will, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat,
+and hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp
+the _constitution of nature_; that is, should discover which is the
+particular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual
+existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced
+to skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual
+experiences, which form the most superficial stratum of nature, and
+the most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us
+so much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment,
+necessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; and we
+need only arrest our attention upon it, and define it to ourselves,
+for an eternal possibility, and some of its intrinsic characters, to
+have been revealed to our thought.
+
+Whatever, then, a man's mental and moral habit might be, it would
+perforce have affinity to some essence or other; his life would
+revolve about some congenial ideal object; he would find some sorts of
+form, some types of relation, more visible, beautiful, and satisfying
+than others. Mr. Russell happens to have a mathematical genius, and to
+find comfort in laying up his treasures in the mathematical heaven. It
+would be highly desirable that this temperament should be more common;
+but even if it were universal it would not reduce mathematical essence
+to a product of human attention, nor raise the "beauty" of mathematics
+to part of its essence. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Russell
+attempts to do the latter; he speaks explicitly of the _value_ of
+mathematical study, a point in ethics and not directly in logic; yet
+his moral philosophy is itself so much assimilated to logic that the
+distinction between the two becomes somewhat dubious; and as Mr.
+Russell will never succeed in convincing us that moral values are
+independent of life, he may, quite against his will, lead us to
+question the independence of essence, with that blind gregarious drift
+of all ideas, in this direction or in that, which is characteristic of
+human philosophising.
+
+
+III. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM
+
+
+The time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is
+called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in
+a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
+issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
+together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
+with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
+"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
+are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
+democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
+trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
+rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
+of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
+touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
+"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
+almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
+of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
+tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
+which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
+philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
+like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
+that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
+'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
+police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
+their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
+pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
+traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
+handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
+as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
+can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
+pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
+is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
+which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
+James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
+the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
+rather than a George III."
+
+A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
+far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
+sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
+the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
+facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
+think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
+God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
+the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
+facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
+theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
+imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
+unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
+whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually
+unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the
+accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which
+scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on
+facts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet
+this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it
+would illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For
+we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,
+that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify
+their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate
+apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our
+temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the
+pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic
+sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal
+experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the
+effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of
+the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of
+experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is
+concerned with. Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,
+for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
+and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
+drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
+to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
+illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
+quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
+nominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the
+local independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
+historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
+and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
+changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
+that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
+adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
+describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
+drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
+only past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,
+for personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the
+effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
+as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
+psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
+theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
+momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
+by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really
+distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;
+of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that
+capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an
+apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).
+
+It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,
+whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that
+school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The
+habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a
+matter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special
+interest in the life of reason, and be an effort, legitimate under
+any system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human
+thought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its
+present degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look
+at things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of
+the natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy
+that denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world
+for granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how
+the human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far
+as he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in
+the course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a
+psychological point of view might be equivalent to the idealistic
+doctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only
+structure of the universe, and its whole history. According to this
+view, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the
+transcendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is,
+still concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision
+would consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility,
+and survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force
+governing the evolution. It would still remain possible for other
+methods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct,
+perhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with
+things-in-themselves. A junction might thus be effected with the
+system of M. Bergson, which would lead to this curious result: that
+pragmatic logic would be the method of intelligence, because
+intelligence is merely a method, useful in practice, for the symbolic
+and improper representation of reality; while another non-pragmatic
+method--sympathy and dream--would alone be able to put us in
+possession of direct knowledge and genuine truth. So that, after all,
+the pragmatic "truth" of working ideas would turn out to be what it
+has seemed hitherto to mankind, namely, no real truth, but rather a
+convenient sort of fiction, which ceases to deceive when once its
+merely pragmatic value is discounted by criticism. I remember once
+putting a question on this subject to Professor James; and his answer
+was one which I am glad to be able to record. In relation to his
+having said that "as far as the past facts go, there is no difference
+... be the atoms or be the God their cause,"[7] I asked whether, if
+God had been the cause, apart from the value of the idea of him in our
+calculations, his existence would not have made a difference to him,
+as he would be presumably self-conscious. "Of course," said Professor
+James, "but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was
+thinking of our idea." The choice of the subjective point of view,
+then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended
+to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.
+And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the
+realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the
+real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be
+verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never
+those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
+our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
+while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless
+and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
+Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
+Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
+catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
+character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
+might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
+the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
+Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
+acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
+believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
+practice.
+
+[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]
+
+Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic
+world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
+in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
+one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
+ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they
+have turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to
+play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate
+result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of
+realism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the
+school and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very
+hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
+romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
+sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
+of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
+the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
+independent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that
+pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
+that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
+(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
+or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
+poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
+was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
+"objective spirit," that is, into dynamic relations between things.
+The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,
+lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and
+disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or
+superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be
+easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there
+is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any
+in heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems
+to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it
+pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly
+not psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is
+pragmatism either.
+
+There is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of
+the system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards
+(justly, I think) as of decisive importance. Is, namely, the pragmatic
+account of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of
+knowledge only? Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit
+that it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence
+in which, they say, it is not concerned: first, the dialectical
+relation between essences; and second, the known occurrence or
+experience of facts. There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of
+cognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists
+to constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations,
+they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects,
+and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch
+contingent fact at all. On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes
+on some matter of fact, as, for instance, "I feel pain," or "I
+expected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,"
+though often true propositions, are not _theoretical_ truths; they are
+not, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate
+observations. Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all,
+perhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of
+memory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover,
+verification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously
+impossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not
+assumed to be truly remembered. How shall we know that our expectation
+is fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an
+expectation? But if we know our past experience directly--not merely
+knew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led
+down to the present--this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a
+tolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic
+verification or "truth" at all. I have never been able to discover
+whether, by that perception of fact which is not "truth" but fact
+itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the
+whole series of these apprehensions. In the latter case, as in the
+philosophy of M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open
+to retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the
+head of any pragmatic method or pragmatic "truth." It looks, indeed,
+as if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken
+for granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.
+Their readiness to make so capital an assumption is a part of their
+heritage from romantic idealism. To the romantic idealist science and
+theology are tales which ought to be reduced to an empirical
+equivalent in his personal experience; but the tale of his personal
+experience itself is a sacred figment, the one precious conviction of
+the romantic heart, which it would be heartless to question. Yet here
+is a kind of assumed truth which cannot be reduced to its pragmatic
+meaning, because it must be true literally in order that the pragmatic
+meaning of other beliefs may be conceived or tested at all.
+
+Now, if it be admitted that the pragmatic theory of truth does not
+touch our knowledge either of matters of fact or of the necessary
+implications of ideas, the question arises: What sort of knowledge
+remains for pragmatic theory to apply to? Simply, Mr. Russell answers,
+those "working hypotheses" to which "prudent people give only a low
+degree of belief." For "we hold different beliefs with very different
+degrees of conviction. Some--such as the belief that I am sitting in a
+chair, or that 2+2=4--can be doubted by few except those who have had
+a long training in philosophy. Such beliefs are held so firmly that
+non-philosophers who deny them are put into lunatic asylums. Other
+beliefs, such as the facts of history, are held rather less firmly....
+Beliefs about the future, as that the sun will rise to-morrow and
+that the trains will run approximately as in Bradshaw, may be held
+with almost as great conviction as beliefs about the past. Scientific
+laws are generally believed less firmly.... Philosophical beliefs,
+finally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the
+opposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,
+therefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,
+doubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,
+from the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood
+heat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only
+temperatures." Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future
+experience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only
+presumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical
+logic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.
+Presumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and
+yet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as
+the confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood
+heat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in
+anything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,
+whatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they
+are to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to
+lead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what
+presumptions refer to explicitly.
+
+It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on
+voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated
+observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,
+as when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really
+regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the
+emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils
+the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called
+luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular
+career that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a
+mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be
+transferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck
+must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not
+needful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working
+hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some
+confusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an
+anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be
+clear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers
+entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they
+do not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance
+of the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak
+of it as if it were composed of indestructible particles. But for
+Democritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not
+a working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional
+makeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain,
+anticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could
+inspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic
+theory is true. If they are right, the validity of this theory would
+not be that of pragmatic "truth" but of pragmatic "fact"; for it would
+be a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might give us, of
+experienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the
+communication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the
+experience of a universal observer. It would be knowledge of reality
+in M. Bergson's sense. Pragmatic "truth," on the contrary, is the
+relative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is
+not a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is
+instrumental.
+
+For theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a
+symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and
+full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full
+knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their
+experimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the
+first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and
+scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they
+gather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it
+is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably
+applied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that
+extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly
+disclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is
+avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it
+is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the
+symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,
+and for which it stands.
+
+It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based
+on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not
+claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths
+or the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is
+patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
+prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
+pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
+pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
+evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
+world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
+pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
+accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
+Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what
+remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has
+abandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,
+the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to
+what was to take its place--spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.
+And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the
+objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get
+at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the
+prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its
+self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.
+
+Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of
+science possess, but with the language they use. If science meant
+knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his
+observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the
+probable ancestors of the human race--all knowledge of actual or
+possible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of
+spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the
+gaps in that knowledge, and mark the _lacunae_ and unsolved problems
+of the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe
+"Science" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and
+when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincaré, turned his subtle
+irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the
+"bankruptcy of science," whereas it is merely the language of science
+that he had reduced to its pragmatic value--to convenience and economy
+in the registering of facts--and had by no means questioned that
+positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.
+It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical
+epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific
+or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing
+truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its
+view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system
+which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to
+divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.
+
+
+IV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS
+
+
+If Mr. Russell, in his essay on "The Elements of Ethics," had wished
+to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert
+him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins
+by telling us that "what is called good conduct is conduct which is a
+means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence
+... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be
+included in ethics." Two consequences are involved in this: first,
+that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with
+"moral" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do
+inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is
+the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this
+matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to
+one error and the professed moralist to another. "The philosopher,
+bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the
+facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all
+be deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the
+other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become
+absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than
+the ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in
+this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any
+imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort
+and courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence
+of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he
+holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will--a view
+which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and
+mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin."
+
+Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will
+be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us
+the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various
+values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what
+combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and
+(if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would
+be possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to
+come into physical conflict. Such ethics, since it would express in
+reflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both
+influence and authority over them; two things which an alien and
+dogmatic ethics necessarily lacks. The joy of the ethical sceptic in
+Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding
+to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a
+preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly
+devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good,"
+which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And
+he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer
+he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might
+perhaps have been absolved from asking the question; for, as he says,
+the so-called definitions of "good"--that it is pleasure, the desired,
+and so forth--are not definitions of the predicate "good," but
+designations of the things to which this predicate is applied by
+different persons. Pleasure, and its rivals, are not synonyms for the
+abstract quality "good," but names for classes of concrete facts that
+are supposed to possess that quality. From this correct, if somewhat
+trifling, observation, however, Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore before
+him, evokes a portentous dogma. Not being able to define good, he
+hypostasises it. "Good and bad," he says, "are qualities which belong
+to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and
+square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good,
+only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know
+which is right." "We cannot maintain that for me a thing ought to
+exist on its own account, while for you it ought not; that would
+merely mean that one of us is mistaken, since in fact everything
+either ought to exist, or ought not." Thus we are asked to believe
+that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to
+no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort
+of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that
+it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary
+quality.
+
+That the quality "good" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious;
+but that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and
+astonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or
+subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the
+connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable
+predicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in
+intuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain
+conditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,
+may have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and
+left are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without
+being invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right
+is not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition
+that some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else
+at the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly
+to the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks
+this is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does not
+please him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we
+suggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the
+idea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality
+of green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the
+intent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have
+any relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and
+these relations they must always retain. But the contradiction
+disappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,
+we consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the
+qualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are
+conjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may
+be, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,
+good and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal
+paradox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of
+view of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and
+talked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should
+still raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.[8] Indeed, while
+square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may
+actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to
+be a cylinder.
+
+[Footnote 8: Plato, _Philebus_, 14, D. The dialectical element in this
+dialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,
+ethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the
+political and the theological. As to the political element, Plato
+everywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it
+to human nature and to the pursuit of happiness--that happiness which
+Mr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people
+prefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the _Philebus_ (11, D) the good
+looked for is declared to be "some state and disposition of the soul
+which has the property of making all men happy"; and later (66, D) the
+conclusion is that insight is better than pleasure "as an element in
+human life." As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising
+the good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,
+which is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,
+and logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that
+ground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole
+Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of
+private will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the
+direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for
+all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the
+creative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.
+Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
+attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
+cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
+good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
+have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]
+
+But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
+that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
+moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
+to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
+that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
+attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
+and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
+independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
+that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
+to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
+to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
+and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
+one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
+right."
+
+To protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr. Russell,
+so far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy. The
+argument is that "if this were not the case, we could not reason with
+a man as to what is right." "We do in fact hold that when one man
+approves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is
+mistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion. If one man
+likes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of
+them is mistaken." In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices,
+however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about
+them! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave
+and the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this
+singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and
+physical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or
+incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is
+good as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but
+deals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.
+But to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false
+collocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at;
+it is not opined. The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are
+not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we
+feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may
+assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we
+may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different
+preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.
+Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great
+advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded
+as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or
+beans, or frogs' legs, or who had a weakness for anything called
+"unnatural"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts
+that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and _par
+excellence_, abominations.
+
+I am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view
+where he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and
+refutes it on the ground that "it is commonly admitted that there are
+bad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean
+desires for what is bad." Most people undoubtedly call desires bad
+when they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call
+objects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
+human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
+to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
+that Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called
+it _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_. Scholastic philosophy is
+inclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he
+candidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about
+good and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he
+triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree
+with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,
+supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to
+recognise was independent of their constitution.
+
+In a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are
+desires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper
+psychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of
+consciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations
+that make one thing good for another. At the same time the words
+desire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,
+for those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral
+units are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional
+interests that things are "really" good or bad; interests which may
+not be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt
+any desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial
+interest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable
+value; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests
+of men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less
+to the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions
+may indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they
+thwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains
+them. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of
+particular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison
+at once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for
+the other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating
+than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a
+strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to
+insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference
+to any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent
+intoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this
+way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead
+bad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders
+reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires,
+and false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point
+of reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point
+of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing
+but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force
+than to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not
+in philosophy.
+
+That good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and
+adventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell's own way of arguing,
+whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,
+to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but
+appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree."
+He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,
+having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as
+intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it
+your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is
+expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an _argumentum ad hominem_
+(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man
+who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is
+self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of
+man. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless
+pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome
+intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the
+voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their
+origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they
+marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and
+causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young
+Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease
+altogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines
+all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for
+political or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our
+humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be
+pursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them. The
+impossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure
+pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to
+their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.
+
+The author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of
+egoism, and most of all in his "Free Man's Religion." Egoism, he
+thinks, is untenable because "if I am right in thinking that my good
+is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits
+that my good, not his, is the only good." "Most people ... would admit
+that it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only
+one person's.... Then what is good is not good _for me_ or _for you_,
+but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to
+secure a greater good for _A_ than a lesser good for _B_, that it is
+hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.
+And if _A_ happens to be some one else, and _B_ to be myself, that
+cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general
+question who _A_ and _B_ may be." To the question, as the logician
+states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
+irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in
+nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
+good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
+locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
+indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
+in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
+practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
+the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
+alien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
+of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
+some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
+representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
+truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
+voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
+to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
+remote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for
+such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
+in a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all
+wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled
+magically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must
+be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to
+be an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it
+would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their
+eyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of
+nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the
+selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for
+the peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can
+generate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them
+intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)
+generate or recognise the goods we prize.
+
+In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like _A_ and _B_, so
+that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,
+abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified
+at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the
+qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever
+they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing
+from sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine
+different goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and
+actual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell
+makes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and
+those akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that
+the things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized
+by others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these
+chosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie
+rather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,
+in many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;
+yet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely
+just. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic
+from exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would
+merely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly
+establishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious
+tyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices
+which would cost them dear; but that would only extend, as it were,
+the pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had
+allowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of
+self-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.
+Moore, even as it stands; and one trembles to think what it may become
+in the mouths of their disciples. Intolerance itself is a form of
+egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. I cannot
+help thinking that a consciousness of the relativity of values, if it
+became prevalent, would tend to render people more truly social than
+would a belief that things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no
+matter what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we said that
+goods, including the right distribution of goods, are relative to
+specific natures, moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned
+arrows. Our private sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to
+have but a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher
+duty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose aims were
+incompatible with it as we meet things physically inconvenient,
+without insulting them as if they were morally vile or logically
+contemptible. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of
+others. Beyond the pale of actual unanimity the only possible
+unselfishness is chivalry--a recognition of the inward right and
+justification of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has
+long been practised in the battle-field without abolishing the causes
+of war; and it might conceivably be extended to all the conflicts of
+men with one another, and of the warring elements within each breast.
+Policy, hypnotisation, and even surgery may be practised without
+exorcisms or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of action,
+it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that
+course is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural
+origin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and
+ethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it
+says by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
+philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction
+that what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to
+existence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn
+absolutely any force--god or man--that destroys what is beautiful or
+precious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
+own to achieve.
+
+The consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting
+than its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might
+still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or
+mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;
+his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long
+help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a
+mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is
+natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been
+projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should
+attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world
+is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more
+serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be
+expressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before
+anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable
+property, that they ought to exist, or at least that, if anything
+exists, it ought to conform to them. What exists, however, is deaf to
+this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason; and,
+indeed, why should she have subordinated her own arbitrariness to a
+good that is no less arbitrary? This good, however, is somehow good
+notwithstanding; so that there is an abysmal wrong in its not being
+obeyed. The world is, in principle, totally depraved; but as the good
+is not a power, there is no one to redeem the world. The saints are
+those who, imitating the impotent dogmatism on high, and despising
+their sinful natural propensities, keep asserting that certain things
+are in themselves good and others bad, and declaring to be detestable
+any other saint who dogmatises differently. In this system the
+Calvinistic God has lost his creative and punitive functions, but
+continues to decree groundlessly what is good and what evil, and to
+love the one and hate the other with an infinite love or hatred.
+Meanwhile the reprobate need not fear hell in the next world, but the
+elect are sure to find it here.
+
+What shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal
+religion? Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old
+force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in
+losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric,
+this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in
+retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic;
+for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit--in this
+case a most pure and heroic spirit--which it strives so hard to
+dethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an
+unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the
+discernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,
+because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true
+philosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial
+systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their
+adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,
+and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but
+simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true
+insight they were based on is too often buried under them. The
+hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the
+forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things
+the limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted
+by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and
+when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.
+Mr. Russell's ethics _is_ ethics. When we mortals have once assumed
+the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to
+some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that
+combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and
+that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract
+pleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity
+if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,
+whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a
+tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
+
+
+It is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and
+there is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains
+that any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and incommensurably,
+if it pleased anybody at any time for any reason. In practice, however,
+the ideal of anarchy is unstable. Irrefutable by argument, it is readily
+overcome by nature. It melts away before the dogmatic operation of the
+anarchist's own will, as soon as he allows himself the least creative
+endeavour. In spite of the infinite variety of what is merely possible,
+human nature and will have a somewhat definite constitution, and only
+what is harmonious with their actual constitution can long maintain
+itself in the moral world. Hence it is a safe principle in the criticism
+of art that technical proficiency, and brilliancy of fancy or execution,
+cannot avail to establish a great reputation. They may dazzle for a
+moment, but they cannot absolve an artist from the need of having an
+important subject-matter and a sane humanity.
+
+If this principle is accepted, however, it might seem that certain
+artists, and perhaps the greatest, might not fare well at our hands.
+How would Shelley, for instance, stand such a test? Every one knows
+the judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who
+evidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only
+in the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley,
+Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating
+his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that
+Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an
+unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word _sale_,
+and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want
+of the sense of humour, which could only be called _bête_. These
+strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They
+unmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all
+revolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only
+through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien
+reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other
+half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a
+common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so
+much as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of
+revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that
+they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the
+midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly
+a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,
+and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the
+leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.
+In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if
+one is out of tune with everything. We should not then be yielding to
+any private bias, but simply noting the conditions under which art may
+exist and may be appreciated, if we accepted the classical principle
+of criticism and asserted that substance, sanity, and even a sort of
+pervasive wisdom are requisite for supreme works of art. On the other
+hand--who can honestly doubt it?--the rebels and individualists are
+the men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shelley in
+particular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and
+Shelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in
+humour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a
+matter of æsthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of
+capital importance in the development of human genius that the great
+revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that
+began with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found
+angels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which
+began at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have
+been one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley. How shall we
+reconcile these conflicting impressions? Shall we force ourselves to
+call the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary,
+and shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation
+or political prejudice? Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox
+principle that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are
+essential to great works? Or shall we look for a different issue out
+of our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not
+perhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in
+Shelley's poetry? This last is the direction in which I conceive the
+truth to lie. A little consideration will show us that Shelley really
+has a great subject-matter--what ought to be; and that he has a real
+humanity--though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal
+principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can
+flourish in the world.
+
+Shelley seems hardly to have been brought up; he grew up in the
+nursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys,
+without any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or
+social tradition. If he received any formal training or correction, he
+instantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and
+turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to
+writing them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical
+experiments. Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but
+not, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through
+the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if
+they were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley's mind disinherited itself out
+of allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly
+endowed for the world into which it had descended. It rejected
+ordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.
+Education is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not
+completely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by
+experience because they are born with various imperfect alternative
+instincts rooted equally in their system. But most animals, and a few
+men, are not of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are
+born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without
+intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed
+with a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:
+and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final
+and only possible system of philosophy.
+
+Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of these
+nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,
+inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature. He was innocent and
+cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind. Being a finished
+child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,
+history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense,
+but was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The
+cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what
+little wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but
+uninstructed. When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own
+natural note. If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he
+hated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being incapable of
+understanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in
+idea. For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it
+was also sensitive, vehement, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he
+had the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was
+united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the
+pelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted swiftly on its
+appointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but
+when it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was
+inwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud
+for liberty and justice.
+
+The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the
+same time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and
+continual suffering. When the world violated the ideal which lay so
+clear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If to
+the irrepressible gushing of life from within we add the suffering and
+horror that continually checked it, we shall have in hand, I think,
+the chief elements of his genius.
+
+Love of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what ought to be, has
+for its necessary counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the
+actual does not conform to that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul
+of the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution
+fails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All moral
+life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they
+venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and
+omnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of
+untasted and ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,
+and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world. Other
+moralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where
+they find the actual particularly galling. These excel in sincerity;
+their purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent
+and sometimes even in action. But the ideals they frame are
+fragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like
+liberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or
+plans for moral life as a whole, like Plato's _Republic_. The Utopian
+or visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world;
+being well-intentioned but impotent, they often take comfort in
+fancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on
+earth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at
+least is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth,
+to which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.
+
+Lovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called
+idealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that
+hard-used word. He early became an idealist after Berkeley's fashion,
+in that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a
+psychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the
+universe. In his drama _Hellas_ he puts this view with evident
+approval into the mouth of Ahasuerus:
+
+                    "This whole
+    Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,
+    With all the silent or tempestuous workings
+    By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
+    Is but a vision;--all that it inherits
+    Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.
+    Thought is its cradle and its grave; nor less
+    The future and the past are idle shadows
+    Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:
+    Nought is but that which feels itself to be."
+
+But Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the
+manner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably
+not working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it;
+and he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal
+realities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the
+glimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away. From the
+infinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind
+draws certain bright forms--the Platonic ideas--"the gathered rays
+which are reality," as Shelley called them: and it is the light of
+these ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some
+degree of reality and value, making out of them "lovely apparitions,
+dim at first, then radiant ... the progeny immortal of painting,
+sculpture, and rapt poesy."
+
+The only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the
+kind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which
+teaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that
+all the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to
+make the universe as good as it possibly could be. In this form,
+idealism is simply contempt for all ideals, and a hearty adoration of
+things as they are; and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that
+be, in church and in state; but in that capacity it would have been as
+hateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were, and as the
+philosophy was that flattered them. For his moral feeling was based on
+suffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a
+visioned good. His conscience was, to a most unusual degree, at once
+elevated and sincere. It was inspired in equal measure by prophecy and
+by indignation. He was carried away in turn by enthusiasm for what his
+ethereal and fertile fancy pictured as possible, and by detestation of
+the reality forced upon him instead. Hence that extraordinary moral
+fervour which is the soul of his poetry. His imagination is no playful
+undirected kaleidoscope; the images, often so tenuous and
+metaphysical, that crowd upon him, are all sparks thrown off at white
+heat, embodiments of a fervent, definite, unswerving inspiration. If
+we think that the _Cloud_ or the _West Wind_ or the _Witch of the
+Atlas_ are mere fireworks, poetic dust, a sort of _bataille des
+fleurs_ in which we are pelted by a shower of images--we have not
+understood the passion that overflows in them, as any long-nursed
+passion may, in any of us, suddenly overflow in an unwonted profusion
+of words. This is a point at which Francis Thompson's understanding of
+Shelley, generally so perfect, seems to me to go astray. The universe,
+Thompson tells us, was Shelley's box of toys. "He gets between the
+feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature,
+and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to
+see how she will look nicest in his song." This last is not, I think,
+Shelley's motive; it is not the truth about the spring of his genius.
+He undoubtedly shatters the world to bits, but only to build it nearer
+to the heart's desire, only to make out of its coloured fragments some
+more Elysian home for love, or some more dazzling symbol for that
+infinite beauty which is the need--the profound, aching, imperative
+need--of the human soul. This recreative impulse of the poet's is not
+wilful, as Thompson calls it: it is moral. Like the _Sensitive Plant_
+
+    "It loves even like Love,--its deep heart is full;
+     It desires what it has not, the beautiful."
+
+The question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his
+song; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is
+soon dry. Shelley's abundance has a more generous source; it springs
+from his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture,
+but in the world. Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it,
+he can exclaim:
+
+    "The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,
+     The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
+     The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!
+     Ha! Ha! the animation of delight,
+     Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,
+     And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!"
+
+To match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement
+sense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty,
+to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror
+of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he
+could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of
+distilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are,
+or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the _Cenci_, he might urge
+that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better
+historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually
+to be found in the world could give him for his _Skylark_, his
+_Epipsychidion_, or his _Prometheus_. But to exaggerate good is to
+vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful
+naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and
+congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,
+on the contrary, is to darken counsel--already dark enough--and the
+want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is
+not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,
+the wantonness of these invectives--for they are invectives in
+intention and in effect--may have seemed justified to Shelley by his
+political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests,
+soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges--to destroy them, I mean, in
+their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all
+its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the
+half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to
+historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an
+impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,
+and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the
+legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of
+the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the
+very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the
+past and its contingent sanctities. Shelley was not left standing
+aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all
+traditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far
+lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a
+perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of
+this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.
+
+So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's
+genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,
+what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at
+the touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an
+opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on
+the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of
+emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused
+suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was
+the belief in perfectibility. An animal that has rigid instincts and
+an _a priori_ mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world
+he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;
+unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or
+by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be
+reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the
+animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality
+offers. So long as such a creature lives--and his life will be
+difficult and short--events will continually disconcert and puzzle
+him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,
+unnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and
+connection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of
+thought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and
+unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;
+he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What
+contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict
+reason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will
+probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is
+an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so
+perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he
+will say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own
+_a priori_ imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,
+and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things
+cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange
+violence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set
+everything right again: nay, everything must be on the point of
+righting itself spontaneously. Wrong, of its very essence, must be in
+unstable equilibrium. The conflict between what such a man feels ought
+to exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure,
+end by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all
+scandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person,
+or by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to
+existence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him,
+it will seem too horrible to be true.
+
+Such a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and
+consequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry. His choice
+lies absolutely between victory and martyrdom. But at the very moment
+of martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of
+victory. The _a priori_ spirit will therefore be always a prophet of
+victory, so long as it subsists at all. The vision of a better world
+at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the
+desert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to
+the world it leaves, "This day thou shall be with me in paradise."
+
+In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility. In his latest
+poems--in _Hellas_, in _Adonais_--he was perhaps a little inclined to
+remove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the
+Christian church soon removed it to the other world. Indeed, an earth
+really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous
+heaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so
+angel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as
+described in _Prometheus_ and in _Epipsychidion_, is too
+festival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it
+cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical
+heaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of
+Platonic ideas, where "life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," no
+longer "stains the white radiance of eternity." But the age had been
+an age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its
+faith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a
+paradise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he
+hoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was
+that eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled
+there by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.
+He believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, "that mankind had only to will
+that there should be no evil, and there would be none." And she adds:
+"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from
+his own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the
+cardinal point of his system." This cosmic extension of the conversion
+of men reminds one of the cosmic extension of the Fall conceived by
+St. Augustine; and in the _Prometheus_ Shelley has allowed his fancy,
+half in symbol, half in glorious physical hyperbole, to carry the warm
+contagion of love into the very bowels of the earth, and even the
+moon, by reflection, to catch the light of love, and be alive again.
+
+Shelley, we may safely say, did not understand the real constitution
+of nature. It was hidden from him by a cloud, all woven of shifting
+rainbows and bright tears. Only his emotional haste made it possible
+for him to entertain such, opinions as he did entertain; or rather,
+it was inevitable that the mechanism of nature, as it is in its
+depths, should remain in his pictures only the shadowiest of
+backgrounds. His poetry is accordingly a part of the poetry of
+illusion; the poetry of truth, if we have the courage to hope for such
+a thing, is reserved for far different and yet unborn poets. But it is
+only fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as
+yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they
+touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each
+successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing,
+or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a
+gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once
+out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and
+sentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous
+pageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic
+relation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as
+anybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The
+distinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,
+subtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits
+so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe
+in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising
+respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts
+from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the
+present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an
+overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any
+divided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid
+or fanciful, when he created what he justly calls "Beautiful idealisms
+of moral excellence."
+
+That is what his poems are fundamentally--the _Skylark_, and the
+_Witch of the Atlas_, and the _Sensitive Plant_ no less than the
+grander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his
+heroic conscience. He felt that what his imagination pictured was a
+true symbol of what human experience should and might pass into.
+Otherwise he would have been aware of playing with idle images; his
+poetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business;
+he would have been a worldling in art and in morals. The clear fire,
+the sustained breath, the fervent accent of his poetry are due to his
+faith in his philosophy. As Mrs. Shelley expressed it, he "had no care
+for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind,
+and develop some high and abstruse truth." Had his poetry not dealt
+with what was supreme in his own eyes, and dearest to his heart, it
+could never have been the exquisite and entrancing poetry that it is.
+It would not have had an adequate subject-matter, as, in spite of
+Matthew Arnold, I think it had; for nothing can be empty that contains
+such a soul. An angel cannot be ineffectual if the standard of
+efficiency is moral; he is what all other things bring about, when
+they are effectual. And a void that is alive with the beating of
+luminous wings, and of a luminous heart, is quite sufficiently
+peopled. Shelley's mind was angelic not merely in its purity and
+fervour, but also in its moral authority, in its prophetic strain.
+What was conscience in his generation was life in him.
+
+The mind of man is not merely a sensorium. His intelligence is not
+merely an instrument for adaptation. There is a germ within, a nucleus
+of force and organisation, which can be unfolded, under favourable
+circumstances, into a perfection inwardly determined. Man's
+constitution is a fountain from which to draw an infinity of gushing
+music, not representing anything external, yet not unmeaning on that
+account, since it represents the capacities and passions latent in him
+from the beginning. These potentialities, however, are no oracles of
+truth. Being innate they are arbitrary; being _a priori_ they are
+subjective; but they are good principles for fiction, for poetry, for
+morals, for religion. They are principles for the true expression of
+man, but not for the true description of the universe. When they are
+taken for the latter, fiction becomes deception, poetry illusion,
+morals fanaticism, and religion bad science. The orgy of delusion into
+which we are then plunged comes from supposing the _a priori_ to be
+capable of controlling the actual, and the innate to be a standard for
+the true. That rich and definite endowment which might have made the
+distinction of the poet, then makes the narrowness of the philosopher.
+So Shelley, with a sort of tyranny of which he does not suspect the
+possible cruelty, would impose his ideal of love and equality upon all
+creatures; he would make enthusiasts of clowns and doves of vultures.
+In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the
+capacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate
+itself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,
+and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar
+reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he
+despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he
+wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
+that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet
+his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was
+perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for
+its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with
+us, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire
+enough within to make a second stellar universe.
+
+An instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to
+be found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view
+of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours
+has put it: "It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater
+good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still
+more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be
+some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question."
+It is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his
+good is no less good than yours. Convince people of this--and who can
+resist such perfect logic?--and _presto_ all property in things has
+disappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour. How
+happy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than
+in our mean, blind, competitive society! The single word love--and we
+have just seen that love is a logical necessity--offers an easy and
+final solution to all moral and political problems. Shelley cannot
+imagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not
+produce love. He can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and
+since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire
+is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in
+the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy
+seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an
+abomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.
+
+Now this is a very unintelligent view of evil; and if Shelley had had
+time to read Spinoza--an author with whom he would have found himself
+largely in sympathy--he might have learned that nothing is evil in
+itself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in
+creation, nor to groundless malice in man. Evil is an inevitable
+aspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve
+themselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter
+enough for them to prosper equally side by side. Under these
+circumstances the partial success of any creature--say, the
+cancer-microbe--is an evil from the point of view of those other
+creatures--say, men--to whom that success is a defeat. Shelley
+sometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy. So he says of the
+fair lady in the _Sensitive Plant_:
+
+    "All killing insects and gnawing worms,
+     And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
+     She bore in a basket of Indian woof,
+     Into the rough woods far aloof--
+     In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
+     The freshest her gentle hands could pull
+     For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
+     Although they did ill, was innocent."
+
+Now it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and
+go feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves do not object; oak-leaves
+might be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot
+listen to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless
+they are quickly and utterly exterminated. And fundamentally men are
+subject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason
+unless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that,
+being animals, they should be reasonable exclusively. Imagination is
+indeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing
+themselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children,
+perhaps, or for their religion. But they are not more capable of
+sacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the
+cancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.
+
+When Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his
+ignorance of the world. The illusion he suffers from is
+constitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly
+subject to in their way: what he is marvelling at is really that
+anything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral
+disposition. Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and
+bids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature: so
+that all is not vanity in his illusion, nor night in his blindness.
+The poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion
+in the expression of his own soul. His political utopias, his belief
+in the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way
+of judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his
+lyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy. If he had understood universal
+nature, he would not have so glorified in his own. And his own nature
+was worth glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest,
+richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse. I have not
+read in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated
+instincts of the mind. The world of Shelley is that which the vital
+monad within many of us--I will not say within all, for who shall set
+bounds to the variations of human nature?--the world which the vital
+monad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have
+its way.
+
+Matthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he
+was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external
+perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his
+lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even
+an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul
+just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous,
+and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest
+playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from
+observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity
+appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men
+would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons,
+like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole
+inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of
+real things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree
+bent by too prevalent a wind. Half the fertility of such a soul is
+lost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy
+deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing
+object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate
+in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an
+ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate
+possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the
+desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.
+His obtuseness to things dynamic--to the material order--leaves his
+whole mind free to develop things æsthetic after their own kind; his
+abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative
+freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.
+
+We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of
+us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or
+stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no
+less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or
+flowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of
+producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,
+like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances
+may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they
+cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed. What
+Shelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like
+what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food--a mass of
+mere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley
+constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed
+organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and
+muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human
+happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may
+be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they
+can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which
+they hide.
+
+When the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the
+world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that
+_freedom_ should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not
+been the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for
+himself. "I never could discern in him," says his friend Hogg, "any
+more than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love
+of liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...
+and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution." We all fancy nowadays
+that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we
+approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make
+them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions
+would be if we retained them. Liberty of the press and liberty to vote
+do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I
+suppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of
+a poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is
+forbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with
+the people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling
+of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test
+of freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the
+beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.
+To be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to
+be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those
+of us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to
+declare frankly that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility
+of freedom.
+
+    "I never was attached to that great sect
+     Whose doctrine is that each one should select,
+     Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend
+     And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
+     To cold oblivion; though it is the code
+     Of modern morals, and the beaten road
+     Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
+     Who travel to their home among the dead
+     By the broad highway of the world, and so
+     With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
+     The dreariest and the longest journey go.
+     True love in this differs from gold and clay,
+     That to divide is not to take away.
+     Love is like understanding that grows bright
+     Gazing on many truths.... Narrow
+     The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
+     The life that wears, the spirit that creates
+     One object and one form, and builds thereby
+     A sepulchre for its eternity!"
+
+The difficulties in reducing this charming theory of love to practice
+are well exemplified in Shelley's own life. He ran away with his first
+wife not because she inspired any uncontrollable passion, but because
+she declared she was a victim of domestic oppression and threw herself
+upon him for protection. Nevertheless, when he discovered that his
+best friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love
+principles, he was very seriously annoyed. When he presently abandoned
+her, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned
+herself in the Serpentine: and his second wife needed all her natural
+sweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the
+waves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept
+the too sensitive heart of her husband. Free love would not, then,
+secure freedom from complications; it would not remove the present
+occasion for jealousy, reproaches, tragedies, and the dragging of a
+lengthening chain. Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom
+of action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements,
+but you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism
+and not, like love, a plastic dream. Wisdom is very old and therefore
+often ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who
+would live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world:
+and that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a snare for
+poets. Let them endure to love freely, hopelessly, and infinitely,
+after the manner of Plato and Dante, and even of Goethe, when Goethe
+really loved: that exquisite sacrifice will improve their verse, and
+it will not kill them. Let them follow in the traces of Shelley when
+he wrote in his youth: "I have been most of the night pacing a
+church-yard. I must now engage in scenes of strong interest.... I
+expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry.... I
+slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not
+die," Happy man if he had been able to add, "And did not marry!"
+
+Last among the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his
+atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his
+biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a
+pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox
+conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a
+judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any
+sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred
+the _Paradiso_ of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to
+the popular _Inferno_ itself, could evidently be attracted by
+Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as
+expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A
+pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this
+whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any
+conscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of
+the whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a
+panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the
+individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral
+ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the
+essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the
+chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He
+maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused
+among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful
+and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose
+it.
+
+    "To suffer ...
+     To forgive ...
+     To defy Power ...
+     To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates
+     From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
+     Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
+     This ... is to be
+     Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free."
+
+Shelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly
+speculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All
+metaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good
+poetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance:
+
+         "The pure spirit shall flow
+    Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
+    A portion of the eternal, which must glow
+    Through time and change, unquenchably the same.
+    Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
+    He hath awakened from the dream of life.
+    'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
+    With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
+
+    "He is made one with Nature. There is heard
+    His voice in all her music, from the moan
+    Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.
+
+    "He is a portion of the loveliness
+    Which once he made more lovely.
+
+    "The splendours of the firmament of time
+    May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:
+    Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
+    And death is a low mist which cannot blot
+    The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
+    Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
+    ... the dead live there."
+
+Atheism or pantheism of this stamp cannot be taxed with being gross or
+materialistic; the trouble is rather that it is too hazy in its
+sublimity. The poet has not perceived the natural relation between
+facts and ideals so clearly or correctly as he has felt the moral
+relation between them. But his allegiance to the intuition which
+defies, for the sake of felt excellence, every form of idolatry or
+cowardice wearing the mask of religion--this allegiance is itself the
+purest religion; and it is capable of inspiring the sweetest and most
+absolute poetry. In daring to lay bare the truths of fate, the poet
+creates for himself the subtlest and most heroic harmonies; and he is
+comforted for the illusions he has lost by being made incapable of
+desiring them.
+
+We have seen that Shelley, being unteachable, could never put together
+any just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions,
+and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does
+not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of
+nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic;
+it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never
+were on earth, and never will be. If you are seriously interested only
+in what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in
+Shelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism
+of life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no
+solidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances
+of life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those
+circumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the
+circumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it
+stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the
+formal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.
+By so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a
+parallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the
+analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances
+of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life
+can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and
+air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as
+persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he
+was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the
+interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are
+probably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which
+Matthew Arnold said we should read in order to know the best that has
+been thought and said in the world. The future, too, even among men,
+may contain, as Shelley puts it, many "arts, though unimagined, yet to
+be." The divination of poets cannot, of course, be expected to reveal
+any of these hidden regions as they actually exist or will exist; but
+what would be the advantage of revealing them? It could only be what
+the advantage of criticising human life would be also, to improve
+subsequent life indirectly by turning it towards attainable goods, and
+is it not as important a thing to improve life directly and in the
+present, if one has the gift, by enriching rather than criticising it?
+Besides, there is need of fixing the ideal by which criticism is to be
+guided. If you have no image of happiness or beauty or perfect
+goodness before you, how are you to judge what portions of life are
+important, and what rendering of them is appropriate?
+
+Being a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal
+goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a
+discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of
+life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life
+is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in
+expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove
+useful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon
+them. This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is
+diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that
+are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other
+names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material
+processes. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
+Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some
+favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these
+visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day
+be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the
+possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is
+precisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,
+that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific
+probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the
+landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that
+the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual
+truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)
+than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre
+and aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by
+sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
+because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul
+touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may
+people the infinite.
+
+For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired
+poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most
+appealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the
+world they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.
+They do not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I
+think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it
+
+                  "Must be
+    A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
+    And build themselves again impregnably
+          In a diviner clime,
+    To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
+    Which frowns above the idle foam of time."
+
+"Frowns," says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something
+timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could
+threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous
+error! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those
+who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to
+reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal
+possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of
+other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite
+unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal
+essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian
+calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome
+to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. Whether
+any one has the will depends on his material constitution, and whether
+he has the power depends on the firm texture of that constitution and
+on circumstances happening to be favourable to its operation.
+Otherwise what the rebel or the visionary hails as his ideal will be
+no picture of his destiny or of that of the world. It will be, and
+will always remain, merely a picture of his heart. This picture,
+indestructible in its ideal essence, will mirror also the hearts of
+those who may share, or may have shared, the nature of the poet who
+drew it. So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of
+Shelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted
+friend wrote upon his tomb: _cor cordium_, the heart of hearts.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
+
+_Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of
+California, August_ 25, 1911.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The privilege of addressing you to-day
+is very welcome to me, not merely for the honour of it, which is
+great, nor for the pleasures of travel, which are many, when it is
+California that one is visiting for the first time, but also because
+there is something I have long wanted to say which this occasion seems
+particularly favourable for saying. America is still a young country,
+and this part of it is especially so; and it would have been nothing
+extraordinary if, in this young country, material preoccupations had
+altogether absorbed people's minds, and they had been too much
+engrossed in living to reflect upon life, or to have any philosophy.
+The opposite, however, is the case. Not only have you already found
+time to philosophise in California, as your society proves, but the
+eastern colonists from the very beginning were a sophisticated race.
+As much as in clearing the land and fighting the Indians they were
+occupied, as they expressed it, in wrestling with the Lord. The
+country was new, but the race was tried, chastened, and full of solemn
+memories. It was an old wine in new bottles; and America did not have
+to wait for its present universities, with their departments of
+academic philosophy, in order to possess a living philosophy--to have
+a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human
+destiny.
+
+Now this situation is a singular and remarkable one, and has many
+consequences, not all of which are equally fortunate. America is a
+young country with an old mentality: it has enjoyed the advantages of
+a child carefully brought up and thoroughly indoctrinated; it has been
+a wise child. But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always
+has a comic and an unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and
+verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and
+emotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged. Or when the
+child is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of
+his own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh
+mentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to
+reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly
+despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses
+the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary
+philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities
+of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or
+of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy
+has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed
+has caught the stale odour from it. America is not simply, as I said a
+moment ago, a young country with an old mentality: it is a country
+with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
+the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and
+discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of
+the mind--in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions--it is the
+hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard
+Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times. The truth
+is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in
+practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but
+slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while,
+alongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the
+other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This
+division may be found symbolised in American architecture: a neat
+reproduction of the colonial mansion--with some modern comforts
+introduced surreptitiously--stands beside the sky-scraper. The
+American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect
+inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American
+man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one
+is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.
+
+Now, with your permission, I should like to analyse more fully how
+this interesting situation has arisen, how it is qualified, and
+whither it tends. And in the first place we should remember what,
+precisely, that philosophy was which the first settlers brought with
+them into the country. In strictness there was more than one; but we
+may confine our attention to what I will call Calvinism, since it is
+on this that the current academic philosophy has been grafted. I do
+not mean exactly the Calvinism of Calvin, or even of Jonathan Edwards;
+for in their systems there was much that was not pure philosophy, but
+rather faith in the externals and history of revelation. Jewish and
+Christian revelation was interpreted by these men, however, in the
+spirit of a particular philosophy, which might have arisen under any
+sky, and been associated with any other religion as well as with
+Protestant Christianity. In fact, the philosophical principle of
+Calvinism appears also in the Koran, in Spinoza, and in Cardinal
+Newman; and persons with no very distinctive Christian belief, like
+Carlyle or like Professor Royce, may be nevertheless, philosophically,
+perfect Calvinists. Calvinism, taken in this sense, is an expression
+of the agonised conscience. It is a view of the world which an
+agonised conscience readily embraces, if it takes itself seriously,
+as, being agonised, of course it must. Calvinism, essentially, asserts
+three things: that sin exists, that sin is punished, and that it is
+beautiful that sin should exist to be punished. The heart of the
+Calvinist is therefore divided between tragic concern at his own
+miserable condition, and tragic exultation about the universe at
+large. He oscillates between a profound abasement and a paradoxical
+elation of the spirit. To be a Calvinist philosophically is to feel a
+fierce pleasure in the existence of misery, especially of one's own,
+in that this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is
+irresponsible or infinite or holy. Human nature, it feels, is totally
+depraved: to have the instincts and motives that we necessarily have
+is a great scandal, and we must suffer for it; but that scandal is
+requisite, since otherwise the serious importance of being as we ought
+to be would not have been vindicated.
+
+To those of us who have not an agonised conscience this system may
+seem fantastic and even unintelligible; yet it is logically and
+intently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take
+permanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain
+conditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small
+nation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic
+and distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints
+life in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and
+black abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps
+to infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, and again
+the early Protestants. If such a people is philosophical at all, it
+will not improbably be Calvinistic. Even in the early American
+communities many of these conditions were fulfilled. The nation was
+small and isolated; it lived under pressure and constant trial; it was
+acquainted with but a small range of goods and evils. Vigilance over
+conduct and an absolute demand for personal integrity were not merely
+traditional things, but things that practical sages, like Franklin and
+Washington, recommended to their countrymen, because they were virtues
+that justified themselves visibly by their fruits. But soon these
+happy results themselves helped to relax the pressure of external
+circumstances, and indirectly the pressure of the agonised conscience
+within. The nation became numerous; it ceased to be either ecstatic or
+distressful; the high social morality which on the whole it preserved
+took another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good
+sense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any
+fixed principles. They retained their instinct for order, and often
+created order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to
+be obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too
+unpractical a notion, and not quite serious. In fact, the second and
+native-born American mentality began to take shape. The sense of sin
+totally evaporated. Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty
+and commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing
+quick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it
+æsthetically. At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had
+elbow-room. His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he
+wished their number to increase. Good will became the great American
+virtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and
+cubic feet, and minutes saved--as if there had been anything to save
+them for. How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan
+Edwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to
+any intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.
+If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would
+think you were joking, as he himself usually is. He is convinced that
+he always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.
+
+Calvinism thus lost its basis in American life. Some emotional
+natures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private
+searchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the
+radical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but
+none can cease to be possible. Other natures, more sensitive to the
+moral and literary influences of the world, preferred to abandon
+parts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which
+should separate the remainder from real life.
+
+Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical
+genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the
+world, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American
+writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest--Poe,
+Hawthorne, and Emerson--had all a certain starved and abstract
+quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too
+keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered
+them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.
+They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.
+Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in
+his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way
+of appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not
+historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might
+have felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a
+poet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to
+avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to
+have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of
+Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of
+vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being
+morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
+rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes
+and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius
+sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in
+comparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.
+Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own persons they
+escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied
+nothing to supplant it in other minds.
+
+The churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no
+philosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism
+contained. The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it
+besides philosophical Calvinism. A Christian tenderness, and a hope of
+grace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and
+it was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now
+emphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant
+damnation. Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would
+perfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to
+exist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics. It is an
+ingredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself
+idealism. But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in
+current idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief
+element in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.
+
+Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in
+Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.
+Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set
+of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe
+regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It is a method, a
+point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain,
+could be approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is
+systematic subjectivism. It studies the perspectives of knowledge as
+they radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of inference
+by which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford
+any systematic or distant vistas. In other words, transcendentalism is
+the critical logic of science. Knowledge, it says, has a station, as
+in a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the
+moment. The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived,
+lie around it, painted as upon a panorama. They cannot be lighted up
+save by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by
+some active operation of the mind.
+
+This is hardly the occasion for developing or explaining this delicate
+insight; suffice it to say, lest you should think later that I
+disparage transcendentalism, that as a method I regard it as correct
+and, when once suggested, unforgettable. I regard it as the chief
+contribution made in modern times to speculation. But it is a method
+only, an attitude we may always assume if we like and that will always
+be legitimate. It is no answer, and involves no particular answer, to
+the question: What exists; in what order is what exists produced; what
+is to exist in the future? This question must be answered by observing
+the object, and tracing humbly the movement of the object. It cannot
+be answered at all by harping on the fact that this object, if
+discovered, must be discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an
+interest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full
+transcendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less
+frankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not
+only their own knowledge but the whole universe centre about
+themselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and
+romantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality
+might be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves;
+nay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their own
+romantic dreams extended indefinitely. Transcendental logic, the
+method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of
+evolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused,
+produced transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge
+was turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish
+sharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is
+significant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental
+systems of the universe, which are chimeras.
+
+In both its parts, however, transcendentalism had much to recommend it
+to American philosophers, for the transcendental method appealed to
+the individualistic and revolutionary temper of their youth, while
+transcendental myths enabled them to find a new status for their
+inherited theology, and to give what parts of it they cared to
+preserve some semblance of philosophical backing. This last was the
+use to which the transcendental method was put by Kant himself, who
+first brought it into vogue, before the terrible weapon had got out of
+hand, and become the instrument of pure romanticism. Kant came, he
+himself said, to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith,
+which in his case meant faith in Calvinism. In other words, he applied
+the transcendental method to matters of fact, reducing them thereby
+to human ideas, in order to give to the Calvinistic postulates of
+conscience a metaphysical validity. For Kant had a genteel tradition
+of his own, which he wished to remove to a place of safety, feeling
+that the empirical world had become too hot for it; and this place of
+safety was the region of transcendental myth. I need hardly say how
+perfectly this expedient suited the needs of philosophers in America,
+and it is no accident if the influence of Kant soon became dominant
+here. To embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound
+metaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no
+difficulty in embracing it. In truth it was a sign of having been
+brought up in the genteel tradition, of feeling it weak, and of
+wishing to save it.
+
+But the transcendental method, in its way, was also sympathetic to the
+American mind. It embodied, in a radical form, the spirit of
+Protestantism as distinguished from its inherited doctrines; it was
+autonomous, undismayed, calmly revolutionary; it felt that Will was
+deeper than Intellect; it focussed everything here and now, and asked
+all things to show their credentials at the bar of the young self, and
+to prove their value for this latest born moment. These things are
+truly American; they would be characteristic of any young society with
+a keen and discursive intelligence, and they are strikingly
+exemplified in the thought and in the person of Emerson. They
+constitute what he called self-trust. Self-trust, like other
+transcendental attitudes, may be expressed in metaphysical fables. The
+romantic spirit may imagine itself to be an absolute force, evoking
+and moulding the plastic world to express its varying moods. But for
+a pioneer who is actually a world-builder this metaphysical illusion
+has a partial warrant in historical fact; far more warrant than it
+could boast of in the fixed and articulated society of Europe, among
+the moonstruck rebels and sulking poets of the romantic era. Emerson
+was a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery,
+child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything
+that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or
+to notice. More, perhaps, than anybody that has ever lived, he
+practised the transcendental method in all its purity. He had no
+system. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh
+sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they
+suggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,
+was not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his
+mind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his
+notions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones
+that they were myths. Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other
+transcendentalists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing
+questions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all have to
+think our ideas final, led him to the very verge of system-making; but
+he stopped short. Had he made a system out of his notion of
+compensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would
+have been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems.
+But he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to
+poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and
+hints toward fresh transcendental musings.
+
+To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher
+says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As Mr.
+Bertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail
+to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those
+who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are
+rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians; and
+ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The truths
+they find are never complete, and are not always important; but they
+are integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to
+fill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate
+or afford to contradict. But professional philosophers are usually
+only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested
+illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study
+the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or
+semblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much
+prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution;
+for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and
+perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet
+truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they
+defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of
+things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever
+been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is
+true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in
+maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea
+of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of
+many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system,
+covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our
+logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of
+human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be
+poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that
+it was true?
+
+Emerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional
+consequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. When he came
+out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous
+close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to
+him: "Why so hot, little sir?" No doubt the spirit or energy of the
+world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every
+little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will
+move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
+dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole
+world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is
+silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which
+bridges the distances and compares the combatants. On this side of his
+genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and
+represented nothing except intelligence itself.
+
+There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with
+transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,
+for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a
+mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing
+his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was
+such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine
+a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually
+has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since
+I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,
+undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that
+is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was
+particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses
+of fellowship with the elements. This is something in which all
+Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and
+spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.
+Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,
+so others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
+resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled
+ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for
+instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but
+when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are
+unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
+that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
+openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where
+human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in
+a purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its
+quietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
+classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the
+presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and
+thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic
+sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.
+Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the
+genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind
+its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so
+precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise
+for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and
+poetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom
+you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however,
+only half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its
+savour if they had wholly escaped it. They point to what contradicts
+it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition,
+for they have nothing solid to put in its place. When they point out
+how ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this
+militates against the standard, but think it a funny perversity in the
+facts. Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition,
+such an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.
+Perhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may
+be taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present
+pervasively, but everywhere weak. Similarly in Italy, during the
+Renaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the
+intellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet
+its hold on the heart was singularly relaxed. The consequence was that
+humorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of
+cardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the
+saints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for
+it so little at heart that they could find it infinitely amusing that
+it should be contradicted in men's lives and that no harm should come
+of it. So when Mark Twain says, "I was born of poor but dishonest
+parents," the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon
+convention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the
+hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom
+one's habitual conviction.
+
+The one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely
+behind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans
+find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest
+ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he
+certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and
+traditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he
+is looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the
+polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the
+inarticulate principles that animate the community, on which its own
+genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly. When the foreigner
+opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last
+upon something representative and original. In Walt Whitman democracy
+is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and
+emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and
+equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to
+speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not
+excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their
+companions--plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the
+refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle
+further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a
+whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of
+the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and
+self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was
+good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia
+rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that
+alone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in
+principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to
+the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius
+to fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the
+registering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,
+and therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and
+his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very
+reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many
+beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a
+worthy filling for the human mind. An American in the nineteenth
+century who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly
+have done more.
+
+But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country,
+who has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as
+Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent
+American mind--I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as
+tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could
+be, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.
+Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two
+brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr.
+Henry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer
+world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns
+everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a
+curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with
+other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the
+genteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it. With
+William James too this infusion of worldly insight and European
+sympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but
+the chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal
+spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality,
+similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so
+to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the
+dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.
+His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of
+thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in
+a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. Thus he eluded the
+genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its
+opposite. The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel's dialectic (which is
+not dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of
+experience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through
+the infusion of new insights, and through the insensible
+transformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at
+last it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of
+expanding them. Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when
+it fell again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist
+like William James. He restored their revolutionary force to its
+neutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them
+separately, according to his personal predilections.
+
+For one thing, William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all
+that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in
+religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to
+sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and
+impostors--for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing
+to draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any
+of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the
+blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the
+certainty of finding sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least
+they were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so
+seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg,
+or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less
+beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus
+William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous,
+half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry
+individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time,
+their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he
+made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world
+has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and
+interests of these people.
+
+Yet the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in
+William James. There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and
+Darwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for
+practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival.
+Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned
+to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James
+embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called
+pragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,
+by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be
+true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its
+roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of
+practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It
+does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to
+connect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its
+psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it
+chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called
+intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his
+kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure
+pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up
+nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally
+useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of
+life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon
+obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds
+and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the
+pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that
+must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.
+To know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is
+anything eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would
+prove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives. Ideas are not
+mirrors, they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet
+events, as future experience may unroll them. Those ideas that
+disappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true
+themselves.
+
+This may seem a very utilitarian view of the mind; and I confess I
+think it a partial one, since the logical force of beliefs and ideas,
+their truth or falsehood as assertions, has been overlooked
+altogether, or confused with the vital force of the material processes
+which these ideas express. It is an external view only, which marks
+the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its
+specific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a
+ring. Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist's theory of
+the mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to
+become. If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to
+expedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and
+a chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be
+expedited, nor could anything be useful to it. In other words--and
+this is a third point at which the philosophy of William James has
+played havoc with the genteel tradition, while ostensibly defending
+it--nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological
+terms. Its purposes are not to be static harmonies, self-unfolding
+destinies, the logic of spirit, the spirit of logic, or any other
+formal method and abstract law; its purposes are to be concrete
+endeavours, finite efforts of souls living in an environment which
+they transform and by which they, too, are affected. A spirit, the
+divine spirit as much as the human, as this new animism conceives it,
+is a romantic adventurer. Its future is undetermined. Its scope, its
+duration, and the quality of its life are all contingent. This spirit
+grows; it buds and sends forth feelers, sounding the depths around for
+such other centres of force or life as may exist there. It has a vital
+momentum, but no predetermined goal. It uses its past as a
+stepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely
+fresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown.
+The universe is an experiment; it is unfinished. It has no ultimate or
+total nature, because it has no end. It embodies no formula or
+statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing
+what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking
+characteristic of existence; the law is a description _a posteriori_
+of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may
+possibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is
+uncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is
+real; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more
+to-day. "There shall be news," William James was fond of saying with
+rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,
+"there shall be news in heaven!" There is almost certainly, he
+thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist
+together, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring
+sympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;
+we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our
+career and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,
+although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.
+Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal
+vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual
+experiment keep quick the edge of life.
+
+This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a
+conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in
+various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision
+radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James
+himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a
+philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.
+William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.
+Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first
+rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.
+Bergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative
+evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to
+"_écraser l'infâme_." We may suspect, notwithstanding, that
+intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if
+the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that
+there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may
+possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing
+new--not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from
+the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet
+had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not
+merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new
+all day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that
+controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial
+evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel
+tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation
+unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William
+James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences
+of religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of
+the genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic
+God is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will
+answer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct
+conditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring
+being, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon
+a personal friend, or a physician, or an insurance company. How
+disconcerting! Is not this new theology a little like superstition?
+And yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!
+I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more
+probable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy. All
+three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which
+probabilities are irrelevant. If one man says the moon is sister to
+the sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not
+which notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all
+expressive. The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith
+and imagination have prejudged the issue. The force of William James's
+new theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this: that it has
+broken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new
+direction, which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than
+the old. The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly
+be true--who shall know that?--but that it has entered the heart of a
+leading American to conceive and to cherish it. The genteel tradition
+cannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which
+it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been
+challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been
+discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No
+one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some
+young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a
+dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be
+afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The
+intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has
+not been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent. That
+is a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.
+Something else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the
+imagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic
+idealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring
+things as they are. The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel
+tradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought
+to be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family,
+by the genius of the race. Henceforth there can hardly be the same
+peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. Hegel will
+be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.
+Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been
+abandoned. An honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel
+tradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.
+
+With this I have finished such a sketch as I am here able to offer you
+of the genteel tradition in American philosophy. The subject is
+complex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote; yet I
+think the main outlines are clear enough. The chief fountains of this
+tradition were Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living
+fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised
+conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.
+When these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared--and the
+American atmosphere is not favourable to either of them--the two
+systems ceased to be inwardly understood; they subsisted as sacred
+mysteries only; and the combination of the two in some transcendental
+system of the universe (a contradiction in principle) was doubly
+artificial. Besides, it could hardly be held with a single mind.
+Natural science, history, the beliefs implied in labour and invention,
+could not be disregarded altogether; so that the transcendental
+philosopher was condemned to a double allegiance, and to not letting
+his left hand know the bluff that his right hand was making.
+Nevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate
+convictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has
+subsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic
+to take its place.
+
+The academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned. On the one side
+came the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude
+naturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism,
+welcoming popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science
+to an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to
+be wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.
+
+This revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you,
+who live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and
+prodigious world. When you transform nature to your uses, when you
+experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you
+cannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these
+adjustments would have been pre-established. Much less can you feel it
+when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm. You must
+feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little
+force among her immense forces. When you escape, as you love to do, to
+your forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel
+you made them, or that they were made for you. They have grown, as you
+have grown, only more massively and more slowly. In their non-human
+beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman
+possibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcendental logic that
+they teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in
+the world. It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic,
+the needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength
+of time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable
+variety, of possible life. Everything is measurable and conditioned,
+indefinitely repeated, yet, in repetition, twisted somewhat from its
+old form. Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an
+incipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor a
+plan. It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is
+the daily discipline of contact with things, so different from the
+verbal discipline of the schools, that will, I trust, inspire the
+philosophy of your children. A Californian whom I had recently the
+pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among
+your mountains their systems would have been different from what they
+are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems
+are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since
+Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly
+they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that
+man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,
+is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains
+and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what,
+indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so
+sweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or
+your friends, or that you have any secret contempt for your present
+ambitions. You respect these, you respect them perhaps too much; you
+are not suffered by the genteel tradition to criticise or to reform
+them at all radically. No; it is the yoke of this genteel tradition
+itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They
+suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as
+individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at
+once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for
+what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious
+infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails
+little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through
+wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you
+are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,
+namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in
+letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their
+life. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for
+reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of
+these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the
+interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes
+that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper
+happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate
+men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so
+many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be
+frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Winds Of Doctrine, by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Winds Of Doctrine
+       Studies in Contemporary Opinion
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: February 16, 2006 [EBook #17771]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDS OF DOCTRINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>WINDS OF DOCTRINE</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3 >STUDIES IN</h3>
+<h2>CONTEMPORARY OPINION</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>G. SANTAYANA</h2>
+
+<h4>LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><img src="images/image_01.jpg" alt="Seal" width="100" height="150" /></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h3>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>FIRST PRINTED IN 1913</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td class="tocch">I.</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#I">THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">II.</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#II">MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">III.</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#III">THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">IV.</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IV">THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL&mdash;</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td  class="tocch">i.</td>
+  <td><a href="#one">A NEW SCHOLASTICISM</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">ii.</td>
+  <td><a href="#two">THE STUDY OF ESSENCE</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">iii.</td>
+  <td><a href="#three">THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td >&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">iv.</td>
+  <td><a href="#four">HYPOSTATIC ETHICS</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">V.</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#V">SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">VI.</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocch">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI">THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>WINDS OF DOCTRINE</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The
+civilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet
+another civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand
+the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of
+our forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,
+sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and
+aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which
+rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of
+the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,
+cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the
+other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind
+of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future
+confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is
+saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit&mdash;that of an
+emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.</p>
+
+<p>These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is
+something positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our
+animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every
+vital impulse,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span> is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we
+deprecate it; it has possession of us already through our
+propensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs
+are at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries
+are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they
+devote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has
+hold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as
+disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our
+day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what
+Goethe said of his successive love affairs&mdash;that it is sweet to see
+the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often
+comfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labours
+long enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not
+particularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama
+and (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. The
+nations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known
+history. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fight
+and believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;
+the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,
+and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few
+demands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge
+together, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.
+The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the
+observer. It stirs not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality and
+hearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.</p>
+
+<p>A chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is not
+limited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,
+but that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the average
+individual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so divided
+within themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, different
+classes of men have stood at different levels of culture, with a
+magnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for their
+respective principles. These militant believers have been keenly
+conscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers to
+them, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank
+negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life
+difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to
+understand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless
+under compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against
+their will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy
+blows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his
+side, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and
+exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that
+his faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a
+clear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or
+incompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his
+garden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.</p>
+
+<p>When men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and to
+count them. During the Reformation,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> when external confusion was at
+its height, you might have ascertained almost statistically what
+persons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was not
+doubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories
+and defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth
+century it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau
+might be alienating from Bossuet and F&eacute;nelon. But how shall we satisfy
+ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?
+Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself
+Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical
+theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,
+too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for
+philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,
+and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its
+accredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterly
+conventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to be
+as impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy in
+acquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have not
+been lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage their
+science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological
+scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid
+speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to
+abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been
+supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still
+call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over
+property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> and drink, amusements,
+and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and
+religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore
+eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who
+speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how
+many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is
+the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather
+lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and
+better men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now
+preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,
+to the instincts of the majority&mdash;the most cruel and unprogressive of
+masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatest
+happiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just or
+generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the
+largest possible population.</p>
+
+<p>Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It
+had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,
+an age whose real achievements were of international application, was
+destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.
+The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there
+is an extreme socialistic party that&mdash;when a wave of national passion
+does not carry it the other way&mdash;believes in international
+brotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally
+excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and
+political ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of
+late an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be
+everywhere established, extinct or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> provincial dialects must be
+galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,
+religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and
+denounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,
+when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to
+occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and
+hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and
+discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that
+the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part
+is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal
+business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.
+It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I
+mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for
+of course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language
+and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own
+is spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to
+which they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of
+shocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
+people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to
+them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural
+for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without
+a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to
+feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
+But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;
+like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis
+of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
+Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
+perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.</p>
+
+<p>Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
+accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
+deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:
+namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,
+collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may
+therefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the
+principles that seem to rule their conduct, may be belated, or
+irrelevant, or premonitory; for the living organism has many strata,
+on any of which, at a given moment, activities may exist perfect
+enough to involve consciousness, yet too weak and isolated to control
+the organs of outer expression; so that (to speak geologically) our
+practice may be historic, our manners glacial, and our religion
+pal&aelig;ozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century may be said to have
+been all belated; the age still yearned with Rousseau or speculated
+with Kant, while it moved with Darwin, Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and
+to-day, in the half-educated classes, among the religious or
+revolutionary sects, we may observe quite modern methods of work
+allied with a somewhat antiquated mentality. The whole nineteenth
+century might well cry with Faust: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my
+bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it
+fall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because
+they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were
+historical,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote
+forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,
+and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This
+sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
+sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking
+ahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and
+bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several
+incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in
+the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic
+sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an
+adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with
+dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the
+philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least
+idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)
+were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like
+Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and
+Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double
+preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know
+what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to
+hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived
+immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The
+imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was
+intent on reform.</p>
+
+<p>Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
+means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
+the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
+Usually the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and
+people break down some established form, without any qualms about the
+capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
+be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
+intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
+forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
+and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be
+laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
+creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that
+diffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should
+render it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust
+Mr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,
+or at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it&mdash;an effort
+to organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of
+barbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a
+danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an
+organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not
+buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised
+world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its
+existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different
+scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble
+within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped
+intellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the
+harmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and
+life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of
+reason whether it will sacrifice natural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> abundance to moral order, or
+moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves
+unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution
+the pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction
+of negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
+reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
+political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a
+clear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love
+of nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical
+attitude towards all the passions.</p>
+
+<p>In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
+still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
+thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have
+penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous
+constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and
+mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little
+sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and
+sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each
+naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half
+lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,
+and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism
+had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and
+despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a
+display of archaeological lore or for exotic <i>motifs</i>; others gave all
+their attention to rediscovering and emphasising<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> abstract problems of
+execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been
+abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they
+have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be
+some danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the
+artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
+religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to
+barbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic
+climaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better
+convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful
+observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,
+and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the
+crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think
+their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;
+no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any
+moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less
+talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often
+interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in
+their works.</p>
+
+<p>In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are
+always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and
+both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.
+Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and
+endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh
+movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its
+various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or
+pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of
+any organising instinct,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> is simply an extreme expression of romantic
+anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle
+upon which modern philosophy has been building&mdash;or unbuilding&mdash;for
+these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.
+Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that
+experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself
+the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the
+second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even
+those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had
+inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present
+experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our
+mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
+prophets&mdash;Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson&mdash;these mental
+principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our
+imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and
+the ideas&mdash;say of God or of matter&mdash;which they lead us to frame have
+nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in
+the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
+enriching the flying moment &aelig;sthetically, or helping it to slip
+prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
+is the only reality, the only <i>fact</i>: if notions which do not
+reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they
+evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the
+word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of
+reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the
+letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor
+the sounds <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they
+lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.
+Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
+scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
+form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
+of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
+which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
+the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
+discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
+imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
+must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
+are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
+denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
+human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
+Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
+practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
+live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
+those of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
+and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything
+in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious
+theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that
+goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of
+its pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
+knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.
+There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
+memory,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you
+will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
+alien experience, if you picture it.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Solipsism has always been the
+evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted
+with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never
+been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the
+uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave
+of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to
+be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,
+that oneself cannot be the absolute because the <i>idea</i> of oneself, to
+arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well
+have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the <i>idea</i> of
+yourself.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+<p>This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
+and confirms it; for all these <i>cans</i> and <i>musts</i> touch only your idea
+of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world
+that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded
+to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of
+the lady has to be changed.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
+possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
+philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
+pole of speculation&mdash;from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
+action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had
+ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in
+general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
+contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
+the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
+there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
+consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
+good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
+the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
+creation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the
+unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its
+justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is
+the thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the
+passions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new
+sensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and
+words; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> love.
+The passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be
+said to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their
+objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or
+cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are
+rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,
+things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,
+by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that
+are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of
+a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral
+materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
+possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
+however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of
+blocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are
+capable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to
+take possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears
+under the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and
+evolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason
+could ever be.</p>
+
+<p>Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
+wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
+respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
+behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
+inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
+consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
+religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
+traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success
+by attribut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>ing success, in the future at least, to what could really
+inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no
+difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end
+if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
+worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power
+is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and
+philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb
+religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or
+life are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is
+mighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival,
+however, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not
+afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life,
+according to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic;
+but according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and
+credulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate
+the individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary
+to declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh.
+In Italy, the mind seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute
+creator, evoking at will, at each moment, a new past, a new future, a
+new earth, and a new God. In America, however, the mind is recommended
+rather as an unpatented device for oiling the engine of the body and
+making it do double work.</p>
+
+<p>Trustful faith in evolution and a longing for intense life are
+characteristic of contemporary sentiment; but they do not appear to be
+consistent with that contempt for the intellect which is no less
+characteristic of it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> Human intelligence is certainly a product, and
+a late and highly organised product, of evolution; it ought apparently
+to be as much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the antennae of ants.
+And if life is better the more intense and concentrated it is,
+intelligence would seem to be the best form of life. But the degree of
+intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable
+that, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs
+for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly
+distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as
+theology it feels <i>la nostalgie de la boue</i>. It was only, M. Bergson
+tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to
+become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it
+touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would find it
+sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom
+in some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy is an
+effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and
+stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which
+it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion
+has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business
+and society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a
+mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their
+intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is
+essentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not
+free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety
+and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
+contemplation of earthly things, and of life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> itself and evolution;
+they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct
+or dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the
+ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the longing
+to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To
+be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was
+really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one
+seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by
+the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.
+Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to
+enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of
+living consisted in dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was
+loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its
+beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own
+fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a
+substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in
+sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more
+indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to
+which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be meaner than the
+anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with
+any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit
+with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days men
+recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
+those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
+Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive
+and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> motion than life,
+and more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking
+of the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged
+to regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us
+from somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must
+bathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives
+in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the
+mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince
+us that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of
+being alive.</p>
+
+<p>When chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they
+can hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be
+virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a
+distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things,
+something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he
+clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in
+the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we
+were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in
+humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a
+mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation
+admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it
+conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as
+when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when
+nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. Or
+perhaps it makes an unprecedented harmony out of things existing
+before, but jangled and detached. The first man was a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> man for
+this latter reason; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his
+multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by
+harnessing all those instincts together, through memory and
+imagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is
+what we call being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you
+have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that
+sway you in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to
+one attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do
+the same thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr
+destroys the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the
+rest of us; and although his private inspiration may be irrational,
+the tendency of it is not, but reduces the public conscience to act
+before any one else has had the courage to do so. Greatness is
+spontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are
+essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the
+direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave
+behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there
+be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in
+an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason,
+in an age when the word <i>dogmatic</i> is a term of reproach? Greatness
+has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and
+perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.</p>
+
+<p>There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of
+mind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current
+phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth
+of a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But
+such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,
+comprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany
+were not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of
+things the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted,
+and by no means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his
+part. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of
+everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not
+disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are
+chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the
+Babel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may
+be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in
+their places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without
+feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths
+are obscure. Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they
+might merely make him blind, and it may be a sufficient understanding
+of them to know that they are not worth investigating. In this way the
+most chaotic age and the most motley horrors might be mirrored
+limpidly in a great mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works
+of Raphael and Shakespeare; but the master's eye itself must be
+single, his style unmistakable, his visionary interest in what he
+depicts frank and supreme. Hence this comprehensive sort of greatness
+too is impossible in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when
+characters are complex, undecided, troubled by the mere existence of
+what is not congenial to them, eager to be not themselves; when, in a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>word, thought is weak and the flux of things overwhelms it.</p>
+
+<p>Without great men and without clear convictions this age is
+nevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical,
+inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite
+openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has
+gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these
+circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive
+achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are
+the <i>Wanderjahre</i> of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face,
+which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after
+any engaging stranger; it even turns up again from time to time at
+home, full of a new tenderness for all it had abandoned there. But to
+settle down would be impossible now. The intellect, the judgment are
+in abeyance. Life is running turbid and full; and it is no marvel that
+reason, after vainly supposing that it ruled the world, should
+abdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously the
+sport of cruder powers&mdash;vested interests, tribal passions, stock
+sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no responsibility laid upon
+it, reason has become irresponsible. Many critics and philosophers
+seem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes
+reason tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters, by
+proving how superior they are to itself; it worships evolution,
+instinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism, pragmatism, and
+the philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires into the
+freehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised, the
+region of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable
+conquests there. This happened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> earlier to the romanticists (in a way
+which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)
+although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to
+perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals
+and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,
+perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the
+sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb
+all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to
+clearness and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its
+own moral and intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.</p>
+
+<p>These are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not
+dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows
+which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the
+coming age steadily before it?</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
+not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
+anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify
+a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
+actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they
+existed, could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did
+not appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless
+both were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,
+idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences
+lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,
+according to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a
+human method of approach into a charter for existence and
+non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.
+When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the
+stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy
+consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of
+activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite
+proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he
+knows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars
+except his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It
+is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me
+and say his <i>higher</i> self; but as his lower self is only the idea of
+himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
+himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really
+the higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the
+cloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of
+history and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the
+present age; and under the name of modernism they have made their
+appearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most
+stable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective
+memory or established usages&mdash;I mean the Catholic church. Even after
+this church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by
+the gradual exclusion of those heresies&mdash;some of them older than
+explicit orthodoxy&mdash;which seemed to misrepresent its implications or
+spirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics
+to share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to
+reconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these
+cross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was
+changed frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;
+but even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds
+of each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the
+<i>Zeitgeist</i>. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of
+foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with
+the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the
+system of Copernicus,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric
+and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was
+accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;
+but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet
+lodged in the flesh. In more recent times we have heard of liberal
+Catholicism, the attitude assumed by some generous but divided minds,
+too much attached to their traditional religion to abandon it, but too
+weak and too hopeful not to glow also with enthusiasm for modern
+liberty and progress. Had those minds been, I will not say
+intelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt
+that this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress
+not an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless
+and heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its essence and origin,
+was an urgent summons to repent and come out of just such a worldly
+life as modern liberty and progress hold up as an ideal to the
+nations. In the Roman empire, as in the promised land of liberalism,
+each man sought to get and to enjoy as much as he could, and supported
+a ponderous government neutral as to religion and moral traditions,
+but favourable to the accumulation of riches; so that a certain
+enlightenment and cosmopolitanism were made possible, and private
+passions and tastes could be gratified without encountering
+persecution or public obloquy, though not without a general relaxation
+of society and a vulgarising of arts and manners. That something so
+self-indulgent and worldly as this ideal of liberalism could have been
+thought compatible with Christianity, the first initiation into which,
+in baptism, involves renouncing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> the world, might well astonish us,
+had we not been rendered deaf to moral discords by the very din which
+from our birth they have been making in our ears.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. Primitive Christianity was not only a summons to
+turn one's heart and mind away from a corrupt world; it was a summons
+to do so under pain of instant and terrible punishment. It was the
+conviction of pious Jews since the days of the Prophets that
+mercilessness, avarice, and disobedience to revealed law were the
+direct path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against
+which St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of
+destruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the
+ancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend
+on it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be
+overthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the
+remnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life
+in the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to
+fast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the
+kingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take
+thought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a
+new earth&mdash;far more worthy of study&mdash;would be unrolled before that
+very generation.</p>
+
+<p>There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,
+and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism
+possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,
+pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.
+But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> polite and
+governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,
+and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some
+of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and
+moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the
+church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the
+English church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply
+aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should
+remain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable
+measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were
+liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such
+persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from
+the tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they
+were nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of
+any sort was most painful to their minds. They longed rather for a
+sweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost
+everything. A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for
+nationality glorious and holy. No wonder that their work in
+nation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are
+scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were
+willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its
+vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent
+before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism
+which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of
+national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is
+fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> with more or less
+power to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan
+society in which they are forced to live.</p>
+
+<p>The question what is true or essential Christianity is a thorny one,
+because each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it
+happens to believe. Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less
+distinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity
+coincide&mdash;what a miracle!&mdash;with his own Lutheran and Kantian
+sentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is
+the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well
+expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by
+what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the
+modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a
+matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.
+Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less
+intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most
+primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole
+man&mdash;intellect, habits, and affections&mdash;from the life of the world to
+a new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about
+destiny. The moral summons was to renounce home, kindred, possessions,
+the respect of men, the hypocrisies of the synagogue, and to devote
+oneself to a wandering and begging life, healing, praying, and
+preaching. And preaching what? Preaching the prophecy about destiny
+which justified that conversion and renunciation; preaching that the
+world, in its present constitution, was about to be destroyed on
+account of its wickedness, and that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> ignorant, the poor, and the
+down-trodden, if they trusted this prophecy, and turned their backs at
+once on all the world pursues, would be saved in the new deluge, and
+would form a new society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be
+raised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called,
+but the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there
+was in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of
+speculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of
+goodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched
+and depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of
+goodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous incubus
+of circumstance that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly
+as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could
+bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and
+diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice
+of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the
+interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a
+cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world&mdash;such was
+Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled
+with the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a
+special hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye
+fixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as
+of serving the state; he despised or ignored everything for which the
+state exists, labour, wealth, power, felicity, splendour, and
+learning. With Christ the natural man in him had been crucified, and
+in Christ he had risen again a spiritual man, to walk the earth, as a
+messenger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> from heaven, for a few more years. His whole life was an
+experience of perpetual graces and miracles.</p>
+
+<p>The prophecy about the speedy end of this wicked world was not
+fulfilled as the early Christians expected; but this fact is less
+disconcerting to the Christian than one would suppose. The spontaneous
+or instinctive Christian&mdash;and there is such a type of mind, quite
+apart from any affiliation to historic Christianity&mdash;takes a personal
+and dramatic view of the world; its values and even its reality are
+the values and reality which it may have for him. It would profit him
+nothing to win it, if he lost his own soul. That prophecy about the
+destruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be
+subservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the
+prophet and vindicate the saints. That the years should pass and
+nothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this
+prophecy for those whose imagination it excites. This world must
+actually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of
+view that counts with the Christian mind. Even if we consider
+posterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are
+short lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their
+substance. The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being
+fulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved,
+is truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an
+operation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the
+experience of each soul, is to follow upon it. Thus the summons to
+repent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of
+Christianity, can fully retain their spirit when for "this wicked
+world" we read "this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> transitory life" and for "the coming of the
+Kingdom" we read "life everlasting." The change is important, but it
+affects the application rather than the nature of the gospel. Morally
+there is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns
+another life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other
+hand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations
+and millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation
+of the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there
+will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling
+that the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in
+store.</p>
+
+<p>What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would
+be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has
+happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in
+another. A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of
+events to be actually experienced, and of their causes. The whole
+inspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that. It was not
+metaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. The promised
+land was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was
+not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it
+returned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah
+was to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;
+prophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too
+is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too
+is a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that
+speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in
+the religion of the gospel, yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> the message of this religion is one
+which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may
+extend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical
+science should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin
+which Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what
+brings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,
+idle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then
+physical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with
+this or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or
+the dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ
+himself, with John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. James, and St. John,
+preached to the world.</p>
+
+<p>Even the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it
+for a fact. What really lent some truth&mdash;moral truth only&mdash;to their
+imaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or
+the groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether
+millstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their
+pictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the
+unseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
+experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult
+existences, how much more must this have been the case among a more
+ignorant and a more intense nation like the Jews? Indeed, <i>events</i> are
+what the Jews have always remembered and hoped for; if their religion
+was not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive and
+experimental salvation, it was nothing. Their theology was meagre in
+the description of the Lord's nature, but rich in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> description of
+his ways. Indeed, their belief in the existence and power of the Lord,
+if we take it pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the
+belief in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency of
+conduct of a certain sort to secure success and good fortune, both
+national and personal. This faith was partly an experience and partly
+a demand; it turned on history and prophecy. History was interpreted
+by a prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to govern
+it; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration of the same
+principles, at work in the catastrophes of the day or of the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal
+apart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into
+the life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they
+were, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the
+Platonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in
+attributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and
+imaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because
+it is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the
+world from the story of salvation, and God's government and the
+sanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a <i>fundamental
+apostasy</i> from Christianity. Christianity, being a practical and
+living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the
+punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most
+brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a
+faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind,
+within, and around the discoverable forces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> of nature, that the
+destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that
+failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble
+faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our
+point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical,
+physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in
+our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but
+were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite
+for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and
+the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the
+intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It
+flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all
+existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at
+the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by
+the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the
+cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread,
+from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for
+prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly
+comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.</p>
+
+<p>It is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort, which might
+wholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can never wholly inspire human
+society. Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its
+Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted into paganism.
+The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger; not
+his kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who is in heaven
+is his brother and sister and mother and his real compatriot. In a
+nation that calls itself Christian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> every child may be pledged, at
+baptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the
+flesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,
+and the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a
+family, will form an integral part of that very world which he will
+pledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the
+font. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the
+Christian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite
+another. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
+only superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element
+can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for
+instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what
+seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?
+Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless
+rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
+regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a
+dawning of all sorts of scientific and &aelig;sthetic passions, in
+themselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel.
+Christendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it
+was a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or
+less Christian. We may see the same thing under different
+circumstances in the Spain of Philip II. Here was a government
+consciously labouring in the service of the church, to resist Turks,
+convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants. Yet the very
+forces engaged in defending the church, the army and the Inquisition,
+were alien to the Christian life; they were fit embodiments rather of
+chivalry and greed, or of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> policy and jealous dominion. The
+ecclesiastical forces also, theology, ritual, and hierarchy, employed
+in spreading the gospel were themselves alien to the gospel. An
+anti-worldly religion finds itself in fact in this dilemma: if it
+remains merely spiritual, developing no material organs, it cannot
+affect the world; while if it develops organs with which to operate on
+the world, these organs become a part of the world from which it is
+trying to wean the individual spirit, so that the moment it is armed
+for conflict such a religion has two enemies on its hands. It is
+stifled by its necessary armour, and adds treason in its members to
+hostility in its foes. The passions and arts it uses against its
+opponents are as fatal to itself as those which its opponents array
+against it.</p>
+
+<p>In every age in which a supernaturalistic system is preached we must
+accordingly expect to find the world standing up stubbornly against
+it, essentially unconverted and hostile, whatever name it may have
+been christened with; and we may expect the spirit of the world to
+find expression, not only in overt opposition to the supernaturalistic
+system, but also in the surviving or supervening worldliness of the
+faithful. Such an insidious revulsion of the natural man against a
+religion he does not openly discard is what, in modern Christendom, we
+call the Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the later
+open rebellion against the same traditions) the Renaissance is
+radically inimical to Christianity. To say that Christianity survives,
+even if weakened or disestablished, is to say that the Renaissance and
+the Revolution are still incomplete, Far from being past events they
+are living programmes. The ideal of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> the Renaissance is to restore
+pagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy, in sentiment, and
+in morals. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.
+Instead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance
+accept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;
+they believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
+perfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect
+it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the
+flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty
+and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil&mdash;if we understand
+by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its
+autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart
+and will in morals&mdash;the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the
+devil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in
+nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical
+and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
+religion of the gospel.</p>
+
+<p>"I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet
+so wonderfully strange&mdash;C&aelig;sar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
+Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing
+to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche
+goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,
+which was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its
+mellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid
+Christianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than
+Nietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> or
+neo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have
+worked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual
+rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have
+been insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles
+nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure
+literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative
+convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function
+simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance.
+The Reformation prevented this euthanasia of Christianity. It
+re-expressed the unenlightened absolutism of the old religion; it
+insisted that dogma was scientifically true, that salvation was urgent
+and fearfully doubtful, that the world, and the worldly paganised
+church, were as Sodom and Gomorrah, and that sin, though natural to
+man, was to God an abomination. In fighting this movement, which soon
+became heretical, the Catholic church had to fight it with its own
+weapons, and thereby reawakened in its own bosom the same sinister
+convictions. It did not have to dig deep to find them. Even without
+Luther, convinced Catholics would have appeared in plenty to prevent
+C&aelig;sar Borgia, had he secured the tiara, from being pope in any novel
+fashion or with any revolutionary result. The supernaturalism, the
+literal realism, the other-worldliness of the Catholic church are too
+much the soul of it to depart without causing its dissolution. While
+the church lives at all, it must live on the strength which these
+principles can lend it. And they are not altogether weak. Persons who
+feel themselves to be exiles in this world&mdash;and what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> noble mind, from
+Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?&mdash;are mightily inclined to
+believe themselves citizens of another. There will always be
+spontaneous, instinctive Christians; and when, under the oppression of
+sin, salvation is looked for and miracles are expected, the
+supernatural scheme of salvation which historical Christianity offers
+will not always be despised. The modernists think the church is doomed
+if it turns a deaf ear to the higher criticism or ignores the
+philosophy of M. Bergson. But it has outlived greater storms. A moment
+when any exotic superstition can find excitable minds to welcome it,
+when new and grotesque forms of faith can spread among the people,
+when the ultimate impotence of science is the theme of every cheap
+philosopher, when constructive philology is reefing its sails, when
+the judicious grieve at the portentous metaphysical shams of yesterday
+and smile at those of to-day&mdash;such a moment is rather ill chosen for
+prophesying the extinction of a deep-rooted system of religion because
+your own studies make it seem to you incredible; especially if you
+hold a theory of knowledge that regards all opinions as arbitrary
+postulates, which it may become convenient to abandon at any moment.</p>
+
+<p>Modernism is the infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic
+and wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the
+rationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other
+modern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms.
+The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is
+creditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as
+Catholics; for what makes them adopt the views of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> rationalistic
+historians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance,
+convincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental
+speculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their
+faith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may
+lead them. A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of
+history, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these are the
+motives, creditable to any spiritual man, that have made modernists of
+so many. But these excellent things appear in the modernists under
+rather unfortunate circumstances. For the modernists to begin with are
+Catholics, and usually priests; they are pledged to a fixed creed,
+touching matters both of history and of philosophy; and it would be a
+marvel if rationalistic criticism of the Bible and rationalistic
+church history confirmed that creed on its historical side, or if
+irresponsible personal speculations, in the manner of Ritschl or of M.
+Bergson, confirmed its metaphysics.</p>
+
+<p>I am far from wishing to suggest that an orthodox Christian cannot be
+scrupulously honest in admitting the probable facts, or cannot have a
+fresh spiritual experience, or frame an original philosophy. But what
+we think probable hangs on our standard of probability and of
+evidence; the spiritual experiences that come to us are according to
+our disposition and affections; and any new philosophy we frame will
+be an answer to the particular problems that beset us, and an
+expression of the solutions we hope for. Now this standard of
+probability, this disposition, and these problems and hopes may be
+those of a Christian or they may not. The true Christian,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> for
+instance, will begin by regarding miracles as probable; he will either
+believe he has experienced them in his own person, or hope for them
+earnestly; nothing will seem to him more natural, more in consonance
+with the actual texture of life, than that they should have occurred
+abundantly and continuously in the past. When he finds the record of
+one he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record
+could have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,
+in spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed
+assurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps
+could be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We
+might say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its
+origin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by
+our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
+miracles <i>a priori</i> expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
+can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
+movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
+is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
+fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
+cannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but
+we could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then
+expect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism
+are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his
+Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add
+that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that
+practical art, by which we help ourselves,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> like Prometheus, and make
+instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond
+the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,
+machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the
+love of life in the consciousness of impotence.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new
+philosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems
+in them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh
+intuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign
+of originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid
+or on heaven like Mohammed, or stop discoursing on them at all; it
+would be a sign of apostasy.</p>
+
+<p>Now the modernists' criterion of probability in history or of
+worthiness in philosophy is not the Christian criterion. It is that of
+their contemporaries outside the church, who are rationalists in
+history and egotists or voluntarists in philosophy. The biblical
+criticism and mystical speculations of the modernists call for no
+special remark; they are such as any studious or spiritual person,
+with no inherited religion, might compose in our day. But what is
+remarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they
+should have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this
+non-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to
+the Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are
+particularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of
+history, of theology, and of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Everything, however, has its explanation. In a Catholic seminary, as
+the modernists bitterly complain,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> very little is heard of the views
+held in the learned world outside. It is not taught there that the
+Christian religion is only one of many, some of them older and
+superior to it in certain respects; that it itself is eclectic and
+contains inward contradictions; that it is and always has been divided
+into rancorous sects; that its position in the world is precarious and
+its future hopeless. On the contrary, everything is so presented as to
+persuade the innocent student that all that is good or true anywhere
+is founded on the faith he is preparing to preach, that the historical
+evidences of its truth are irrefragable, that it is logically perfect
+and spiritually all-sufficing. These convictions, which no breath from
+the outside is allowed to ruffle, are deepened in the case of pensive
+and studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own
+religious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,
+perhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas
+originated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.
+This (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of
+disillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider
+basis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing
+here; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be
+enlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself
+many diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of
+thought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and
+other types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be
+progressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.</p>
+
+<p>This insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> doubt it gives him
+a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the
+acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton
+information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,
+expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national
+hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy
+of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,
+render these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal
+expressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,
+provided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that
+the world is made for man, and that even God is just such a God as man
+would have wished him to be, the existent ideal of human nature and
+the foregone solution to all human problems. Nevertheless, Christian
+dogmas are definite,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> while human inspirations are potentially
+limitless; and if the object of the two is identical either the dogmas
+must be stretched and ultimately abandoned, or inspiration which does
+not conform to them must be denounced as illusory or diabolical.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span></p>
+<p>At this point the modernist first chooses the path which must lead him
+away, steadily and for ever, from the church which he did not think to
+desert. He chooses a personal, psychological, variable standard of
+inspiration; he becomes, in principle, a Protestant. Why does he not
+become one in name also? Because, as one of the most distinguished
+modernists has said, the age of partial heresy is past. It is suicidal
+to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking
+another part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand
+firmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what
+you challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the
+pope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and
+then the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against
+the New Testament, or God revealed in nature against God revealed in
+the Bible, or God revealed in your own conscience or transcendental
+self against God revealed in nature; and you will be lucky if your
+conscience and transcendental self can long hold their own against the
+flux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be
+taken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol
+for the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace
+and express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and
+follow it on all sides in its vital development. But if the age of
+partial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?
+What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience
+interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would
+embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in
+religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes
+him a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is
+the prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that
+all human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by
+trusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular
+religion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,
+together with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound
+ignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,
+only in grotesque caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted
+in them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a
+derivation from it&mdash;a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have
+wholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of
+professors of philosophy. I need not observe how completely the secret
+of each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent
+outraged: the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this
+unconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of
+what, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is. He feels
+himself full of love&mdash;except for the pope&mdash;of mysticism, and of a sort
+of archaeological piety. He is learned and eloquent and wistful. Why
+should he not remain in the church? Why should he not bring all its
+cold and recalcitrant members up to his own level of insight?</p>
+
+<p>The modernist, like the Protestants before him, is certainly justified
+in contrasting a certain essence or true life of religion with the
+formulas and practices, not all equally well-chosen, which have
+crystallised round it. In the routine of Catholic teaching and worship
+there is notoriously a deal of mummery: phrases and cere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>monies abound
+that have lost their meaning, and that people run through without even
+that general devout attitude and unction which, after all, is all that
+can be asked for in the presence of mysteries. Not only is all sense
+of the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma
+itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock
+phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium.
+Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would
+be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is
+that "Scholasticism" and "Medi&aelig;valism" against which the modernists
+inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness
+may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice
+which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and
+pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for
+historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists
+to contrast with the official religion what was pure and vital in the
+religion of their fathers. Like the early Protestants, they wish to
+revert to a more genuine Christianity; but while their historical
+imagination is much more accurate and well-fed than that of any one in
+the sixteenth century could be, they have no hold on the Protestant
+principle of faith. The Protestants, taking the Bible as an oracle
+which personal inspiration was to interpret, could reform tradition in
+any way and to any extent which their reason or feeling happened to
+prompt. But so long as their Christianity was a positive faith, the
+residue, when all the dross had been criticised and burned away, was
+of divine authority. The Bible never became for them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> merely an
+ancient Jewish encyclop&aelig;dia, often eloquent, often curious, and often
+barbarous. God never became a literary symbol, covering some
+problematical cosmic force, or some ideal of the conscience. But for
+the modernist this total transformation takes place at once. He keeps
+the whole Catholic system, but he believes in no part of it as it
+demands to be believed. He understands and shares the moral experience
+that it enshrines; but the bubble has been pricked, the painted world
+has been discovered to be but painted. He has ceased to be a Christian
+to become an amateur, or if you will a connoisseur, of Christianity.
+He believes&mdash;and this unquestioningly, for he is a child of his
+age&mdash;in history, in philology, in evolution, perhaps in German
+idealism; he does not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in
+revelation. His study of history has disclosed Christianity to him in
+its evolution and in its character of a myth; he wishes to keep it in
+its entirety precisely because he regards it as a convention, like a
+language or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the
+contrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly
+supposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.
+Modernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing. It is the
+love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.
+It is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has
+discovered that he is a pagan.</p>
+
+<p>When the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double
+allegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological
+criticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while
+the Christian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> dogmas touching these things&mdash;the incarnation and
+resurrection of Christ, for instance&mdash;must be taken in a purely
+symbolic or moral sense. In saying this they may be entirely right; it
+seems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of
+meaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth
+there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of
+little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of
+all religions, is to be found in its <i>moral idealism</i>, I mean, in the
+expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries,
+of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a
+moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what
+it is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic
+rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity
+is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the
+pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of
+salvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment,
+from hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the
+Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons
+and the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have
+lost all force for it and become fables.</p>
+
+<p>The modernist, then, starts with the orthodox but untenable persuasion
+that Catholicism comprehends all that is good; he adds the heterodox
+though amiable sentiment that any well-meaning ambition of the mind,
+any hope, any illumination, any science, must be good, and therefore
+compatible with Catholicism. He bathes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> himself in idealistic
+philosophy, he dabbles in liberal politics, he accepts and emulates
+rationalistic exegesis and anti-clerical church history. Soon he finds
+himself, on every particular point, out of sympathy with the acts and
+tendencies of the church to which he belongs; and then he yields to
+the most pathetic of his many illusions&mdash;he sets about to purge this
+church, so as not to be compelled to abandon it; to purge it of its
+first principles, of its whole history, and of its sublime if
+chimerical ideal.</p>
+
+<p>The modernist wishes to reconcile the church and the world. Therein he
+forgets what Christianity came into the world to announce and why its
+message was believed. It came to announce salvation from the world;
+there should be no more need of just those things which the modernist
+so deeply loves and respects and blushes that his church should not be
+adorned with&mdash;emancipated science, free poetic religion, optimistic
+politics, and dissolute art. These things, according to the Christian
+conscience, were all vanity and vexation of spirit, and the pagan
+world itself almost confessed as much. They were vexatious and vain
+because they were bred out of sin, out of ignoring the inward and the
+revealed law of God; and they would lead surely and quickly to
+destruction. The needful salvation from these follies, Christianity
+went on to announce, had come through the cross of Christ; whose
+grace, together with admission to his future heavenly kingdom, was
+offered freely to such as believed in him, separated themselves from
+the world, and lived in charity, humility, and innocence, waiting lamp
+in hand for the celestial bride<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>groom. These abstracted and elected
+spirits were the true disciples of Christ and the church itself.</p>
+
+<p>Having no ears for this essential message of Christianity, the
+modernist also has no eyes for its history. The church converted the
+world only partially and inessentially; yet Christianity was outwardly
+established as the traditional religion of many nations. And why?
+Because, although the prophecies it relied on were strained and its
+miracles dubious, it furnished a needful sanctuary from the shames,
+sorrows, injustices, violence, and gathering darkness of earth; and
+not only a sanctuary one might fly to, but a holy precinct where one
+might live, where there was sacred learning, based on revelation and
+tradition, to occupy the inquisitive, and sacred philosophy to occupy
+the speculative; where there might be religious art, ministering to
+the faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister,
+transformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness,
+and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become
+those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an
+ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the
+Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and
+they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect
+development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
+Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
+apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give
+out the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,
+but nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of
+it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>tion. It is
+not a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of
+something latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
+instruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there
+was an immense development of Christianity during the first three
+centuries, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever
+since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have
+refused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches
+have eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the
+preservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst
+of so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands
+the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in
+another world. The <i>mise-en-sc&egrave;ne</i> has changed immensely. The gospel
+has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
+in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a
+gilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel
+has been preserved by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated
+fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater
+resemblance to the apostles in his outer situation than the pope does;
+but what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the
+natural world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the
+blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the inferiority of natural
+human bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full
+of pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this. It is here, and
+certainly not among the modernists, that the gospel is still believed.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span></p>
+<p>Of course, it is open to any one to say that there is a nobler
+religion possible without these trammels and this officialdom, that
+there is a deeper philosophy than this supernaturalistic rationalism,
+that there is a sweeter life than this legal piety. Perhaps: I think
+the pagan Greeks, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans would have much to
+say for themselves before the impartial tribunal of human nature and
+reason. But they are not Christians and do not wish to be. No more, in
+their hearts, are the modernists, and they should feel it beneath
+their dignity to pose as such; indeed the more sensitive of them
+already feel it. To say they are not Christians at heart, but
+diametrically opposed to the fundamental faith and purpose of
+Christianity, is not to say they may not be profound mystics (as many
+Hindus, Jews, and pagan Greeks have been), or excellent scholars, or
+generous philanthropists. But the very motive that attaches them to
+Christianity is worldly and un-Christian. They wish to preserve the
+continuity of moral traditions; they wish the poetry of life to flow
+down to them uninterruptedly and copiously from all the ages. It is an
+amiable and wise desire; but it shows that they are men of the
+Renaissance, pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiment, to
+whom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive
+just because it presupposes that Christianity is true.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even in this historical and poetical allegiance to Christianity I
+suspect the modernists suffer from a serious illusion. They think the
+weakness of the church lies in its not following the inspirations of
+the age. But when this age is past, might not that weakness be a
+source<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> of strength again? For an idea ever to be fashionable is
+ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. No doubt it
+would be dishonest in any of us now, who see clearly that Noah surely
+did not lead all the animals two by two into the Ark, to say that we
+believe he did so, on the ground that stories of that kind are rather
+favourable to the spread of religion. No doubt such a story, and even
+the fables essential to Christian theology, are now incredible to most
+of us. But on the other hand it would be stupid to assume that what is
+incredible to you or me now must always be incredible to mankind. What
+was foolishness to the Greeks of St. Paul's day spread mightily among
+them one or two hundred years later; and what is foolishness to the
+modernist of to-day may edify future generations. The imagination is
+suggestible and there is nothing men will not believe in matters of
+religion. These rational persuasions by which we are swayed, the
+conventions of unbelieving science and unbelieving history, are
+superficial growths; yesterday they did not exist, to-morrow they may
+have disappeared. This is a doctrine which the modernist philosophers
+themselves emphasise, as does M. Bergson, whom some of them follow,
+and say the Catholic church itself ought to follow in order to be
+saved&mdash;for prophets are constitutionally without a sense of humour.
+These philosophers maintain that intelligence is merely a convenient
+method of picking one's way through the world of matter, that it is a
+falsification of life, and wholly unfit to grasp the roots of it. We
+may well be of another opinion, if we think the roots of life are not
+in consciousness but in nature, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> intelligence alone can reveal;
+but we must agree that in life itself intelligence is a superficial
+growth, and easily blighted, and that the experience of the vanity of
+the world, of sin, of salvation, of miracles, of strange revelations,
+and of mystic loves is a far deeper, more primitive, and therefore
+probably more lasting human possession than is that of clear
+historical or scientific ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Now religious experience, as I have said, may take other forms than
+the Christian, and within Christianity it may take other forms than
+the Catholic; but the Catholic form is as good as any intrinsically
+for the devotee himself, and it has immense advantages over its
+probable rivals in charm, in comprehensiveness, in maturity, in
+internal rationality, in external adaptability; so much so that a
+strong anti-clerical government, like the French, cannot safely leave
+the church to be overwhelmed by the forces of science, good sense,
+ridicule, frivolity, and avarice (all strong forces in France), but
+must use violence as well to do it. In the English church, too, it is
+not those who accept the deluge, the resurrection, and the sacraments
+only as symbols that are the vital party, but those who accept them
+literally; for only these have anything to say to the poor, or to the
+rich, that can refresh them. In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight
+clericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of
+the church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the
+world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying
+in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will
+be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the
+past. As to modernism,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> it is suicide. It is the last of those
+concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and
+double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a
+mortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that
+everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> At least in their devotional and moral import. I suggest
+this qualification in deference to M. Le Roy's interesting theory of
+dogma, <i>viz</i>., that the verbal or intellectual definition of a dogma may
+be changed without changing the dogma itself (as a sentence might be
+translated into a new language without altering the meaning) provided
+the suggested conduct and feeling in the presence of the mystery
+remained the same. Thus the definition of transubstantiation might be
+modified to suit an idealistic philosophy, but the new definition
+would be no less orthodox than the old if it did not discourage the
+worship of the consecrated elements or the sense of mystical union
+with Christ in the sacrament.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON</h3>
+
+
+<p>The most representative and remarkable of living philosophers is M.
+Henri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract
+universal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in
+form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and
+mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of
+science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be
+secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems
+to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is
+eloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has
+received and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent
+than he is. He uses the French language (and little else is French
+about him) in the manner of the more recent artists in words,
+retaining the precision of phrase and the measured judgments which are
+traditional in French literature, yet managing to envelop everything
+in a penumbra of emotional suggestion. Each expression of an idea is
+complete in itself; yet these expressions are often varied and
+constantly metaphorical, so that we are led to feel that much in that
+idea has remained unexpressed and is indeed inexpressible.</p>
+
+<p>Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less
+elaborate in his learning. In the history of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> philosophy, in
+mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has
+taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and
+spirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an
+expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality
+and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine
+historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the
+views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in
+interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever
+thought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as
+persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian
+insight. The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to
+exercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things. First
+the evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which
+is true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values;
+as modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does
+not exactly crown it. The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume
+that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out
+of: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very
+unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own
+opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when
+it is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be
+established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had
+the last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for
+instance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the
+dramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of
+reconstructing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> history was, on the surface, very sympathetic. He too,
+like M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at
+every turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially
+if this was a philosophical attitude or temper. Yet in reality his
+historical judgments were forced and brutal: Greece was but a
+stepping-stone to Prussia, Plato and Spinoza found their higher
+synthesis in himself, and (though he may not say so frankly) Jesus
+Christ and St. Francis realised their better selves in Luther. Actual
+spiritual life, the thoughts, affections, and pleasures of
+individuals, passed with Hegel for so much moonshine; the true spirit
+was "objective," it was simply the movement of those circumstances in
+which actual spirit arose. He was accordingly contemptuous of
+everything intrinsically good, and his idealism consisted in forcing
+the natural world into a formula of evolution and then worshipping it
+as the embodiment of the living God. But under the guise of optimism
+and belief in a cosmic reason this is mere idolatry of success&mdash;a
+malign superstition, by which all moral independence is crushed out
+and conscience enslaved to chronology; and it is no marvel if,
+somewhat to relieve this subjection, history in turn was expurgated,
+marshalled, and distorted, that it might pass muster for the work of
+the Holy Ghost.</p>
+
+<p>In truth the value of spiritual life is intrinsic and centred at every
+point. It is never wholly recoverable. To recover it at all, an
+historian must have a certain detachment and ingenuousness; knowing
+the dignity and simplicity of his own mind, he must courteously
+attribute the same dignity and simplicity to others,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> unless their
+avowed attitude prevents; this is to be an intelligent critic and to
+write history like a gentleman. The truth, which all philosophers
+alike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to
+another; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the
+better. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;
+else nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and
+ultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and
+excellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that
+tests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving
+upward or downward or in a circle.</p>
+
+<p>M. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order
+utterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be
+open to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it
+"<i>retardent sur Kant;</i>" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,
+and he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was
+a hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a
+great many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of
+departure, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of
+progress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,
+Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric
+and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,
+which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,
+thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one
+might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English
+malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of
+being the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of
+Protestantism that, in groping after that moral freedom which is so
+ineradicable a need of a pure spirit, thought to find it in a revision
+of revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to
+these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental,
+and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all
+humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits
+are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted
+bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which
+his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of
+time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that
+all previous systems empty into it, which is hardly true, and that all
+future systems must flow out of it, which is hardly necessary.</p>
+
+<p>The embarrassment that qualifies M. Bergson's attainments in
+mathematics and physics has another and more personal source. He
+understands, but he trembles. Non-human immensities frighten him, as
+they did Pascal. He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We
+might think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity
+to move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.
+But M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy
+deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,
+that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is
+that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He
+dreads that the imagination should be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> fascinated by the homogeneous
+and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in
+<i>Auseinandersein</i>. This would be a real death and petrifaction of
+consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite
+void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and
+succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or
+hearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,
+with the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards
+through time, in a word, the more personal and historical the
+apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to
+what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find
+they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human
+prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a
+plea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have
+stolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a
+certain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and
+sting the hated oppressor, as if some desperate small being were at
+bay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of
+mathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the
+intellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of
+nothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a
+philosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen
+his sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman
+of many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity and animal illusion are
+deep in the heart of all of us. Practice may compel us to bow to the
+conventions of the intellect, as to those of polite society; but
+secretly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> in our moments of immersion in ourselves, we may find them
+a great nuisance, even a vain nightmare. Could we only listen
+undisturbed to the beat of protoplasm in our hearts, would not that
+oracle solve all the riddles of the universe, or at least avoid them?</p>
+
+<p>To protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the
+mystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground. If he
+refuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might
+be accused of ignorance of the subject. He will therefore study it
+conscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done
+with it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology. Such a
+student, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free
+inquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed
+of its form, but of its nature and value. Why, for instance, has M.
+Bergson such a horror of mechanical physics? He seems to think it a
+black art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to
+salvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes
+always at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul. But
+physical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly
+absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must
+worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a
+mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor
+does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the
+whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its
+sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the
+calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that
+events have other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> aspects&mdash;the psychic and the moral, for
+instance&mdash;no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation
+would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable
+elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
+given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
+it is in the accidents, in the <i>farbiger Abglanz</i>, that we have our
+life. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine
+any man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that
+true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible
+statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this
+freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme
+of relation between events.</p>
+
+<p>The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to
+that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it
+arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported
+inopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions
+mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it
+exercises&mdash;one of Kant's confusions&mdash;over the empirical world, and
+trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should
+somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But
+nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity
+to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and
+to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery
+over things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the
+hypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in
+that. Moreover,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use
+of mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business
+world; whereas its inherent use is emancipating and Platonic, in that
+it shows us the possibility of other worlds, less contingent and
+perturbed than this one. If he allows himself any excursus from his
+beloved immediacy, it is only in the interests of practice; he little
+knows the pleasures of a liberal mind, ranging over the congenial
+realm of internal accuracy and ideal truth, where it can possess
+itself of what treasures it likes in perfect security and freedom. An
+artist in his workmanship, M. Bergson is not an artist in his
+allegiance; he has no respect for what is merely ideal.</p>
+
+<p>For this very reason, perhaps, he is more at home in natural history
+than in the exact sciences. He has the gift of observation, and can
+suggest vividly the actual appearance of natural processes, in
+contrast to the verbal paraphrase of these processes which is
+sometimes taken to explain them. He is content to stop at habit
+without formulating laws; he refuses to assume that the large obvious
+cycles of change in things can be reduced to mechanism, that is, to
+minute included cycles repeated <i>ad libitum</i>. He may sometimes defend
+this refusal by sophistical arguments, as when he says that mechanism
+would require the last stage of the universe to be simultaneous with
+the first, forgetting that the unit of mechanism is not a mathematical
+equation but some observed typical event. The refusal itself, however,
+would be honest scepticism enough were it made with no <i>arri&egrave;re
+pens&eacute;e</i>, but simply in view of the immense complexity of the facts and
+the extreme simplicity of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> the mechanical hypothesis. In such a
+situation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true
+naturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and
+the human passion for system and simplification. At the first reading,
+M. Bergson's <i>Evolution Cr&eacute;atrice</i> may well dazzle the professional
+naturalist and seem to him an illuminating confession of the nature
+and limits of his science; yet a second reading, I have good authority
+for saying, may as easily reverse that impression. M. Bergson never
+reviews his facts in order to understand them, but only if possible to
+discredit others who may have fancied they understood. He raises
+difficulties, he marks the problems that confront the naturalist, and
+the inadequacy of explanations that may have been suggested. Such
+criticism would be a valuable beginning if it were followed by the
+suggestion of some new solution; but the suggestion only is that no
+solution is possible, that the phenomena of life are simply
+miraculous, and that it is in the tendency or vocation of the animal,
+not in its body or its past, that we must see the ground of what goes
+on before us.</p>
+
+<p>With such a philosophy of science, it is evident that all progress in
+the understanding of nature would cease, as it ceased after Aristotle.
+The attempt would again be abandoned to reduce gross and obvious
+cycles of change, such as generation, growth, and death, to minute
+latent cycles, so that natural history should offer a picturesque
+approach to universal physics. If for the magic power of types,
+invoked by Aristotle, we substituted with M. Bergson the magic power
+of the <i>&eacute;lan vital</i>, that is, of evolution in general, we should be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+referring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive
+processes, but to one all-embracing process, unique and always
+incomplete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and
+looser than what our observation began with. Aristotle at least could
+refer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social
+science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in
+making a learned show before the public. But if divination and
+eloquence&mdash;for science is out of the question&mdash;were to invoke nothing
+but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of
+phenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All
+knowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps
+enlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery
+of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world
+would be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere
+novel-readers.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism
+of knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from
+which science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,
+whilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those
+appearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is
+through hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before
+the mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been
+straightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the
+fact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,
+with the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;
+that if we were not intelligent our sensa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>tions would exist for us
+without meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of
+knowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense
+that it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any
+interpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience
+may have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have
+expressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.
+Intelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no
+penetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent
+exists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations
+and the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for
+striding over the surface of sentience.</p>
+
+<p>This negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and
+futile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the
+same time that everything happens exactly <i>as if</i> the intellect were a
+true instrument of discovery, and <i>as if</i> a material world underlay
+our experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley
+were scientific at heart, and full of the intelligence they dissected;
+they seemed to cry to nature: Though thou dost not exist, yet will I
+trust in thee. Their idealism was a theoretical scruple rather than a
+passionate superstition. Not so M. Bergson; he is not so simple as to
+invoke the malicious criticism of knowledge in order to go on thinking
+rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable.
+His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis,
+but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism
+brought them about; they come, at least in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> the organic world, as if a
+magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving them
+on.</p>
+
+<p>Thus M. Bergson introduces metaphysics into natural history; he
+invokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power,
+called the <i>&eacute;lan vital,</i> on a level with the "Will" of Schopenhauer or
+the "Unknowable Force" of Herbert Spencer. But there is a scientific
+vitalism also, which it is well to distinguish from the metaphysical
+sort. The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is
+whether the living processes in nature can be resolved into a
+combination of the material. The material processes will always remain
+vital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for
+they will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking
+a certain time, like the fall of an apple. The movement of nature is
+never dialectical; the first part of any event does not logically
+imply the last part of it. Physics is descriptive, historical,
+reporting after the fact what are found to be the habits of matter.
+But if these habits are constant and calculable we call the vitality
+of them mechanical. Thus the larger processes of nature, no matter how
+vital they may be and whatever consciousness may accompany them, will
+always be mechanical if they can be calculated and predicted, being a
+combination of the more minute and widespread processes which they
+contain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as
+nutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as
+the fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of
+mechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science.
+Both possibilities will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> always remain open, because however far
+mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension
+presents them, will always remain irreducible to any common
+denominator with the rest; and on the other hand, wherever the actual
+reduction of the habits of animals to those of matter may have
+stopped, we can never know that a further reduction is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>The balance of reasonable presumption, however, is not even. The most
+inclusive movements known to us in nature, the astronomical, are
+calculable, and so are the most minute and pervasive processes, the
+chemical. These are also, if evolution is to be accepted, the earliest
+processes upon which all others have supervened and out of which, as
+it were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention,
+therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate
+processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The
+appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is
+easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in
+terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous
+to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them
+is hidden from us, as is that of our bodies, we suppose that these
+passions which we find on the surface in ourselves, or read into other
+creatures, are the substantial and only forces that carry on our part
+of the world. Penetrating this illusion, dispassionate observers in
+all ages have received the general impression that nature is one and
+mechanical. This was, and still remains, a general impression only;
+but I suspect no one who walks the earth with his eyes open would be
+concerned to resist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> it, were it not for certain fond human conceits
+which such a view would rebuke and, if accepted, would tend to
+obliterate. The psychological illusion that our ideas and purposes are
+original facts and forces (instead of expressions in consciousness of
+facts and forces which are material) and the practical and optical
+illusion that everything wheels about us in this world&mdash;these are the
+primitive persuasions which the enemies of naturalism have always been
+concerned to protect.</p>
+
+<p>One might indeed be a vitalist in biology, out of pure caution and
+conscientiousness, without sharing those prejudices; and many a
+speculative philosopher has been free from them who has been a
+vitalist in metaphysics. Schopenhauer, for instance, observed that the
+cannon-ball which, if self-conscious, would think it moved freely,
+would be quite right in thinking so. The "Will" was as evident to him
+in mechanism as in animal life. M. Bergson, in the more hidden reaches
+of his thought, seems to be a universal vitalist; apparently an <i>&eacute;lan
+vital</i> must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the
+energy stored there, and to set mechanism going. But he relies on
+biology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort
+to live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could
+never do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism
+does. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar
+requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses
+the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to
+believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but
+an alien and ghostly madness descending into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> it&mdash;I say a ghostly
+madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should
+live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal
+than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far
+less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough
+mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest
+to an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on
+a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick
+and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,
+but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its
+movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and
+requires a disinterested mind. M. Bergson would have us believe that
+mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,
+for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are
+fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely
+Israel.</p>
+
+<p>In spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye
+for the facts&mdash;things Aristotle also possessed&mdash;he is like Aristotle
+profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from
+nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a
+disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a
+logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite
+different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very
+arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the
+imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres
+of passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is
+practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span> brilliantly
+executed it demands a minute and extended observation of life. Unless
+your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of
+the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his
+psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them
+circumstantial and convincing. Just so M. Bergson's achievements in
+psychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are,
+required all his learning. The history of philosophy, mathematics, and
+physics, and above all natural history, had to supply him first with
+suggestions; and if he is not really a master in any of those fields,
+that is not to be wondered at. His heart is elsewhere. To write a
+universal biological romance, such as he has sketched for us in his
+system, he would ideally have required all scientific knowledge, but
+only as Homer required the knowledge of seamanship, generalship,
+statecraft, augury, and charioteering, in order to turn the aspects of
+them into poetry, and not with that technical solidity which Plato
+unjustly blames him for not possessing. Just so M. Bergson's proper
+achievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies
+entirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical
+probabilities. In essence, it is myth or fable; but in the texture and
+degree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of
+previous metaphysicians. Primitive poets, even ancient philosophers,
+were not psychologists; their fables were compacted out of elements
+found in practical life, and they reckoned in the units in which
+language and passion reckon&mdash;wooing, feasting, fighting, vice, virtue,
+happiness, justice. Above all, they talked about persons or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> about
+ideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was
+what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not
+so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what
+he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but
+something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory,
+or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these
+elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so
+his anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and
+theologians, though no less real.</p>
+
+<p>This peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable
+extension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human
+life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain
+conscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;
+their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be
+puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant
+moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the
+mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally
+interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.
+If &AElig;sop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,
+really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to
+the public; and they would have had no human value except that of
+illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible
+variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.
+Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
+in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
+Indeed what he asks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
+absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
+them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
+<i>&eacute;lan vital</i> which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew
+by intuition the <i>&eacute;lan vital</i> that the smile of Francesca expressed.</p>
+
+<p>The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
+which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
+and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
+organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
+and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
+intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
+contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
+feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
+subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
+when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
+been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
+are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
+equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
+indications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
+traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
+and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
+such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
+the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
+latter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have
+found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
+plausibility to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
+Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
+pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
+entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
+to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
+whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and
+subjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between
+the observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic
+evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
+feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
+always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
+there were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul
+has of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less
+than it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the
+consciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather
+than the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be
+worth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may
+lead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower
+depths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the
+psychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the
+universe, which he has built out of that introspection, is his
+metaphysics.</p>
+
+<p>Many a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and
+obscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected
+metaphysically; but not one will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> be found to be arbitrary; not one
+but is based on attentive introspection and perception of the
+immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his
+somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel
+oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (<i>i.e.</i> immediately
+felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the
+present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present
+sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like
+a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;
+all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without
+surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear
+in such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that
+preceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation itself
+modifies them, and what develops is in no way deducible or predictable
+out of what exists. This situation is perfectly explicable
+scientifically. The movement of consciousness will be self-congruous
+and sustained when it rests on continuous processes in the same
+tissues, and yet quite unpredictable from within, because the direct
+sensuous report of bodily processes (in nausea, for instance, or in
+hunger) contains no picture of their actual mechanism. Even wholly new
+features, due to little crises in bodily life, may appear in a dream
+to flow out of what already exists, yet freely develop it; because in
+dreams comparison, the attempt to be consistent, is wholly in
+abeyance, and also because the new feature will come imbedded in
+others which are not new, but have dramatic relevance in the story. So
+immediate con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>sciousness yields the two factors of Bergsonian freedom,
+continuity and indetermination.</p>
+
+<p>Again, take the somewhat disconcerting assertion that movement exists
+when there is nothing that moves, and no space that it moves through.
+In vision, perhaps, it is not easy to imagine a consciousness of
+motion without some presentation of a field, and of a distinguishable
+something in it; but if we descend to somatic feelings (and the more
+we descend, with M. Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in
+shooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a
+change and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea
+of a <i>mobile</i> or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)
+through which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,
+and the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred
+out of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our
+philosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of
+motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
+riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
+infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
+Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
+may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
+apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
+taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
+call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
+had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
+would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
+consciousness comes in stretches,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> in breaths: all its data are
+&aelig;sthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
+never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.</p>
+
+<p>When a man has taught himself&mdash;and it is a difficult art&mdash;to revert in
+this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
+will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
+psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
+has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
+intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
+stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
+confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
+in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
+psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
+both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
+terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
+have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
+appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
+imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
+are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless
+bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate
+are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is
+much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start
+safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn
+to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and
+feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
+prejudice suggests,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
+sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
+character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
+so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
+love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
+poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
+accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
+itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
+persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
+wonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems
+no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the
+story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the
+siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves
+of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as
+the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare
+and say:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So do <i>their spirits</i> hasten to their end."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Some reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious
+introspection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that
+lead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface
+appearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part
+of the internal rumble of this great engine of the world. How should
+it loosen or dissolve that engine, as your philosophy evidently
+professes that it must? That nature exists we perceive whenever we
+resume our intellectual and practical life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> interrupted for a moment
+by this interesting reversion to the immediate. The consciousness
+which in introspection we treat as an object is, in operation, a
+cognitive activity: it demonstrates the world. You would never
+yourself have conceived the minds of ethereal vibrations, or of birds,
+or of ants, or of men suspending their intelligence, if you had known
+of no men, ants, birds, or ether. It is the material objects that
+suggest to you their souls, and teach you how to conceive them. How
+then should the souls be substituted for the bodies, and abolish them?</p>
+
+<p>Poor guileless reader! If philosophers were straightforward men of
+science, adding each his mite to the general store of knowledge, they
+would all substantially agree, and while they might make interesting
+discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the
+whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or
+apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in
+the interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising
+inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common
+apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by
+poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not
+require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if
+you will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the
+excitement begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical
+intellect, your boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what
+the real truth is instead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that
+the immediate, as he describes it, is the sole reality; all else is
+unreal, artificial, and a more or less convenient symbol<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> in
+discourse&mdash;discourse itself being taken, of course, for a movement in
+immediate sensibility, which is what it is existentially, but never
+for an excursion into an independent logical realm, which is what it
+is spiritually and in intent. So we must revise all our psychological
+observations, and turn them into metaphysical dogmas. It would be
+nothing to say simply: <i>For immediate feeling</i> the past is contained
+in the present, movement is prior to that which moves, spaces are
+many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events are indivisible
+wholes, perception is in its object and identical with it, the future
+is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple, and evolution
+is creative, its course being obedient to a general tendency or
+groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say instead: <i>In
+the universe at large</i> the whole past is preserved bodily in the
+present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is motion,
+and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are
+incommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of
+them (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of
+these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to
+an absolute Effort which exists <i>in vacuo</i> and is simplicity itself;
+and this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues,
+nevertheless produces it out of nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as
+we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will
+appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
+"who has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>ever practised literary composition knows very well that,
+after he has devoted long study to the subject, collected all the
+documents, and taken all his notes, one thing more is needful before
+he can actually embark on the work of composition; namely, an effort,
+often a very painful one, to plant himself all at once in the very
+heart of the subject, and to fetch from as profound a depth as
+possible the momentum by which he need simply let himself be borne
+along in the sequel. This momentum, as soon as it is acquired, carries
+the mind forward along a path where it recovers all the facts it had
+gathered together, and a thousand other details besides. The momentum
+develops and breaks up of itself into particulars that might be
+retailed <i>ad infinitum.</i> The more he advances the more he finds; he
+will never have exhausted the subject; and nevertheless if he turns
+round suddenly to face the momentum he feels at his back and see what
+it is, it eludes him; for it is not a thing but a direction of
+movement, and though capable of being extended indefinitely, it is
+simplicity itself."</p>
+
+<p>This is evidently well observed: heighten the tone a little, and you
+might have a poem on those joyful pangs of gestation and parturition
+which are not denied to a male animal. It is a description of the
+<i>sensation</i> of literary composition, of the <i>immediate experience</i> of
+a writer as words and images rise into his mind. He cannot summon his
+memories explicitly, for he would first have to remember them to do
+so; his consciousness of inspiration, of literary creation, is nothing
+but a consciousness of pregnancy and of a certain "direction of
+movement," as if he were being wafted in a balloon; and just in its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+moments of highest tension his mind is filled with mere expectancy and
+mere excitement, without images, plans, or motives; and what guides it
+is inwardly, as M. Bergson says, simplicity itself. Yet excellent as
+such a description is psychologically, it is a literary confession
+rather than a piece of science; for scientific psychology is a part of
+natural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable
+phenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we
+should at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which
+this occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what
+variations in the result follow upon variations in the situation. At
+once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those
+data of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that
+painful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as
+he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?
+Not at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is
+overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the
+spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and
+overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,
+and joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether <i>all</i>
+the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and
+what relation the "thousand other details" have to them; and we should
+find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous
+endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general
+circumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the
+momentum which to introspection was so mysterious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> was in fact the
+discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system
+(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and
+crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the
+past, and creation also, are closely attached. Thus we should utterly
+refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended
+indefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of
+literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it
+precedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and
+flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is
+regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is
+simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions
+outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
+that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
+introspection might yield in others.</p>
+
+<p>There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer
+is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
+general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
+quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
+its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
+experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
+memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
+knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra,</i> for instance, he planted himself in the very
+heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
+Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
+was, according to M.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
+reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
+part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
+suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
+bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
+facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
+them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
+consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch <i>thence</i> the profound momentum
+which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
+adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
+thousand other details which he may add to the picture.</p>
+
+<p>Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
+immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
+projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.
+Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
+characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
+passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
+words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
+framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
+pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
+from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
+This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose
+metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's
+own heart and draw <i>from oneself</i> impulses as profound as possible
+with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.
+Yet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> found to
+involve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and
+spiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he
+conceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things
+are made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its
+several objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by
+becoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies
+where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past
+experience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and
+Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of
+Cleopatra herself&mdash;in those moments when she spoke English.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can
+never do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual
+Cleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the
+cause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of
+such criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly
+blind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not
+far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
+literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
+sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
+knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
+literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
+it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
+discerned in a body <i>are</i> that body; and the movement of those
+aspects, when you enact it, <i>is</i> the spirit of that body, and at the
+same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> man's
+consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
+over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
+things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
+more or less everywhere in diffusion&mdash;that, for the mystic, is to be
+once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
+you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories&mdash;space, matter,
+mind, truth, person&mdash;life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
+who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
+a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
+calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
+life, and that of all the kinds&mdash;mystical, passionate, practical,
+&aelig;sthetic, intellectual&mdash;with their various degrees of light and heat,
+the life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I
+am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
+reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
+perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
+sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
+to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
+enough.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
+the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
+evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
+the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
+seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
+maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
+part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
+of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
+speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;
+while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of
+ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would
+deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature
+is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far
+rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple
+than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. M.
+Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously
+examining the egg on every side&mdash;for he would do more than taste
+it&mdash;and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his
+intuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and
+then he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without
+parts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that
+it was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the
+essence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better
+than it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know
+how it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really
+create or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,
+now with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.
+Doubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new
+philosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than
+they, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>ignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?</p>
+
+<p>Let us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly
+inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,
+shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that
+evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the
+homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of
+pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is
+what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and
+rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the
+facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of
+nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are
+really without structure, the true causes of the formation of birds
+are the last conditions, whatever they may be, that introduce that
+phenomenon and determine its character&mdash;the type of the parents, the
+act of fertilisation, the temperature, or whatever else observation
+might find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.
+These facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,
+would be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.
+They would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature
+were no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper
+than that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose
+that nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,
+and has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a
+stopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied
+with some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their
+collisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts
+discover<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>able, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the
+only sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If
+somebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of
+the atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God
+that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
+thrown a bright light on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
+vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
+two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
+molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
+vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
+propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
+developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
+coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
+by a common <i>tendency towards vision</i>. Suppose (what some young man in
+a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
+Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
+then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
+other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
+just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
+puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
+heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
+not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
+the presence in her of a <i>tendency to puddles</i>, to be formed in
+inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
+insight when he proclaims in her a <i>tendency to vision.</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>If those
+words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
+if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
+discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
+substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
+constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
+understand the weather; but Neptune and &AElig;olus are not thereby proved
+to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
+be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
+efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
+contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
+matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
+arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
+"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
+things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
+beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
+existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
+did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
+conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
+which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
+effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
+transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
+it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
+answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
+Yet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature
+is actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers
+raises all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> others, artificially and without occasion. This side
+of M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar
+vices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to
+investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this
+name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This
+is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would
+be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.</p>
+
+<p>The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern
+Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We
+find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too
+obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is
+unmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other
+words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to
+discover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence
+would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a
+modification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and
+discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge
+(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have
+discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has
+taken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on
+the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you
+mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of
+what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it
+substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your
+description. This, however, would not be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> a counter-theory at all if
+the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative
+dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible
+and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.
+Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has
+got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest
+schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism
+is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a
+difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to
+idealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with
+self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you
+started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The
+fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an
+existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view
+should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's
+solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
+exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
+of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
+and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
+foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
+and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
+the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
+identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
+into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
+all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
+To <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
+shut out the others, is to be a mind.</p>
+
+<p>This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
+things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
+talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
+himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
+and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
+between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
+thing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is
+to offer us a history, <i>on the assumption of idealism,</i> of the idea of
+mind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough
+psychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might
+possibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question
+concerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it
+occurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these
+hereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out <i>a priori,</i> and
+the life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole
+universe. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than
+realism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection
+from other objects, the mind has come to be distinguished: but the
+subterfuge is vain, because by "mind" they mean simply the idea of
+mind, and they give no name, except perhaps experience, to the mind
+that forms that idea. Matter and mind, for these transcendentalists
+posing as realists, merge and flow so easily together only because
+both are images or groups of images in an original mind presupposed
+but never honestly posited. It is in this forgotten mind,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> also, as
+the professed idealists urge, that the relations of proximity and
+simultaneity between various lives can alone subsist, if to subsist is
+to be experienced.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, one point of real difference, at least initially,
+between the idealism of M. Bergson and that of his predecessors. The
+universal mind, for M. Bergson, is in process of actual
+transformation. It is not an omniscient God but a cosmic sensibility.
+In this sensibility matter, with all its vibrations felt in detail,
+forms one moving panorama together with all minds, which are patterns
+visible at will from various points of view in that same woof of
+matter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of
+a giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,
+shuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a
+labyrinth of cross-purposes.</p>
+
+<p>Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the
+prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it
+would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy
+with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing
+comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,
+are inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his
+pupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for
+themselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,
+as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have
+just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect
+that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far
+more orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not
+com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>patible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in
+representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you
+posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,
+instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of
+change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a
+moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre
+and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is
+simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived
+through. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but
+have no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on
+immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable
+freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given <i>feeling</i>
+of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a
+given image of the future&mdash;all these terms being contained in the
+present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute
+immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and
+Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a
+while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a
+familiar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of
+creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For apparently
+creative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be
+explained away idealistically) has to submit to the following
+conditions: first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to
+create some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side
+by side;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the
+additions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no
+sequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all
+effort would be wasted. These are compulsions; but it may also, I
+suppose, be thought a <i>duty</i> on the part of the vital impulse to be
+true to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like
+the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of
+its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty
+and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these
+conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to
+a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition;
+and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in
+reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system,
+such, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself,
+of equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and
+of spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when
+there is no nature to predetermine it.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that M. Bergson's system precludes ethics: I cannot
+think that observation just. Apart from the moral inspiration which
+appears throughout his philosophy, which is indeed a passionate
+attempt to exalt (or debase) values into powers, it offers, I should
+say, two starting-points for ethics. In the first place, the <i>&eacute;lan
+vital</i> ought not to falter, although it can do so: therefore to
+persevere, labour, experiment, propagate, must be duties, and the
+opposite must be sins. In the second place, freedom, in adding
+uncaused increments to life, ought to do so in continuation of the
+whole past,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> though it might do so frivolously: therefore it is a duty
+to be studious, consecutive, loyal; you may move in any direction but
+you must carry the whole past with you. I will not say this suggests a
+sound system of ethics, because it would be extracted from dogmas
+which are physical and incidentally incredible; nor would it represent
+a mature and disillusioned morality, because it would look to the
+future and not to the eternal; nevertheless it would be deeply
+ethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic
+morality.</p>
+
+<p>A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it
+thinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or
+rather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live
+disembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the
+first provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of
+this subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that
+it might occupy in his system.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> Life, according to him, is the
+original and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a
+potentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to
+emphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,
+special possibilities of living; and where these special lives have
+their chosen boundary <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>(if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)
+they posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each
+life takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of
+living. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be
+carried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or
+material things about it; it would not show how death could ever
+overtake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which
+life has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter
+could never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of
+the arena can never abolish the show for which they have been
+prepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist
+is served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and
+failure. M. Bergson even thinks that the facing of increased dangers
+is one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were
+an equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of
+death, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the
+higher organisms and the finer arts.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Yet if life is the only
+substance, how is such a risk of death possible at all? I suppose the
+special life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by
+emphasising some of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>relations which that feeling has in the
+world, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another
+set of its relations, starting from some other nucleus. We must
+remember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not
+apperceptions merely. They are creative efforts. The future
+constitution of the flux will vary in response to them. Each mind
+sucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex. A cross
+apperception will then amount to a contrary force. Two souls will not
+be able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship. Being
+forces, they will pull that matter in different ways. Each soul will
+tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by
+the other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will
+live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not
+like that painful word. He says the lower organisms store energy for
+the higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy
+stored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if
+the grass and the sheep had perished. Their <i>&eacute;lan vital</i> is no longer
+theirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill. Nothing arises in
+nature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.
+Of course, this is no defeat for the <i>&eacute;lan vital</i> in general; for
+according to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has
+been making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who
+eats the mutton, now possesses. The sheep and the grass were only
+things by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity. But would
+it not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not
+requiring abstract intellect nor artificial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span> weapons, but endowed with
+instinct and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by
+radiating electricity? And might not men then turn out to have been
+mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion
+by that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the
+thought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is
+the pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies. Yet I
+can see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not
+crediting the <i>&eacute;lan vital</i> with some such digestive intention. M.
+Bergson's system would hardly be more speculative if it entertained
+this possibility, and it would seem more honest.</p>
+
+<p>The vital impulse is certainly immortal; for if we take it in the
+naturalistic exoteric sense, for a force discovered in biology, it is
+an independent agent coming down into matter, organising it against
+its will, and stirring it like the angel the pool of Bethesda. Though
+the ripples die down, the angel is not affected. He has merely flown
+away. And if we take the vital impulse mystically and esoterically, as
+the <i>only</i> primal force, creating matter in order to play with it, the
+immortality of life is even more obvious; for there is then nothing
+else in being that could possibly abolish it. But when we come to
+immortality for the individual, all grows obscure and ambiguous. The
+original tendency of life was certainly cosmic and not distinguished
+into persons: we are told it was like a wireless message sent at the
+creation which is being read off at last by the humanity of to-day. In
+the naturalistic view, the diversity of persons would seem to be due
+to the different material<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> conditions under which one and the same
+spiritual purpose must fight its way towards realisation in different
+times and places. It is quite conceivable, however, that in the
+mystical view the very sense of the original message should comport
+this variety of interpretations, and that the purpose should always
+have been to produce diverse individuals.</p>
+
+<p>The first view, as usual, is the one which M. Bergson has prevailingly
+in mind, and communicates most plausibly; while he holds to it he is
+still talking about the natural world, and so we still know what he is
+talking about. On this view, however, personal immortality would be
+impossible; it would be, if it were aimed at, a self-contradiction in
+the aim of life; for the diversity of persons would be due to
+impediments only, and souls would differ simply in so far as they
+mutilated the message which they were all alike trying to repeat. They
+would necessarily, when the spirit was victorious, be reabsorbed and
+identified in the universal spirit. This view also seems most
+consonant with M. Bergson's theory of primitive reality, as a flux of
+fused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is
+attributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the
+flux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises
+reality. Of course the destiny of spirit would not be to revert to
+that diffused materiality; for the original mind lost in matter had a
+very short memory; it was a sort of cosmic trepidation only, whereas
+the ultimate mind would remember all that, in its efforts after
+freedom, it had ever super added to that trepidation or made it turn
+into. Even the abstract views of things<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> taken by the practical
+intellect would, I fear, have to burden the universal memory to the
+end. We should be remembered, even if we could no longer exist.</p>
+
+<p>On the other more profound view, however, might not personal
+immortality be secured? Suppose the original message said: Translate
+me into a thousand tongues! In fulfilling its duty, the universe would
+then continue to divide its dream into phantom individuals; as it had
+to insulate its parts in the beginning in order to dominate and
+transform them freely, so it would always continue to insulate them,
+so as not to lose its cross-vistas and its mobility. There is no
+reason, then, why individuals should not live for ever. But a
+condition seems to be involved which may well make belief stagger. It
+would be impossible for the universe to divide its images into
+particular minds unless it preserved the images of their particular
+bodies also. Particular minds arise, according to this philosophy, in
+the interests of practice: which means, biologically, to secure a
+better adjustment of the body to its environment, so that it may
+survive. Mystically, too, the fundamental force is a half-conscious
+purpose that practice, or freedom, should come to be; or rather, that
+an apparition or experience of practice and freedom should arise; for
+in this philosophy appearance is all. To secure this desirable
+apparition of practice special tasks are set to various nuclei in felt
+space (such, for instance, as the task to see), and the image of a
+body (in this case that of an eye) is gradually formed, in order to
+execute that task; for evidently the Absolute can see only if it
+looks, and to look it must first choose a point of view and an optical
+method. This point of view<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> and this method posit the individual; they
+fix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his
+passive experience: they are his body. If the Absolute, then, wishes
+to retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one
+of its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image
+of his body. His body must continue to figure in that landscape of
+nature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing
+and recomposing. Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made
+from the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be
+preserved.</p>
+
+<p>M. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are
+going to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to
+understand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot
+venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed
+generation; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too
+amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of
+immortality. He asks if we are not "led to suppose" that consciousness
+passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute
+distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other
+animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I
+wonder?) are "capable of remembering all and willing all and
+controlling their past and their future," so that "we shall have no
+repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,
+consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." Elsewhere he
+says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+famous, that in man the spirit can "spurn every kind of resistance and
+break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death." Here the tenor
+has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.
+But was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not
+sung it in falsetto?</p>
+
+<p>The immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to
+conceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about
+it, and that little so far from serious. But he talks a great deal
+about life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet
+death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.
+What is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set
+it in motion? What is this life, that in any individual can be
+suddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this <i>elan-vital</i>, that a
+little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?
+The study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of
+season. The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom
+from philosophy, warns us that in M. Bergson's thought we have
+something occasional and partial, the work of an astute apologist, a
+party man, driven to desperate speculation by a timid attachment to
+prejudice. Like other terrified idealisms, the system of M. Bergson
+has neither good sense, nor rigour, nor candour, nor solidity. It is a
+brilliant attempt to confuse the lessons of experience by refining
+upon its texture, an attempt to make us halt, for the love of
+primitive illusions, in the path of discipline and reason. It is
+likely to prove a successful attempt, because it flatters the
+weaknesses of the moment, expresses them with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> emotion, and covers
+them with a feint at scientific speculation. It is not, however, a
+powerful system, like that of Hegel, capable of bewildering and
+obsessing many who have no natural love for shams. M. Bergson will
+hardly bewilder; his style is too clear, the field where his just
+observations lie&mdash;the immediate&mdash;is too well defined, and the
+mythology which results from projecting the terms of the immediate
+into the absolute, and turning them into powers, is too obviously
+verbal. He will not long impose on any save those who enjoy being
+imposed upon; but for a long time he may increase their number. His
+doctrine is indeed alluring. Instead of telling us, as a stern and
+contrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and
+almost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and
+unfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our
+better selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather
+tells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary
+consciousness, with its vague instincts and premonitions, that
+everything ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at heart, is as
+palpitating and irrational as ourselves. Why then strain the inquiry?
+Why seek to dominate passion by understanding it? Rather live on;
+work, it matters little at what, and grow, it matters nothing in what
+direction. Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion;
+let your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the
+roar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of
+your living soul, not a stark adoration of things reputed eternal.</p>
+
+<p>So the intellectual faithlessness and the material<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> servility of the
+age are flattered together and taught to justify themselves
+theoretically. They cry joyfully, <i>non peccavi</i>, which is the modern
+formula for confession. M. Bergson's philosophy itself is a confession
+of a certain mystical rebellion and atavism in the contemporary mind.
+It will remain a beautiful monument to the passing moment, a capital
+film for the cinematography of history, full of psychological truth
+and of a kind of restrained sentimental piety. His thought has all the
+charm that can go without strength and all the competence that can go
+without mastery. This is not an age of mastery; it is confused with
+too much business; it has no brave simplicity. The mind has forgotten
+its proper function, which is to crown life by quickening it into
+intelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that it accelerated
+life, that might perhaps justify its existence; like a philosopher at
+sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> "Introduction a la M&eacute;taphysique." <i>Revue de M&eacute;taphysique
+et de Morale</i>, Janvier, 1903.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Mati&egrave;re et M&eacute;moire</i>, p. <a href="#Page_38">38.</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea
+of non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of
+existence, and posterior to it. He evidently thinks this disposes of
+the reality of non-existence also: for it is the reality that he
+wishes to exorcise by his words. If, however, non-existence and the
+idea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible
+for me not to exist before I was born: my non-existence then would be
+more complex than my existence now, and posterior to it. The initiated
+would not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of
+some catechumens. It is a good test of the malicious theory of
+knowledge.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the
+difficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily
+into science. An equilibrium would not displace itself! But an
+equilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity. It is
+continually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal
+movements or external agencies; and while many a time the equilibrium
+is thereby destroyed altogether, sometimes it is replaced by a more
+elaborate and perilous equilibrium; as glaciers carry many rocks down,
+but leave some, here and there, piled in the most unlikely pinnacles
+and pagodas.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL</h3>
+
+<h3><a name="one" id="one"></a>I. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM</h3>
+
+
+<p>In its chase after idols this age has not wholly forgotten the gods,
+and reason and faith in reason are not left without advocates. Some
+years ago, at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. G.E. Moore began to
+produce a very deep impression amongst the younger spirits by his
+powerful and luminous dialectic. Like Socrates, he used all the sharp
+arts of a disputant in the interests of common sense and of an almost
+archaic dogmatism. Those who heard him felt how superior his position
+was, both in rigour and in force, to the prevailing inversions and
+idealisms. The abuse of psychology, rampant for two hundred years,
+seemed at last to be detected and challenged; and the impressionistic
+rhetoric that philosophy was saturated with began to be squeezed out
+by clear questions, and by a disconcerting demand for literal
+sincerity. German idealism, when we study it as a product of its own
+age and country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of
+afflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of heart; but it is essentially
+romantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere
+system-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic
+people <i>ex cathedra,</i> in stentorian tones, and represented as the
+rational foundation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> science and religion, with neither of which it
+has any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious&mdash;one of the
+worst imposture and blights to which a youthful imagination could be
+subjected. It is chiefly against the incubus of this celestial monster
+that Mr. Moore dared to lift up his eyes; and many a less courageous
+or less clear-sighted person was thankful to him for it. But a man
+with such a mission requires a certain narrowness and concentration of
+mind; he has to be intolerant and to pound a good deal on the same
+notes. We need not wonder if Mr. Moore has written rather meagerly,
+and with a certain vehemence and want of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>All this, however, was more than made up by the powerful ally who soon
+came to his aid. Mr. Bertrand Russell began by adopting Mr. Moore's
+metaphysics, but he has given as much as he has received. Apart from
+his well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance
+the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to
+pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written
+abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity,
+candour, and charm. Especially his <i>Philosophical Essays</i> and his
+little book on <i>The Problems of Philosophy</i> can be read with pleasure
+by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the
+tenets of the school. Yet it must be remembered that Mr. Russell, like
+Mr. Moore, is still young and his thoughts have not assumed their
+ultimate form. Moreover, he lives in an atmosphere of academic
+disputation which makes one technical point after another acquire a
+preponderating influence in his thoughts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> His book on <i>The Problems
+of Philosophy</i> is admirable in style, temper, and insight, but it
+hardly deserves its title; it treats principally, in a somewhat
+personal and partial way, of the relation of knowledge to its objects,
+and it might rather have been called "The problems which Moore and I
+have been agitating lately." Indeed, his philosophy is so little
+settled as yet that every new article and every fresh conversation
+revokes some of his former opinions, and places the crux of
+philosophical controversy at a new point. We are soon made aware that
+exact thinking and true thinking are not synonymous, but that one
+exact thought, in the same mind, may be the exact opposite of the
+next. This inconstancy, which after all does not go very deep, is a
+sign of sincerity and pure love of truth; it marks the freshness, the
+vivacity, the self-forgetfulness, the logical ardour belonging to this
+delightful reformer. It may seem a paradox, but at bottom it is not,
+that the vitalists should be oppressed, womanish, and mystical, and
+only the intellectualists keen, argumentative, fearless, and full of
+life. I mention this casualness and inconstancy in Mr. Russell's
+utterances not to deride them, but to show the reader how impossible
+it is, at this juncture, to give a comprehensive account of his
+philosophy, much less a final judgment upon it.</p>
+
+<p>The principles most fundamental and dominant in his thought are
+perhaps the following: That the objects the mind deals with, whether
+material or ideal, are what and where the mind says they are, and
+independent of it; that some general principles and ideas have to be
+assumed to be valid not merely for thought but for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> things; that
+relations may subsist, arise, and disappear between things without at
+all affecting these things internally; and that the nature of
+everything is just what it is, and not to be confused either with its
+origin or with any opinion about it. These principles, joined with an
+obvious predilection for Plato and Leibnitz among philosophers, lead
+to the following doctrines, among others: that the mind or soul is an
+entity separate from its thoughts and pre-existent; that a material
+world exists in space and time; that its substantial elements may be
+infinite in number, having position and quality, but no extension, so
+that each mind or soul might well be one of them; that both the
+existent and the ideal worlds may be infinite, while the ideal world
+contains an infinity of things not realised in the actual world; and
+that this ideal world is knowable by a separate mental consideration,
+a consideration which is, however, empirical in spirit, since the
+ideal world of ethics, logic, and mathematics has a special and
+surprising constitution, which we do not make but must attentively
+discover.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will perceive, perhaps, that if the function of philosophy
+is really, as the saying goes, to give us assurance of God, freedom,
+and immortality, Mr. Russell's philosophy is a dire failure. In fact,
+its author sometimes gives vent to a rather emphatic pessimism about
+this world; he has a keen sense for the manifold absurdities of
+existence. But the sense for absurdities is not without its delights,
+and Mr. Russell's satirical wit is more constant and better grounded
+than his despair. I should be inclined to say of his philosophy what
+he himself has said of that of Leibnitz, that it is at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> its best in
+those subjects which are most remote from human life. It needs to be
+very largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can
+be called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments,
+and meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest
+degree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian
+looseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head
+again, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine:
+and this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in
+the most emancipated and unflinchingly radical quarter. It is
+refreshing and reassuring, after the confused, melodramatic ways of
+philosophising to which the idealists and the pragmatists have
+accustomed us, to breathe again the crisp air of scholastic common
+sense. It is good for us to be held down, as the Platonic Socrates
+would have held us, to saying what we really believe, and sticking to
+what we say. We seem to regain our intellectual birthright when we are
+allowed to declare our genuine intent, even in philosophy, instead of
+begging some kind psychologist to investigate our "meaning" for us, or
+even waiting for the flux of events to endow us with what "meaning" it
+will. It is also instructive to have the ethical attitude purified of
+all that is not ethical and turned explicitly into what, in its moral
+capacity, it essentially is: a groundless pronouncement upon the
+better and the worse.</p>
+
+<p>Here a certain one-sidedness begins to make itself felt in Mr.
+Russell's views. The ethical attitude doubtless has no <i>ethical</i>
+ground, but that fact does not prevent it from having a <i>natural</i>
+ground; and the observer of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> animate creation need not have much
+difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell,
+however, refuses to look also in that direction. He insists, rightly
+enough, that good is predicated categorically by the conscience; he
+will not remember that all life is not moral bias merely, and that, in
+the very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance
+back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,
+and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward
+look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical
+self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to
+deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all
+their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard
+more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic
+entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be
+more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of
+Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a
+logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,
+though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing
+outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.
+We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full
+image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that
+perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is
+moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and
+fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for
+the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the
+doctrine of retributive punishment, or in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> Mr. Russell's intolerance
+of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any
+pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like
+that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a
+moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the
+function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we
+wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly
+the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with
+what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false
+place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.
+However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
+confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
+mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
+us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.</p>
+
+<p>In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
+doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
+comprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own
+interspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him
+three subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the
+inspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young
+philosophy.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="two" id="two"></a>II. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE</h3>
+
+
+<p>"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the
+mathematical infinite is probably," says Mr. Russell, "the greatest
+achievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as
+self-evident,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,
+that if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the
+number of things left must always be less than the original number of
+things. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite
+collections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,
+has been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled
+human reason in this matter." And he adds in another place: "To
+reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of
+Fate ... is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still
+further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to
+which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must
+conform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a
+habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied
+and our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly
+understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this
+world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound
+importance of its beauty."</p>
+
+<p>Mathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of
+religion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a
+heaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar
+sweetness and consolation. "Real life," he writes, "is to most men a
+long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the
+possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
+practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying
+in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from
+which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+from the pitiful laws of nature, the generations have gradually
+created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its
+natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can
+escape from the dreary exile of the actual world." This study is one
+of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The
+true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than
+man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found
+in mathematics as surely as in poetry."</p>
+
+<p>This enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite
+effect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might
+make them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,
+so satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by
+the same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to
+know absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary
+relations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over
+them; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to
+haul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of
+fishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and
+it would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into
+the mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to
+his bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as
+dreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values
+which the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for
+different minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal
+necessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or
+good. The case is not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> such as if we were dealing with existence.
+Existence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing
+justification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by
+taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.
+Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing
+good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance
+thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may
+chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the
+same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
+since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
+the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
+adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
+presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
+an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
+eternal necessity.</p>
+
+<p>The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
+possible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and
+consisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment
+of feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact
+occurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred
+remains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or
+for consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the
+realm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in
+tracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm
+of essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies
+there eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his
+human nature and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in
+so exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition
+and of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four
+if I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to
+do so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not
+to combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I
+happen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,
+and the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in
+contrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to
+my idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be
+congenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have
+affinity to them.</p>
+
+<p>And how, may I ask, has it become a part of my genius? Simply because
+nature, of which I am a part, and to which all my ideas must refer if
+they are to be relevant to my destiny, happens to have mathematical
+form. Nature had to have some form or other, if it was to exist at
+all; and whatever form it had happened to take would have had its
+prior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical
+relations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which
+nature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be
+revealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my
+admirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take
+on existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all
+essence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, it cannot
+undertake to examine exhaustively; for there are many features
+nestling in them, and many relations radiating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> from them, which no
+one needs or cares to attend to. The implications which logicians and
+mathematicians actually observe in the terms they use are a small
+selection from all those that really obtain, even in their chosen
+field; so that, for instance, as Mr. Russell was telling us, it was
+only the other day that Cantor and Dedekind observed that although
+time continually eats up the days and years, the possible future
+always remains as long as it was before. This happens to be a fact
+interesting to mankind. Apart from the mathematical puzzles it may
+help to solve, it opens before existence a vista of perpetual youth,
+and the vital stress in us leaps up in recognition of its inmost
+ambition. Many other things are doubtless implied in infinity which,
+if we noticed them, would leave us quite cold; and still others, no
+doubt, are inapprehensible with our sort and degree of intellect.
+There is of course nothing in essence which an intellect postulated
+<i>ad hoc</i> would not be able to apprehend; but the kind of intellect we
+know of and possess is an expression of vital adjustments, and is
+tethered to nature.</p>
+
+<p>That a few eternal essences, then, with a few of their necessary
+relations to one another, do actually appear to us, and do fascinate
+our attention and excite our wonder, is nothing paradoxical. This is
+merely what was bound to happen, if we became aware of anything at
+all; for the essence embodied in anything is eternal and has necessary
+relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there
+might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to
+be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that
+every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>thing that is true of any essence is true of it always and
+everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and
+eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement
+than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is eternal and
+necessary.</p>
+
+<p>This fact will be more clearly recognised, perhaps, if we remember
+that the cogency of our ideal knowledge follows upon our intent in
+fixing its object. It hangs on a virtual definition, and explicates
+it. We cannot oblige anybody or anything to reproduce the idea which
+we have chosen; but that idea will remain the idea it is whether
+forgotten or remembered, exemplified or not exemplified in things. To
+penetrate to the foundation of being is possible for us only because
+the foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set
+of differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing
+might appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm
+of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental
+possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any
+experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the
+light of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you
+will, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat,
+and hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp
+the <i>constitution of nature</i>; that is, should discover which is the
+particular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual
+existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced
+to skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual
+experiences, which form the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> most superficial stratum of nature, and
+the most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us
+so much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment,
+necessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; and we
+need only arrest our attention upon it, and define it to ourselves,
+for an eternal possibility, and some of its intrinsic characters, to
+have been revealed to our thought.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever, then, a man's mental and moral habit might be, it would
+perforce have affinity to some essence or other; his life would
+revolve about some congenial ideal object; he would find some sorts of
+form, some types of relation, more visible, beautiful, and satisfying
+than others. Mr. Russell happens to have a mathematical genius, and to
+find comfort in laying up his treasures in the mathematical heaven. It
+would be highly desirable that this temperament should be more common;
+but even if it were universal it would not reduce mathematical essence
+to a product of human attention, nor raise the "beauty" of mathematics
+to part of its essence. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Russell
+attempts to do the latter; he speaks explicitly of the <i>value</i> of
+mathematical study, a point in ethics and not directly in logic; yet
+his moral philosophy is itself so much assimilated to logic that the
+distinction between the two becomes somewhat dubious; and as Mr.
+Russell will never succeed in convincing us that moral values are
+independent of life, he may, quite against his will, lead us to
+question the independence of essence, with that blind gregarious drift
+of all ideas, in this direction or in that, which is characteristic of
+human philosophising.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="three" id="three"></a>III. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM</h3>
+
+
+<p>The time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is
+called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in
+a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
+issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
+together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
+with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
+"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
+are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
+democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
+trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
+rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
+of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
+touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
+"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
+almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
+of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
+tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
+which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
+philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
+like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
+that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
+'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
+police force in a democracy, the servant of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> people instead of
+their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
+pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
+traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
+handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
+as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
+can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
+pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
+is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
+which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
+James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
+the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
+rather than a George III."</p>
+
+<p>A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
+far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
+sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
+the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
+facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
+think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
+God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
+the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
+facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
+theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
+imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
+unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
+whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> if not actually
+unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the
+accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which
+scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on
+facts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet
+this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it
+would illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For
+we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,
+that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify
+their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate
+apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our
+temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the
+pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic
+sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal
+experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the
+effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of
+the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of
+experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is
+concerned with. Yet these are not the <i>pragmata</i> of the pragmatist,
+for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
+and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
+drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
+to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
+illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
+quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
+nominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the
+local<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
+historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
+and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
+changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
+that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
+adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
+describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
+drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
+only past that exists&mdash;the real past being unattainable and therefore,
+for personal idealism, non-existent&mdash;it is abundantly clear that the
+effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
+as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
+psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
+theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
+momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
+by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really
+distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;
+of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that
+capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an
+apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).</p>
+
+<p>It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,
+whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that
+school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The
+habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a
+matter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special
+interest in the life of reason, and be an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> effort, legitimate under
+any system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human
+thought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its
+present degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look
+at things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of
+the natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy
+that denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world
+for granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how
+the human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far
+as he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in
+the course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a
+psychological point of view might be equivalent to the idealistic
+doctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only
+structure of the universe, and its whole history. According to this
+view, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the
+transcendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is,
+still concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision
+would consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility,
+and survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force
+governing the evolution. It would still remain possible for other
+methods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct,
+perhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with
+things-in-themselves. A junction might thus be effected with the
+system of M. Bergson, which would lead to this curious result: that
+pragmatic logic would be the method of intelligence, because
+intelligence is merely a method, useful in practice, for the symbolic
+and improper repre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>sentation of reality; while another non-pragmatic
+method&mdash;sympathy and dream&mdash;would alone be able to put us in
+possession of direct knowledge and genuine truth. So that, after all,
+the pragmatic "truth" of working ideas would turn out to be what it
+has seemed hitherto to mankind, namely, no real truth, but rather a
+convenient sort of fiction, which ceases to deceive when once its
+merely pragmatic value is discounted by criticism. I remember once
+putting a question on this subject to Professor James; and his answer
+was one which I am glad to be able to record. In relation to his
+having said that "as far as the past facts go, there is no difference
+... be the atoms or be the God their cause,"<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> I asked whether, if
+God had been the cause, apart from the value of the idea of him in our
+calculations, his existence would not have made a difference to him,
+as he would be presumably self-conscious. "Of course," said Professor
+James, "but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was
+thinking of our idea." The choice of the subjective point of view,
+then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended
+to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.
+And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the
+realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the
+real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be
+verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never
+those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
+our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
+while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>useless
+and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
+Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
+Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
+catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
+character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
+might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
+the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
+Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
+acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
+believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
+practice.</p>
+
+<p>Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic
+world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
+in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
+one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
+ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they
+have turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to
+play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate
+result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of
+realism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the
+school and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very
+hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
+romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
+sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
+of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
+the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
+independent reality. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> this problem is precisely the one that
+pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
+that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
+(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
+or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
+poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
+was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
+"objective spirit," that is, into dynamic relations between things.
+The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,
+lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and
+disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or
+superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be
+easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there
+is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any
+in heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems
+to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it
+pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly
+not psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is
+pragmatism either.</p>
+
+<p>There is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of
+the system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards
+(justly, I think) as of decisive importance. Is, namely, the pragmatic
+account of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of
+knowledge only? Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit
+that it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence
+in which, they say, it is not concerned: first, the dialectical
+relation between essences;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> and second, the known occurrence or
+experience of facts. There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of
+cognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists
+to constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations,
+they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects,
+and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch
+contingent fact at all. On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes
+on some matter of fact, as, for instance, "I feel pain," or "I
+expected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,"
+though often true propositions, are not <i>theoretical</i> truths; they are
+not, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate
+observations. Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all,
+perhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of
+memory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover,
+verification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously
+impossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not
+assumed to be truly remembered. How shall we know that our expectation
+is fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an
+expectation? But if we know our past experience directly&mdash;not merely
+knew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led
+down to the present&mdash;this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a
+tolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic
+verification or "truth" at all. I have never been able to discover
+whether, by that perception of fact which is not "truth" but fact
+itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the
+whole series of these apprehensions. In the latter case, as in the
+philosophy of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open
+to retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the
+head of any pragmatic method or pragmatic "truth." It looks, indeed,
+as if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken
+for granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.
+Their readiness to make so capital an assumption is a part of their
+heritage from romantic idealism. To the romantic idealist science and
+theology are tales which ought to be reduced to an empirical
+equivalent in his personal experience; but the tale of his personal
+experience itself is a sacred figment, the one precious conviction of
+the romantic heart, which it would be heartless to question. Yet here
+is a kind of assumed truth which cannot be reduced to its pragmatic
+meaning, because it must be true literally in order that the pragmatic
+meaning of other beliefs may be conceived or tested at all.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if it be admitted that the pragmatic theory of truth does not
+touch our knowledge either of matters of fact or of the necessary
+implications of ideas, the question arises: What sort of knowledge
+remains for pragmatic theory to apply to? Simply, Mr. Russell answers,
+those "working hypotheses" to which "prudent people give only a low
+degree of belief." For "we hold different beliefs with very different
+degrees of conviction. Some&mdash;such as the belief that I am sitting in a
+chair, or that 2+2=4&mdash;can be doubted by few except those who have had
+a long training in philosophy. Such beliefs are held so firmly that
+non-philosophers who deny them are put into lunatic asylums. Other
+beliefs, such as the facts of history, are held rather less firmly....
+Beliefs about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> the future, as that the sun will rise to-morrow and
+that the trains will run approximately as in Bradshaw, may be held
+with almost as great conviction as beliefs about the past. Scientific
+laws are generally believed less firmly.... Philosophical beliefs,
+finally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the
+opposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,
+therefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,
+doubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,
+from the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood
+heat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only
+temperatures." Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future
+experience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only
+presumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical
+logic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.
+Presumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and
+yet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as
+the confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood
+heat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in
+anything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,
+whatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they
+are to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to
+lead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what
+presumptions refer to explicitly.</p>
+
+<p>It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on
+voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated
+observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,
+as when a man says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> he believes in his luck; the presumption really
+regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the
+emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils
+the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called
+luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular
+career that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a
+mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be
+transferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck
+must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not
+needful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working
+hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some
+confusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an
+anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be
+clear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers
+entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they
+do not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance
+of the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak
+of it as if it were composed of indestructible particles. But for
+Democritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not
+a working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional
+makeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain,
+anticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could
+inspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic
+theory is true. If they are right, the validity of this theory would
+not be that of pragmatic "truth" but of pragmatic "fact"; for it would
+be a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> give us, of
+experienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the
+communication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the
+experience of a universal observer. It would be knowledge of reality
+in M. Bergson's sense. Pragmatic "truth," on the contrary, is the
+relative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is
+not a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is
+instrumental.</p>
+
+<p>For theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a
+symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and
+full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full
+knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their
+experimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the
+first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and
+scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they
+gather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it
+is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably
+applied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that
+extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly
+disclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is
+avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it
+is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the
+symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,
+and for which it stands.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based
+on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not
+claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths
+or the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span> graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is
+patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
+prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
+pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
+pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
+evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
+world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
+pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
+accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
+Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what
+remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has
+abandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,
+the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to
+what was to take its place&mdash;spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.
+And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the
+objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get
+at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the
+prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its
+self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.</p>
+
+<p>Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of
+science possess, but with the language they use. If science meant
+knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his
+observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the
+probable ancestors of the human race&mdash;all knowledge of actual or
+possible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of
+spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the
+gaps in that knowledge, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> mark the <i>lacunae</i> and unsolved problems
+of the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe
+"Science" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and
+when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincar&eacute;, turned his subtle
+irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the
+"bankruptcy of science," whereas it is merely the language of science
+that he had reduced to its pragmatic value&mdash;to convenience and economy
+in the registering of facts&mdash;and had by no means questioned that
+positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.
+It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical
+epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific
+or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing
+truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its
+view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system
+which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to
+divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="four" id="four"></a>IV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS</h3>
+
+
+<p>If Mr. Russell, in his essay on "The Elements of Ethics," had wished
+to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert
+him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins
+by telling us that "what is called good conduct is conduct which is a
+means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence
+... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be
+included in ethics."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> Two consequences are involved in this: first,
+that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with
+"moral" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do
+inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is
+the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this
+matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to
+one error and the professed moralist to another. "The philosopher,
+bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the
+facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all
+be deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the
+other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become
+absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than
+the ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in
+this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any
+imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort
+and courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence
+of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he
+holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will&mdash;a view
+which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and
+mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin."</p>
+
+<p>Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will
+be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us
+the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various
+values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what
+combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> and
+(if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would
+be possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to
+come into physical conflict. Such ethics, since it would express in
+reflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both
+influence and authority over them; two things which an alien and
+dogmatic ethics necessarily lacks. The joy of the ethical sceptic in
+Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding
+to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a
+preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly
+devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good,"
+which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And
+he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer
+he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might
+perhaps have been absolved from asking the question; for, as he says,
+the so-called definitions of "good"&mdash;that it is pleasure, the desired,
+and so forth&mdash;are not definitions of the predicate "good," but
+designations of the things to which this predicate is applied by
+different persons. Pleasure, and its rivals, are not synonyms for the
+abstract quality "good," but names for classes of concrete facts that
+are supposed to possess that quality. From this correct, if somewhat
+trifling, observation, however, Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore before
+him, evokes a portentous dogma. Not being able to define good, he
+hypostasises it. "Good and bad," he says, "are qualities which belong
+to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and
+square do; and when two people differ as to whether a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> thing is good,
+only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know
+which is right." "We cannot maintain that for me a thing ought to
+exist on its own account, while for you it ought not; that would
+merely mean that one of us is mistaken, since in fact everything
+either ought to exist, or ought not." Thus we are asked to believe
+that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to
+no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort
+of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that
+it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary
+quality.</p>
+
+<p>That the quality "good" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious;
+but that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and
+astonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or
+subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the
+connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable
+predicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in
+intuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain
+conditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,
+may have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and
+left are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without
+being invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right
+is not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition
+that some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else
+at the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly
+to the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks
+this is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> not
+please him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we
+suggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the
+idea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality
+of green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the
+intent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have
+any relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and
+these relations they must always retain. But the contradiction
+disappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,
+we consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the
+qualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are
+conjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may
+be, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,
+good and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal
+paradox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of
+view of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and
+talked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should
+still raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Indeed, while
+square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may
+actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to
+be a cylinder.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>
+<p>But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
+that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
+moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
+to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
+that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
+attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
+and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
+independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
+that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
+to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
+to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
+and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
+one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
+right."</p>
+
+<p>To protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr. Russell,
+so far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy. The
+argument is that "if this were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> not the case, we could not reason with
+a man as to what is right." "We do in fact hold that when one man
+approves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is
+mistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion. If one man
+likes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of
+them is mistaken." In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices,
+however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about
+them! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave
+and the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this
+singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and
+physical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or
+incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is
+good as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but
+deals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.
+But to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false
+collocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at;
+it is not opined. The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are
+not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we
+feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may
+assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we
+may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different
+preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.
+Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great
+advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded
+as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or
+beans, or frogs' legs, or who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> had a weakness for anything called
+"unnatural"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts
+that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and <i>par
+excellence</i>, abominations.</p>
+
+<p>I am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view
+where he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and
+refutes it on the ground that "it is commonly admitted that there are
+bad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean
+desires for what is bad." Most people undoubtedly call desires bad
+when they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call
+objects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
+human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
+to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
+that Englishmen called a certain object <i>bread</i>, and Frenchmen called
+it <i>pain</i>, but that it really was <i>Brod</i>. Scholastic philosophy is
+inclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he
+candidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about
+good and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he
+triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree
+with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,
+supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to
+recognise was independent of their constitution.</p>
+
+<p>In a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are
+desires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper
+psychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of
+consciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations
+that make one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> thing good for another. At the same time the words
+desire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,
+for those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral
+units are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional
+interests that things are "really" good or bad; interests which may
+not be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt
+any desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial
+interest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable
+value; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests
+of men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less
+to the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions
+may indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they
+thwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains
+them. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of
+particular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison
+at once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for
+the other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating
+than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a
+strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to
+insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference
+to any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent
+intoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this
+way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead
+bad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders
+reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires,
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point
+of reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point
+of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing
+but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force
+than to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not
+in philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>That good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and
+adventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell's own way of arguing,
+whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,
+to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but
+appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree."
+He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,
+having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as
+intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it
+your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is
+expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an <i>argumentum ad hominem</i>
+(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man
+who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is
+self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of
+man. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless
+pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome
+intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the
+voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their
+origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they
+marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young
+Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease
+altogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines
+all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for
+political or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our
+humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be
+pursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them. The
+impossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure
+pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to
+their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.</p>
+
+<p>The author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of
+egoism, and most of all in his "Free Man's Religion." Egoism, he
+thinks, is untenable because "if I am right in thinking that my good
+is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits
+that my good, not his, is the only good." "Most people ... would admit
+that it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only
+one person's.... Then what is good is not good <i>for me</i> or <i>for you</i>,
+but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to
+secure a greater good for <i>A</i> than a lesser good for <i>B</i>, that it is
+hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.
+And if <i>A</i> happens to be some one else, and <i>B</i> to be myself, that
+cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general
+question who <i>A</i> and <i>B</i> may be." To the question, as the logician
+states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
+irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span> in
+nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
+good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
+locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
+indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
+in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
+practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
+the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
+alien good <i>was</i> a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
+of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
+some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
+representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
+truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
+voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
+to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
+remote existence before us vividly <i>sub specie boni</i>. Capacity for
+such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
+in a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all
+wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled
+magically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must
+be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to
+be an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it
+would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their
+eyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of
+nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the
+selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can
+generate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them
+intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)
+generate or recognise the goods we prize.</p>
+
+<p>In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like <i>A</i> and <i>B</i>, so
+that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,
+abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified
+at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the
+qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever
+they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing
+from sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine
+different goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and
+actual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell
+makes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and
+those akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that
+the things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized
+by others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these
+chosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie
+rather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,
+in many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;
+yet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely
+just. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic
+from exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would
+merely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly
+establishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious
+tyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices
+which would cost them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> dear; but that would only extend, as it were,
+the pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had
+allowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of
+self-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.
+Moore, even as it stands; and one trembles to think what it may become
+in the mouths of their disciples. Intolerance itself is a form of
+egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. I cannot
+help thinking that a consciousness of the relativity of values, if it
+became prevalent, would tend to render people more truly social than
+would a belief that things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no
+matter what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we said that
+goods, including the right distribution of goods, are relative to
+specific natures, moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned
+arrows. Our private sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to
+have but a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher
+duty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose aims were
+incompatible with it as we meet things physically inconvenient,
+without insulting them as if they were morally vile or logically
+contemptible. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of
+others. Beyond the pale of actual unanimity the only possible
+unselfishness is chivalry&mdash;a recognition of the inward right and
+justification of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has
+long been practised in the battle-field without abolishing the causes
+of war; and it might conceivably be extended to all the conflicts of
+men with one another, and of the warring elements within each breast.
+Policy, hypnotisation, and even surgery<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span> may be practised without
+exorcisms or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of action,
+it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that
+course is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural
+origin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and
+ethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it
+says by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
+philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction
+that what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to
+existence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn
+absolutely any force&mdash;god or man&mdash;that destroys what is beautiful or
+precious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
+own to achieve.</p>
+
+<p>The consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting
+than its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might
+still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or
+mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;
+his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long
+help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a
+mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is
+natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been
+projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should
+attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world
+is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more
+serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be
+expressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before
+anything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable
+property, that they ought to exist, or at least that, if anything
+exists, it ought to conform to them. What exists, however, is deaf to
+this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason; and,
+indeed, why should she have subordinated her own arbitrariness to a
+good that is no less arbitrary? This good, however, is somehow good
+notwithstanding; so that there is an abysmal wrong in its not being
+obeyed. The world is, in principle, totally depraved; but as the good
+is not a power, there is no one to redeem the world. The saints are
+those who, imitating the impotent dogmatism on high, and despising
+their sinful natural propensities, keep asserting that certain things
+are in themselves good and others bad, and declaring to be detestable
+any other saint who dogmatises differently. In this system the
+Calvinistic God has lost his creative and punitive functions, but
+continues to decree groundlessly what is good and what evil, and to
+love the one and hate the other with an infinite love or hatred.
+Meanwhile the reprobate need not fear hell in the next world, but the
+elect are sure to find it here.</p>
+
+<p>What shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal
+religion? Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old
+force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in
+losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric,
+this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in
+retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic;
+for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit&mdash;in this
+case a most pure and heroic spirit&mdash;which it strives so hard to
+dethrone. After all,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> the hypostasis of the good is only an
+unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the
+discernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,
+because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true
+philosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial
+systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their
+adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,
+and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but
+simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true
+insight they were based on is too often buried under them. The
+hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the
+forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things
+the limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted
+by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and
+when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.
+Mr. Russell's ethics <i>is</i> ethics. When we mortals have once assumed
+the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to
+some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that
+combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and
+that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract
+pleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity
+if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,
+whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a
+tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Pragmatism</i>, p.<a href="#Page_101"> 101.</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Plato, <i>Philebus</i>, 14, D. The dialectical element in this
+dialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,
+ethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the
+political and the theological. As to the political element, Plato
+everywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it
+to human nature and to the pursuit of happiness&mdash;that happiness which
+Mr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people
+prefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the <i>Philebus</i> (11, D) the good
+looked for is declared to be "some state and disposition of the soul
+which has the property of making all men happy"; and later (66, D) the
+conclusion is that insight is better than pleasure "as an element in
+human life." As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising
+the good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,
+which is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,
+and logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that
+ground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole
+Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of
+private will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the
+direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for
+all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the
+creative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.
+Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
+attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
+cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
+good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
+have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF
+
+REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and
+there is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains
+that any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and
+incommensurably, if it pleased anybody at any time for any reason. In
+practice, however, the ideal of anarchy is unstable. Irrefutable by
+argument, it is readily overcome by nature. It melts away before the
+dogmatic operation of the anarchist's own will, as soon as he allows
+himself the least creative endeavour. In spite of the infinite variety
+of what is merely possible, human nature and will have a somewhat
+definite constitution, and only what is harmonious with their actual
+constitution can long maintain itself in the moral world. Hence it is
+a safe principle in the criticism of art that technical proficiency,
+and brilliancy of fancy or execution, cannot avail to establish a
+great reputation. They may dazzle for a moment, but they cannot
+absolve an artist from the need of having an important subject-matter
+and a sane humanity.</p>
+
+<p>If this principle is accepted, however, it might seem that certain
+artists, and perhaps the greatest, might not fare well at our hands.
+How would Shelley, for instance, stand such a test? Every one knows
+the judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+evidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only
+in the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley,
+Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating
+his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that
+Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an
+unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word <i>sale</i>,
+and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want
+of the sense of humour, which could only be called <i>b&ecirc;te</i>. These
+strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They
+unmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all
+revolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only
+through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien
+reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other
+half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a
+common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so
+much as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of
+revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that
+they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the
+midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly
+a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,
+and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the
+leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.
+In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if
+one is out of tune with everything. We should not then be yielding to
+any private bias, but simply noting the conditions under which art may
+exist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> and may be appreciated, if we accepted the classical principle
+of criticism and asserted that substance, sanity, and even a sort of
+pervasive wisdom are requisite for supreme works of art. On the other
+hand&mdash;who can honestly doubt it?&mdash;the rebels and individualists are
+the men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shelley in
+particular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and
+Shelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in
+humour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a
+matter of &aelig;sthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of
+capital importance in the development of human genius that the great
+revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that
+began with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found
+angels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which
+began at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have
+been one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley. How shall we
+reconcile these conflicting impressions? Shall we force ourselves to
+call the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary,
+and shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation
+or political prejudice? Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox
+principle that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are
+essential to great works? Or shall we look for a different issue out
+of our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not
+perhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in
+Shelley's poetry? This last is the direction in which I conceive the
+truth to lie. A little consideration will show us that Shelley really<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+has a great subject-matter&mdash;what ought to be; and that he has a real
+humanity&mdash;though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal
+principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can
+flourish in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley seems hardly to have been brought up; he grew up in the
+nursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys,
+without any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or
+social tradition. If he received any formal training or correction, he
+instantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and
+turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to
+writing them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical
+experiments. Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but
+not, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through
+the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if
+they were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley's mind disinherited itself out
+of allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly
+endowed for the world into which it had descended. It rejected
+ordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.
+Education is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not
+completely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by
+experience because they are born with various imperfect alternative
+instincts rooted equally in their system. But most animals, and a few
+men, are not of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are
+born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without
+intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed
+with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:
+and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final
+and only possible system of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the <i>a priori</i>, one of these
+nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,
+inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature. He was innocent and
+cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind. Being a finished
+child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,
+history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense,
+but was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The
+cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what
+little wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but
+uninstructed. When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own
+natural note. If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he
+hated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being incapable of
+understanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in
+idea. For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it
+was also sensitive, vehement, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he
+had the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was
+united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the
+pelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted swiftly on its
+appointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but
+when it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was
+inwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>for liberty and justice.</p>
+
+<p>The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the
+same time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and
+continual suffering. When the world violated the ideal which lay so
+clear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If to
+the irrepressible gushing of life from within we add the suffering and
+horror that continually checked it, we shall have in hand, I think,
+the chief elements of his genius.</p>
+
+<p>Love of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what ought to be, has
+for its necessary counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the
+actual does not conform to that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul
+of the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution
+fails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All moral
+life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they
+venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and
+omnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of
+untasted and ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,
+and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world. Other
+moralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where
+they find the actual particularly galling. These excel in sincerity;
+their purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent
+and sometimes even in action. But the ideals they frame are
+fragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like
+liberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or
+plans for moral life as a whole, like Plato's <i>Republic</i>. The Utopian
+or visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world;
+being well-intentioned but impotent,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> they often take comfort in
+fancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on
+earth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at
+least is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth,
+to which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Lovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called
+idealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that
+hard-used word. He early became an idealist after Berkeley's fashion,
+in that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a
+psychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the
+universe. In his drama <i>Hellas</i> he puts this view with evident
+approval into the mouth of Ahasuerus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">"This whole<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With all the silent or tempestuous workings<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By which they have been, are, or cease to be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is but a vision;&mdash;all that it inherits<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thought is its cradle and its grave; nor less<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The future and the past are idle shadows<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of thought's eternal flight&mdash;they have no being:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nought is but that which feels itself to be."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the
+manner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably
+not working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it;
+and he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal
+realities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the
+glimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away. From the
+infinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind
+draws certain bright forms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>&mdash;the Platonic ideas&mdash;"the gathered rays
+which are reality," as Shelley called them: and it is the light of
+these ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some
+degree of reality and value, making out of them "lovely apparitions,
+dim at first, then radiant ... the progeny immortal of painting,
+sculpture, and rapt poesy."</p>
+
+<p>The only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the
+kind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which
+teaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that
+all the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to
+make the universe as good as it possibly could be. In this form,
+idealism is simply contempt for all ideals, and a hearty adoration of
+things as they are; and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that
+be, in church and in state; but in that capacity it would have been as
+hateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were, and as the
+philosophy was that flattered them. For his moral feeling was based on
+suffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a
+visioned good. His conscience was, to a most unusual degree, at once
+elevated and sincere. It was inspired in equal measure by prophecy and
+by indignation. He was carried away in turn by enthusiasm for what his
+ethereal and fertile fancy pictured as possible, and by detestation of
+the reality forced upon him instead. Hence that extraordinary moral
+fervour which is the soul of his poetry. His imagination is no playful
+undirected kaleidoscope; the images, often so tenuous and
+metaphysical, that crowd upon him, are all sparks thrown off at white
+heat,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> embodiments of a fervent, definite, unswerving inspiration. If
+we think that the <i>Cloud</i> or the <i>West Wind</i> or the <i>Witch of the
+Atlas</i> are mere fireworks, poetic dust, a sort of <i>bataille des
+fleurs</i> in which we are pelted by a shower of images&mdash;we have not
+understood the passion that overflows in them, as any long-nursed
+passion may, in any of us, suddenly overflow in an unwonted profusion
+of words. This is a point at which Francis Thompson's understanding of
+Shelley, generally so perfect, seems to me to go astray. The universe,
+Thompson tells us, was Shelley's box of toys. "He gets between the
+feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature,
+and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to
+see how she will look nicest in his song." This last is not, I think,
+Shelley's motive; it is not the truth about the spring of his genius.
+He undoubtedly shatters the world to bits, but only to build it nearer
+to the heart's desire, only to make out of its coloured fragments some
+more Elysian home for love, or some more dazzling symbol for that
+infinite beauty which is the need&mdash;the profound, aching, imperative
+need&mdash;of the human soul. This recreative impulse of the poet's is not
+wilful, as Thompson calls it: it is moral. Like the <i>Sensitive Plant</i></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"It loves even like Love,&mdash;its deep heart is full;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It desires what it has not, the beautiful."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his
+song; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is
+soon dry. Shelley's abundance has a more generous source; it springs
+from his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture,
+but in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> the world. Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it,
+he can exclaim:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ha! Ha! the animation of delight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement
+sense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty,
+to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror
+of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he
+could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of
+distilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are,
+or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the <i>Cenci</i>, he might urge
+that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better
+historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually
+to be found in the world could give him for his <i>Skylark</i>, his
+<i>Epipsychidion</i>, or his <i>Prometheus</i>. But to exaggerate good is to
+vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful
+naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and
+congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,
+on the contrary, is to darken counsel&mdash;already dark enough&mdash;and the
+want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is
+not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,
+the wantonness of these invectives&mdash;for they are invectives in
+intention and in effect&mdash;may have seemed justified to Shelley by his
+political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> priests,
+soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges&mdash;to destroy them, I mean, in
+their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all
+its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the
+half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to
+historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an
+impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,
+and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the
+legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of
+the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the
+very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the
+past and its contingent sanctities. Shelley was not left standing
+aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all
+traditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far
+lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a
+perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of
+this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.</p>
+
+<p>So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's
+genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,
+what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at
+the touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an
+opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on
+the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of
+emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused
+suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was
+the belief in perfectibility.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> An animal that has rigid instincts and
+an <i>a priori</i> mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world
+he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;
+unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or
+by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be
+reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the
+animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality
+offers. So long as such a creature lives&mdash;and his life will be
+difficult and short&mdash;events will continually disconcert and puzzle
+him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,
+unnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and
+connection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of
+thought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and
+unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;
+he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What
+contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict
+reason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will
+probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is
+an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so
+perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he
+will say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own
+<i>a priori</i> imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,
+and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things
+cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange
+violence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set
+everything right again: nay, everything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> must be on the point of
+righting itself spontaneously. Wrong, of its very essence, must be in
+unstable equilibrium. The conflict between what such a man feels ought
+to exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure,
+end by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all
+scandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person,
+or by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to
+existence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him,
+it will seem too horrible to be true.</p>
+
+<p>Such a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and
+consequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry. His choice
+lies absolutely between victory and martyrdom. But at the very moment
+of martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of
+victory. The <i>a priori</i> spirit will therefore be always a prophet of
+victory, so long as it subsists at all. The vision of a better world
+at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the
+desert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to
+the world it leaves, "This day thou shall be with me in paradise."</p>
+
+<p>In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility. In his latest
+poems&mdash;in <i>Hellas</i>, in <i>Adonais</i>&mdash;he was perhaps a little inclined to
+remove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the
+Christian church soon removed it to the other world. Indeed, an earth
+really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous
+heaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so
+angel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as
+described in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> <i>Prometheus</i> and in <i>Epipsychidion</i>, is too
+festival-like too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it
+cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical
+heaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of
+Platonic ideas, where "life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," no
+longer "stains the white radiance of eternity." But the age had been
+an age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its
+faith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a
+paradise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he
+hoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was
+that eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled
+there by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.
+He believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, "that mankind had only to will
+that there should be no evil, and there would be none." And she adds:
+"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from
+his own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the
+cardinal point of his system." This cosmic extension of the conversion
+of men reminds one of the cosmic extension of the Fall conceived by
+St. Augustine; and in the <i>Prometheus</i> Shelley has allowed his fancy,
+half in symbol, half in glorious physical hyperbole, to carry the warm
+contagion of love into the very bowels of the earth, and even the
+moon, by reflection, to catch the light of love, and be alive again.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley, we may safely say, did not understand the real constitution
+of nature. It was hidden from him by a cloud, all woven of shifting
+rainbows and bright tears. Only his emotional haste made it possible
+for him to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> entertain such, opinions as he did entertain; or rather,
+it was inevitable that the mechanism of nature, as it is in its
+depths, should remain in his pictures only the shadowiest of
+backgrounds. His poetry is accordingly a part of the poetry of
+illusion; the poetry of truth, if we have the courage to hope for such
+a thing, is reserved for far different and yet unborn poets. But it is
+only fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as
+yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they
+touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each
+successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing,
+or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a
+gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once
+out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and
+sentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous
+pageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic
+relation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as
+anybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The
+distinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,
+subtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits
+so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe
+in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising
+respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts
+from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the
+present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an
+overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any
+divided allegiance, by any sense that he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> straying into the vapid
+or fanciful, when he created what he justly calls "Beautiful idealisms
+of moral excellence."</p>
+
+<p>That is what his poems are fundamentally&mdash;the <i>Skylark</i>, and the
+<i>Witch of the Atlas</i>, and the <i>Sensitive Plant</i> no less than the
+grander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his
+heroic conscience. He felt that what his imagination pictured was a
+true symbol of what human experience should and might pass into.
+Otherwise he would have been aware of playing with idle images; his
+poetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business;
+he would have been a worldling in art and in morals. The clear fire,
+the sustained breath, the fervent accent of his poetry are due to his
+faith in his philosophy. As Mrs. Shelley expressed it, he "had no care
+for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind,
+and develop some high and abstruse truth." Had his poetry not dealt
+with what was supreme in his own eyes, and dearest to his heart, it
+could never have been the exquisite and entrancing poetry that it is.
+It would not have had an adequate subject-matter, as, in spite of
+Matthew Arnold, I think it had; for nothing can be empty that contains
+such a soul. An angel cannot be ineffectual if the standard of
+efficiency is moral; he is what all other things bring about, when
+they are effectual. And a void that is alive with the beating of
+luminous wings, and of a luminous heart, is quite sufficiently
+peopled. Shelley's mind was angelic not merely in its purity and
+fervour, but also in its moral authority, in its prophetic strain.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>What was conscience in his generation was life in him.</p>
+
+<p>The mind of man is not merely a sensorium. His intelligence is not
+merely an instrument for adaptation. There is a germ within, a nucleus
+of force and organisation, which can be unfolded, under favourable
+circumstances, into a perfection inwardly determined. Man's
+constitution is a fountain from which to draw an infinity of gushing
+music, not representing anything external, yet not unmeaning on that
+account, since it represents the capacities and passions latent in him
+from the beginning. These potentialities, however, are no oracles of
+truth. Being innate they are arbitrary; being <i>a priori</i> they are
+subjective; but they are good principles for fiction, for poetry, for
+morals, for religion. They are principles for the true expression of
+man, but not for the true description of the universe. When they are
+taken for the latter, fiction becomes deception, poetry illusion,
+morals fanaticism, and religion bad science. The orgy of delusion into
+which we are then plunged comes from supposing the <i>a priori</i> to be
+capable of controlling the actual, and the innate to be a standard for
+the true. That rich and definite endowment which might have made the
+distinction of the poet, then makes the narrowness of the philosopher.
+So Shelley, with a sort of tyranny of which he does not suspect the
+possible cruelty, would impose his ideal of love and equality upon all
+creatures; he would make enthusiasts of clowns and doves of vultures.
+In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the
+capacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate
+itself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,
+and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he
+despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he
+wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
+that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet
+his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was
+perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for
+its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with
+us, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire
+enough within to make a second stellar universe.</p>
+
+<p>An instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to
+be found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view
+of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours
+has put it: "It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater
+good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still
+more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be
+some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question."
+It is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his
+good is no less good than yours. Convince people of this&mdash;and who can
+resist such perfect logic?&mdash;and <i>presto</i> all property in things has
+disappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour. How
+happy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than
+in our mean, blind, competitive society! The single word love&mdash;and we
+have just seen that love is a logical necessity&mdash;offers an easy and
+final solution to all moral and political problems. Shelley cannot
+imagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not
+produce love. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and
+since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire
+is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in
+the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy
+seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an
+abomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.</p>
+
+<p>Now this is a very unintelligent view of evil; and if Shelley had had
+time to read Spinoza&mdash;an author with whom he would have found himself
+largely in sympathy&mdash;he might have learned that nothing is evil in
+itself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in
+creation, nor to groundless malice in man. Evil is an inevitable
+aspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve
+themselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter
+enough for them to prosper equally side by side. Under these
+circumstances the partial success of any creature&mdash;say, the
+cancer-microbe&mdash;is an evil from the point of view of those other
+creatures&mdash;say, men&mdash;to whom that success is a defeat. Shelley
+sometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy. So he says of the
+fair lady in the <i>Sensitive Plant</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All killing insects and gnawing worms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And things of obscene and unlovely forms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She bore in a basket of Indian woof,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the rough woods far aloof&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The freshest her gentle hands could pull<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the poor banished insects, whose intent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Although they did ill, was innocent."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and
+go feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> do not object; oak-leaves
+might be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot
+listen to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless
+they are quickly and utterly exterminated. And fundamentally men are
+subject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason
+unless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that,
+being animals, they should be reasonable exclusively. Imagination is
+indeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing
+themselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children,
+perhaps, or for their religion. But they are not more capable of
+sacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the
+cancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.</p>
+
+<p>When Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his
+ignorance of the world. The illusion he suffers from is
+constitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly
+subject to in their way: what he is marvelling at is really that
+anything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral
+disposition. Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and
+bids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature: so
+that all is not vanity in his illusion, nor night in his blindness.
+The poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion
+in the expression of his own soul. His political utopias, his belief
+in the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way
+of judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his
+lyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy. If he had understood universal
+nature, he would not have so glorified in his own. And his own nature
+was worth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span> glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest,
+richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse. I have not
+read in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated
+instincts of the mind. The world of Shelley is that which the vital
+monad within many of us&mdash;I will not say within all, for who shall set
+bounds to the variations of human nature?&mdash;the world which the vital
+monad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have
+its way.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he
+was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external
+perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his
+lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even
+an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul
+just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous,
+and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest
+playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from
+observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity
+appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men
+would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons,
+like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole
+inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of
+real things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree
+bent by too prevalent a wind. Half the fertility of such a soul is
+lost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy
+deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing
+object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate
+in which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an
+ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate
+possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the
+desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.
+His obtuseness to things dynamic&mdash;to the material order&mdash;leaves his
+whole mind free to develop things &aelig;sthetic after their own kind; his
+abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative
+freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.</p>
+
+<p>We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of
+us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or
+stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no
+less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or
+flowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of
+producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,
+like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances
+may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they
+cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed. What
+Shelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like
+what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food&mdash;a mass of
+mere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley
+constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed
+organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and
+muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human
+happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may
+be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> to shame; they
+can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which
+they hide.</p>
+
+<p>When the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the
+world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that
+<i>freedom</i> should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not
+been the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for
+himself. "I never could discern in him," says his friend Hogg, "any
+more than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love
+of liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...
+and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution." We all fancy nowadays
+that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we
+approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make
+them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions
+would be if we retained them. Liberty of the press and liberty to vote
+do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I
+suppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of
+a poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is
+forbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with
+the people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling
+of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test
+of freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the
+beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.
+To be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to
+be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those
+of us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to
+declare frankly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility
+of freedom.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I never was attached to that great sect<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose doctrine is that each one should select,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To cold oblivion; though it is the code<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of modern morals, and the beaten road<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who travel to their home among the dead<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the broad highway of the world, and so<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dreariest and the longest journey go.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">True love in this differs from gold and clay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That to divide is not to take away.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love is like understanding that grows bright<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gazing on many truths.... Narrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The life that wears, the spirit that creates<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One object and one form, and builds thereby<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sepulchre for its eternity!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The difficulties in reducing this charming theory of love to practice
+are well exemplified in Shelley's own life. He ran away with his first
+wife not because she inspired any uncontrollable passion, but because
+she declared she was a victim of domestic oppression and threw herself
+upon him for protection. Nevertheless, when he discovered that his
+best friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love
+principles, he was very seriously annoyed. When he presently abandoned
+her, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned
+herself in the Serpentine: and his second wife needed all her natural
+sweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the
+waves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept
+the too sensitive heart of her husband. Free love would not, then,
+secure freedom from complications; it would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span> not remove the present
+occasion for jealousy, reproaches, tragedies, and the dragging of a
+lengthening chain. Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom
+of action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements,
+but you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism
+and not, like love, a plastic dream. Wisdom is very old and therefore
+often ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who
+would live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world:
+and that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a snare for
+poets. Let them endure to love freely, hopelessly, and infinitely,
+after the manner of Plato and Dante, and even of Goethe, when Goethe
+really loved: that exquisite sacrifice will improve their verse, and
+it will not kill them. Let them follow in the traces of Shelley when
+he wrote in his youth: "I have been most of the night pacing a
+church-yard. I must now engage in scenes of strong interest.... I
+expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry.... I
+slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not
+die," Happy man if he had been able to add, "And did not marry!"</p>
+
+<p>Last among the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his
+atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his
+biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a
+pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox
+conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a
+judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any
+sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred
+the <i>Paradiso</i> of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span> Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to
+the popular <i>Inferno</i> itself, could evidently be attracted by
+Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as
+expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A
+pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this
+whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any
+conscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of
+the whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a
+panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the
+individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral
+ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the
+essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the
+chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He
+maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused
+among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful
+and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose
+it.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To suffer ...<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To forgive ...<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To defy Power ...<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This ... is to be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly
+speculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All
+metaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good
+poetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">"The pure spirit shall flow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Back to the burning fountain whence it came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A portion of the eternal, which must glow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through time and change, unquenchably the same.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He hath awakened from the dream of life.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With phantoms an unprofitable strife.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He is made one with Nature. There is heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His voice in all her music, from the moan<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He is a portion of the loveliness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which once he made more lovely.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The splendours of the firmament of time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like stars to their appointed height they climb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And death is a low mist which cannot blot<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">... the dead live there."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Atheism or pantheism of this stamp cannot be taxed with being gross or
+materialistic; the trouble is rather that it is too hazy in its
+sublimity. The poet has not perceived the natural relation between
+facts and ideals so clearly or correctly as he has felt the moral
+relation between them. But his allegiance to the intuition which
+defies, for the sake of felt excellence, every form of idolatry or
+cowardice wearing the mask of religion&mdash;this allegiance is itself the
+purest religion; and it is capable of inspiring the sweetest and most
+absolute poetry. In daring to lay bare the truths of fate, the poet
+creates for himself the subtlest and most heroic harmonies; and he is
+comforted for the illusions he has lost by being made incapable of
+desiring them.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that Shelley, being unteachable, could never put together
+any just idea of the world: he merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> collected images and emotions,
+and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does
+not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of
+nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic;
+it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never
+were on earth, and never will be. If you are seriously interested only
+in what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in
+Shelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism
+of life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no
+solidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances
+of life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those
+circumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the
+circumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it
+stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the
+formal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.
+By so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a
+parallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the
+analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances
+of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life
+can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and
+air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as
+persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he
+was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the
+interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are
+probably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which
+Matthew Arnold said we should read in order to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> know the best that has
+been thought and said in the world. The future, too, even among men,
+may contain, as Shelley puts it, many "arts, though unimagined, yet to
+be." The divination of poets cannot, of course, be expected to reveal
+any of these hidden regions as they actually exist or will exist; but
+what would be the advantage of revealing them? It could only be what
+the advantage of criticising human life would be also, to improve
+subsequent life indirectly by turning it towards attainable goods, and
+is it not as important a thing to improve life directly and in the
+present, if one has the gift, by enriching rather than criticising it?
+Besides, there is need of fixing the ideal by which criticism is to be
+guided. If you have no image of happiness or beauty or perfect
+goodness before you, how are you to judge what portions of life are
+important, and what rendering of them is appropriate?</p>
+
+<p>Being a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal
+goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a
+discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of
+life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life
+is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in
+expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove
+useful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon
+them. This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is
+diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that
+are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other
+names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material
+processes. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
+Its visions are its own offspring, hatched<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span> in the warmth of some
+favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these
+visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day
+be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the
+possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is
+precisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,
+that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific
+probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the
+landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that
+the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual
+truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)
+than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre
+and aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by
+sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
+because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul
+touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may
+people the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired
+poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most
+appealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the
+world they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.
+They do not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I
+think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">"Must be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And build themselves again impregnably<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">In a diviner clime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which frowns above the idle foam of time."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Frowns," says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something
+timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could
+threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous
+error! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those
+who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to
+reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal
+possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of
+other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite
+unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal
+essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian
+calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome
+to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. Whether
+any one has the will depends on his material constitution, and whether
+he has the power depends on the firm texture of that constitution and
+on circumstances happening to be favourable to its operation.
+Otherwise what the rebel or the visionary hails as his ideal will be
+no picture of his destiny or of that of the world. It will be, and
+will always remain, merely a picture of his heart. This picture,
+indestructible in its ideal essence, will mirror also the hearts of
+those who may share, or may have shared, the nature of the poet who
+drew it. So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of
+Shelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted
+friend wrote upon his tomb: <i>cor cordium</i>, the heart of hearts.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the <br />University of
+California, August</i> 25, 1911.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ladies and Gentlemen</span>,&mdash;The privilege of addressing you to-day
+is very welcome to me, not merely for the honour of it, which is
+great, nor for the pleasures of travel, which are many, when it is
+California that one is visiting for the first time, but also because
+there is something I have long wanted to say which this occasion seems
+particularly favourable for saying. America is still a young country,
+and this part of it is especially so; and it would have been nothing
+extraordinary if, in this young country, material preoccupations had
+altogether absorbed people's minds, and they had been too much
+engrossed in living to reflect upon life, or to have any philosophy.
+The opposite, however, is the case. Not only have you already found
+time to philosophise in California, as your society proves, but the
+eastern colonists from the very beginning were a sophisticated race.
+As much as in clearing the land and fighting the Indians they were
+occupied, as they expressed it, in wrestling with the Lord. The
+country was new, but the race was tried, chastened, and full of solemn
+memories. It was an old wine in new bottles; and America did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span> have
+to wait for its present universities, with their departments of
+academic philosophy, in order to possess a living philosophy&mdash;to have
+a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human
+destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Now this situation is a singular and remarkable one, and has many
+consequences, not all of which are equally fortunate. America is a
+young country with an old mentality: it has enjoyed the advantages of
+a child carefully brought up and thoroughly indoctrinated; it has been
+a wise child. But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always
+has a comic and an unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and
+verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and
+emotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged. Or when the
+child is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of
+his own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh
+mentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to
+reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly
+despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses
+the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary
+philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities
+of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or
+of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy
+has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed
+has caught the stale odour from it. America is not simply, as I said a
+moment ago, a young country with an old mentality: it is a country
+with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
+the fathers, the other an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> expression of the instincts, practice, and
+discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of
+the mind&mdash;in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions&mdash;it is the
+hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard
+Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times. The truth
+is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in
+practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but
+slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while,
+alongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the
+other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This
+division may be found symbolised in American architecture: a neat
+reproduction of the colonial mansion&mdash;with some modern comforts
+introduced surreptitiously&mdash;stands beside the sky-scraper. The
+American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect
+inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American
+man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one
+is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Now, with your permission, I should like to analyse more fully how
+this interesting situation has arisen, how it is qualified, and
+whither it tends. And in the first place we should remember what,
+precisely, that philosophy was which the first settlers brought with
+them into the country. In strictness there was more than one; but we
+may confine our attention to what I will call Calvinism, since it is
+on this that the current academic philosophy has been grafted. I do
+not mean exactly the Calvinism of Calvin, or even of Jonathan Edwards;
+for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span> in their systems there was much that was not pure philosophy, but
+rather faith in the externals and history of revelation. Jewish and
+Christian revelation was interpreted by these men, however, in the
+spirit of a particular philosophy, which might have arisen under any
+sky, and been associated with any other religion as well as with
+Protestant Christianity. In fact, the philosophical principle of
+Calvinism appears also in the Koran, in Spinoza, and in Cardinal
+Newman; and persons with no very distinctive Christian belief, like
+Carlyle or like Professor Royce, may be nevertheless, philosophically,
+perfect Calvinists. Calvinism, taken in this sense, is an expression
+of the agonised conscience. It is a view of the world which an
+agonised conscience readily embraces, if it takes itself seriously,
+as, being agonised, of course it must. Calvinism, essentially, asserts
+three things: that sin exists, that sin is punished, and that it is
+beautiful that sin should exist to be punished. The heart of the
+Calvinist is therefore divided between tragic concern at his own
+miserable condition, and tragic exultation about the universe at
+large. He oscillates between a profound abasement and a paradoxical
+elation of the spirit. To be a Calvinist philosophically is to feel a
+fierce pleasure in the existence of misery, especially of one's own,
+in that this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is
+irresponsible or infinite or holy. Human nature, it feels, is totally
+depraved: to have the instincts and motives that we necessarily have
+is a great scandal, and we must suffer for it; but that scandal is
+requisite, since otherwise the serious importance of being as we ought
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>to be would not have been vindicated.</p>
+
+<p>To those of us who have not an agonised conscience this system may
+seem fantastic and even unintelligible; yet it is logically and
+intently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take
+permanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain
+conditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small
+nation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic
+and distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints
+life in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and
+black abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps
+to infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, and again
+the early Protestants. If such a people is philosophical at all, it
+will not improbably be Calvinistic. Even in the early American
+communities many of these conditions were fulfilled. The nation was
+small and isolated; it lived under pressure and constant trial; it was
+acquainted with but a small range of goods and evils. Vigilance over
+conduct and an absolute demand for personal integrity were not merely
+traditional things, but things that practical sages, like Franklin and
+Washington, recommended to their countrymen, because they were virtues
+that justified themselves visibly by their fruits. But soon these
+happy results themselves helped to relax the pressure of external
+circumstances, and indirectly the pressure of the agonised conscience
+within. The nation became numerous; it ceased to be either ecstatic or
+distressful; the high social morality which on the whole it preserved
+took another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good
+sense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any
+fixed principles.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> They retained their instinct for order, and often
+created order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to
+be obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too
+unpractical a notion, and not quite serious. In fact, the second and
+native-born American mentality began to take shape. The sense of sin
+totally evaporated. Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty
+and commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing
+quick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it
+&aelig;sthetically. At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had
+elbow-room. His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he
+wished their number to increase. Good will became the great American
+virtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and
+cubic feet, and minutes saved&mdash;as if there had been anything to save
+them for. How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan
+Edwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to
+any intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.
+If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would
+think you were joking, as he himself usually is. He is convinced that
+he always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.</p>
+
+<p>Calvinism thus lost its basis in American life. Some emotional
+natures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private
+searchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the
+radical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but
+none can cease to be possible. Other natures, more sensitive to the
+moral and literary influences of the world, preferred to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span> abandon
+parts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which
+should separate the remainder from real life.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical
+genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the
+world, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American
+writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest&mdash;Poe,
+Hawthorne, and Emerson&mdash;had all a certain starved and abstract
+quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too
+keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered
+them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.
+They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.
+Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in
+his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way
+of appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not
+historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might
+have felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a
+poet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to
+avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to
+have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of
+Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of
+vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being
+morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
+rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes
+and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius
+sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> fancies in
+comparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.
+Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own persons they
+escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied
+nothing to supplant it in other minds.</p>
+
+<p>The churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no
+philosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism
+contained. The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it
+besides philosophical Calvinism. A Christian tenderness, and a hope of
+grace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and
+it was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now
+emphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant
+damnation. Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would
+perfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to
+exist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics. It is an
+ingredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself
+idealism. But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in
+current idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief
+element in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.</p>
+
+<p>Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in
+Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.
+Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set
+of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe
+regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It is a method, a
+point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain,
+could be approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is
+systematic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> subjectivism. It studies the perspectives of knowledge as
+they radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of inference
+by which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford
+any systematic or distant vistas. In other words, transcendentalism is
+the critical logic of science. Knowledge, it says, has a station, as
+in a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the
+moment. The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived,
+lie around it, painted as upon a panorama. They cannot be lighted up
+save by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by
+some active operation of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>This is hardly the occasion for developing or explaining this delicate
+insight; suffice it to say, lest you should think later that I
+disparage transcendentalism, that as a method I regard it as correct
+and, when once suggested, unforgettable. I regard it as the chief
+contribution made in modern times to speculation. But it is a method
+only, an attitude we may always assume if we like and that will always
+be legitimate. It is no answer, and involves no particular answer, to
+the question: What exists; in what order is what exists produced; what
+is to exist in the future? This question must be answered by observing
+the object, and tracing humbly the movement of the object. It cannot
+be answered at all by harping on the fact that this object, if
+discovered, must be discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an
+interest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full
+transcendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less
+frankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not
+only their own know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>ledge but the whole universe centre about
+themselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and
+romantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality
+might be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves;
+nay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their own
+romantic dreams extended indefinitely. Transcendental logic, the
+method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of
+evolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused,
+produced transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge
+was turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish
+sharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is
+significant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental
+systems of the universe, which are chimeras.</p>
+
+<p>In both its parts, however, transcendentalism had much to recommend it
+to American philosophers, for the transcendental method appealed to
+the individualistic and revolutionary temper of their youth, while
+transcendental myths enabled them to find a new status for their
+inherited theology, and to give what parts of it they cared to
+preserve some semblance of philosophical backing. This last was the
+use to which the transcendental method was put by Kant himself, who
+first brought it into vogue, before the terrible weapon had got out of
+hand, and become the instrument of pure romanticism. Kant came, he
+himself said, to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith,
+which in his case meant faith in Calvinism. In other words, he applied
+the transcendental method to matters of fact, reducing them thereby
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span> human ideas, in order to give to the Calvinistic postulates of
+conscience a metaphysical validity. For Kant had a genteel tradition
+of his own, which he wished to remove to a place of safety, feeling
+that the empirical world had become too hot for it; and this place of
+safety was the region of transcendental myth. I need hardly say how
+perfectly this expedient suited the needs of philosophers in America,
+and it is no accident if the influence of Kant soon became dominant
+here. To embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound
+metaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no
+difficulty in embracing it. In truth it was a sign of having been
+brought up in the genteel tradition, of feeling it weak, and of
+wishing to save it.</p>
+
+<p>But the transcendental method, in its way, was also sympathetic to the
+American mind. It embodied, in a radical form, the spirit of
+Protestantism as distinguished from its inherited doctrines; it was
+autonomous, undismayed, calmly revolutionary; it felt that Will was
+deeper than Intellect; it focussed everything here and now, and asked
+all things to show their credentials at the bar of the young self, and
+to prove their value for this latest born moment. These things are
+truly American; they would be characteristic of any young society with
+a keen and discursive intelligence, and they are strikingly
+exemplified in the thought and in the person of Emerson. They
+constitute what he called self-trust. Self-trust, like other
+transcendental attitudes, may be expressed in metaphysical fables. The
+romantic spirit may imagine itself to be an absolute force, evoking
+and moulding the plastic world to express its varying moods. But for
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> pioneer who is actually a world-builder this metaphysical illusion
+has a partial warrant in historical fact; far more warrant than it
+could boast of in the fixed and articulated society of Europe, among
+the moonstruck rebels and sulking poets of the romantic era. Emerson
+was a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery,
+child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything
+that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or
+to notice. More, perhaps, than anybody that has ever lived, he
+practised the transcendental method in all its purity. He had no
+system. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh
+sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they
+suggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,
+was not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his
+mind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his
+notions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones
+that they were myths. Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other
+transcendentalists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing
+questions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all have to
+think our ideas final, led him to the very verge of system-making; but
+he stopped short. Had he made a system out of his notion of
+compensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would
+have been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems.
+But he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to
+poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and
+hints toward fresh transcendental musings.</p>
+
+<p>To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> philosopher
+says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As Mr.
+Bertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail
+to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those
+who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are
+rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians; and
+ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The truths
+they find are never complete, and are not always important; but they
+are integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to
+fill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate
+or afford to contradict. But professional philosophers are usually
+only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested
+illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study
+the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or
+semblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much
+prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution;
+for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and
+perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet
+truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they
+defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of
+things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever
+been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is
+true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in
+maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea
+of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of
+many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system,
+covering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our
+logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of
+human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be
+poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that
+it was true?</p>
+
+<p>Emerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional
+consequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. When he came
+out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous
+close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to
+him: "Why so hot, little sir?" No doubt the spirit or energy of the
+world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every
+little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will
+move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
+dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole
+world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is
+silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which
+bridges the distances and compares the combatants. On this side of his
+genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and
+represented nothing except intelligence itself.</p>
+
+<p>There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with
+transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,
+for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a
+mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing
+his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was
+such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine
+a ready explanation of what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>ever beauty and commodity nature actually
+has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since
+I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,
+undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that
+is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was
+particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses
+of fellowship with the elements. This is something in which all
+Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and
+spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.
+Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,
+so others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
+resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled
+ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for
+instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but
+when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are
+unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
+that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
+openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where
+human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in
+a purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its
+quietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
+classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the
+presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and
+thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic
+sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the
+genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind
+its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so
+precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise
+for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and
+poetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom
+you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however,
+only half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its
+savour if they had wholly escaped it. They point to what contradicts
+it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition,
+for they have nothing solid to put in its place. When they point out
+how ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this
+militates against the standard, but think it a funny perversity in the
+facts. Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition,
+such an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.
+Perhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may
+be taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present
+pervasively, but everywhere weak. Similarly in Italy, during the
+Renaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the
+intellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet
+its hold on the heart was singularly relaxed. The consequence was that
+humorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of
+cardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the
+saints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for
+it so little at heart that they could find it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span> infinitely amusing that
+it should be contradicted in men's lives and that no harm should come
+of it. So when Mark Twain says, "I was born of poor but dishonest
+parents," the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon
+convention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the
+hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom
+one's habitual conviction.</p>
+
+<p>The one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely
+behind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans
+find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest
+ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he
+certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and
+traditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he
+is looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the
+polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the
+inarticulate principles that animate the community, on which its own
+genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly. When the foreigner
+opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last
+upon something representative and original. In Walt Whitman democracy
+is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and
+emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and
+equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to
+speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not
+excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their
+companions&mdash;plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the
+refusal to discriminate stop there; we must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> carry our principle
+further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a
+whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of
+the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and
+self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was
+good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia
+rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that
+alone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in
+principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to
+the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius
+to fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the
+registering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,
+and therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and
+his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very
+reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many
+beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a
+worthy filling for the human mind. An American in the nineteenth
+century who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly
+have done more.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country,
+who has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as
+Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent
+American mind&mdash;I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as
+tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could
+be, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.
+Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> in which the two
+brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr.
+Henry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer
+world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns
+everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a
+curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with
+other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the
+genteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it. With
+William James too this infusion of worldly insight and European
+sympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but
+the chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal
+spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality,
+similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so
+to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the
+dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.
+His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of
+thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in
+a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. Thus he eluded the
+genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its
+opposite. The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel's dialectic (which is
+not dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of
+experience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through
+the infusion of new insights, and through the insensible
+transformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at
+last it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of
+expanding them. Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when
+it fell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist
+like William James. He restored their revolutionary force to its
+neutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them
+separately, according to his personal predilections.</p>
+
+<p>For one thing, William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all
+that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in
+religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to
+sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and
+impostors&mdash;for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing
+to draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any
+of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the
+blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the
+certainty of finding sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least
+they were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so
+seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg,
+or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less
+beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus
+William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous,
+half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry
+individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time,
+their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he
+made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world
+has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and
+interests of these people.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in
+William James. There is a feeling abroad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span> now, to which biology and
+Darwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for
+practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival.
+Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned
+to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James
+embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called
+pragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,
+by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be
+true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its
+roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of
+practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It
+does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to
+connect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its
+psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it
+chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called
+intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his
+kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure
+pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up
+nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally
+useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of
+life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon
+obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds
+and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the
+pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that
+must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.
+To know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is
+anything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would
+prove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives. Ideas are not
+mirrors, they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet
+events, as future experience may unroll them. Those ideas that
+disappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>This may seem a very utilitarian view of the mind; and I confess I
+think it a partial one, since the logical force of beliefs and ideas,
+their truth or falsehood as assertions, has been overlooked
+altogether, or confused with the vital force of the material processes
+which these ideas express. It is an external view only, which marks
+the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its
+specific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a
+ring. Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist's theory of
+the mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to
+become. If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to
+expedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and
+a chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be
+expedited, nor could anything be useful to it. In other words&mdash;and
+this is a third point at which the philosophy of William James has
+played havoc with the genteel tradition, while ostensibly defending
+it&mdash;nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological
+terms. Its purposes are not to be static harmonies, self-unfolding
+destinies, the logic of spirit, the spirit of logic, or any other
+formal method and abstract law; its purposes are to be concrete
+endeavours, finite efforts of souls living in an environment which
+they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> transform and by which they, too, are affected. A spirit, the
+divine spirit as much as the human, as this new animism conceives it,
+is a romantic adventurer. Its future is undetermined. Its scope, its
+duration, and the quality of its life are all contingent. This spirit
+grows; it buds and sends forth feelers, sounding the depths around for
+such other centres of force or life as may exist there. It has a vital
+momentum, but no predetermined goal. It uses its past as a
+stepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely
+fresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown.
+The universe is an experiment; it is unfinished. It has no ultimate or
+total nature, because it has no end. It embodies no formula or
+statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing
+what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking
+characteristic of existence; the law is a description <i>a posteriori</i>
+of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may
+possibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is
+uncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is
+real; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more
+to-day. "There shall be news," William James was fond of saying with
+rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,
+"there shall be news in heaven!" There is almost certainly, he
+thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist
+together, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring
+sympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;
+we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our
+career and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,
+although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.
+Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal
+vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual
+experiment keep quick the edge of life.</p>
+
+<p>This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a
+conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in
+various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision
+radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James
+himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a
+philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.
+William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.
+Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first
+rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.
+Bergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative
+evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to
+"<i>&eacute;craser l'inf&acirc;me</i>." We may suspect, notwithstanding, that
+intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if
+the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that
+there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may
+possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing
+new&mdash;not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from
+the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet
+had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not
+merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new
+all day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span> I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that
+controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial
+evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel
+tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation
+unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William
+James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences
+of religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of
+the genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic
+God is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will
+answer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct
+conditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring
+being, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon
+a personal friend, or a physician, or an insurance company. How
+disconcerting! Is not this new theology a little like superstition?
+And yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!
+I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more
+probable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy. All
+three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which
+probabilities are irrelevant. If one man says the moon is sister to
+the sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not
+which notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all
+expressive. The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith
+and imagination have prejudged the issue. The force of William James's
+new theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this: that it has
+broken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new
+direction,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than
+the old. The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly
+be true&mdash;who shall know that?&mdash;but that it has entered the heart of a
+leading American to conceive and to cherish it. The genteel tradition
+cannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which
+it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been
+challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been
+discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No
+one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some
+young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a
+dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be
+afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The
+intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has
+not been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent. That
+is a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.
+Something else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the
+imagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic
+idealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring
+things as they are. The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel
+tradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought
+to be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family,
+by the genius of the race. Henceforth there can hardly be the same
+peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. Hegel will
+be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.
+Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been
+abandoned. An<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel
+tradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.</p>
+
+<p>With this I have finished such a sketch as I am here able to offer you
+of the genteel tradition in American philosophy. The subject is
+complex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote; yet I
+think the main outlines are clear enough. The chief fountains of this
+tradition were Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living
+fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised
+conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.
+When these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared&mdash;and the
+American atmosphere is not favourable to either of them&mdash;the two
+systems ceased to be inwardly understood; they subsisted as sacred
+mysteries only; and the combination of the two in some transcendental
+system of the universe (a contradiction in principle) was doubly
+artificial. Besides, it could hardly be held with a single mind.
+Natural science, history, the beliefs implied in labour and invention,
+could not be disregarded altogether; so that the transcendental
+philosopher was condemned to a double allegiance, and to not letting
+his left hand know the bluff that his right hand was making.
+Nevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate
+convictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has
+subsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic
+to take its place.</p>
+
+<p>The academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned. On the one side
+came the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude
+naturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism,
+welcoming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science
+to an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to
+be wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.</p>
+
+<p>This revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you,
+who live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and
+prodigious world. When you transform nature to your uses, when you
+experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you
+cannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these
+adjustments would have been pre-established. Much less can you feel it
+when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm. You must
+feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little
+force among her immense forces. When you escape, as you love to do, to
+your forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel
+you made them, or that they were made for you. They have grown, as you
+have grown, only more massively and more slowly. In their non-human
+beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman
+possibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcendental logic that
+they teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in
+the world. It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic,
+the needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength
+of time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable
+variety, of possible life. Everything is measurable and conditioned,
+indefinitely repeated, yet, in repetition, twisted somewhat from its
+old form. Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an
+incipient harmony, nowhere an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> intention, nor a responsibility, nor a
+plan. It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is
+the daily discipline of contact with things, so different from the
+verbal discipline of the schools, that will, I trust, inspire the
+philosophy of your children. A Californian whom I had recently the
+pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among
+your mountains their systems would have been different from what they
+are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems
+are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since
+Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly
+they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that
+man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,
+is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains
+and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what,
+indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so
+sweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or
+your friends, or that you have any secret contempt for your present
+ambitions. You respect these, you respect them perhaps too much; you
+are not suffered by the genteel tradition to criticise or to reform
+them at all radically. No; it is the yoke of this genteel tradition
+itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They
+suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as
+individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at
+once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for
+what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious
+infinity of nature. You are admonished that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> what you can do avails
+little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through
+wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you
+are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,
+namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in
+letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their
+life. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for
+reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of
+these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the
+interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes
+that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper
+happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate
+men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so
+many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be
+frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Winds Of Doctrine, by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Winds Of Doctrine
+       Studies in Contemporary Opinion
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: February 16, 2006 [EBook #17771]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDS OF DOCTRINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          WINDS OF DOCTRINE
+
+                             STUDIES IN
+                        CONTEMPORARY OPINION
+
+
+
+                                 BY
+
+                            G. SANTAYANA
+
+          LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+                  NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+                        FIRST PRINTED IN 1913
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+I. THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE
+
+II. MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
+
+III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON
+
+IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL--
+
+     i. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM
+
+     ii. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
+
+     iii. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM
+
+     iv. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS
+
+V. SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
+
+VI. THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+
+WINDS OF DOCTRINE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE
+
+
+The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The
+civilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet
+another civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand
+the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of
+our forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,
+sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and
+aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which
+rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of
+the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,
+cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the
+other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind
+of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future
+confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is
+saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an
+emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.
+
+These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is
+something positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our
+animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every
+vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we
+deprecate it; it has possession of us already through our
+propensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs
+are at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries
+are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they
+devote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has
+hold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as
+disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our
+day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what
+Goethe said of his successive love affairs--that it is sweet to see
+the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.
+
+Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often
+comfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labours
+long enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not
+particularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama
+and (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. The
+nations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known
+history. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fight
+and believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;
+the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,
+and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few
+demands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge
+together, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.
+The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the
+observer. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality and
+hearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.
+
+A chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is not
+limited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,
+but that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the average
+individual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so divided
+within themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, different
+classes of men have stood at different levels of culture, with a
+magnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for their
+respective principles. These militant believers have been keenly
+conscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers to
+them, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank
+negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life
+difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to
+understand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless
+under compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against
+their will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy
+blows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his
+side, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and
+exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that
+his faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a
+clear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or
+incompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his
+garden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.
+
+When men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and to
+count them. During the Reformation, when external confusion was at
+its height, you might have ascertained almost statistically what
+persons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was not
+doubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories
+and defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth
+century it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau
+might be alienating from Bossuet and Fenelon. But how shall we satisfy
+ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?
+Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself
+Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical
+theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,
+too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for
+philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,
+and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its
+accredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterly
+conventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to be
+as impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy in
+acquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have not
+been lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage their
+science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological
+scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid
+speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to
+abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been
+supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still
+call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over
+property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,
+and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and
+religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore
+eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who
+speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how
+many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is
+the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather
+lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and
+better men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now
+preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,
+to the instincts of the majority--the most cruel and unprogressive of
+masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatest
+happiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just or
+generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the
+largest possible population.
+
+Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It
+had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,
+an age whose real achievements were of international application, was
+destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.
+The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there
+is an extreme socialistic party that--when a wave of national passion
+does not carry it the other way--believes in international
+brotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally
+excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and
+political ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of
+late an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be
+everywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be
+galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,
+religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and
+denounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,
+when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to
+occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and
+hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and
+discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that
+the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part
+is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal
+business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.
+It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I
+mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for
+of course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language
+and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own
+is spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to
+which they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of
+shocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
+people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to
+them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural
+for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without
+a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to
+feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
+But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;
+like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis
+of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a
+flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
+Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
+perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.
+
+Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
+accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
+deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:
+namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,
+collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may
+therefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the
+principles that seem to rule their conduct, may be belated, or
+irrelevant, or premonitory; for the living organism has many strata,
+on any of which, at a given moment, activities may exist perfect
+enough to involve consciousness, yet too weak and isolated to control
+the organs of outer expression; so that (to speak geologically) our
+practice may be historic, our manners glacial, and our religion
+palaeozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century may be said to have
+been all belated; the age still yearned with Rousseau or speculated
+with Kant, while it moved with Darwin, Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and
+to-day, in the half-educated classes, among the religious or
+revolutionary sects, we may observe quite modern methods of work
+allied with a somewhat antiquated mentality. The whole nineteenth
+century might well cry with Faust: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my
+bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it
+fall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because
+they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were
+historical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote
+forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,
+and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This
+sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
+sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking
+ahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and
+bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several
+incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in
+the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic
+sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an
+adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with
+dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the
+philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least
+idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)
+were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like
+Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and
+Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double
+preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know
+what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to
+hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived
+immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The
+imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was
+intent on reform.
+
+Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
+means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
+the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
+Usually the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and
+people break down some established form, without any qualms about the
+capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
+be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
+intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
+forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
+and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be
+laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
+creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that
+diffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should
+render it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust
+Mr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,
+or at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort
+to organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of
+barbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a
+danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an
+organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not
+buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised
+world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its
+existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different
+scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble
+within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped
+intellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the
+harmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and
+life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of
+reason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral order, or
+moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves
+unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.
+
+Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution
+the pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction
+of negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
+reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
+political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a
+clear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love
+of nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical
+attitude towards all the passions.
+
+In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
+still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
+thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have
+penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous
+constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and
+mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little
+sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and
+sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each
+naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half
+lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,
+and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism
+had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and
+despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a
+display of archaeological lore or for exotic _motifs_; others gave all
+their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of
+execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been
+abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they
+have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be
+some danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the
+artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
+religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to
+barbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic
+climaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better
+convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful
+observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,
+and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the
+crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think
+their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;
+no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any
+moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less
+talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often
+interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in
+their works.
+
+In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are
+always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and
+both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.
+Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and
+endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh
+movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its
+various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or
+pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of
+any organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic
+anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle
+upon which modern philosophy has been building--or unbuilding--for
+these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.
+Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that
+experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself
+the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the
+second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even
+those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had
+inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present
+experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our
+mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
+prophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental
+principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our
+imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and
+the ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have
+nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in
+the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
+enriching the flying moment aesthetically, or helping it to slip
+prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
+is the only reality, the only _fact_: if notions which do not
+reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they
+evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the
+word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of
+reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the
+letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor
+the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they
+lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.
+Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
+scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
+form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
+of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
+which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
+the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
+discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
+imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
+must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
+are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
+denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
+human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
+Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
+practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
+live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
+those of the universe.
+
+With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
+and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything
+in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious
+theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that
+goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of
+its pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
+knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.
+There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
+memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you
+will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
+alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the
+evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted
+with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never
+been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the
+uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave
+of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to
+be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,
+that oneself cannot be the absolute because the _idea_ of oneself, to
+arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well
+have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the _idea_ of
+yourself.
+
+[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
+not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
+anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify
+a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
+actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they
+existed, could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did
+not appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless
+both were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,
+idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences
+lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,
+according to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a
+human method of approach into a charter for existence and
+non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.
+When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the
+stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy
+consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of
+activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite
+proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he
+knows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars
+except his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It
+is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me
+and say his _higher_ self; but as his lower self is only the idea of
+himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
+himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really
+the higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]
+
+This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
+and confirms it; for all these _cans_ and _musts_ touch only your idea
+of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world
+that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded
+to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of
+the lady has to be changed.
+
+Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
+possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
+philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
+pole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
+action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had
+ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in
+general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
+contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
+the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
+there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
+consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
+good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
+the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
+creation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the
+unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its
+justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is
+the thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the
+passions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new
+sensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and
+words; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or love.
+The passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be
+said to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their
+objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or
+cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are
+rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,
+things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,
+by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that
+are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of
+a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral
+materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
+possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
+however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of
+blocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are
+capable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to
+take possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears
+under the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and
+evolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason
+could ever be.
+
+Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
+wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
+respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
+behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
+inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
+consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
+religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
+traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success
+by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really
+inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no
+difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end
+if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
+worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power
+is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and
+philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb
+religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or
+life are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is
+mighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival,
+however, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not
+afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life,
+according to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic;
+but according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and
+credulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate
+the individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary
+to declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh.
+In Italy, the mind seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute
+creator, evoking at will, at each moment, a new past, a new future, a
+new earth, and a new God. In America, however, the mind is recommended
+rather as an unpatented device for oiling the engine of the body and
+making it do double work.
+
+Trustful faith in evolution and a longing for intense life are
+characteristic of contemporary sentiment; but they do not appear to be
+consistent with that contempt for the intellect which is no less
+characteristic of it. Human intelligence is certainly a product, and
+a late and highly organised product, of evolution; it ought apparently
+to be as much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the antennae of ants.
+And if life is better the more intense and concentrated it is,
+intelligence would seem to be the best form of life. But the degree of
+intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable
+that, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs
+for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly
+distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as
+theology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_. It was only, M. Bergson
+tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to
+become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it
+touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would find it
+sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom
+in some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy is an
+effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and
+stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which
+it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion
+has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business
+and society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a
+mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their
+intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is
+essentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not
+free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety
+and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
+contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;
+they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct
+or dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the
+ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the longing
+to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To
+be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was
+really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one
+seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by
+the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.
+Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to
+enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of
+living consisted in dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was
+loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its
+beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own
+fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a
+substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in
+sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more
+indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to
+which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be meaner than the
+anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with
+any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit
+with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days men
+recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
+those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
+Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive
+and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life,
+and more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking
+of the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged
+to regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us
+from somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must
+bathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives
+in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the
+mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince
+us that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of
+being alive.
+
+When chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they
+can hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be
+virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a
+distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things,
+something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he
+clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in
+the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we
+were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in
+humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a
+mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation
+admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it
+conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as
+when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when
+nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. Or
+perhaps it makes an unprecedented harmony out of things existing
+before, but jangled and detached. The first man was a great man for
+this latter reason; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his
+multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by
+harnessing all those instincts together, through memory and
+imagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is
+what we call being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you
+have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that
+sway you in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to
+one attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do
+the same thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr
+destroys the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the
+rest of us; and although his private inspiration may be irrational,
+the tendency of it is not, but reduces the public conscience to act
+before any one else has had the courage to do so. Greatness is
+spontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are
+essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the
+direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave
+behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there
+be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in
+an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason,
+in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness
+has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and
+perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.
+
+There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of
+mind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current
+phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth
+of a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But
+such largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,
+comprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany
+were not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of
+things the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted,
+and by no means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his
+part. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of
+everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not
+disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are
+chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the
+Babel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may
+be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in
+their places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without
+feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths
+are obscure. Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they
+might merely make him blind, and it may be a sufficient understanding
+of them to know that they are not worth investigating. In this way the
+most chaotic age and the most motley horrors might be mirrored
+limpidly in a great mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works
+of Raphael and Shakespeare; but the master's eye itself must be
+single, his style unmistakable, his visionary interest in what he
+depicts frank and supreme. Hence this comprehensive sort of greatness
+too is impossible in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when
+characters are complex, undecided, troubled by the mere existence of
+what is not congenial to them, eager to be not themselves; when, in a
+word, thought is weak and the flux of things overwhelms it.
+
+Without great men and without clear convictions this age is
+nevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical,
+inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite
+openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has
+gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these
+circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive
+achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are
+the _Wanderjahre_ of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face,
+which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after
+any engaging stranger; it even turns up again from time to time at
+home, full of a new tenderness for all it had abandoned there. But to
+settle down would be impossible now. The intellect, the judgment are
+in abeyance. Life is running turbid and full; and it is no marvel that
+reason, after vainly supposing that it ruled the world, should
+abdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously the
+sport of cruder powers--vested interests, tribal passions, stock
+sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no responsibility laid upon
+it, reason has become irresponsible. Many critics and philosophers
+seem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes
+reason tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters, by
+proving how superior they are to itself; it worships evolution,
+instinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism, pragmatism, and
+the philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires into the
+freehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised, the
+region of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable
+conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way
+which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)
+although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to
+perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals
+and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,
+perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the
+sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb
+all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to
+clearness and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its
+own moral and intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.
+
+These are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not
+dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows
+which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the
+coming age steadily before it?
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
+
+
+Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the
+cloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of
+history and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the
+present age; and under the name of modernism they have made their
+appearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most
+stable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective
+memory or established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after
+this church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by
+the gradual exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than
+explicit orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or
+spirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics
+to share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to
+reconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these
+cross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was
+changed frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;
+but even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds
+of each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the
+_Zeitgeist_. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of
+foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with
+the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the
+system of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric
+and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was
+accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;
+but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet
+lodged in the flesh. In more recent times we have heard of liberal
+Catholicism, the attitude assumed by some generous but divided minds,
+too much attached to their traditional religion to abandon it, but too
+weak and too hopeful not to glow also with enthusiasm for modern
+liberty and progress. Had those minds been, I will not say
+intelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt
+that this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress
+not an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless
+and heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its essence and origin,
+was an urgent summons to repent and come out of just such a worldly
+life as modern liberty and progress hold up as an ideal to the
+nations. In the Roman empire, as in the promised land of liberalism,
+each man sought to get and to enjoy as much as he could, and supported
+a ponderous government neutral as to religion and moral traditions,
+but favourable to the accumulation of riches; so that a certain
+enlightenment and cosmopolitanism were made possible, and private
+passions and tastes could be gratified without encountering
+persecution or public obloquy, though not without a general relaxation
+of society and a vulgarising of arts and manners. That something so
+self-indulgent and worldly as this ideal of liberalism could have been
+thought compatible with Christianity, the first initiation into which,
+in baptism, involves renouncing the world, might well astonish us,
+had we not been rendered deaf to moral discords by the very din which
+from our birth they have been making in our ears.
+
+But this is not all. Primitive Christianity was not only a summons to
+turn one's heart and mind away from a corrupt world; it was a summons
+to do so under pain of instant and terrible punishment. It was the
+conviction of pious Jews since the days of the Prophets that
+mercilessness, avarice, and disobedience to revealed law were the
+direct path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against
+which St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of
+destruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the
+ancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend
+on it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be
+overthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the
+remnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life
+in the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to
+fast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the
+kingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take
+thought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a
+new earth--far more worthy of study--would be unrolled before that
+very generation.
+
+There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,
+and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism
+possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,
+pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.
+But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and
+governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,
+and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some
+of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and
+moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the
+church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the
+English church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply
+aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should
+remain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable
+measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were
+liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such
+persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from
+the tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they
+were nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of
+any sort was most painful to their minds. They longed rather for a
+sweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost
+everything. A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for
+nationality glorious and holy. No wonder that their work in
+nation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are
+scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were
+willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its
+vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent
+before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism
+which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of
+national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is
+fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less
+power to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan
+society in which they are forced to live.
+
+The question what is true or essential Christianity is a thorny one,
+because each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it
+happens to believe. Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less
+distinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity
+coincide--what a miracle!--with his own Lutheran and Kantian
+sentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is
+the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well
+expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by
+what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the
+modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a
+matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.
+Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less
+intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most
+primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole
+man--intellect, habits, and affections--from the life of the world to
+a new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about
+destiny. The moral summons was to renounce home, kindred, possessions,
+the respect of men, the hypocrisies of the synagogue, and to devote
+oneself to a wandering and begging life, healing, praying, and
+preaching. And preaching what? Preaching the prophecy about destiny
+which justified that conversion and renunciation; preaching that the
+world, in its present constitution, was about to be destroyed on
+account of its wickedness, and that the ignorant, the poor, and the
+down-trodden, if they trusted this prophecy, and turned their backs at
+once on all the world pursues, would be saved in the new deluge, and
+would form a new society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be
+raised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called,
+but the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there
+was in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of
+speculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of
+goodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched
+and depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of
+goodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous incubus
+of circumstance that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly
+as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could
+bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and
+diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice
+of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the
+interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a
+cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world--such was
+Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled
+with the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a
+special hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye
+fixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as
+of serving the state; he despised or ignored everything for which the
+state exists, labour, wealth, power, felicity, splendour, and
+learning. With Christ the natural man in him had been crucified, and
+in Christ he had risen again a spiritual man, to walk the earth, as a
+messenger from heaven, for a few more years. His whole life was an
+experience of perpetual graces and miracles.
+
+The prophecy about the speedy end of this wicked world was not
+fulfilled as the early Christians expected; but this fact is less
+disconcerting to the Christian than one would suppose. The spontaneous
+or instinctive Christian--and there is such a type of mind, quite
+apart from any affiliation to historic Christianity--takes a personal
+and dramatic view of the world; its values and even its reality are
+the values and reality which it may have for him. It would profit him
+nothing to win it, if he lost his own soul. That prophecy about the
+destruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be
+subservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the
+prophet and vindicate the saints. That the years should pass and
+nothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this
+prophecy for those whose imagination it excites. This world must
+actually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of
+view that counts with the Christian mind. Even if we consider
+posterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are
+short lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their
+substance. The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being
+fulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved,
+is truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an
+operation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the
+experience of each soul, is to follow upon it. Thus the summons to
+repent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of
+Christianity, can fully retain their spirit when for "this wicked
+world" we read "this transitory life" and for "the coming of the
+Kingdom" we read "life everlasting." The change is important, but it
+affects the application rather than the nature of the gospel. Morally
+there is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns
+another life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other
+hand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations
+and millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation
+of the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there
+will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling
+that the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in
+store.
+
+What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would
+be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has
+happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in
+another. A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of
+events to be actually experienced, and of their causes. The whole
+inspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that. It was not
+metaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. The promised
+land was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was
+not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it
+returned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah
+was to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;
+prophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too
+is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too
+is a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that
+speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in
+the religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one
+which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may
+extend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical
+science should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin
+which Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what
+brings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,
+idle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then
+physical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with
+this or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or
+the dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ
+himself, with John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. James, and St. John,
+preached to the world.
+
+Even the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it
+for a fact. What really lent some truth--moral truth only--to their
+imaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or
+the groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether
+millstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their
+pictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the
+unseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
+experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult
+existences, how much more must this have been the case among a more
+ignorant and a more intense nation like the Jews? Indeed, _events_ are
+what the Jews have always remembered and hoped for; if their religion
+was not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive and
+experimental salvation, it was nothing. Their theology was meagre in
+the description of the Lord's nature, but rich in the description of
+his ways. Indeed, their belief in the existence and power of the Lord,
+if we take it pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the
+belief in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency of
+conduct of a certain sort to secure success and good fortune, both
+national and personal. This faith was partly an experience and partly
+a demand; it turned on history and prophecy. History was interpreted
+by a prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to govern
+it; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration of the same
+principles, at work in the catastrophes of the day or of the morrow.
+
+There is no doubt a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal
+apart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into
+the life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they
+were, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the
+Platonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in
+attributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and
+imaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because
+it is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the
+world from the story of salvation, and God's government and the
+sanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a _fundamental
+apostasy_ from Christianity. Christianity, being a practical and
+living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the
+punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most
+brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a
+faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind,
+within, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the
+destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that
+failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble
+faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our
+point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical,
+physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in
+our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but
+were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite
+for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and
+the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the
+intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It
+flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all
+existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at
+the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by
+the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the
+cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread,
+from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for
+prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly
+comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.
+
+It is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort, which might
+wholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can never wholly inspire human
+society. Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its
+Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted into paganism.
+The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger; not
+his kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who is in heaven
+is his brother and sister and mother and his real compatriot. In a
+nation that calls itself Christian every child may be pledged, at
+baptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the
+flesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,
+and the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a
+family, will form an integral part of that very world which he will
+pledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the
+font. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the
+Christian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite
+another. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
+only superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element
+can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for
+instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what
+seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?
+Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless
+rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
+regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a
+dawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic passions, in
+themselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel.
+Christendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it
+was a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or
+less Christian. We may see the same thing under different
+circumstances in the Spain of Philip II. Here was a government
+consciously labouring in the service of the church, to resist Turks,
+convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants. Yet the very
+forces engaged in defending the church, the army and the Inquisition,
+were alien to the Christian life; they were fit embodiments rather of
+chivalry and greed, or of policy and jealous dominion. The
+ecclesiastical forces also, theology, ritual, and hierarchy, employed
+in spreading the gospel were themselves alien to the gospel. An
+anti-worldly religion finds itself in fact in this dilemma: if it
+remains merely spiritual, developing no material organs, it cannot
+affect the world; while if it develops organs with which to operate on
+the world, these organs become a part of the world from which it is
+trying to wean the individual spirit, so that the moment it is armed
+for conflict such a religion has two enemies on its hands. It is
+stifled by its necessary armour, and adds treason in its members to
+hostility in its foes. The passions and arts it uses against its
+opponents are as fatal to itself as those which its opponents array
+against it.
+
+In every age in which a supernaturalistic system is preached we must
+accordingly expect to find the world standing up stubbornly against
+it, essentially unconverted and hostile, whatever name it may have
+been christened with; and we may expect the spirit of the world to
+find expression, not only in overt opposition to the supernaturalistic
+system, but also in the surviving or supervening worldliness of the
+faithful. Such an insidious revulsion of the natural man against a
+religion he does not openly discard is what, in modern Christendom, we
+call the Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the later
+open rebellion against the same traditions) the Renaissance is
+radically inimical to Christianity. To say that Christianity survives,
+even if weakened or disestablished, is to say that the Renaissance and
+the Revolution are still incomplete, Far from being past events they
+are living programmes. The ideal of the Renaissance is to restore
+pagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy, in sentiment, and
+in morals. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.
+Instead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance
+accept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;
+they believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
+perfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect
+it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the
+flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty
+and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil--if we understand
+by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its
+autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart
+and will in morals--the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the
+devil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in
+nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical
+and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
+religion of the gospel.
+
+"I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet
+so wonderfully strange--Caesar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
+Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing
+to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche
+goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,
+which was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its
+mellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid
+Christianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than
+Nietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic or
+neo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have
+worked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual
+rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have
+been insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles
+nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure
+literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative
+convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function
+simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance.
+The Reformation prevented this euthanasia of Christianity. It
+re-expressed the unenlightened absolutism of the old religion; it
+insisted that dogma was scientifically true, that salvation was urgent
+and fearfully doubtful, that the world, and the worldly paganised
+church, were as Sodom and Gomorrah, and that sin, though natural to
+man, was to God an abomination. In fighting this movement, which soon
+became heretical, the Catholic church had to fight it with its own
+weapons, and thereby reawakened in its own bosom the same sinister
+convictions. It did not have to dig deep to find them. Even without
+Luther, convinced Catholics would have appeared in plenty to prevent
+Caesar Borgia, had he secured the tiara, from being pope in any novel
+fashion or with any revolutionary result. The supernaturalism, the
+literal realism, the other-worldliness of the Catholic church are too
+much the soul of it to depart without causing its dissolution. While
+the church lives at all, it must live on the strength which these
+principles can lend it. And they are not altogether weak. Persons who
+feel themselves to be exiles in this world--and what noble mind, from
+Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?--are mightily inclined to
+believe themselves citizens of another. There will always be
+spontaneous, instinctive Christians; and when, under the oppression of
+sin, salvation is looked for and miracles are expected, the
+supernatural scheme of salvation which historical Christianity offers
+will not always be despised. The modernists think the church is doomed
+if it turns a deaf ear to the higher criticism or ignores the
+philosophy of M. Bergson. But it has outlived greater storms. A moment
+when any exotic superstition can find excitable minds to welcome it,
+when new and grotesque forms of faith can spread among the people,
+when the ultimate impotence of science is the theme of every cheap
+philosopher, when constructive philology is reefing its sails, when
+the judicious grieve at the portentous metaphysical shams of yesterday
+and smile at those of to-day--such a moment is rather ill chosen for
+prophesying the extinction of a deep-rooted system of religion because
+your own studies make it seem to you incredible; especially if you
+hold a theory of knowledge that regards all opinions as arbitrary
+postulates, which it may become convenient to abandon at any moment.
+
+Modernism is the infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic
+and wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the
+rationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other
+modern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms.
+The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is
+creditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as
+Catholics; for what makes them adopt the views of rationalistic
+historians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance,
+convincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental
+speculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their
+faith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may
+lead them. A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of
+history, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these are the
+motives, creditable to any spiritual man, that have made modernists of
+so many. But these excellent things appear in the modernists under
+rather unfortunate circumstances. For the modernists to begin with are
+Catholics, and usually priests; they are pledged to a fixed creed,
+touching matters both of history and of philosophy; and it would be a
+marvel if rationalistic criticism of the Bible and rationalistic
+church history confirmed that creed on its historical side, or if
+irresponsible personal speculations, in the manner of Ritschl or of M.
+Bergson, confirmed its metaphysics.
+
+I am far from wishing to suggest that an orthodox Christian cannot be
+scrupulously honest in admitting the probable facts, or cannot have a
+fresh spiritual experience, or frame an original philosophy. But what
+we think probable hangs on our standard of probability and of
+evidence; the spiritual experiences that come to us are according to
+our disposition and affections; and any new philosophy we frame will
+be an answer to the particular problems that beset us, and an
+expression of the solutions we hope for. Now this standard of
+probability, this disposition, and these problems and hopes may be
+those of a Christian or they may not. The true Christian, for
+instance, will begin by regarding miracles as probable; he will either
+believe he has experienced them in his own person, or hope for them
+earnestly; nothing will seem to him more natural, more in consonance
+with the actual texture of life, than that they should have occurred
+abundantly and continuously in the past. When he finds the record of
+one he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record
+could have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,
+in spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed
+assurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps
+could be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We
+might say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its
+origin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by
+our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
+miracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
+can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
+movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
+is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
+fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
+cannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but
+we could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then
+expect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism
+are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his
+Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add
+that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that
+practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make
+instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond
+the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,
+machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the
+love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
+
+Similarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new
+philosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems
+in them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh
+intuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign
+of originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid
+or on heaven like Mohammed, or stop discoursing on them at all; it
+would be a sign of apostasy.
+
+Now the modernists' criterion of probability in history or of
+worthiness in philosophy is not the Christian criterion. It is that of
+their contemporaries outside the church, who are rationalists in
+history and egotists or voluntarists in philosophy. The biblical
+criticism and mystical speculations of the modernists call for no
+special remark; they are such as any studious or spiritual person,
+with no inherited religion, might compose in our day. But what is
+remarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they
+should have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this
+non-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to
+the Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are
+particularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of
+history, of theology, and of the world.
+
+Everything, however, has its explanation. In a Catholic seminary, as
+the modernists bitterly complain, very little is heard of the views
+held in the learned world outside. It is not taught there that the
+Christian religion is only one of many, some of them older and
+superior to it in certain respects; that it itself is eclectic and
+contains inward contradictions; that it is and always has been divided
+into rancorous sects; that its position in the world is precarious and
+its future hopeless. On the contrary, everything is so presented as to
+persuade the innocent student that all that is good or true anywhere
+is founded on the faith he is preparing to preach, that the historical
+evidences of its truth are irrefragable, that it is logically perfect
+and spiritually all-sufficing. These convictions, which no breath from
+the outside is allowed to ruffle, are deepened in the case of pensive
+and studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own
+religious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,
+perhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas
+originated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.
+This (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of
+disillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider
+basis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing
+here; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be
+enlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself
+many diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of
+thought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and
+other types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be
+progressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.
+
+This insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No doubt it gives him
+a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the
+acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton
+information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,
+expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national
+hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy
+of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,
+render these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal
+expressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,
+provided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that
+the world is made for man, and that even God is just such a God as man
+would have wished him to be, the existent ideal of human nature and
+the foregone solution to all human problems. Nevertheless, Christian
+dogmas are definite,[2] while human inspirations are potentially
+limitless; and if the object of the two is identical either the dogmas
+must be stretched and ultimately abandoned, or inspiration which does
+not conform to them must be denounced as illusory or diabolical.
+
+[Footnote 2: At least in their devotional and moral import. I suggest
+this qualification in deference to M. Le Roy's interesting theory of
+dogma, viz., that the verbal or intellectual definition of a dogma may
+be changed without changing the dogma itself (as a sentence might be
+translated into a new language without altering the meaning) provided
+the suggested conduct and feeling in the presence of the mystery
+remained the same. Thus the definition of transubstantiation might be
+modified to suit an idealistic philosophy, but the new definition
+would be no less orthodox than the old if it did not discourage the
+worship of the consecrated elements or the sense of mystical union
+with Christ in the sacrament.]
+
+At this point the modernist first chooses the path which must lead him
+away, steadily and for ever, from the church which he did not think to
+desert. He chooses a personal, psychological, variable standard of
+inspiration; he becomes, in principle, a Protestant. Why does he not
+become one in name also? Because, as one of the most distinguished
+modernists has said, the age of partial heresy is past. It is suicidal
+to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking
+another part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand
+firmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what
+you challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the
+pope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and
+then the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against
+the New Testament, or God revealed in nature against God revealed in
+the Bible, or God revealed in your own conscience or transcendental
+self against God revealed in nature; and you will be lucky if your
+conscience and transcendental self can long hold their own against the
+flux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be
+taken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol
+for the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace
+and express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and
+follow it on all sides in its vital development. But if the age of
+partial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?
+What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience
+interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would
+embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in
+religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes
+him a strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is
+the prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that
+all human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by
+trusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular
+religion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,
+together with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound
+ignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,
+only in grotesque caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted
+in them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a
+derivation from it--a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have
+wholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of
+professors of philosophy. I need not observe how completely the secret
+of each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent
+outraged: the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this
+unconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of
+what, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is. He feels
+himself full of love--except for the pope--of mysticism, and of a sort
+of archaeological piety. He is learned and eloquent and wistful. Why
+should he not remain in the church? Why should he not bring all its
+cold and recalcitrant members up to his own level of insight?
+
+The modernist, like the Protestants before him, is certainly justified
+in contrasting a certain essence or true life of religion with the
+formulas and practices, not all equally well-chosen, which have
+crystallised round it. In the routine of Catholic teaching and worship
+there is notoriously a deal of mummery: phrases and ceremonies abound
+that have lost their meaning, and that people run through without even
+that general devout attitude and unction which, after all, is all that
+can be asked for in the presence of mysteries. Not only is all sense
+of the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma
+itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock
+phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium.
+Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would
+be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is
+that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists
+inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness
+may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice
+which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and
+pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for
+historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists
+to contrast with the official religion what was pure and vital in the
+religion of their fathers. Like the early Protestants, they wish to
+revert to a more genuine Christianity; but while their historical
+imagination is much more accurate and well-fed than that of any one in
+the sixteenth century could be, they have no hold on the Protestant
+principle of faith. The Protestants, taking the Bible as an oracle
+which personal inspiration was to interpret, could reform tradition in
+any way and to any extent which their reason or feeling happened to
+prompt. But so long as their Christianity was a positive faith, the
+residue, when all the dross had been criticised and burned away, was
+of divine authority. The Bible never became for them merely an
+ancient Jewish encyclopaedia, often eloquent, often curious, and often
+barbarous. God never became a literary symbol, covering some
+problematical cosmic force, or some ideal of the conscience. But for
+the modernist this total transformation takes place at once. He keeps
+the whole Catholic system, but he believes in no part of it as it
+demands to be believed. He understands and shares the moral experience
+that it enshrines; but the bubble has been pricked, the painted world
+has been discovered to be but painted. He has ceased to be a Christian
+to become an amateur, or if you will a connoisseur, of Christianity.
+He believes--and this unquestioningly, for he is a child of his
+age--in history, in philology, in evolution, perhaps in German
+idealism; he does not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in
+revelation. His study of history has disclosed Christianity to him in
+its evolution and in its character of a myth; he wishes to keep it in
+its entirety precisely because he regards it as a convention, like a
+language or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the
+contrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly
+supposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.
+Modernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing. It is the
+love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.
+It is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has
+discovered that he is a pagan.
+
+When the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double
+allegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological
+criticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while
+the Christian dogmas touching these things--the incarnation and
+resurrection of Christ, for instance--must be taken in a purely
+symbolic or moral sense. In saying this they may be entirely right; it
+seems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of
+meaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth
+there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of
+little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of
+all religions, is to be found in its _moral idealism_, I mean, in the
+expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries,
+of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a
+moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what
+it is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic
+rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity
+is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the
+pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of
+salvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment,
+from hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the
+Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons
+and the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have
+lost all force for it and become fables.
+
+The modernist, then, starts with the orthodox but untenable persuasion
+that Catholicism comprehends all that is good; he adds the heterodox
+though amiable sentiment that any well-meaning ambition of the mind,
+any hope, any illumination, any science, must be good, and therefore
+compatible with Catholicism. He bathes himself in idealistic
+philosophy, he dabbles in liberal politics, he accepts and emulates
+rationalistic exegesis and anti-clerical church history. Soon he finds
+himself, on every particular point, out of sympathy with the acts and
+tendencies of the church to which he belongs; and then he yields to
+the most pathetic of his many illusions--he sets about to purge this
+church, so as not to be compelled to abandon it; to purge it of its
+first principles, of its whole history, and of its sublime if
+chimerical ideal.
+
+The modernist wishes to reconcile the church and the world. Therein he
+forgets what Christianity came into the world to announce and why its
+message was believed. It came to announce salvation from the world;
+there should be no more need of just those things which the modernist
+so deeply loves and respects and blushes that his church should not be
+adorned with--emancipated science, free poetic religion, optimistic
+politics, and dissolute art. These things, according to the Christian
+conscience, were all vanity and vexation of spirit, and the pagan
+world itself almost confessed as much. They were vexatious and vain
+because they were bred out of sin, out of ignoring the inward and the
+revealed law of God; and they would lead surely and quickly to
+destruction. The needful salvation from these follies, Christianity
+went on to announce, had come through the cross of Christ; whose
+grace, together with admission to his future heavenly kingdom, was
+offered freely to such as believed in him, separated themselves from
+the world, and lived in charity, humility, and innocence, waiting lamp
+in hand for the celestial bridegroom. These abstracted and elected
+spirits were the true disciples of Christ and the church itself.
+
+Having no ears for this essential message of Christianity, the
+modernist also has no eyes for its history. The church converted the
+world only partially and inessentially; yet Christianity was outwardly
+established as the traditional religion of many nations. And why?
+Because, although the prophecies it relied on were strained and its
+miracles dubious, it furnished a needful sanctuary from the shames,
+sorrows, injustices, violence, and gathering darkness of earth; and
+not only a sanctuary one might fly to, but a holy precinct where one
+might live, where there was sacred learning, based on revelation and
+tradition, to occupy the inquisitive, and sacred philosophy to occupy
+the speculative; where there might be religious art, ministering to
+the faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister,
+transformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness,
+and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become
+those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an
+ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the
+Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and
+they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect
+development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
+Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
+apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give
+out the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,
+but nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of
+it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolution. It is
+not a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of
+something latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
+instruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there
+was an immense development of Christianity during the first three
+centuries, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever
+since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have
+refused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches
+have eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the
+preservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst
+of so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands
+the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in
+another world. The _mise-en-scene_ has changed immensely. The gospel
+has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
+in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a
+gilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel
+has been preserved by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated
+fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater
+resemblance to the apostles in his outer situation than the pope does;
+but what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the
+natural world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the
+blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the inferiority of natural
+human bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full
+of pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this. It is here, and
+certainly not among the modernists, that the gospel is still believed.
+
+Of course, it is open to any one to say that there is a nobler
+religion possible without these trammels and this officialdom, that
+there is a deeper philosophy than this supernaturalistic rationalism,
+that there is a sweeter life than this legal piety. Perhaps: I think
+the pagan Greeks, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans would have much to
+say for themselves before the impartial tribunal of human nature and
+reason. But they are not Christians and do not wish to be. No more, in
+their hearts, are the modernists, and they should feel it beneath
+their dignity to pose as such; indeed the more sensitive of them
+already feel it. To say they are not Christians at heart, but
+diametrically opposed to the fundamental faith and purpose of
+Christianity, is not to say they may not be profound mystics (as many
+Hindus, Jews, and pagan Greeks have been), or excellent scholars, or
+generous philanthropists. But the very motive that attaches them to
+Christianity is worldly and un-Christian. They wish to preserve the
+continuity of moral traditions; they wish the poetry of life to flow
+down to them uninterruptedly and copiously from all the ages. It is an
+amiable and wise desire; but it shows that they are men of the
+Renaissance, pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiment, to
+whom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive
+just because it presupposes that Christianity is true.
+
+Yet even in this historical and poetical allegiance to Christianity I
+suspect the modernists suffer from a serious illusion. They think the
+weakness of the church lies in its not following the inspirations of
+the age. But when this age is past, might not that weakness be a
+source of strength again? For an idea ever to be fashionable is
+ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. No doubt it
+would be dishonest in any of us now, who see clearly that Noah surely
+did not lead all the animals two by two into the Ark, to say that we
+believe he did so, on the ground that stories of that kind are rather
+favourable to the spread of religion. No doubt such a story, and even
+the fables essential to Christian theology, are now incredible to most
+of us. But on the other hand it would be stupid to assume that what is
+incredible to you or me now must always be incredible to mankind. What
+was foolishness to the Greeks of St. Paul's day spread mightily among
+them one or two hundred years later; and what is foolishness to the
+modernist of to-day may edify future generations. The imagination is
+suggestible and there is nothing men will not believe in matters of
+religion. These rational persuasions by which we are swayed, the
+conventions of unbelieving science and unbelieving history, are
+superficial growths; yesterday they did not exist, to-morrow they may
+have disappeared. This is a doctrine which the modernist philosophers
+themselves emphasise, as does M. Bergson, whom some of them follow,
+and say the Catholic church itself ought to follow in order to be
+saved--for prophets are constitutionally without a sense of humour.
+These philosophers maintain that intelligence is merely a convenient
+method of picking one's way through the world of matter, that it is a
+falsification of life, and wholly unfit to grasp the roots of it. We
+may well be of another opinion, if we think the roots of life are not
+in consciousness but in nature, which intelligence alone can reveal;
+but we must agree that in life itself intelligence is a superficial
+growth, and easily blighted, and that the experience of the vanity of
+the world, of sin, of salvation, of miracles, of strange revelations,
+and of mystic loves is a far deeper, more primitive, and therefore
+probably more lasting human possession than is that of clear
+historical or scientific ideas.
+
+Now religious experience, as I have said, may take other forms than
+the Christian, and within Christianity it may take other forms than
+the Catholic; but the Catholic form is as good as any intrinsically
+for the devotee himself, and it has immense advantages over its
+probable rivals in charm, in comprehensiveness, in maturity, in
+internal rationality, in external adaptability; so much so that a
+strong anti-clerical government, like the French, cannot safely leave
+the church to be overwhelmed by the forces of science, good sense,
+ridicule, frivolity, and avarice (all strong forces in France), but
+must use violence as well to do it. In the English church, too, it is
+not those who accept the deluge, the resurrection, and the sacraments
+only as symbols that are the vital party, but those who accept them
+literally; for only these have anything to say to the poor, or to the
+rich, that can refresh them. In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight
+clericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of
+the church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the
+world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying
+in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will
+be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the
+past. As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those
+concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and
+double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a
+mortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that
+everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON
+
+
+The most representative and remarkable of living philosophers is M.
+Henri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract
+universal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in
+form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and
+mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of
+science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be
+secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems
+to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is
+eloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has
+received and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent
+than he is. He uses the French language (and little else is French
+about him) in the manner of the more recent artists in words,
+retaining the precision of phrase and the measured judgments which are
+traditional in French literature, yet managing to envelop everything
+in a penumbra of emotional suggestion. Each expression of an idea is
+complete in itself; yet these expressions are often varied and
+constantly metaphorical, so that we are led to feel that much in that
+idea has remained unexpressed and is indeed inexpressible.
+
+Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less
+elaborate in his learning. In the history of philosophy, in
+mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has
+taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and
+spirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an
+expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality
+and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine
+historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the
+views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in
+interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever
+thought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as
+persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian
+insight. The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to
+exercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things. First
+the evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which
+is true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values;
+as modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does
+not exactly crown it. The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume
+that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out
+of: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very
+unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own
+opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when
+it is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be
+established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had
+the last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for
+instance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the
+dramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of
+reconstructing history was, on the surface, very sympathetic. He too,
+like M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at
+every turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially
+if this was a philosophical attitude or temper. Yet in reality his
+historical judgments were forced and brutal: Greece was but a
+stepping-stone to Prussia, Plato and Spinoza found their higher
+synthesis in himself, and (though he may not say so frankly) Jesus
+Christ and St. Francis realised their better selves in Luther. Actual
+spiritual life, the thoughts, affections, and pleasures of
+individuals, passed with Hegel for so much moonshine; the true spirit
+was "objective," it was simply the movement of those circumstances in
+which actual spirit arose. He was accordingly contemptuous of
+everything intrinsically good, and his idealism consisted in forcing
+the natural world into a formula of evolution and then worshipping it
+as the embodiment of the living God. But under the guise of optimism
+and belief in a cosmic reason this is mere idolatry of success--a
+malign superstition, by which all moral independence is crushed out
+and conscience enslaved to chronology; and it is no marvel if,
+somewhat to relieve this subjection, history in turn was expurgated,
+marshalled, and distorted, that it might pass muster for the work of
+the Holy Ghost.
+
+In truth the value of spiritual life is intrinsic and centred at every
+point. It is never wholly recoverable. To recover it at all, an
+historian must have a certain detachment and ingenuousness; knowing
+the dignity and simplicity of his own mind, he must courteously
+attribute the same dignity and simplicity to others, unless their
+avowed attitude prevents; this is to be an intelligent critic and to
+write history like a gentleman. The truth, which all philosophers
+alike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to
+another; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the
+better. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;
+else nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and
+ultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and
+excellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that
+tests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving
+upward or downward or in a circle.
+
+M. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order
+utterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be
+open to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it
+"_retardent sur Kant;_" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,
+and he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was
+a hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a
+great many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of
+departure, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of
+progress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,
+Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric
+and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,
+which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,
+thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one
+might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English
+malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that
+the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of
+being the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of
+Protestantism that, in groping after that moral freedom which is so
+ineradicable a need of a pure spirit, thought to find it in a revision
+of revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to
+these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental,
+and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all
+humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits
+are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted
+bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which
+his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of
+time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that
+all previous systems empty into it, which is hardly true, and that all
+future systems must flow out of it, which is hardly necessary.
+
+The embarrassment that qualifies M. Bergson's attainments in
+mathematics and physics has another and more personal source. He
+understands, but he trembles. Non-human immensities frighten him, as
+they did Pascal. He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We
+might think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity
+to move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.
+But M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy
+deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,
+that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is
+that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He
+dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous
+and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in
+_Auseinandersein_. This would be a real death and petrifaction of
+consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite
+void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and
+succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or
+hearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,
+with the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards
+through time, in a word, the more personal and historical the
+apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to
+what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find
+they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human
+prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a
+plea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have
+stolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a
+certain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and
+sting the hated oppressor, as if some desperate small being were at
+bay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of
+mathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the
+intellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of
+nothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a
+philosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen
+his sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman
+of many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity and animal illusion are
+deep in the heart of all of us. Practice may compel us to bow to the
+conventions of the intellect, as to those of polite society; but
+secretly, in our moments of immersion in ourselves, we may find them
+a great nuisance, even a vain nightmare. Could we only listen
+undisturbed to the beat of protoplasm in our hearts, would not that
+oracle solve all the riddles of the universe, or at least avoid them?
+
+To protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the
+mystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground. If he
+refuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might
+be accused of ignorance of the subject. He will therefore study it
+conscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done
+with it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology. Such a
+student, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free
+inquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed
+of its form, but of its nature and value. Why, for instance, has M.
+Bergson such a horror of mechanical physics? He seems to think it a
+black art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to
+salvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes
+always at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul. But
+physical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly
+absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must
+worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a
+mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor
+does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the
+whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its
+sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the
+calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that
+events have other aspects--the psychic and the moral, for
+instance--no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation
+would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable
+elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
+given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
+it is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our
+life. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine
+any man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that
+true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible
+statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this
+freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme
+of relation between events.
+
+The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to
+that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it
+arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported
+inopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions
+mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it
+exercises--one of Kant's confusions--over the empirical world, and
+trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should
+somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But
+nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity
+to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and
+to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery
+over things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the
+hypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in
+that. Moreover, M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use
+of mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business
+world; whereas its inherent use is emancipating and Platonic, in that
+it shows us the possibility of other worlds, less contingent and
+perturbed than this one. If he allows himself any excursus from his
+beloved immediacy, it is only in the interests of practice; he little
+knows the pleasures of a liberal mind, ranging over the congenial
+realm of internal accuracy and ideal truth, where it can possess
+itself of what treasures it likes in perfect security and freedom. An
+artist in his workmanship, M. Bergson is not an artist in his
+allegiance; he has no respect for what is merely ideal.
+
+For this very reason, perhaps, he is more at home in natural history
+than in the exact sciences. He has the gift of observation, and can
+suggest vividly the actual appearance of natural processes, in
+contrast to the verbal paraphrase of these processes which is
+sometimes taken to explain them. He is content to stop at habit
+without formulating laws; he refuses to assume that the large obvious
+cycles of change in things can be reduced to mechanism, that is, to
+minute included cycles repeated _ad libitum_. He may sometimes defend
+this refusal by sophistical arguments, as when he says that mechanism
+would require the last stage of the universe to be simultaneous with
+the first, forgetting that the unit of mechanism is not a mathematical
+equation but some observed typical event. The refusal itself, however,
+would be honest scepticism enough were it made with no _arriere
+pensee_, but simply in view of the immense complexity of the facts and
+the extreme simplicity of the mechanical hypothesis. In such a
+situation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true
+naturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and
+the human passion for system and simplification. At the first reading,
+M. Bergson's _Evolution Creatrice_ may well dazzle the professional
+naturalist and seem to him an illuminating confession of the nature
+and limits of his science; yet a second reading, I have good authority
+for saying, may as easily reverse that impression. M. Bergson never
+reviews his facts in order to understand them, but only if possible to
+discredit others who may have fancied they understood. He raises
+difficulties, he marks the problems that confront the naturalist, and
+the inadequacy of explanations that may have been suggested. Such
+criticism would be a valuable beginning if it were followed by the
+suggestion of some new solution; but the suggestion only is that no
+solution is possible, that the phenomena of life are simply
+miraculous, and that it is in the tendency or vocation of the animal,
+not in its body or its past, that we must see the ground of what goes
+on before us.
+
+With such a philosophy of science, it is evident that all progress in
+the understanding of nature would cease, as it ceased after Aristotle.
+The attempt would again be abandoned to reduce gross and obvious
+cycles of change, such as generation, growth, and death, to minute
+latent cycles, so that natural history should offer a picturesque
+approach to universal physics. If for the magic power of types,
+invoked by Aristotle, we substituted with M. Bergson the magic power
+of the _elan vital_, that is, of evolution in general, we should be
+referring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive
+processes, but to one all-embracing process, unique and always
+incomplete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and
+looser than what our observation began with. Aristotle at least could
+refer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social
+science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in
+making a learned show before the public. But if divination and
+eloquence--for science is out of the question--were to invoke nothing
+but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of
+phenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All
+knowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps
+enlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery
+of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world
+would be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere
+novel-readers.
+
+Nothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism
+of knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from
+which science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,
+whilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those
+appearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is
+through hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before
+the mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been
+straightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the
+fact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,
+with the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;
+that if we were not intelligent our sensations would exist for us
+without meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of
+knowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense
+that it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any
+interpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience
+may have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have
+expressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.
+Intelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no
+penetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent
+exists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations
+and the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for
+striding over the surface of sentience.
+
+This negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and
+futile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the
+same time that everything happens exactly _as if_ the intellect were a
+true instrument of discovery, and _as if_ a material world underlay
+our experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley
+were scientific at heart, and full of the intelligence they dissected;
+they seemed to cry to nature: Though thou dost not exist, yet will I
+trust in thee. Their idealism was a theoretical scruple rather than a
+passionate superstition. Not so M. Bergson; he is not so simple as to
+invoke the malicious criticism of knowledge in order to go on thinking
+rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable.
+His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis,
+but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism
+brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a
+magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving them
+on.
+
+Thus M. Bergson introduces metaphysics into natural history; he
+invokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power,
+called the _elan vital,_ on a level with the "Will" of Schopenhauer or
+the "Unknowable Force" of Herbert Spencer. But there is a scientific
+vitalism also, which it is well to distinguish from the metaphysical
+sort. The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is
+whether the living processes in nature can be resolved into a
+combination of the material. The material processes will always remain
+vital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for
+they will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking
+a certain time, like the fall of an apple. The movement of nature is
+never dialectical; the first part of any event does not logically
+imply the last part of it. Physics is descriptive, historical,
+reporting after the fact what are found to be the habits of matter.
+But if these habits are constant and calculable we call the vitality
+of them mechanical. Thus the larger processes of nature, no matter how
+vital they may be and whatever consciousness may accompany them, will
+always be mechanical if they can be calculated and predicted, being a
+combination of the more minute and widespread processes which they
+contain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as
+nutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as
+the fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of
+mechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science.
+Both possibilities will always remain open, because however far
+mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension
+presents them, will always remain irreducible to any common
+denominator with the rest; and on the other hand, wherever the actual
+reduction of the habits of animals to those of matter may have
+stopped, we can never know that a further reduction is impossible.
+
+The balance of reasonable presumption, however, is not even. The most
+inclusive movements known to us in nature, the astronomical, are
+calculable, and so are the most minute and pervasive processes, the
+chemical. These are also, if evolution is to be accepted, the earliest
+processes upon which all others have supervened and out of which, as
+it were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention,
+therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate
+processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The
+appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is
+easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in
+terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous
+to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them
+is hidden from us, as is that of our bodies, we suppose that these
+passions which we find on the surface in ourselves, or read into other
+creatures, are the substantial and only forces that carry on our part
+of the world. Penetrating this illusion, dispassionate observers in
+all ages have received the general impression that nature is one and
+mechanical. This was, and still remains, a general impression only;
+but I suspect no one who walks the earth with his eyes open would be
+concerned to resist it, were it not for certain fond human conceits
+which such a view would rebuke and, if accepted, would tend to
+obliterate. The psychological illusion that our ideas and purposes are
+original facts and forces (instead of expressions in consciousness of
+facts and forces which are material) and the practical and optical
+illusion that everything wheels about us in this world--these are the
+primitive persuasions which the enemies of naturalism have always been
+concerned to protect.
+
+One might indeed be a vitalist in biology, out of pure caution and
+conscientiousness, without sharing those prejudices; and many a
+speculative philosopher has been free from them who has been a
+vitalist in metaphysics. Schopenhauer, for instance, observed that the
+cannon-ball which, if self-conscious, would think it moved freely,
+would be quite right in thinking so. The "Will" was as evident to him
+in mechanism as in animal life. M. Bergson, in the more hidden reaches
+of his thought, seems to be a universal vitalist; apparently an _elan
+vital_ must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the
+energy stored there, and to set mechanism going. But he relies on
+biology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort
+to live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could
+never do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism
+does. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar
+requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses
+the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to
+believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but
+an alien and ghostly madness descending into it--I say a ghostly
+madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should
+live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal
+than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far
+less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough
+mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest
+to an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on
+a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick
+and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,
+but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its
+movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and
+requires a disinterested mind. M. Bergson would have us believe that
+mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,
+for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are
+fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely
+Israel.
+
+In spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye
+for the facts--things Aristotle also possessed--he is like Aristotle
+profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from
+nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a
+disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a
+logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite
+different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very
+arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the
+imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres
+of passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is
+practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly
+executed it demands a minute and extended observation of life. Unless
+your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of
+the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his
+psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them
+circumstantial and convincing. Just so M. Bergson's achievements in
+psychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are,
+required all his learning. The history of philosophy, mathematics, and
+physics, and above all natural history, had to supply him first with
+suggestions; and if he is not really a master in any of those fields,
+that is not to be wondered at. His heart is elsewhere. To write a
+universal biological romance, such as he has sketched for us in his
+system, he would ideally have required all scientific knowledge, but
+only as Homer required the knowledge of seamanship, generalship,
+statecraft, augury, and charioteering, in order to turn the aspects of
+them into poetry, and not with that technical solidity which Plato
+unjustly blames him for not possessing. Just so M. Bergson's proper
+achievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies
+entirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical
+probabilities. In essence, it is myth or fable; but in the texture and
+degree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of
+previous metaphysicians. Primitive poets, even ancient philosophers,
+were not psychologists; their fables were compacted out of elements
+found in practical life, and they reckoned in the units in which
+language and passion reckon--wooing, feasting, fighting, vice, virtue,
+happiness, justice. Above all, they talked about persons or about
+ideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was
+what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not
+so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what
+he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but
+something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory,
+or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these
+elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so
+his anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and
+theologians, though no less real.
+
+This peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable
+extension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human
+life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain
+conscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;
+their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be
+puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant
+moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the
+mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally
+interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.
+If AEsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,
+really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to
+the public; and they would have had no human value except that of
+illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible
+variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.
+Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
+in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
+Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
+absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
+them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
+_elan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew
+by intuition the _elan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.
+
+The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
+which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
+and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
+organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
+and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
+intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
+contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
+feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
+subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
+when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
+been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
+are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
+equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
+indications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
+traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
+and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
+such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
+the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
+latter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have
+found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
+plausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
+Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
+pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
+entertainment.
+
+Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
+to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
+whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and
+subjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between
+the observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic
+evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
+feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
+always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
+there were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul
+has of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less
+than it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the
+consciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather
+than the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be
+worth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may
+lead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower
+depths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the
+psychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the
+universe, which he has built out of that introspection, is his
+metaphysics.
+
+Many a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and
+obscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected
+metaphysically; but not one will be found to be arbitrary; not one
+but is based on attentive introspection and perception of the
+immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his
+somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel
+oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (_i.e._ immediately
+felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the
+present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present
+sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like
+a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;
+all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without
+surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear
+in such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that
+preceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation itself
+modifies them, and what develops is in no way deducible or predictable
+out of what exists. This situation is perfectly explicable
+scientifically. The movement of consciousness will be self-congruous
+and sustained when it rests on continuous processes in the same
+tissues, and yet quite unpredictable from within, because the direct
+sensuous report of bodily processes (in nausea, for instance, or in
+hunger) contains no picture of their actual mechanism. Even wholly new
+features, due to little crises in bodily life, may appear in a dream
+to flow out of what already exists, yet freely develop it; because in
+dreams comparison, the attempt to be consistent, is wholly in
+abeyance, and also because the new feature will come imbedded in
+others which are not new, but have dramatic relevance in the story. So
+immediate consciousness yields the two factors of Bergsonian freedom,
+continuity and indetermination.
+
+Again, take the somewhat disconcerting assertion that movement exists
+when there is nothing that moves, and no space that it moves through.
+In vision, perhaps, it is not easy to imagine a consciousness of
+motion without some presentation of a field, and of a distinguishable
+something in it; but if we descend to somatic feelings (and the more
+we descend, with M. Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in
+shooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a
+change and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea
+of a _mobile_ or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)
+through which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,
+and the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred
+out of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our
+philosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of
+motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
+riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
+infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
+Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
+may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
+apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
+taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
+call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
+had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
+would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
+consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
+aesthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
+never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.
+
+When a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in
+this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
+will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
+psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
+has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
+intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
+stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
+confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
+in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
+psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
+both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
+terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
+have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
+appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
+imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
+are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless
+bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate
+are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is
+much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start
+safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn
+to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and
+feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
+prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
+sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
+character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
+so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
+love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
+poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
+accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
+itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
+persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
+wonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems
+no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the
+story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the
+siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves
+of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as
+the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare
+and say:
+
+    "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
+     So do _their spirits_ hasten to their end."
+
+Some reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious
+introspection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that
+lead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface
+appearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part
+of the internal rumble of this great engine of the world. How should
+it loosen or dissolve that engine, as your philosophy evidently
+professes that it must? That nature exists we perceive whenever we
+resume our intellectual and practical life, interrupted for a moment
+by this interesting reversion to the immediate. The consciousness
+which in introspection we treat as an object is, in operation, a
+cognitive activity: it demonstrates the world. You would never
+yourself have conceived the minds of ethereal vibrations, or of birds,
+or of ants, or of men suspending their intelligence, if you had known
+of no men, ants, birds, or ether. It is the material objects that
+suggest to you their souls, and teach you how to conceive them. How
+then should the souls be substituted for the bodies, and abolish them?
+
+Poor guileless reader! If philosophers were straightforward men of
+science, adding each his mite to the general store of knowledge, they
+would all substantially agree, and while they might make interesting
+discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the
+whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or
+apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the
+interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising
+inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common
+apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by
+poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not
+require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you
+will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement
+begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your
+boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is
+instead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that the immediate, as he
+describes it, is the sole reality; all else is unreal, artificial, and a
+more or less convenient symbol in discourse--discourse itself being
+taken, of course, for a movement in immediate sensibility, which is what
+it is existentially, but never for an excursion into an independent
+logical realm, which is what it is spiritually and in intent. So we must
+revise all our psychological observations, and turn them into
+metaphysical dogmas. It would be nothing to say simply: _For immediate
+feeling_ the past is contained in the present, movement is prior to that
+which moves, spaces are many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events
+are indivisible wholes, perception is in its object and identical with
+it, the future is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple,
+and evolution is creative, its course being obedient to a general
+tendency or groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say
+instead: _In the universe at large_ the whole past is preserved bodily
+in the present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is
+motion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are
+incommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of
+them (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of
+these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an
+absolute Effort which exists _in vacuo_ and is simplicity itself; and
+this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless
+produces it out of nothing.
+
+The accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as
+we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will
+appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,[3]
+"who has ever practised literary composition knows very well that,
+after he has devoted long study to the subject, collected all the
+documents, and taken all his notes, one thing more is needful before
+he can actually embark on the work of composition; namely, an effort,
+often a very painful one, to plant himself all at once in the very
+heart of the subject, and to fetch from as profound a depth as
+possible the momentum by which he need simply let himself be borne
+along in the sequel. This momentum, as soon as it is acquired, carries
+the mind forward along a path where it recovers all the facts it had
+gathered together, and a thousand other details besides. The momentum
+develops and breaks up of itself into particulars that might be
+retailed _ad infinitum._ The more he advances the more he finds; he
+will never have exhausted the subject; and nevertheless if he turns
+round suddenly to face the momentum he feels at his back and see what
+it is, it eludes him; for it is not a thing but a direction of
+movement, and though capable of being extended indefinitely, it is
+simplicity itself."
+
+[Footnote 3: "Introduction a la Metaphysique." _Revue de Metaphysique
+et de Morale_, Janvier, 1903.]
+
+This is evidently well observed: heighten the tone a little, and you
+might have a poem on those joyful pangs of gestation and parturition
+which are not denied to a male animal. It is a description of the
+_sensation_ of literary composition, of the _immediate experience_ of
+a writer as words and images rise into his mind. He cannot summon his
+memories explicitly, for he would first have to remember them to do
+so; his consciousness of inspiration, of literary creation, is nothing
+but a consciousness of pregnancy and of a certain "direction of
+movement," as if he were being wafted in a balloon; and just in its
+moments of highest tension his mind is filled with mere expectancy and
+mere excitement, without images, plans, or motives; and what guides it
+is inwardly, as M. Bergson says, simplicity itself. Yet excellent as
+such a description is psychologically, it is a literary confession
+rather than a piece of science; for scientific psychology is a part of
+natural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable
+phenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we
+should at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which
+this occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what
+variations in the result follow upon variations in the situation. At
+once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those
+data of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that
+painful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as
+he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?
+Not at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is
+overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the
+spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and
+overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,
+and joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether _all_
+the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and
+what relation the "thousand other details" have to them; and we should
+find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous
+endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general
+circumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the
+momentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the
+discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system
+(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and
+crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the
+past, and creation also, are closely attached. Thus we should utterly
+refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended
+indefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of
+literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it
+precedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and
+flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is
+regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is
+simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions
+outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
+that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
+introspection might yield in others.
+
+There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer
+is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
+general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
+quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
+its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
+experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
+memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
+knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
+_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very
+heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
+Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
+was, according to M. Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
+reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
+part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
+suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
+bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
+facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
+them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
+consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum
+which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
+adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
+thousand other details which he may add to the picture.
+
+Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
+immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
+projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.
+Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
+characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
+passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
+words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
+framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
+pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
+from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
+This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose
+metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's
+own heart and draw _from oneself_ impulses as profound as possible
+with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.
+Yet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be found to
+involve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and
+spiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he
+conceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things
+are made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its
+several objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by
+becoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies
+where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past
+experience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and
+Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of
+Cleopatra herself--in those moments when she spoke English.
+
+It is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can
+never do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual
+Cleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the
+cause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of
+such criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly
+blind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not
+far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
+literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
+sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
+knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
+literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
+it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
+discerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those
+aspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the
+same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's
+consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
+over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
+things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
+more or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be
+once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
+you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,
+mind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
+who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
+a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
+calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
+life, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,
+aesthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,
+the life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I
+am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
+reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
+perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
+sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
+to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
+enough.
+
+Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
+the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
+evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
+the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
+seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
+maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
+part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we
+may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
+of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
+speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;
+while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of
+ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would
+deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature
+is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far
+rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple
+than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. M.
+Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously
+examining the egg on every side--for he would do more than taste
+it--and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his
+intuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and
+then he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without
+parts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that
+it was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the
+essence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better
+than it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know
+how it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really
+create or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,
+now with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.
+Doubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new
+philosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than
+they, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be
+ignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?
+
+Let us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly
+inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,
+shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that
+evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the
+homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of
+pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is
+what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and
+rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the
+facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of
+nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are
+really without structure, the true causes of the formation of birds
+are the last conditions, whatever they may be, that introduce that
+phenomenon and determine its character--the type of the parents, the
+act of fertilisation, the temperature, or whatever else observation
+might find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.
+These facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,
+would be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.
+They would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature
+were no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper
+than that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose
+that nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,
+and has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a
+stopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied
+with some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their
+collisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts
+discoverable, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the
+only sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If
+somebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of
+the atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God
+that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
+thrown a bright light on the subject.
+
+Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
+vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
+two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
+molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
+vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
+propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
+developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
+coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
+by a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in
+a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
+Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
+then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
+other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
+just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
+puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
+heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
+not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
+the presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in
+inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
+insight when he proclaims in her a _tendency to vision._ If those
+words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
+if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
+discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
+substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
+constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
+understand the weather; but Neptune and AEolus are not thereby proved
+to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
+be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
+efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
+contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
+matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
+arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
+"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
+things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
+beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
+existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
+did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
+conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
+which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
+effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
+transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
+it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
+answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
+Yet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature
+is actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers
+raises all the others, artificially and without occasion. This side
+of M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar
+vices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to
+investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this
+name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This
+is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would
+be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.
+
+The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern
+Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We
+find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too
+obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is
+unmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other
+words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to
+discover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence
+would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a
+modification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and
+discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge
+(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have
+discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has
+taken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on
+the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you
+mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of
+what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it
+substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your
+description. This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if
+the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative
+dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible
+and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.
+Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has
+got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest
+schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism
+is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a
+difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to
+idealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with
+self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you
+started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The
+fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an
+existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view
+should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's
+solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
+exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
+of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
+and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
+foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
+and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
+the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
+identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
+into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
+all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4]
+To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
+shut out the others, is to be a mind.
+
+[Footnote 4: _Matiere et Memoire_, p. 38.]
+
+This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
+things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
+talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
+himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
+and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
+between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
+thing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is
+to offer us a history, _on the assumption of idealism,_ of the idea of
+mind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough
+psychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might
+possibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question
+concerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it
+occurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these
+hereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out _a priori,_ and
+the life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole
+universe. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than
+realism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection
+from other objects, the mind has come to be distinguished: but the
+subterfuge is vain, because by "mind" they mean simply the idea of
+mind, and they give no name, except perhaps experience, to the mind
+that forms that idea. Matter and mind, for these transcendentalists
+posing as realists, merge and flow so easily together only because
+both are images or groups of images in an original mind presupposed
+but never honestly posited. It is in this forgotten mind, also, as
+the professed idealists urge, that the relations of proximity and
+simultaneity between various lives can alone subsist, if to subsist is
+to be experienced.
+
+There is, however, one point of real difference, at least initially,
+between the idealism of M. Bergson and that of his predecessors. The
+universal mind, for M. Bergson, is in process of actual
+transformation. It is not an omniscient God but a cosmic sensibility.
+In this sensibility matter, with all its vibrations felt in detail,
+forms one moving panorama together with all minds, which are patterns
+visible at will from various points of view in that same woof of
+matter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of
+a giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,
+shuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a
+labyrinth of cross-purposes.
+
+Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the
+prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it
+would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy
+with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing
+comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,
+are inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his
+pupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for
+themselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,
+as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have
+just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect
+that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far
+more orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not
+compatible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in
+representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you
+posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,
+instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of
+change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a
+moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre
+and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is
+simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived
+through. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but
+have no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on
+immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable
+freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given _feeling_
+of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a
+given image of the future--all these terms being contained in the
+present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute
+immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and
+Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.
+
+Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a
+while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a
+familiar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of
+creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For apparently
+creative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be
+explained away idealistically) has to submit to the following
+conditions: first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to
+create some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side
+by side; and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the
+additions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no
+sequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all
+effort would be wasted. These are compulsions; but it may also, I
+suppose, be thought a _duty_ on the part of the vital impulse to be
+true to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like
+the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of
+its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty
+and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these
+conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to
+a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition;
+and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in
+reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system,
+such, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself,
+of equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and
+of spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when
+there is no nature to predetermine it.
+
+It has been said that M. Bergson's system precludes ethics: I cannot
+think that observation just. Apart from the moral inspiration which
+appears throughout his philosophy, which is indeed a passionate
+attempt to exalt (or debase) values into powers, it offers, I should
+say, two starting-points for ethics. In the first place, the _elan
+vital_ ought not to falter, although it can do so: therefore to
+persevere, labour, experiment, propagate, must be duties, and the
+opposite must be sins. In the second place, freedom, in adding
+uncaused increments to life, ought to do so in continuation of the
+whole past, though it might do so frivolously: therefore it is a duty
+to be studious, consecutive, loyal; you may move in any direction but
+you must carry the whole past with you. I will not say this suggests a
+sound system of ethics, because it would be extracted from dogmas
+which are physical and incidentally incredible; nor would it represent
+a mature and disillusioned morality, because it would look to the
+future and not to the eternal; nevertheless it would be deeply
+ethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic
+morality.
+
+A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it
+thinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or
+rather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live
+disembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the
+first provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of
+this subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that
+it might occupy in his system.[5] Life, according to him, is the
+original and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a
+potentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to
+emphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,
+special possibilities of living; and where these special lives have
+their chosen boundary (if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)
+they posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each
+life takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of
+living. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be
+carried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or
+material things about it; it would not show how death could ever
+overtake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which
+life has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter
+could never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of
+the arena can never abolish the show for which they have been
+prepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist
+is served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.
+
+[Footnote 5: M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea
+of non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of
+existence, and posterior to it. He evidently thinks this disposes of
+the reality of non-existence also: for it is the reality that he
+wishes to exorcise by his words. If, however, non-existence and the
+idea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible
+for me not to exist before I was born: my non-existence then would be
+more complex than my existence now, and posterior to it. The initiated
+would not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of
+some catechumens. It is a good test of the malicious theory of
+knowledge.]
+
+Yet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and
+failure. M. Bergson even thinks that the facing of increased dangers
+is one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were
+an equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of
+death, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the
+higher organisms and the finer arts.[6] Yet if life is the only
+substance, how is such a risk of death possible at all? I suppose the
+special life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by
+emphasising some of the relations which that feeling has in the
+world, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another
+set of its relations, starting from some other nucleus. We must
+remember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not
+apperceptions merely. They are creative efforts. The future
+constitution of the flux will vary in response to them. Each mind
+sucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex. A cross
+apperception will then amount to a contrary force. Two souls will not
+be able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship. Being
+forces, they will pull that matter in different ways. Each soul will
+tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by
+the other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will
+live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not
+like that painful word. He says the lower organisms store energy for
+the higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy
+stored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if
+the grass and the sheep had perished. Their _elan vital_ is no longer
+theirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill. Nothing arises in
+nature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.
+Of course, this is no defeat for the _elan vital_ in general; for
+according to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has
+been making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who
+eats the mutton, now possesses. The sheep and the grass were only
+things by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity. But would
+it not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not
+requiring abstract intellect nor artificial weapons, but endowed with
+instinct and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by
+radiating electricity? And might not men then turn out to have been
+mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion
+by that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the
+thought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is
+the pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies. Yet I
+can see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not
+crediting the _elan vital_ with some such digestive intention. M.
+Bergson's system would hardly be more speculative if it entertained
+this possibility, and it would seem more honest.
+
+[Footnote 6: This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the
+difficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily
+into science. An equilibrium would not displace itself! But an
+equilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity. It is
+continually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal
+movements or external agencies; and while many a time the equilibrium
+is thereby destroyed altogether, sometimes it is replaced by a more
+elaborate and perilous equilibrium; as glaciers carry many rocks down,
+but leave some, here and there, piled in the most unlikely pinnacles
+and pagodas.]
+
+The vital impulse is certainly immortal; for if we take it in the
+naturalistic exoteric sense, for a force discovered in biology, it is
+an independent agent coming down into matter, organising it against
+its will, and stirring it like the angel the pool of Bethesda. Though
+the ripples die down, the angel is not affected. He has merely flown
+away. And if we take the vital impulse mystically and esoterically, as
+the _only_ primal force, creating matter in order to play with it, the
+immortality of life is even more obvious; for there is then nothing
+else in being that could possibly abolish it. But when we come to
+immortality for the individual, all grows obscure and ambiguous. The
+original tendency of life was certainly cosmic and not distinguished
+into persons: we are told it was like a wireless message sent at the
+creation which is being read off at last by the humanity of to-day. In
+the naturalistic view, the diversity of persons would seem to be due
+to the different material conditions under which one and the same
+spiritual purpose must fight its way towards realisation in different
+times and places. It is quite conceivable, however, that in the
+mystical view the very sense of the original message should comport
+this variety of interpretations, and that the purpose should always
+have been to produce diverse individuals.
+
+The first view, as usual, is the one which M. Bergson has prevailingly
+in mind, and communicates most plausibly; while he holds to it he is
+still talking about the natural world, and so we still know what he is
+talking about. On this view, however, personal immortality would be
+impossible; it would be, if it were aimed at, a self-contradiction in
+the aim of life; for the diversity of persons would be due to
+impediments only, and souls would differ simply in so far as they
+mutilated the message which they were all alike trying to repeat. They
+would necessarily, when the spirit was victorious, be reabsorbed and
+identified in the universal spirit. This view also seems most
+consonant with M. Bergson's theory of primitive reality, as a flux of
+fused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is
+attributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the
+flux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises
+reality. Of course the destiny of spirit would not be to revert to
+that diffused materiality; for the original mind lost in matter had a
+very short memory; it was a sort of cosmic trepidation only, whereas
+the ultimate mind would remember all that, in its efforts after
+freedom, it had ever super added to that trepidation or made it turn
+into. Even the abstract views of things taken by the practical
+intellect would, I fear, have to burden the universal memory to the
+end. We should be remembered, even if we could no longer exist.
+
+On the other more profound view, however, might not personal
+immortality be secured? Suppose the original message said: Translate
+me into a thousand tongues! In fulfilling its duty, the universe would
+then continue to divide its dream into phantom individuals; as it had
+to insulate its parts in the beginning in order to dominate and
+transform them freely, so it would always continue to insulate them,
+so as not to lose its cross-vistas and its mobility. There is no
+reason, then, why individuals should not live for ever. But a
+condition seems to be involved which may well make belief stagger. It
+would be impossible for the universe to divide its images into
+particular minds unless it preserved the images of their particular
+bodies also. Particular minds arise, according to this philosophy, in
+the interests of practice: which means, biologically, to secure a
+better adjustment of the body to its environment, so that it may
+survive. Mystically, too, the fundamental force is a half-conscious
+purpose that practice, or freedom, should come to be; or rather, that
+an apparition or experience of practice and freedom should arise; for
+in this philosophy appearance is all. To secure this desirable
+apparition of practice special tasks are set to various nuclei in felt
+space (such, for instance, as the task to see), and the image of a
+body (in this case that of an eye) is gradually formed, in order to
+execute that task; for evidently the Absolute can see only if it
+looks, and to look it must first choose a point of view and an optical
+method. This point of view and this method posit the individual; they
+fix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his
+passive experience: they are his body. If the Absolute, then, wishes
+to retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one
+of its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image
+of his body. His body must continue to figure in that landscape of
+nature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing
+and recomposing. Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made
+from the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be
+preserved.
+
+M. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are
+going to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to
+understand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot
+venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed
+generation; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too
+amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of
+immortality. He asks if we are not "led to suppose" that consciousness
+passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute
+distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other
+animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I
+wonder?) are "capable of remembering all and willing all and
+controlling their past and their future," so that "we shall have no
+repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,
+consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." Elsewhere he
+says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be
+famous, that in man the spirit can "spurn every kind of resistance and
+break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death." Here the tenor
+has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.
+But was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not
+sung it in falsetto?
+
+The immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to
+conceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about
+it, and that little so far from serious. But he talks a great deal
+about life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet
+death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.
+What is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set
+it in motion? What is this life, that in any individual can be
+suddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this _elan-vital_, that a
+little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?
+The study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of
+season. The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom
+from philosophy, warns us that in M. Bergson's thought we have
+something occasional and partial, the work of an astute apologist, a
+party man, driven to desperate speculation by a timid attachment to
+prejudice. Like other terrified idealisms, the system of M. Bergson
+has neither good sense, nor rigour, nor candour, nor solidity. It is a
+brilliant attempt to confuse the lessons of experience by refining
+upon its texture, an attempt to make us halt, for the love of
+primitive illusions, in the path of discipline and reason. It is
+likely to prove a successful attempt, because it flatters the
+weaknesses of the moment, expresses them with emotion, and covers
+them with a feint at scientific speculation. It is not, however, a
+powerful system, like that of Hegel, capable of bewildering and
+obsessing many who have no natural love for shams. M. Bergson will
+hardly bewilder; his style is too clear, the field where his just
+observations lie--the immediate--is too well defined, and the
+mythology which results from projecting the terms of the immediate
+into the absolute, and turning them into powers, is too obviously
+verbal. He will not long impose on any save those who enjoy being
+imposed upon; but for a long time he may increase their number. His
+doctrine is indeed alluring. Instead of telling us, as a stern and
+contrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and
+almost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and
+unfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our
+better selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather
+tells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary
+consciousness, with its vague instincts and premonitions, that
+everything ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at heart, is as
+palpitating and irrational as ourselves. Why then strain the inquiry?
+Why seek to dominate passion by understanding it? Rather live on;
+work, it matters little at what, and grow, it matters nothing in what
+direction. Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion;
+let your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the
+roar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of
+your living soul, not a stark adoration of things reputed eternal.
+
+So the intellectual faithlessness and the material servility of the
+age are flattered together and taught to justify themselves
+theoretically. They cry joyfully, _non peccavi_, which is the modern
+formula for confession. M. Bergson's philosophy itself is a confession
+of a certain mystical rebellion and atavism in the contemporary mind.
+It will remain a beautiful monument to the passing moment, a capital
+film for the cinematography of history, full of psychological truth
+and of a kind of restrained sentimental piety. His thought has all the
+charm that can go without strength and all the competence that can go
+without mastery. This is not an age of mastery; it is confused with
+too much business; it has no brave simplicity. The mind has forgotten
+its proper function, which is to crown life by quickening it into
+intelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that it accelerated
+life, that might perhaps justify its existence; like a philosopher at
+sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL
+
+I. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM
+
+
+In its chase after idols this age has not wholly forgotten the gods,
+and reason and faith in reason are not left without advocates. Some
+years ago, at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. G.E. Moore began to
+produce a very deep impression amongst the younger spirits by his
+powerful and luminous dialectic. Like Socrates, he used all the sharp
+arts of a disputant in the interests of common sense and of an almost
+archaic dogmatism. Those who heard him felt how superior his position
+was, both in rigour and in force, to the prevailing inversions and
+idealisms. The abuse of psychology, rampant for two hundred years,
+seemed at last to be detected and challenged; and the impressionistic
+rhetoric that philosophy was saturated with began to be squeezed out
+by clear questions, and by a disconcerting demand for literal
+sincerity. German idealism, when we study it as a product of its own
+age and country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of
+afflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of heart; but it is essentially
+romantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere
+system-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic
+people _ex cathedra,_ in stentorian tones, and represented as the
+rational foundation of science and religion, with neither of which it
+has any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious--one of the
+worst imposture and blights to which a youthful imagination could be
+subjected. It is chiefly against the incubus of this celestial monster
+that Mr. Moore dared to lift up his eyes; and many a less courageous
+or less clear-sighted person was thankful to him for it. But a man
+with such a mission requires a certain narrowness and concentration of
+mind; he has to be intolerant and to pound a good deal on the same
+notes. We need not wonder if Mr. Moore has written rather meagerly,
+and with a certain vehemence and want of imagination.
+
+All this, however, was more than made up by the powerful ally who soon
+came to his aid. Mr. Bertrand Russell began by adopting Mr. Moore's
+metaphysics, but he has given as much as he has received. Apart from
+his well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance
+the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to
+pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written
+abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity,
+candour, and charm. Especially his _Philosophical Essays_ and his
+little book on _The Problems of Philosophy_ can be read with pleasure
+by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the
+tenets of the school. Yet it must be remembered that Mr. Russell, like
+Mr. Moore, is still young and his thoughts have not assumed their
+ultimate form. Moreover, he lives in an atmosphere of academic
+disputation which makes one technical point after another acquire a
+preponderating influence in his thoughts. His book on _The Problems
+of Philosophy_ is admirable in style, temper, and insight, but it
+hardly deserves its title; it treats principally, in a somewhat
+personal and partial way, of the relation of knowledge to its objects,
+and it might rather have been called "The problems which Moore and I
+have been agitating lately." Indeed, his philosophy is so little
+settled as yet that every new article and every fresh conversation
+revokes some of his former opinions, and places the crux of
+philosophical controversy at a new point. We are soon made aware that
+exact thinking and true thinking are not synonymous, but that one
+exact thought, in the same mind, may be the exact opposite of the
+next. This inconstancy, which after all does not go very deep, is a
+sign of sincerity and pure love of truth; it marks the freshness, the
+vivacity, the self-forgetfulness, the logical ardour belonging to this
+delightful reformer. It may seem a paradox, but at bottom it is not,
+that the vitalists should be oppressed, womanish, and mystical, and
+only the intellectualists keen, argumentative, fearless, and full of
+life. I mention this casualness and inconstancy in Mr. Russell's
+utterances not to deride them, but to show the reader how impossible
+it is, at this juncture, to give a comprehensive account of his
+philosophy, much less a final judgment upon it.
+
+The principles most fundamental and dominant in his thought are
+perhaps the following: That the objects the mind deals with, whether
+material or ideal, are what and where the mind says they are, and
+independent of it; that some general principles and ideas have to be
+assumed to be valid not merely for thought but for things; that
+relations may subsist, arise, and disappear between things without at
+all affecting these things internally; and that the nature of
+everything is just what it is, and not to be confused either with its
+origin or with any opinion about it. These principles, joined with an
+obvious predilection for Plato and Leibnitz among philosophers, lead
+to the following doctrines, among others: that the mind or soul is an
+entity separate from its thoughts and pre-existent; that a material
+world exists in space and time; that its substantial elements may be
+infinite in number, having position and quality, but no extension, so
+that each mind or soul might well be one of them; that both the
+existent and the ideal worlds may be infinite, while the ideal world
+contains an infinity of things not realised in the actual world; and
+that this ideal world is knowable by a separate mental consideration,
+a consideration which is, however, empirical in spirit, since the
+ideal world of ethics, logic, and mathematics has a special and
+surprising constitution, which we do not make but must attentively
+discover.
+
+The reader will perceive, perhaps, that if the function of philosophy
+is really, as the saying goes, to give us assurance of God, freedom,
+and immortality, Mr. Russell's philosophy is a dire failure. In fact,
+its author sometimes gives vent to a rather emphatic pessimism about
+this world; he has a keen sense for the manifold absurdities of
+existence. But the sense for absurdities is not without its delights,
+and Mr. Russell's satirical wit is more constant and better grounded
+than his despair. I should be inclined to say of his philosophy what
+he himself has said of that of Leibnitz, that it is at its best in
+those subjects which are most remote from human life. It needs to be
+very largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can
+be called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments,
+and meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest
+degree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian
+looseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head
+again, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine:
+and this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in
+the most emancipated and unflinchingly radical quarter. It is
+refreshing and reassuring, after the confused, melodramatic ways of
+philosophising to which the idealists and the pragmatists have
+accustomed us, to breathe again the crisp air of scholastic common
+sense. It is good for us to be held down, as the Platonic Socrates
+would have held us, to saying what we really believe, and sticking to
+what we say. We seem to regain our intellectual birthright when we are
+allowed to declare our genuine intent, even in philosophy, instead of
+begging some kind psychologist to investigate our "meaning" for us, or
+even waiting for the flux of events to endow us with what "meaning" it
+will. It is also instructive to have the ethical attitude purified of
+all that is not ethical and turned explicitly into what, in its moral
+capacity, it essentially is: a groundless pronouncement upon the
+better and the worse.
+
+Here a certain one-sidedness begins to make itself felt in Mr.
+Russell's views. The ethical attitude doubtless has no _ethical_
+ground, but that fact does not prevent it from having a _natural_
+ground; and the observer of the animate creation need not have much
+difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell,
+however, refuses to look also in that direction. He insists, rightly
+enough, that good is predicated categorically by the conscience; he
+will not remember that all life is not moral bias merely, and that, in
+the very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance
+back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,
+and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward
+look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical
+self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to
+deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all
+their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard
+more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic
+entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be
+more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of
+Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a
+logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,
+though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing
+outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.
+We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full
+image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that
+perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is
+moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and
+fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for
+the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the
+doctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance
+of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any
+pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like
+that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a
+moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the
+function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we
+wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly
+the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with
+what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false
+place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.
+However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
+confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
+mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
+us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.
+
+In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
+doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
+comprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own
+interspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him
+three subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the
+inspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young
+philosophy.
+
+
+II. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
+
+
+"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the
+mathematical infinite is probably," says Mr. Russell, "the greatest
+achievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as
+self-evident, until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,
+that if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the
+number of things left must always be less than the original number of
+things. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite
+collections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,
+has been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled
+human reason in this matter." And he adds in another place: "To
+reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of
+Fate ... is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still
+further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to
+which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must
+conform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a
+habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied
+and our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly
+understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this
+world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound
+importance of its beauty."
+
+Mathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of
+religion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a
+heaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar
+sweetness and consolation. "Real life," he writes, "is to most men a
+long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the
+possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
+practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying
+in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from
+which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even
+from the pitiful laws of nature, the generations have gradually
+created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its
+natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can
+escape from the dreary exile of the actual world." This study is one
+of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The
+true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than
+man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found
+in mathematics as surely as in poetry."
+
+This enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite
+effect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might
+make them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,
+so satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by
+the same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to
+know absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary
+relations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over
+them; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to
+haul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of
+fishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and
+it would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into
+the mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to
+his bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as
+dreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values
+which the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for
+different minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal
+necessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or
+good. The case is not such as if we were dealing with existence.
+Existence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing
+justification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by
+taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.
+Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing
+good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance
+thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may
+chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the
+same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
+since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
+the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
+adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
+presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
+an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
+eternal necessity.
+
+The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
+possible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and
+consisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment
+of feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact
+occurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred
+remains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or
+for consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the
+realm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in
+tracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm
+of essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies
+there eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his
+human nature and circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in
+so exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition
+and of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four
+if I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to
+do so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not
+to combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I
+happen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,
+and the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in
+contrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to
+my idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be
+congenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have
+affinity to them.
+
+And how, may I ask, has it become a part of my genius? Simply because
+nature, of which I am a part, and to which all my ideas must refer if
+they are to be relevant to my destiny, happens to have mathematical
+form. Nature had to have some form or other, if it was to exist at
+all; and whatever form it had happened to take would have had its
+prior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical
+relations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which
+nature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be
+revealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my
+admirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take
+on existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all
+essence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, it cannot
+undertake to examine exhaustively; for there are many features
+nestling in them, and many relations radiating from them, which no
+one needs or cares to attend to. The implications which logicians and
+mathematicians actually observe in the terms they use are a small
+selection from all those that really obtain, even in their chosen
+field; so that, for instance, as Mr. Russell was telling us, it was
+only the other day that Cantor and Dedekind observed that although
+time continually eats up the days and years, the possible future
+always remains as long as it was before. This happens to be a fact
+interesting to mankind. Apart from the mathematical puzzles it may
+help to solve, it opens before existence a vista of perpetual youth,
+and the vital stress in us leaps up in recognition of its inmost
+ambition. Many other things are doubtless implied in infinity which,
+if we noticed them, would leave us quite cold; and still others, no
+doubt, are inapprehensible with our sort and degree of intellect.
+There is of course nothing in essence which an intellect postulated
+_ad hoc_ would not be able to apprehend; but the kind of intellect we
+know of and possess is an expression of vital adjustments, and is
+tethered to nature.
+
+That a few eternal essences, then, with a few of their necessary
+relations to one another, do actually appear to us, and do fascinate
+our attention and excite our wonder, is nothing paradoxical. This is
+merely what was bound to happen, if we became aware of anything at
+all; for the essence embodied in anything is eternal and has necessary
+relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there
+might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to
+be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that
+everything that is true of any essence is true of it always and
+everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and
+eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement
+than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is eternal and
+necessary.
+
+This fact will be more clearly recognised, perhaps, if we remember
+that the cogency of our ideal knowledge follows upon our intent in
+fixing its object. It hangs on a virtual definition, and explicates
+it. We cannot oblige anybody or anything to reproduce the idea which
+we have chosen; but that idea will remain the idea it is whether
+forgotten or remembered, exemplified or not exemplified in things. To
+penetrate to the foundation of being is possible for us only because
+the foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set
+of differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing
+might appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm
+of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental
+possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any
+experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the
+light of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you
+will, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat,
+and hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp
+the _constitution of nature_; that is, should discover which is the
+particular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual
+existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced
+to skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual
+experiences, which form the most superficial stratum of nature, and
+the most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us
+so much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment,
+necessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; and we
+need only arrest our attention upon it, and define it to ourselves,
+for an eternal possibility, and some of its intrinsic characters, to
+have been revealed to our thought.
+
+Whatever, then, a man's mental and moral habit might be, it would
+perforce have affinity to some essence or other; his life would
+revolve about some congenial ideal object; he would find some sorts of
+form, some types of relation, more visible, beautiful, and satisfying
+than others. Mr. Russell happens to have a mathematical genius, and to
+find comfort in laying up his treasures in the mathematical heaven. It
+would be highly desirable that this temperament should be more common;
+but even if it were universal it would not reduce mathematical essence
+to a product of human attention, nor raise the "beauty" of mathematics
+to part of its essence. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Russell
+attempts to do the latter; he speaks explicitly of the _value_ of
+mathematical study, a point in ethics and not directly in logic; yet
+his moral philosophy is itself so much assimilated to logic that the
+distinction between the two becomes somewhat dubious; and as Mr.
+Russell will never succeed in convincing us that moral values are
+independent of life, he may, quite against his will, lead us to
+question the independence of essence, with that blind gregarious drift
+of all ideas, in this direction or in that, which is characteristic of
+human philosophising.
+
+
+III. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM
+
+
+The time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is
+called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in
+a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
+issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
+together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
+with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
+"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
+are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
+democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
+trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
+rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
+of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
+touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
+"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
+almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
+of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
+tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
+which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
+philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
+like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
+that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
+'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
+police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
+their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
+pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
+traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
+handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
+as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
+can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
+pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
+is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
+which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
+James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
+the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
+rather than a George III."
+
+A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
+far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
+sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
+the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
+facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
+think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
+God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
+the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
+facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
+theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
+imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
+unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
+whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually
+unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the
+accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which
+scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on
+facts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet
+this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it
+would illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For
+we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,
+that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify
+their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate
+apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our
+temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the
+pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic
+sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal
+experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the
+effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of
+the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of
+experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is
+concerned with. Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,
+for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
+and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
+drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
+to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
+illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
+quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
+nominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the
+local independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
+historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
+and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
+changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
+that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
+adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
+describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
+drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
+only past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,
+for personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the
+effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
+as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
+psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
+theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
+momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
+by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really
+distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;
+of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that
+capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an
+apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).
+
+It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,
+whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that
+school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The
+habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a
+matter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special
+interest in the life of reason, and be an effort, legitimate under
+any system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human
+thought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its
+present degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look
+at things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of
+the natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy
+that denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world
+for granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how
+the human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far
+as he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in
+the course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a
+psychological point of view might be equivalent to the idealistic
+doctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only
+structure of the universe, and its whole history. According to this
+view, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the
+transcendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is,
+still concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision
+would consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility,
+and survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force
+governing the evolution. It would still remain possible for other
+methods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct,
+perhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with
+things-in-themselves. A junction might thus be effected with the
+system of M. Bergson, which would lead to this curious result: that
+pragmatic logic would be the method of intelligence, because
+intelligence is merely a method, useful in practice, for the symbolic
+and improper representation of reality; while another non-pragmatic
+method--sympathy and dream--would alone be able to put us in
+possession of direct knowledge and genuine truth. So that, after all,
+the pragmatic "truth" of working ideas would turn out to be what it
+has seemed hitherto to mankind, namely, no real truth, but rather a
+convenient sort of fiction, which ceases to deceive when once its
+merely pragmatic value is discounted by criticism. I remember once
+putting a question on this subject to Professor James; and his answer
+was one which I am glad to be able to record. In relation to his
+having said that "as far as the past facts go, there is no difference
+... be the atoms or be the God their cause,"[7] I asked whether, if
+God had been the cause, apart from the value of the idea of him in our
+calculations, his existence would not have made a difference to him,
+as he would be presumably self-conscious. "Of course," said Professor
+James, "but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was
+thinking of our idea." The choice of the subjective point of view,
+then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended
+to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.
+And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the
+realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the
+real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be
+verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never
+those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
+our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
+while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless
+and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
+Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
+Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
+catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
+character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
+might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
+the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
+Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
+acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
+believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
+practice.
+
+[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]
+
+Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic
+world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
+in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
+one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
+ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they
+have turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to
+play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate
+result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of
+realism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the
+school and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very
+hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
+romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
+sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
+of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
+the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
+independent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that
+pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
+that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
+(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
+or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
+poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
+was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
+"objective spirit," that is, into dynamic relations between things.
+The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,
+lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and
+disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or
+superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be
+easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there
+is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any
+in heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems
+to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it
+pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly
+not psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is
+pragmatism either.
+
+There is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of
+the system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards
+(justly, I think) as of decisive importance. Is, namely, the pragmatic
+account of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of
+knowledge only? Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit
+that it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence
+in which, they say, it is not concerned: first, the dialectical
+relation between essences; and second, the known occurrence or
+experience of facts. There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of
+cognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists
+to constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations,
+they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects,
+and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch
+contingent fact at all. On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes
+on some matter of fact, as, for instance, "I feel pain," or "I
+expected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,"
+though often true propositions, are not _theoretical_ truths; they are
+not, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate
+observations. Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all,
+perhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of
+memory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover,
+verification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously
+impossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not
+assumed to be truly remembered. How shall we know that our expectation
+is fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an
+expectation? But if we know our past experience directly--not merely
+knew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led
+down to the present--this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a
+tolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic
+verification or "truth" at all. I have never been able to discover
+whether, by that perception of fact which is not "truth" but fact
+itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the
+whole series of these apprehensions. In the latter case, as in the
+philosophy of M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open
+to retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the
+head of any pragmatic method or pragmatic "truth." It looks, indeed,
+as if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken
+for granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.
+Their readiness to make so capital an assumption is a part of their
+heritage from romantic idealism. To the romantic idealist science and
+theology are tales which ought to be reduced to an empirical
+equivalent in his personal experience; but the tale of his personal
+experience itself is a sacred figment, the one precious conviction of
+the romantic heart, which it would be heartless to question. Yet here
+is a kind of assumed truth which cannot be reduced to its pragmatic
+meaning, because it must be true literally in order that the pragmatic
+meaning of other beliefs may be conceived or tested at all.
+
+Now, if it be admitted that the pragmatic theory of truth does not
+touch our knowledge either of matters of fact or of the necessary
+implications of ideas, the question arises: What sort of knowledge
+remains for pragmatic theory to apply to? Simply, Mr. Russell answers,
+those "working hypotheses" to which "prudent people give only a low
+degree of belief." For "we hold different beliefs with very different
+degrees of conviction. Some--such as the belief that I am sitting in a
+chair, or that 2+2=4--can be doubted by few except those who have had
+a long training in philosophy. Such beliefs are held so firmly that
+non-philosophers who deny them are put into lunatic asylums. Other
+beliefs, such as the facts of history, are held rather less firmly....
+Beliefs about the future, as that the sun will rise to-morrow and
+that the trains will run approximately as in Bradshaw, may be held
+with almost as great conviction as beliefs about the past. Scientific
+laws are generally believed less firmly.... Philosophical beliefs,
+finally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the
+opposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,
+therefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,
+doubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,
+from the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood
+heat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only
+temperatures." Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future
+experience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only
+presumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical
+logic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.
+Presumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and
+yet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as
+the confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood
+heat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in
+anything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,
+whatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they
+are to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to
+lead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what
+presumptions refer to explicitly.
+
+It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on
+voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated
+observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,
+as when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really
+regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the
+emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils
+the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called
+luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular
+career that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a
+mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be
+transferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck
+must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not
+needful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working
+hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some
+confusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an
+anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be
+clear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers
+entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they
+do not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance
+of the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak
+of it as if it were composed of indestructible particles. But for
+Democritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not
+a working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional
+makeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain,
+anticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could
+inspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic
+theory is true. If they are right, the validity of this theory would
+not be that of pragmatic "truth" but of pragmatic "fact"; for it would
+be a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might give us, of
+experienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the
+communication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the
+experience of a universal observer. It would be knowledge of reality
+in M. Bergson's sense. Pragmatic "truth," on the contrary, is the
+relative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is
+not a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is
+instrumental.
+
+For theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a
+symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and
+full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full
+knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their
+experimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the
+first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and
+scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they
+gather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it
+is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably
+applied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that
+extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly
+disclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is
+avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it
+is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the
+symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,
+and for which it stands.
+
+It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based
+on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not
+claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths
+or the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is
+patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
+prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
+pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
+pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
+evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
+world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
+pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
+accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
+Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what
+remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has
+abandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,
+the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to
+what was to take its place--spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.
+And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the
+objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get
+at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the
+prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its
+self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.
+
+Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of
+science possess, but with the language they use. If science meant
+knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his
+observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the
+probable ancestors of the human race--all knowledge of actual or
+possible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of
+spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the
+gaps in that knowledge, and mark the _lacunae_ and unsolved problems
+of the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe
+"Science" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and
+when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincare, turned his subtle
+irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the
+"bankruptcy of science," whereas it is merely the language of science
+that he had reduced to its pragmatic value--to convenience and economy
+in the registering of facts--and had by no means questioned that
+positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.
+It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical
+epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific
+or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing
+truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its
+view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system
+which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to
+divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.
+
+
+IV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS
+
+
+If Mr. Russell, in his essay on "The Elements of Ethics," had wished
+to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert
+him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins
+by telling us that "what is called good conduct is conduct which is a
+means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence
+... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be
+included in ethics." Two consequences are involved in this: first,
+that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with
+"moral" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do
+inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is
+the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this
+matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to
+one error and the professed moralist to another. "The philosopher,
+bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the
+facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all
+be deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the
+other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become
+absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than
+the ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in
+this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any
+imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort
+and courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence
+of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he
+holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will--a view
+which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and
+mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin."
+
+Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will
+be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us
+the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various
+values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what
+combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and
+(if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would
+be possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to
+come into physical conflict. Such ethics, since it would express in
+reflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both
+influence and authority over them; two things which an alien and
+dogmatic ethics necessarily lacks. The joy of the ethical sceptic in
+Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding
+to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a
+preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly
+devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good,"
+which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And
+he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer
+he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might
+perhaps have been absolved from asking the question; for, as he says,
+the so-called definitions of "good"--that it is pleasure, the desired,
+and so forth--are not definitions of the predicate "good," but
+designations of the things to which this predicate is applied by
+different persons. Pleasure, and its rivals, are not synonyms for the
+abstract quality "good," but names for classes of concrete facts that
+are supposed to possess that quality. From this correct, if somewhat
+trifling, observation, however, Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore before
+him, evokes a portentous dogma. Not being able to define good, he
+hypostasises it. "Good and bad," he says, "are qualities which belong
+to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and
+square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good,
+only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know
+which is right." "We cannot maintain that for me a thing ought to
+exist on its own account, while for you it ought not; that would
+merely mean that one of us is mistaken, since in fact everything
+either ought to exist, or ought not." Thus we are asked to believe
+that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to
+no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort
+of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that
+it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary
+quality.
+
+That the quality "good" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious;
+but that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and
+astonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or
+subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the
+connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable
+predicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in
+intuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain
+conditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,
+may have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and
+left are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without
+being invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right
+is not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition
+that some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else
+at the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly
+to the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks
+this is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does not
+please him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we
+suggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the
+idea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality
+of green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the
+intent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have
+any relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and
+these relations they must always retain. But the contradiction
+disappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,
+we consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the
+qualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are
+conjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may
+be, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,
+good and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal
+paradox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of
+view of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and
+talked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should
+still raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.[8] Indeed, while
+square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may
+actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to
+be a cylinder.
+
+[Footnote 8: Plato, _Philebus_, 14, D. The dialectical element in this
+dialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,
+ethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the
+political and the theological. As to the political element, Plato
+everywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it
+to human nature and to the pursuit of happiness--that happiness which
+Mr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people
+prefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the _Philebus_ (11, D) the good
+looked for is declared to be "some state and disposition of the soul
+which has the property of making all men happy"; and later (66, D) the
+conclusion is that insight is better than pleasure "as an element in
+human life." As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising
+the good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,
+which is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,
+and logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that
+ground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole
+Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of
+private will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the
+direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for
+all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the
+creative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.
+Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
+attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
+cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
+good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
+have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]
+
+But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
+that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
+moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
+to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
+that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
+attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
+and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
+independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
+that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
+to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
+to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
+and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
+one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
+right."
+
+To protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr. Russell,
+so far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy. The
+argument is that "if this were not the case, we could not reason with
+a man as to what is right." "We do in fact hold that when one man
+approves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is
+mistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion. If one man
+likes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of
+them is mistaken." In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices,
+however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about
+them! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave
+and the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this
+singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and
+physical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or
+incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is
+good as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but
+deals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.
+But to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false
+collocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at;
+it is not opined. The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are
+not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we
+feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may
+assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we
+may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different
+preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.
+Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great
+advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded
+as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or
+beans, or frogs' legs, or who had a weakness for anything called
+"unnatural"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts
+that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and _par
+excellence_, abominations.
+
+I am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view
+where he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and
+refutes it on the ground that "it is commonly admitted that there are
+bad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean
+desires for what is bad." Most people undoubtedly call desires bad
+when they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call
+objects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
+human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
+to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
+that Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called
+it _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_. Scholastic philosophy is
+inclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he
+candidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about
+good and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he
+triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree
+with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,
+supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to
+recognise was independent of their constitution.
+
+In a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are
+desires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper
+psychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of
+consciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations
+that make one thing good for another. At the same time the words
+desire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,
+for those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral
+units are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional
+interests that things are "really" good or bad; interests which may
+not be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt
+any desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial
+interest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable
+value; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests
+of men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less
+to the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions
+may indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they
+thwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains
+them. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of
+particular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison
+at once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for
+the other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating
+than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a
+strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to
+insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference
+to any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent
+intoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this
+way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead
+bad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders
+reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires,
+and false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point
+of reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point
+of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing
+but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force
+than to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not
+in philosophy.
+
+That good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and
+adventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell's own way of arguing,
+whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,
+to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but
+appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree."
+He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,
+having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as
+intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it
+your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is
+expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an _argumentum ad hominem_
+(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man
+who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is
+self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of
+man. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless
+pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome
+intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the
+voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their
+origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they
+marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and
+causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young
+Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease
+altogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines
+all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for
+political or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our
+humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be
+pursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them. The
+impossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure
+pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to
+their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.
+
+The author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of
+egoism, and most of all in his "Free Man's Religion." Egoism, he
+thinks, is untenable because "if I am right in thinking that my good
+is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits
+that my good, not his, is the only good." "Most people ... would admit
+that it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only
+one person's.... Then what is good is not good _for me_ or _for you_,
+but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to
+secure a greater good for _A_ than a lesser good for _B_, that it is
+hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.
+And if _A_ happens to be some one else, and _B_ to be myself, that
+cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general
+question who _A_ and _B_ may be." To the question, as the logician
+states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
+irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in
+nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
+good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
+locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
+indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
+in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
+practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
+the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
+alien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
+of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
+some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
+representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
+truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
+voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
+to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
+remote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for
+such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
+in a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all
+wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled
+magically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must
+be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to
+be an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it
+would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their
+eyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of
+nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the
+selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for
+the peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can
+generate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them
+intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)
+generate or recognise the goods we prize.
+
+In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like _A_ and _B_, so
+that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,
+abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified
+at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the
+qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever
+they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing
+from sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine
+different goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and
+actual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell
+makes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and
+those akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that
+the things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized
+by others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these
+chosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie
+rather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,
+in many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;
+yet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely
+just. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic
+from exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would
+merely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly
+establishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious
+tyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices
+which would cost them dear; but that would only extend, as it were,
+the pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had
+allowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of
+self-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.
+Moore, even as it stands; and one trembles to think what it may become
+in the mouths of their disciples. Intolerance itself is a form of
+egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. I cannot
+help thinking that a consciousness of the relativity of values, if it
+became prevalent, would tend to render people more truly social than
+would a belief that things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no
+matter what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we said that
+goods, including the right distribution of goods, are relative to
+specific natures, moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned
+arrows. Our private sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to
+have but a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher
+duty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose aims were
+incompatible with it as we meet things physically inconvenient,
+without insulting them as if they were morally vile or logically
+contemptible. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of
+others. Beyond the pale of actual unanimity the only possible
+unselfishness is chivalry--a recognition of the inward right and
+justification of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has
+long been practised in the battle-field without abolishing the causes
+of war; and it might conceivably be extended to all the conflicts of
+men with one another, and of the warring elements within each breast.
+Policy, hypnotisation, and even surgery may be practised without
+exorcisms or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of action,
+it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that
+course is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural
+origin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and
+ethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it
+says by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
+philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction
+that what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to
+existence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn
+absolutely any force--god or man--that destroys what is beautiful or
+precious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
+own to achieve.
+
+The consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting
+than its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might
+still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or
+mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;
+his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long
+help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a
+mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is
+natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been
+projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should
+attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world
+is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more
+serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be
+expressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before
+anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable
+property, that they ought to exist, or at least that, if anything
+exists, it ought to conform to them. What exists, however, is deaf to
+this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason; and,
+indeed, why should she have subordinated her own arbitrariness to a
+good that is no less arbitrary? This good, however, is somehow good
+notwithstanding; so that there is an abysmal wrong in its not being
+obeyed. The world is, in principle, totally depraved; but as the good
+is not a power, there is no one to redeem the world. The saints are
+those who, imitating the impotent dogmatism on high, and despising
+their sinful natural propensities, keep asserting that certain things
+are in themselves good and others bad, and declaring to be detestable
+any other saint who dogmatises differently. In this system the
+Calvinistic God has lost his creative and punitive functions, but
+continues to decree groundlessly what is good and what evil, and to
+love the one and hate the other with an infinite love or hatred.
+Meanwhile the reprobate need not fear hell in the next world, but the
+elect are sure to find it here.
+
+What shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal
+religion? Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old
+force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in
+losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric,
+this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in
+retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic;
+for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit--in this
+case a most pure and heroic spirit--which it strives so hard to
+dethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an
+unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the
+discernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,
+because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true
+philosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial
+systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their
+adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,
+and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but
+simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true
+insight they were based on is too often buried under them. The
+hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the
+forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things
+the limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted
+by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and
+when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.
+Mr. Russell's ethics _is_ ethics. When we mortals have once assumed
+the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to
+some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that
+combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and
+that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract
+pleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity
+if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,
+whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a
+tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
+
+
+It is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and
+there is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains
+that any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and incommensurably,
+if it pleased anybody at any time for any reason. In practice, however,
+the ideal of anarchy is unstable. Irrefutable by argument, it is readily
+overcome by nature. It melts away before the dogmatic operation of the
+anarchist's own will, as soon as he allows himself the least creative
+endeavour. In spite of the infinite variety of what is merely possible,
+human nature and will have a somewhat definite constitution, and only
+what is harmonious with their actual constitution can long maintain
+itself in the moral world. Hence it is a safe principle in the criticism
+of art that technical proficiency, and brilliancy of fancy or execution,
+cannot avail to establish a great reputation. They may dazzle for a
+moment, but they cannot absolve an artist from the need of having an
+important subject-matter and a sane humanity.
+
+If this principle is accepted, however, it might seem that certain
+artists, and perhaps the greatest, might not fare well at our hands.
+How would Shelley, for instance, stand such a test? Every one knows
+the judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who
+evidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only
+in the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley,
+Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating
+his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that
+Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an
+unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word _sale_,
+and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want
+of the sense of humour, which could only be called _bete_. These
+strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They
+unmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all
+revolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only
+through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien
+reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other
+half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a
+common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so
+much as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of
+revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that
+they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the
+midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly
+a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,
+and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the
+leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.
+In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if
+one is out of tune with everything. We should not then be yielding to
+any private bias, but simply noting the conditions under which art may
+exist and may be appreciated, if we accepted the classical principle
+of criticism and asserted that substance, sanity, and even a sort of
+pervasive wisdom are requisite for supreme works of art. On the other
+hand--who can honestly doubt it?--the rebels and individualists are
+the men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shelley in
+particular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and
+Shelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in
+humour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a
+matter of aesthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of
+capital importance in the development of human genius that the great
+revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that
+began with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found
+angels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which
+began at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have
+been one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley. How shall we
+reconcile these conflicting impressions? Shall we force ourselves to
+call the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary,
+and shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation
+or political prejudice? Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox
+principle that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are
+essential to great works? Or shall we look for a different issue out
+of our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not
+perhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in
+Shelley's poetry? This last is the direction in which I conceive the
+truth to lie. A little consideration will show us that Shelley really
+has a great subject-matter--what ought to be; and that he has a real
+humanity--though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal
+principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can
+flourish in the world.
+
+Shelley seems hardly to have been brought up; he grew up in the
+nursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys,
+without any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or
+social tradition. If he received any formal training or correction, he
+instantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and
+turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to
+writing them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical
+experiments. Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but
+not, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through
+the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if
+they were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley's mind disinherited itself out
+of allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly
+endowed for the world into which it had descended. It rejected
+ordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.
+Education is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not
+completely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by
+experience because they are born with various imperfect alternative
+instincts rooted equally in their system. But most animals, and a few
+men, are not of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are
+born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without
+intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed
+with a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:
+and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final
+and only possible system of philosophy.
+
+Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of these
+nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,
+inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature. He was innocent and
+cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind. Being a finished
+child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,
+history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense,
+but was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The
+cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what
+little wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but
+uninstructed. When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own
+natural note. If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he
+hated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being incapable of
+understanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in
+idea. For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it
+was also sensitive, vehement, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he
+had the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was
+united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the
+pelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted swiftly on its
+appointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but
+when it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was
+inwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud
+for liberty and justice.
+
+The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the
+same time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and
+continual suffering. When the world violated the ideal which lay so
+clear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If to
+the irrepressible gushing of life from within we add the suffering and
+horror that continually checked it, we shall have in hand, I think,
+the chief elements of his genius.
+
+Love of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what ought to be, has
+for its necessary counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the
+actual does not conform to that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul
+of the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution
+fails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All moral
+life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they
+venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and
+omnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of
+untasted and ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,
+and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world. Other
+moralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where
+they find the actual particularly galling. These excel in sincerity;
+their purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent
+and sometimes even in action. But the ideals they frame are
+fragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like
+liberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or
+plans for moral life as a whole, like Plato's _Republic_. The Utopian
+or visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world;
+being well-intentioned but impotent, they often take comfort in
+fancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on
+earth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at
+least is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth,
+to which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.
+
+Lovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called
+idealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that
+hard-used word. He early became an idealist after Berkeley's fashion,
+in that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a
+psychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the
+universe. In his drama _Hellas_ he puts this view with evident
+approval into the mouth of Ahasuerus:
+
+                    "This whole
+    Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,
+    With all the silent or tempestuous workings
+    By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
+    Is but a vision;--all that it inherits
+    Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.
+    Thought is its cradle and its grave; nor less
+    The future and the past are idle shadows
+    Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:
+    Nought is but that which feels itself to be."
+
+But Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the
+manner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably
+not working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it;
+and he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal
+realities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the
+glimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away. From the
+infinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind
+draws certain bright forms--the Platonic ideas--"the gathered rays
+which are reality," as Shelley called them: and it is the light of
+these ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some
+degree of reality and value, making out of them "lovely apparitions,
+dim at first, then radiant ... the progeny immortal of painting,
+sculpture, and rapt poesy."
+
+The only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the
+kind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which
+teaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that
+all the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to
+make the universe as good as it possibly could be. In this form,
+idealism is simply contempt for all ideals, and a hearty adoration of
+things as they are; and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that
+be, in church and in state; but in that capacity it would have been as
+hateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were, and as the
+philosophy was that flattered them. For his moral feeling was based on
+suffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a
+visioned good. His conscience was, to a most unusual degree, at once
+elevated and sincere. It was inspired in equal measure by prophecy and
+by indignation. He was carried away in turn by enthusiasm for what his
+ethereal and fertile fancy pictured as possible, and by detestation of
+the reality forced upon him instead. Hence that extraordinary moral
+fervour which is the soul of his poetry. His imagination is no playful
+undirected kaleidoscope; the images, often so tenuous and
+metaphysical, that crowd upon him, are all sparks thrown off at white
+heat, embodiments of a fervent, definite, unswerving inspiration. If
+we think that the _Cloud_ or the _West Wind_ or the _Witch of the
+Atlas_ are mere fireworks, poetic dust, a sort of _bataille des
+fleurs_ in which we are pelted by a shower of images--we have not
+understood the passion that overflows in them, as any long-nursed
+passion may, in any of us, suddenly overflow in an unwonted profusion
+of words. This is a point at which Francis Thompson's understanding of
+Shelley, generally so perfect, seems to me to go astray. The universe,
+Thompson tells us, was Shelley's box of toys. "He gets between the
+feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature,
+and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to
+see how she will look nicest in his song." This last is not, I think,
+Shelley's motive; it is not the truth about the spring of his genius.
+He undoubtedly shatters the world to bits, but only to build it nearer
+to the heart's desire, only to make out of its coloured fragments some
+more Elysian home for love, or some more dazzling symbol for that
+infinite beauty which is the need--the profound, aching, imperative
+need--of the human soul. This recreative impulse of the poet's is not
+wilful, as Thompson calls it: it is moral. Like the _Sensitive Plant_
+
+    "It loves even like Love,--its deep heart is full;
+     It desires what it has not, the beautiful."
+
+The question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his
+song; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is
+soon dry. Shelley's abundance has a more generous source; it springs
+from his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture,
+but in the world. Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it,
+he can exclaim:
+
+    "The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,
+     The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
+     The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!
+     Ha! Ha! the animation of delight,
+     Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,
+     And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!"
+
+To match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement
+sense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty,
+to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror
+of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he
+could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of
+distilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are,
+or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the _Cenci_, he might urge
+that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better
+historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually
+to be found in the world could give him for his _Skylark_, his
+_Epipsychidion_, or his _Prometheus_. But to exaggerate good is to
+vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful
+naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and
+congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,
+on the contrary, is to darken counsel--already dark enough--and the
+want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is
+not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,
+the wantonness of these invectives--for they are invectives in
+intention and in effect--may have seemed justified to Shelley by his
+political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests,
+soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges--to destroy them, I mean, in
+their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all
+its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the
+half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to
+historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an
+impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,
+and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the
+legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of
+the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the
+very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the
+past and its contingent sanctities. Shelley was not left standing
+aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all
+traditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far
+lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a
+perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of
+this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.
+
+So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's
+genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,
+what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at
+the touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an
+opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on
+the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of
+emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused
+suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was
+the belief in perfectibility. An animal that has rigid instincts and
+an _a priori_ mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world
+he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;
+unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or
+by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be
+reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the
+animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality
+offers. So long as such a creature lives--and his life will be
+difficult and short--events will continually disconcert and puzzle
+him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,
+unnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and
+connection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of
+thought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and
+unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;
+he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What
+contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict
+reason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will
+probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is
+an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so
+perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he
+will say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own
+_a priori_ imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,
+and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things
+cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange
+violence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set
+everything right again: nay, everything must be on the point of
+righting itself spontaneously. Wrong, of its very essence, must be in
+unstable equilibrium. The conflict between what such a man feels ought
+to exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure,
+end by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all
+scandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person,
+or by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to
+existence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him,
+it will seem too horrible to be true.
+
+Such a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and
+consequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry. His choice
+lies absolutely between victory and martyrdom. But at the very moment
+of martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of
+victory. The _a priori_ spirit will therefore be always a prophet of
+victory, so long as it subsists at all. The vision of a better world
+at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the
+desert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to
+the world it leaves, "This day thou shall be with me in paradise."
+
+In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility. In his latest
+poems--in _Hellas_, in _Adonais_--he was perhaps a little inclined to
+remove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the
+Christian church soon removed it to the other world. Indeed, an earth
+really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous
+heaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so
+angel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as
+described in _Prometheus_ and in _Epipsychidion_, is too
+festival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it
+cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical
+heaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of
+Platonic ideas, where "life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," no
+longer "stains the white radiance of eternity." But the age had been
+an age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its
+faith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a
+paradise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he
+hoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was
+that eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled
+there by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.
+He believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, "that mankind had only to will
+that there should be no evil, and there would be none." And she adds:
+"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from
+his own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the
+cardinal point of his system." This cosmic extension of the conversion
+of men reminds one of the cosmic extension of the Fall conceived by
+St. Augustine; and in the _Prometheus_ Shelley has allowed his fancy,
+half in symbol, half in glorious physical hyperbole, to carry the warm
+contagion of love into the very bowels of the earth, and even the
+moon, by reflection, to catch the light of love, and be alive again.
+
+Shelley, we may safely say, did not understand the real constitution
+of nature. It was hidden from him by a cloud, all woven of shifting
+rainbows and bright tears. Only his emotional haste made it possible
+for him to entertain such, opinions as he did entertain; or rather,
+it was inevitable that the mechanism of nature, as it is in its
+depths, should remain in his pictures only the shadowiest of
+backgrounds. His poetry is accordingly a part of the poetry of
+illusion; the poetry of truth, if we have the courage to hope for such
+a thing, is reserved for far different and yet unborn poets. But it is
+only fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as
+yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they
+touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each
+successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing,
+or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a
+gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once
+out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and
+sentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous
+pageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic
+relation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as
+anybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The
+distinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,
+subtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits
+so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe
+in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising
+respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts
+from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the
+present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an
+overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any
+divided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid
+or fanciful, when he created what he justly calls "Beautiful idealisms
+of moral excellence."
+
+That is what his poems are fundamentally--the _Skylark_, and the
+_Witch of the Atlas_, and the _Sensitive Plant_ no less than the
+grander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his
+heroic conscience. He felt that what his imagination pictured was a
+true symbol of what human experience should and might pass into.
+Otherwise he would have been aware of playing with idle images; his
+poetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business;
+he would have been a worldling in art and in morals. The clear fire,
+the sustained breath, the fervent accent of his poetry are due to his
+faith in his philosophy. As Mrs. Shelley expressed it, he "had no care
+for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind,
+and develop some high and abstruse truth." Had his poetry not dealt
+with what was supreme in his own eyes, and dearest to his heart, it
+could never have been the exquisite and entrancing poetry that it is.
+It would not have had an adequate subject-matter, as, in spite of
+Matthew Arnold, I think it had; for nothing can be empty that contains
+such a soul. An angel cannot be ineffectual if the standard of
+efficiency is moral; he is what all other things bring about, when
+they are effectual. And a void that is alive with the beating of
+luminous wings, and of a luminous heart, is quite sufficiently
+peopled. Shelley's mind was angelic not merely in its purity and
+fervour, but also in its moral authority, in its prophetic strain.
+What was conscience in his generation was life in him.
+
+The mind of man is not merely a sensorium. His intelligence is not
+merely an instrument for adaptation. There is a germ within, a nucleus
+of force and organisation, which can be unfolded, under favourable
+circumstances, into a perfection inwardly determined. Man's
+constitution is a fountain from which to draw an infinity of gushing
+music, not representing anything external, yet not unmeaning on that
+account, since it represents the capacities and passions latent in him
+from the beginning. These potentialities, however, are no oracles of
+truth. Being innate they are arbitrary; being _a priori_ they are
+subjective; but they are good principles for fiction, for poetry, for
+morals, for religion. They are principles for the true expression of
+man, but not for the true description of the universe. When they are
+taken for the latter, fiction becomes deception, poetry illusion,
+morals fanaticism, and religion bad science. The orgy of delusion into
+which we are then plunged comes from supposing the _a priori_ to be
+capable of controlling the actual, and the innate to be a standard for
+the true. That rich and definite endowment which might have made the
+distinction of the poet, then makes the narrowness of the philosopher.
+So Shelley, with a sort of tyranny of which he does not suspect the
+possible cruelty, would impose his ideal of love and equality upon all
+creatures; he would make enthusiasts of clowns and doves of vultures.
+In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the
+capacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate
+itself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,
+and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar
+reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he
+despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he
+wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
+that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet
+his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was
+perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for
+its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with
+us, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire
+enough within to make a second stellar universe.
+
+An instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to
+be found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view
+of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours
+has put it: "It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater
+good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still
+more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be
+some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question."
+It is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his
+good is no less good than yours. Convince people of this--and who can
+resist such perfect logic?--and _presto_ all property in things has
+disappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour. How
+happy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than
+in our mean, blind, competitive society! The single word love--and we
+have just seen that love is a logical necessity--offers an easy and
+final solution to all moral and political problems. Shelley cannot
+imagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not
+produce love. He can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and
+since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire
+is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in
+the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy
+seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an
+abomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.
+
+Now this is a very unintelligent view of evil; and if Shelley had had
+time to read Spinoza--an author with whom he would have found himself
+largely in sympathy--he might have learned that nothing is evil in
+itself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in
+creation, nor to groundless malice in man. Evil is an inevitable
+aspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve
+themselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter
+enough for them to prosper equally side by side. Under these
+circumstances the partial success of any creature--say, the
+cancer-microbe--is an evil from the point of view of those other
+creatures--say, men--to whom that success is a defeat. Shelley
+sometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy. So he says of the
+fair lady in the _Sensitive Plant_:
+
+    "All killing insects and gnawing worms,
+     And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
+     She bore in a basket of Indian woof,
+     Into the rough woods far aloof--
+     In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
+     The freshest her gentle hands could pull
+     For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
+     Although they did ill, was innocent."
+
+Now it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and
+go feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves do not object; oak-leaves
+might be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot
+listen to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless
+they are quickly and utterly exterminated. And fundamentally men are
+subject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason
+unless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that,
+being animals, they should be reasonable exclusively. Imagination is
+indeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing
+themselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children,
+perhaps, or for their religion. But they are not more capable of
+sacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the
+cancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.
+
+When Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his
+ignorance of the world. The illusion he suffers from is
+constitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly
+subject to in their way: what he is marvelling at is really that
+anything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral
+disposition. Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and
+bids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature: so
+that all is not vanity in his illusion, nor night in his blindness.
+The poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion
+in the expression of his own soul. His political utopias, his belief
+in the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way
+of judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his
+lyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy. If he had understood universal
+nature, he would not have so glorified in his own. And his own nature
+was worth glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest,
+richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse. I have not
+read in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated
+instincts of the mind. The world of Shelley is that which the vital
+monad within many of us--I will not say within all, for who shall set
+bounds to the variations of human nature?--the world which the vital
+monad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have
+its way.
+
+Matthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he
+was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external
+perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his
+lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even
+an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul
+just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous,
+and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest
+playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from
+observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity
+appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men
+would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons,
+like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole
+inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of
+real things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree
+bent by too prevalent a wind. Half the fertility of such a soul is
+lost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy
+deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing
+object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate
+in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an
+ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate
+possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the
+desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.
+His obtuseness to things dynamic--to the material order--leaves his
+whole mind free to develop things aesthetic after their own kind; his
+abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative
+freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.
+
+We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of
+us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or
+stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no
+less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or
+flowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of
+producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,
+like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances
+may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they
+cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed. What
+Shelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like
+what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food--a mass of
+mere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley
+constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed
+organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and
+muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human
+happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may
+be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they
+can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which
+they hide.
+
+When the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the
+world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that
+_freedom_ should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not
+been the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for
+himself. "I never could discern in him," says his friend Hogg, "any
+more than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love
+of liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...
+and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution." We all fancy nowadays
+that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we
+approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make
+them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions
+would be if we retained them. Liberty of the press and liberty to vote
+do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I
+suppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of
+a poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is
+forbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with
+the people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling
+of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test
+of freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the
+beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.
+To be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to
+be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those
+of us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to
+declare frankly that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility
+of freedom.
+
+    "I never was attached to that great sect
+     Whose doctrine is that each one should select,
+     Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend
+     And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
+     To cold oblivion; though it is the code
+     Of modern morals, and the beaten road
+     Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
+     Who travel to their home among the dead
+     By the broad highway of the world, and so
+     With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
+     The dreariest and the longest journey go.
+     True love in this differs from gold and clay,
+     That to divide is not to take away.
+     Love is like understanding that grows bright
+     Gazing on many truths.... Narrow
+     The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
+     The life that wears, the spirit that creates
+     One object and one form, and builds thereby
+     A sepulchre for its eternity!"
+
+The difficulties in reducing this charming theory of love to practice
+are well exemplified in Shelley's own life. He ran away with his first
+wife not because she inspired any uncontrollable passion, but because
+she declared she was a victim of domestic oppression and threw herself
+upon him for protection. Nevertheless, when he discovered that his
+best friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love
+principles, he was very seriously annoyed. When he presently abandoned
+her, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned
+herself in the Serpentine: and his second wife needed all her natural
+sweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the
+waves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept
+the too sensitive heart of her husband. Free love would not, then,
+secure freedom from complications; it would not remove the present
+occasion for jealousy, reproaches, tragedies, and the dragging of a
+lengthening chain. Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom
+of action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements,
+but you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism
+and not, like love, a plastic dream. Wisdom is very old and therefore
+often ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who
+would live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world:
+and that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a snare for
+poets. Let them endure to love freely, hopelessly, and infinitely,
+after the manner of Plato and Dante, and even of Goethe, when Goethe
+really loved: that exquisite sacrifice will improve their verse, and
+it will not kill them. Let them follow in the traces of Shelley when
+he wrote in his youth: "I have been most of the night pacing a
+church-yard. I must now engage in scenes of strong interest.... I
+expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry.... I
+slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not
+die," Happy man if he had been able to add, "And did not marry!"
+
+Last among the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his
+atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his
+biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a
+pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox
+conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a
+judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any
+sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred
+the _Paradiso_ of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to
+the popular _Inferno_ itself, could evidently be attracted by
+Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as
+expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A
+pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this
+whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any
+conscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of
+the whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a
+panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the
+individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral
+ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the
+essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the
+chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He
+maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused
+among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful
+and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose
+it.
+
+    "To suffer ...
+     To forgive ...
+     To defy Power ...
+     To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates
+     From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
+     Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
+     This ... is to be
+     Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free."
+
+Shelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly
+speculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All
+metaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good
+poetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance:
+
+         "The pure spirit shall flow
+    Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
+    A portion of the eternal, which must glow
+    Through time and change, unquenchably the same.
+    Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
+    He hath awakened from the dream of life.
+    'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
+    With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
+
+    "He is made one with Nature. There is heard
+    His voice in all her music, from the moan
+    Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.
+
+    "He is a portion of the loveliness
+    Which once he made more lovely.
+
+    "The splendours of the firmament of time
+    May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:
+    Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
+    And death is a low mist which cannot blot
+    The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
+    Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
+    ... the dead live there."
+
+Atheism or pantheism of this stamp cannot be taxed with being gross or
+materialistic; the trouble is rather that it is too hazy in its
+sublimity. The poet has not perceived the natural relation between
+facts and ideals so clearly or correctly as he has felt the moral
+relation between them. But his allegiance to the intuition which
+defies, for the sake of felt excellence, every form of idolatry or
+cowardice wearing the mask of religion--this allegiance is itself the
+purest religion; and it is capable of inspiring the sweetest and most
+absolute poetry. In daring to lay bare the truths of fate, the poet
+creates for himself the subtlest and most heroic harmonies; and he is
+comforted for the illusions he has lost by being made incapable of
+desiring them.
+
+We have seen that Shelley, being unteachable, could never put together
+any just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions,
+and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does
+not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of
+nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic;
+it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never
+were on earth, and never will be. If you are seriously interested only
+in what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in
+Shelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism
+of life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no
+solidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances
+of life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those
+circumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the
+circumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it
+stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the
+formal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.
+By so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a
+parallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the
+analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances
+of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life
+can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and
+air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as
+persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he
+was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the
+interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are
+probably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which
+Matthew Arnold said we should read in order to know the best that has
+been thought and said in the world. The future, too, even among men,
+may contain, as Shelley puts it, many "arts, though unimagined, yet to
+be." The divination of poets cannot, of course, be expected to reveal
+any of these hidden regions as they actually exist or will exist; but
+what would be the advantage of revealing them? It could only be what
+the advantage of criticising human life would be also, to improve
+subsequent life indirectly by turning it towards attainable goods, and
+is it not as important a thing to improve life directly and in the
+present, if one has the gift, by enriching rather than criticising it?
+Besides, there is need of fixing the ideal by which criticism is to be
+guided. If you have no image of happiness or beauty or perfect
+goodness before you, how are you to judge what portions of life are
+important, and what rendering of them is appropriate?
+
+Being a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal
+goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a
+discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of
+life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life
+is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in
+expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove
+useful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon
+them. This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is
+diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that
+are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other
+names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material
+processes. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
+Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some
+favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these
+visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day
+be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the
+possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is
+precisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,
+that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific
+probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the
+landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that
+the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual
+truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)
+than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre
+and aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by
+sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
+because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul
+touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may
+people the infinite.
+
+For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired
+poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most
+appealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the
+world they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.
+They do not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I
+think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it
+
+                  "Must be
+    A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
+    And build themselves again impregnably
+          In a diviner clime,
+    To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
+    Which frowns above the idle foam of time."
+
+"Frowns," says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something
+timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could
+threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous
+error! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those
+who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to
+reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal
+possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of
+other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite
+unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal
+essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian
+calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome
+to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. Whether
+any one has the will depends on his material constitution, and whether
+he has the power depends on the firm texture of that constitution and
+on circumstances happening to be favourable to its operation.
+Otherwise what the rebel or the visionary hails as his ideal will be
+no picture of his destiny or of that of the world. It will be, and
+will always remain, merely a picture of his heart. This picture,
+indestructible in its ideal essence, will mirror also the hearts of
+those who may share, or may have shared, the nature of the poet who
+drew it. So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of
+Shelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted
+friend wrote upon his tomb: _cor cordium_, the heart of hearts.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
+
+_Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of
+California, August_ 25, 1911.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The privilege of addressing you to-day
+is very welcome to me, not merely for the honour of it, which is
+great, nor for the pleasures of travel, which are many, when it is
+California that one is visiting for the first time, but also because
+there is something I have long wanted to say which this occasion seems
+particularly favourable for saying. America is still a young country,
+and this part of it is especially so; and it would have been nothing
+extraordinary if, in this young country, material preoccupations had
+altogether absorbed people's minds, and they had been too much
+engrossed in living to reflect upon life, or to have any philosophy.
+The opposite, however, is the case. Not only have you already found
+time to philosophise in California, as your society proves, but the
+eastern colonists from the very beginning were a sophisticated race.
+As much as in clearing the land and fighting the Indians they were
+occupied, as they expressed it, in wrestling with the Lord. The
+country was new, but the race was tried, chastened, and full of solemn
+memories. It was an old wine in new bottles; and America did not have
+to wait for its present universities, with their departments of
+academic philosophy, in order to possess a living philosophy--to have
+a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human
+destiny.
+
+Now this situation is a singular and remarkable one, and has many
+consequences, not all of which are equally fortunate. America is a
+young country with an old mentality: it has enjoyed the advantages of
+a child carefully brought up and thoroughly indoctrinated; it has been
+a wise child. But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always
+has a comic and an unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and
+verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and
+emotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged. Or when the
+child is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of
+his own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh
+mentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to
+reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly
+despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses
+the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary
+philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities
+of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or
+of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy
+has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed
+has caught the stale odour from it. America is not simply, as I said a
+moment ago, a young country with an old mentality: it is a country
+with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
+the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and
+discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of
+the mind--in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions--it is the
+hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard
+Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times. The truth
+is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in
+practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but
+slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while,
+alongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the
+other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This
+division may be found symbolised in American architecture: a neat
+reproduction of the colonial mansion--with some modern comforts
+introduced surreptitiously--stands beside the sky-scraper. The
+American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect
+inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American
+man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one
+is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.
+
+Now, with your permission, I should like to analyse more fully how
+this interesting situation has arisen, how it is qualified, and
+whither it tends. And in the first place we should remember what,
+precisely, that philosophy was which the first settlers brought with
+them into the country. In strictness there was more than one; but we
+may confine our attention to what I will call Calvinism, since it is
+on this that the current academic philosophy has been grafted. I do
+not mean exactly the Calvinism of Calvin, or even of Jonathan Edwards;
+for in their systems there was much that was not pure philosophy, but
+rather faith in the externals and history of revelation. Jewish and
+Christian revelation was interpreted by these men, however, in the
+spirit of a particular philosophy, which might have arisen under any
+sky, and been associated with any other religion as well as with
+Protestant Christianity. In fact, the philosophical principle of
+Calvinism appears also in the Koran, in Spinoza, and in Cardinal
+Newman; and persons with no very distinctive Christian belief, like
+Carlyle or like Professor Royce, may be nevertheless, philosophically,
+perfect Calvinists. Calvinism, taken in this sense, is an expression
+of the agonised conscience. It is a view of the world which an
+agonised conscience readily embraces, if it takes itself seriously,
+as, being agonised, of course it must. Calvinism, essentially, asserts
+three things: that sin exists, that sin is punished, and that it is
+beautiful that sin should exist to be punished. The heart of the
+Calvinist is therefore divided between tragic concern at his own
+miserable condition, and tragic exultation about the universe at
+large. He oscillates between a profound abasement and a paradoxical
+elation of the spirit. To be a Calvinist philosophically is to feel a
+fierce pleasure in the existence of misery, especially of one's own,
+in that this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is
+irresponsible or infinite or holy. Human nature, it feels, is totally
+depraved: to have the instincts and motives that we necessarily have
+is a great scandal, and we must suffer for it; but that scandal is
+requisite, since otherwise the serious importance of being as we ought
+to be would not have been vindicated.
+
+To those of us who have not an agonised conscience this system may
+seem fantastic and even unintelligible; yet it is logically and
+intently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take
+permanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain
+conditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small
+nation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic
+and distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints
+life in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and
+black abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps
+to infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, and again
+the early Protestants. If such a people is philosophical at all, it
+will not improbably be Calvinistic. Even in the early American
+communities many of these conditions were fulfilled. The nation was
+small and isolated; it lived under pressure and constant trial; it was
+acquainted with but a small range of goods and evils. Vigilance over
+conduct and an absolute demand for personal integrity were not merely
+traditional things, but things that practical sages, like Franklin and
+Washington, recommended to their countrymen, because they were virtues
+that justified themselves visibly by their fruits. But soon these
+happy results themselves helped to relax the pressure of external
+circumstances, and indirectly the pressure of the agonised conscience
+within. The nation became numerous; it ceased to be either ecstatic or
+distressful; the high social morality which on the whole it preserved
+took another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good
+sense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any
+fixed principles. They retained their instinct for order, and often
+created order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to
+be obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too
+unpractical a notion, and not quite serious. In fact, the second and
+native-born American mentality began to take shape. The sense of sin
+totally evaporated. Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty
+and commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing
+quick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it
+aesthetically. At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had
+elbow-room. His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he
+wished their number to increase. Good will became the great American
+virtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and
+cubic feet, and minutes saved--as if there had been anything to save
+them for. How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan
+Edwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to
+any intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.
+If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would
+think you were joking, as he himself usually is. He is convinced that
+he always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.
+
+Calvinism thus lost its basis in American life. Some emotional
+natures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private
+searchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the
+radical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but
+none can cease to be possible. Other natures, more sensitive to the
+moral and literary influences of the world, preferred to abandon
+parts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which
+should separate the remainder from real life.
+
+Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical
+genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the
+world, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American
+writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest--Poe,
+Hawthorne, and Emerson--had all a certain starved and abstract
+quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too
+keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered
+them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.
+They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.
+Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in
+his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way
+of appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not
+historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might
+have felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a
+poet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to
+avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to
+have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of
+Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of
+vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being
+morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
+rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes
+and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius
+sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in
+comparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.
+Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own persons they
+escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied
+nothing to supplant it in other minds.
+
+The churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no
+philosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism
+contained. The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it
+besides philosophical Calvinism. A Christian tenderness, and a hope of
+grace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and
+it was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now
+emphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant
+damnation. Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would
+perfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to
+exist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics. It is an
+ingredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself
+idealism. But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in
+current idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief
+element in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.
+
+Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in
+Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.
+Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set
+of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe
+regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It is a method, a
+point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain,
+could be approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is
+systematic subjectivism. It studies the perspectives of knowledge as
+they radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of inference
+by which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford
+any systematic or distant vistas. In other words, transcendentalism is
+the critical logic of science. Knowledge, it says, has a station, as
+in a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the
+moment. The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived,
+lie around it, painted as upon a panorama. They cannot be lighted up
+save by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by
+some active operation of the mind.
+
+This is hardly the occasion for developing or explaining this delicate
+insight; suffice it to say, lest you should think later that I
+disparage transcendentalism, that as a method I regard it as correct
+and, when once suggested, unforgettable. I regard it as the chief
+contribution made in modern times to speculation. But it is a method
+only, an attitude we may always assume if we like and that will always
+be legitimate. It is no answer, and involves no particular answer, to
+the question: What exists; in what order is what exists produced; what
+is to exist in the future? This question must be answered by observing
+the object, and tracing humbly the movement of the object. It cannot
+be answered at all by harping on the fact that this object, if
+discovered, must be discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an
+interest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full
+transcendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less
+frankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not
+only their own knowledge but the whole universe centre about
+themselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and
+romantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality
+might be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves;
+nay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their own
+romantic dreams extended indefinitely. Transcendental logic, the
+method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of
+evolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused,
+produced transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge
+was turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish
+sharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is
+significant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental
+systems of the universe, which are chimeras.
+
+In both its parts, however, transcendentalism had much to recommend it
+to American philosophers, for the transcendental method appealed to
+the individualistic and revolutionary temper of their youth, while
+transcendental myths enabled them to find a new status for their
+inherited theology, and to give what parts of it they cared to
+preserve some semblance of philosophical backing. This last was the
+use to which the transcendental method was put by Kant himself, who
+first brought it into vogue, before the terrible weapon had got out of
+hand, and become the instrument of pure romanticism. Kant came, he
+himself said, to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith,
+which in his case meant faith in Calvinism. In other words, he applied
+the transcendental method to matters of fact, reducing them thereby
+to human ideas, in order to give to the Calvinistic postulates of
+conscience a metaphysical validity. For Kant had a genteel tradition
+of his own, which he wished to remove to a place of safety, feeling
+that the empirical world had become too hot for it; and this place of
+safety was the region of transcendental myth. I need hardly say how
+perfectly this expedient suited the needs of philosophers in America,
+and it is no accident if the influence of Kant soon became dominant
+here. To embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound
+metaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no
+difficulty in embracing it. In truth it was a sign of having been
+brought up in the genteel tradition, of feeling it weak, and of
+wishing to save it.
+
+But the transcendental method, in its way, was also sympathetic to the
+American mind. It embodied, in a radical form, the spirit of
+Protestantism as distinguished from its inherited doctrines; it was
+autonomous, undismayed, calmly revolutionary; it felt that Will was
+deeper than Intellect; it focussed everything here and now, and asked
+all things to show their credentials at the bar of the young self, and
+to prove their value for this latest born moment. These things are
+truly American; they would be characteristic of any young society with
+a keen and discursive intelligence, and they are strikingly
+exemplified in the thought and in the person of Emerson. They
+constitute what he called self-trust. Self-trust, like other
+transcendental attitudes, may be expressed in metaphysical fables. The
+romantic spirit may imagine itself to be an absolute force, evoking
+and moulding the plastic world to express its varying moods. But for
+a pioneer who is actually a world-builder this metaphysical illusion
+has a partial warrant in historical fact; far more warrant than it
+could boast of in the fixed and articulated society of Europe, among
+the moonstruck rebels and sulking poets of the romantic era. Emerson
+was a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery,
+child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything
+that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or
+to notice. More, perhaps, than anybody that has ever lived, he
+practised the transcendental method in all its purity. He had no
+system. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh
+sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they
+suggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,
+was not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his
+mind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his
+notions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones
+that they were myths. Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other
+transcendentalists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing
+questions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all have to
+think our ideas final, led him to the very verge of system-making; but
+he stopped short. Had he made a system out of his notion of
+compensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would
+have been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems.
+But he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to
+poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and
+hints toward fresh transcendental musings.
+
+To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher
+says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As Mr.
+Bertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail
+to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those
+who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are
+rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians; and
+ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The truths
+they find are never complete, and are not always important; but they
+are integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to
+fill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate
+or afford to contradict. But professional philosophers are usually
+only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested
+illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study
+the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or
+semblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much
+prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution;
+for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and
+perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet
+truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they
+defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of
+things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever
+been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is
+true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in
+maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea
+of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of
+many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system,
+covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our
+logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of
+human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be
+poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that
+it was true?
+
+Emerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional
+consequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. When he came
+out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous
+close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to
+him: "Why so hot, little sir?" No doubt the spirit or energy of the
+world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every
+little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will
+move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
+dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole
+world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is
+silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which
+bridges the distances and compares the combatants. On this side of his
+genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and
+represented nothing except intelligence itself.
+
+There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with
+transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,
+for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a
+mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing
+his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was
+such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine
+a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually
+has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since
+I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,
+undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that
+is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was
+particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses
+of fellowship with the elements. This is something in which all
+Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and
+spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.
+Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,
+so others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
+resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled
+ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for
+instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but
+when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are
+unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
+that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
+openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where
+human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in
+a purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its
+quietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
+classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the
+presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and
+thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic
+sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.
+Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the
+genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind
+its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so
+precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise
+for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and
+poetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom
+you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however,
+only half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its
+savour if they had wholly escaped it. They point to what contradicts
+it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition,
+for they have nothing solid to put in its place. When they point out
+how ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this
+militates against the standard, but think it a funny perversity in the
+facts. Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition,
+such an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.
+Perhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may
+be taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present
+pervasively, but everywhere weak. Similarly in Italy, during the
+Renaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the
+intellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet
+its hold on the heart was singularly relaxed. The consequence was that
+humorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of
+cardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the
+saints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for
+it so little at heart that they could find it infinitely amusing that
+it should be contradicted in men's lives and that no harm should come
+of it. So when Mark Twain says, "I was born of poor but dishonest
+parents," the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon
+convention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the
+hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom
+one's habitual conviction.
+
+The one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely
+behind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans
+find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest
+ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he
+certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and
+traditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he
+is looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the
+polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the
+inarticulate principles that animate the community, on which its own
+genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly. When the foreigner
+opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last
+upon something representative and original. In Walt Whitman democracy
+is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and
+emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and
+equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to
+speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not
+excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their
+companions--plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the
+refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle
+further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a
+whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of
+the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and
+self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was
+good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia
+rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that
+alone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in
+principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to
+the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius
+to fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the
+registering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,
+and therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and
+his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very
+reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many
+beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a
+worthy filling for the human mind. An American in the nineteenth
+century who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly
+have done more.
+
+But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country,
+who has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as
+Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent
+American mind--I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as
+tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could
+be, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.
+Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two
+brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr.
+Henry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer
+world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns
+everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a
+curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with
+other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the
+genteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it. With
+William James too this infusion of worldly insight and European
+sympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but
+the chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal
+spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality,
+similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so
+to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the
+dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.
+His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of
+thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in
+a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. Thus he eluded the
+genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its
+opposite. The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel's dialectic (which is
+not dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of
+experience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through
+the infusion of new insights, and through the insensible
+transformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at
+last it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of
+expanding them. Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when
+it fell again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist
+like William James. He restored their revolutionary force to its
+neutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them
+separately, according to his personal predilections.
+
+For one thing, William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all
+that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in
+religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to
+sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and
+impostors--for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing
+to draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any
+of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the
+blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the
+certainty of finding sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least
+they were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so
+seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg,
+or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less
+beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus
+William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous,
+half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry
+individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time,
+their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he
+made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world
+has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and
+interests of these people.
+
+Yet the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in
+William James. There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and
+Darwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for
+practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival.
+Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned
+to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James
+embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called
+pragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,
+by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be
+true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its
+roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of
+practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It
+does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to
+connect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its
+psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it
+chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called
+intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his
+kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure
+pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up
+nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally
+useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of
+life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon
+obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds
+and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the
+pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that
+must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.
+To know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is
+anything eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would
+prove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives. Ideas are not
+mirrors, they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet
+events, as future experience may unroll them. Those ideas that
+disappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true
+themselves.
+
+This may seem a very utilitarian view of the mind; and I confess I
+think it a partial one, since the logical force of beliefs and ideas,
+their truth or falsehood as assertions, has been overlooked
+altogether, or confused with the vital force of the material processes
+which these ideas express. It is an external view only, which marks
+the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its
+specific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a
+ring. Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist's theory of
+the mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to
+become. If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to
+expedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and
+a chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be
+expedited, nor could anything be useful to it. In other words--and
+this is a third point at which the philosophy of William James has
+played havoc with the genteel tradition, while ostensibly defending
+it--nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological
+terms. Its purposes are not to be static harmonies, self-unfolding
+destinies, the logic of spirit, the spirit of logic, or any other
+formal method and abstract law; its purposes are to be concrete
+endeavours, finite efforts of souls living in an environment which
+they transform and by which they, too, are affected. A spirit, the
+divine spirit as much as the human, as this new animism conceives it,
+is a romantic adventurer. Its future is undetermined. Its scope, its
+duration, and the quality of its life are all contingent. This spirit
+grows; it buds and sends forth feelers, sounding the depths around for
+such other centres of force or life as may exist there. It has a vital
+momentum, but no predetermined goal. It uses its past as a
+stepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely
+fresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown.
+The universe is an experiment; it is unfinished. It has no ultimate or
+total nature, because it has no end. It embodies no formula or
+statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing
+what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking
+characteristic of existence; the law is a description _a posteriori_
+of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may
+possibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is
+uncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is
+real; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more
+to-day. "There shall be news," William James was fond of saying with
+rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,
+"there shall be news in heaven!" There is almost certainly, he
+thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist
+together, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring
+sympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;
+we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our
+career and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,
+although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.
+Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal
+vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual
+experiment keep quick the edge of life.
+
+This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a
+conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in
+various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision
+radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James
+himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a
+philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.
+William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.
+Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first
+rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.
+Bergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative
+evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to
+"_ecraser l'infame_." We may suspect, notwithstanding, that
+intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if
+the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that
+there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may
+possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing
+new--not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from
+the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet
+had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not
+merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new
+all day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that
+controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial
+evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel
+tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation
+unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William
+James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences
+of religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of
+the genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic
+God is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will
+answer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct
+conditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring
+being, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon
+a personal friend, or a physician, or an insurance company. How
+disconcerting! Is not this new theology a little like superstition?
+And yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!
+I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more
+probable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy. All
+three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which
+probabilities are irrelevant. If one man says the moon is sister to
+the sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not
+which notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all
+expressive. The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith
+and imagination have prejudged the issue. The force of William James's
+new theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this: that it has
+broken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new
+direction, which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than
+the old. The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly
+be true--who shall know that?--but that it has entered the heart of a
+leading American to conceive and to cherish it. The genteel tradition
+cannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which
+it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been
+challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been
+discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No
+one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some
+young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a
+dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be
+afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The
+intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has
+not been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent. That
+is a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.
+Something else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the
+imagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic
+idealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring
+things as they are. The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel
+tradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought
+to be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family,
+by the genius of the race. Henceforth there can hardly be the same
+peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. Hegel will
+be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.
+Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been
+abandoned. An honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel
+tradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.
+
+With this I have finished such a sketch as I am here able to offer you
+of the genteel tradition in American philosophy. The subject is
+complex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote; yet I
+think the main outlines are clear enough. The chief fountains of this
+tradition were Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living
+fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised
+conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.
+When these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared--and the
+American atmosphere is not favourable to either of them--the two
+systems ceased to be inwardly understood; they subsisted as sacred
+mysteries only; and the combination of the two in some transcendental
+system of the universe (a contradiction in principle) was doubly
+artificial. Besides, it could hardly be held with a single mind.
+Natural science, history, the beliefs implied in labour and invention,
+could not be disregarded altogether; so that the transcendental
+philosopher was condemned to a double allegiance, and to not letting
+his left hand know the bluff that his right hand was making.
+Nevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate
+convictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has
+subsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic
+to take its place.
+
+The academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned. On the one side
+came the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude
+naturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism,
+welcoming popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science
+to an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to
+be wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.
+
+This revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you,
+who live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and
+prodigious world. When you transform nature to your uses, when you
+experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you
+cannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these
+adjustments would have been pre-established. Much less can you feel it
+when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm. You must
+feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little
+force among her immense forces. When you escape, as you love to do, to
+your forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel
+you made them, or that they were made for you. They have grown, as you
+have grown, only more massively and more slowly. In their non-human
+beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman
+possibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcendental logic that
+they teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in
+the world. It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic,
+the needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength
+of time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable
+variety, of possible life. Everything is measurable and conditioned,
+indefinitely repeated, yet, in repetition, twisted somewhat from its
+old form. Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an
+incipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor a
+plan. It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is
+the daily discipline of contact with things, so different from the
+verbal discipline of the schools, that will, I trust, inspire the
+philosophy of your children. A Californian whom I had recently the
+pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among
+your mountains their systems would have been different from what they
+are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems
+are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since
+Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly
+they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that
+man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,
+is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains
+and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what,
+indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so
+sweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or
+your friends, or that you have any secret contempt for your present
+ambitions. You respect these, you respect them perhaps too much; you
+are not suffered by the genteel tradition to criticise or to reform
+them at all radically. No; it is the yoke of this genteel tradition
+itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They
+suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as
+individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at
+once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for
+what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious
+infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails
+little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through
+wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you
+are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,
+namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in
+letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their
+life. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for
+reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of
+these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the
+interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes
+that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper
+happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate
+men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so
+many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be
+frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Winds Of Doctrine, by George Santayana
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