THE LIFE OF REASON

The Phases of Human Progress

In Five Volumes

by

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

Dover Publication, Inc. New York

CONTENTS

 Volume I. REASON IN COMMON SENSE

 Volume II. REASON IN SOCIETY

 Volume III. REASON IN RELIGION

 Volume IV. REASON IN ART

 Volume V. REASON IN SCIENCE

REASON IN COMMON SENSE

Volume One of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

This Dover edition, first published in 1980, is anunabridged republication of volume one of _TheLife of Reason; or the Phases of Human Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons in1905. This volume contains the general introductionto the entire five-volume series. 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS Pages 1-32 Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates. --Efficacious reflection is reason. --The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness. --- It is the sum of Art. --It has a natural basis which makes it definable. --Modern philosophy not helpful. --Positivism no positive ideal. --Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions. --Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world. --The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals. --Heraclitus and the immediate. --Democritus and the naturally intelligible. --Socrates and the autonomy of mind. --Plato gave the ideal its full expression. --Aristotle supplied its natural basis. --Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement. --Plato's myths in lieu of physics. --Aristotle's final causes. --Modern science can avoid such expedients. --Transcendentalism true but inconsequential. --Verbal ethics. --Spinoza and the Life of Reason. --Modern and classic sources of inspiration

REASON IN COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER I--THE BIRTH OF REASON Pages 35-47 Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with a chosen good. --Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent. --In experience order is relative to interests which determine the moral status of all powers. --The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning. --The flux first. --Life the fixation of interests. --Primary dualities. --First gropings. --Instinct the nucleus of reason. --Better and worse the fundamental categories

CHAPTER II--FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS Pages 48-63 Dreams before thoughts. --The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces. --Internal order supervenes. --Intrinsic pleasure in existence. --Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object. --Subhuman delights. --Animal living. --Causes at last discerned. --Attention guided by bodily impulse

CHAPTER III--THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS Pages 64-83 Nature man's home. --Difficulties in conceiving nature. --Transcendental qualms. --Thought an aspect of life and transitive. --Perception cumulative and synthetic. --No identical agent needed. --Example of the sun. --His primitive divinity. --Causes and essences contrasted. --Voracity of intellect. --Can the transcendent be known?--Can the immediate be meant?--Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?--_Mens naturaliter platonica_. --Identity and independence predicated of things

CHAPTER IV--ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY Pages 84-117 Psychology as a solvent. --Misconceived rôle of intelligence. --All criticism dogmatic. --A choice of hypotheses. --Critics disguised enthusiasts. --Hume's gratuitous scepticism. --Kant's substitute for knowledge. --False subjectivity attributed to reason. --Chimerical reconstruction. --The Critique a work on mental architecture. --Incoherences. --Nature the true system of conditions. --Artificial pathos in subjectivism. --Berkeley's algebra of perception. --Horror of physics. --Puerility in morals. --Truism and sophism. --Reality is the practical made intelligible. --Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fictions"

CHAPTER V--NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED Pages 118-136 Man's feeble grasp of nature. --Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought. --Mind the erratic residue of existence. --Ghostly character of mind. --Hypostasis and criticism both need control. --Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas. --Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature. --Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit. --Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science redistributes but does not deny

CHAPTER VI--DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS Pages 137-160 Another background for current experience may be found in alien minds. --Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul. --Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms. --Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities. --Tertiary qualities transposed. --Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived body--"Pathetic fallacy" normal, yet ordinarily fallacious. --Case where it is not a fallacy. --Knowledge succeeds only by accident. --Limits of insight. --Perception of character. --Conduct divined, consciousness ignored. --Consciousness untrustworthy. --Metaphorical mind. --Summary

CHAPTER VII--CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE Pages 161-183 So-called abstract qualities primary. --General qualities prior to particular things. --Universals are concretions in discourse. --Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea. --Ideas are ideal. --So-called abstractions complete facts. --Things concretions of concretions. --Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of nature. --Aristotle's compromise. --Empirical bias in favour of contiguity. --Artificial divorce of logic from practice. --Their mutual involution. --Rationalistic suicide. --Complementary character of essence and existence

CHAPTER VIII--ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS Pages 184-204 Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle. --Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions. --Idealism rudimentary. --Naturalism sad. --The soul akin to the eternal and ideal. --Her inexperience. --Platonism spontaneous. --Its essential fidelity to the ideal. --Equal rights of empiricism. --Logic dependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence. --Reason and docility. --Applicable thought and clarified experience

CHAPTER IX--HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL Pages 205-235 Functional relations of mind and body. --They form one natural life. --Artifices involved in separating them. --Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility. --Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression. --Thought's march automatic and thereby implicated in events. --Contemplative essence of action. --Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence. --Consciousness transcendental and transcendent. --It is the seat of value. --Apparent utility of pain. --Its real impotence. --- Preformations involved. --Its untoward significance. --Perfect function not unconscious. --Inchoate ethics. --Thought the entelechy of being. --Its exuberance

CHAPTER X--THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION Pages 236-255 Honesty in hedonism. --Necessary qualifications. --The will must judge. --Injustice inherent in representation. --Æsthetic and speculative cruelty. --Imputed values: their inconstancy. --Methods of control. --Example of fame. --Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic. --Irrational religious allegiance. --Pathetic idealisations. --Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy. --The test a controlled present ideal

CHAPTER XI--SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL Pages 256-268 The ultimate end a resultant. --Demands the substance of ideals. --Discipline of the will. --Demands made practical and consistent. --The ideal natural. --Need of unity and finality. --Ideals of nothing. --Darwin on moral sense. --Conscience and reason compared. --Reason imposes no new sacrifice. --Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle. --Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason

CHAPTER XII--FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE Pages 269-291 Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed. --Contrary currents of opinion. --Pantheism. --Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals. --Absolutist philosophy human and halting. --All science a deliverance of momentary thought. --All criticism likewise. --Origins inessential. --Ideals functional. --They are transferable to similar beings. --Authority internal. --Reason autonomous. --Its distribution. --Natural selection of minds. --Living stability. --Continuity necessary to progress. --Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage. --Perfectibility. --Nature and human nature. --Human nature formulated. --Its concrete description reserved for the sequel

Introduction to "The Life of Reason"

[Sidenote: Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates. ]

Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised byman, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science orreligion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man'scareer, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; althoughthis variation may often regard or propitiate things external, adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance ofthese external things, as well as their existence, he can establish onlyby the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in hislife. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man mightunfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countlessscintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandriansages, in a single version of the truth committed to each forinterpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination ofheart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? Inwhich of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its wholeexperience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer thesequestions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by anindividual, is the purpose of the following work. 

[Sidenote: Efficacious reflection is reason. ]

A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself amouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casualconsideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the samething. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principlesof synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism. So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks beforeand after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect orretrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative partof his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in whichnothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remainidle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging theabsent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitutea new complication in being) the practical function of modifying thefuture. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection andveers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properlycalled reason. Man's rational life consists in those moments in whichreflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent thenworks in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt. Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that itspresence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action. Reflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relativeworth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude ofwill in the presence of a world better understood and turned to somepurpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rationalaction; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, whatis the same thing, of profitable living. 

[Sidenote: The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and allaction justified by its fruits in consciousness. ]

Thus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate thehappy maintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, wemay say with Aristotle that life is reason in operation. The _Life ofReason_ will then be a name for that part of experience which perceivesand pursues ideals--all conduct so controlled and all sense sointerpreted as to perfect natural happiness. 

Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures andpains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those painswould be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if adevil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Sincethe beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, byhypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment wouldtake place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called aprogress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without theideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being. In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, havingits sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentiencewould not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and theincreasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for withouta picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow, the improvement could be neither remembered nor measured nor desired. The Life of Reason is accordingly neither a mere means nor a mereincident in human progress; it is the total and embodied progressitself, in which the pleasures of sense are included in so far as theycan be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount man's rationalmoments would be to take an inventory of all his goods; for he is nothimself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others. If he everappropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is only on the groundof some physical relation which they may have to his being. 

Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we shouldnot recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to somedegree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measurerelevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams, do not amount to intelligence until the images in the mind begin torepresent in some way, however symbolic, the forces and realitiesconfronted in action. There may well be intense consciousness in thetotal absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams, in madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths ofuniversal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lustswould not have the dignity of human souls even if they seemed to pursuecertain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be illumined byany vision of its goal. Reason and humanity begin with the union ofinstinct and ideation, when instinct becomes enlightened, establishesvalues in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art, whileat the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive, beginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realitiesamong which it arises. 

Reason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonlyled in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulseexpressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflectionexpressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life ofReason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at oncethe universal method of practice and its continual reward. Allreflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful inhappiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time totime a partial embodiment when he practises useful arts, when hispassions happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breedsvisions pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life ofReason in so far as he finds a steady light behind the world's glitterand a clear residuum of joy beneath pleasure or success. No experiencenot to be repented of falls without its sphere. Every solution to adoubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every practical achievementnot neutralised by a second maladjustment consequent upon it, everyconsolation not the seed of another greater sorrow, may be gatheredtogether and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happymarriage of two elements--impulse and ideation--which if wholly divorcedwould reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal isgenerated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideaswhich have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to bevain. 

[Sidenote: It is the sum of Art. ]

Thus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense ofthe word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their purposeis conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole ideais creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of theproduct is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Likeart, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, thespontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment. Both art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that itsissues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical andcognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justifyand understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created theworld in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extendits sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhereexemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as itis from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religionand mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were alreadyactual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously, to a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, aconfusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is importantto avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what theyare--poetic expressions of the ideal--help us to see how deeply rootedthis ideal is in man's mind, and afford us a standard by which tomeasure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams. For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man'simitation of divinity. 

[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable. ]

To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence, is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has anatural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who isattentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life ofReason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love ofman, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great andconfused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be aromantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot, without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals arefree, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than theliving natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and eachinitially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are notrealisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in theworld. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicialoffice to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentativeand ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards mustarise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure thatprogress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give itdirection and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward itsnatural goal. 

[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful. ]

There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which acritique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school, indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physicaltheory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrowfrom current science and speculation the picture they draw of man'sconditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These mayfurnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hintof its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on themind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series ofcatastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, thenaturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life fromthe outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses. Bacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, afunction still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments. Habitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in theirmouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in thatdirection which they conceive to be on the whole predominant. If theycombine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these areusually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued(probably, alas! because to do so is a psychological law); but whathappiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or byputting together their national prejudices and party saws. 

[Sidenote: Positivism no positive ideal. ]

The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinksitself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Likechildren escaped from school, they find their whole happiness infreedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great witwere required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If youastonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further thanthat there should be a great many people and that they should be allalike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, andlater they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They havediscarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal;they have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Reasonand gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, ispure humanity; and they have thus remained entangled in the colossalerror that ideals are something adventitious and unmeaning, not having asoil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there. 

[Sidenote: Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts andconditions. ]

The profound and pathetic ideas which inspired Christianity wereattached in the beginning to ancient myths and soon crystallised intomany new ones. The mythical manner pervades Christian philosophy; butmyth succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrepresenting itshistory and conditions. This method was indeed not original with theFathers; they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himselfin an open and harmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to hisschool. Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard poeticfictions as revelations of supernatural facts is as old as the soul'sprimitive incapacity to distinguish dreams from waking perceptions, signfrom thing signified, and inner emotions from external powers. Suchconfusions, though in a way they obey moral forces, make a rationalestimate of things impossible. To misrepresent the conditions andconsequences of action is no merely speculative error; it involves afalse emphasis in character and an artificial balance and co-ordinationamong human pursuits. When ideals are hypostasised into powers allegedto provide for their own expression, the Life of Reason cannot beconceived; in theory its field of operation is pre-empted and itsfunction gone, while in practice its inner impulses are turned awry byartificial stimulation and repression. 

The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, wereextraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and whilethey inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universefabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents andpowers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old worldremained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modernRome; and, what is more important, the natural springs of human actionwere still acknowledged, and if a supernatural discipline was imposed, it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation inwhich the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was notdestroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister:it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, onlya little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, isthe situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy hasnot appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken anew and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturbingeffect in practice and isolated its primary illusion. The symptoms havebeen cured and the disease driven in. 

[Sidenote: Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a naturalworld. ]

The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principlesubject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition andspontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think, however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that inProtestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation toreality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth hasbecome its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities, future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriouslypropose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to beshortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world anideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernaturalgrounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnisheddescription of things. Even immortality and the idea of God aresubmitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the otherhand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than thatwhich keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to theobjects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they willnot accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them, because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any humanor finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, whichcan alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life. 

The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; forthe Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in orderto win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but thiseffort and discipline, which had of course been mythically sanctioned, not only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and sublime tothink its object could ever have been earthly; and the supernaturalmachinery which was to have secured prosperity, while that stillenticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion it hadartificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effortwhen you have forgotten your aim. 

An earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love ofreal things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeperthan the earth's foundations--such an earnestness, until culture turnsit into intelligent interests, will naturally breed a new mythology. Itwill try to place some world of Afrites and shadowy giants behind theconstellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be itscompanions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague andinfinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for thosewhich the earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they areparts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yetzealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed onsomething invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake orenjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art andlittle joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberalmist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole nopertinent direction. 

[Sidenote: The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals. ]

In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancientsled a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation asmen might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leapedat once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thusgiving that background to human life which shrewd observation wouldalways have descried, and which modern science has laboriouslyrediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions, what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being. Heraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant andpervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could bearrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all wasinstability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remainsthe empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial divisionwhich Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feelagain the absolute aptness of Heraclitus's expressions. These werethought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetratingand direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention andreflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man whodiscloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing butinnocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism, scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways triedto fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuousenough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice toits direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet ofimmediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who doesnot rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, atranscendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas. 

[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate. ]

The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and theexpounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. Allthey could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declareeverything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reasonin which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus hadopened the door into another region: had he passed through, hisphilosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms wouldhave forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials. Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such asynthesis had not yet arrived. 

[Sidenote: Democritus and the naturally intelligible. ]

At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reducephenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, andto conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what anatural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is notmerely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought thisscientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychicexistence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which naturalscience has since practically abandoned but which it may some day becompelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even forchemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformationif they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but thatvery grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must befor ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearlyformulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligibleas we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also itfails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it morepropitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion aswe learn better how to live in it. 

The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to beworlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their innerorganisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did itdisclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only ifconstant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. Sothat while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysicaltruth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and efficaciousstructure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practicalintelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason. His system, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partlyrevived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it representsan ultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in someparticular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others. In natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins, transmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself. 

Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato. It is a pity that Democritus' physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. Forwith the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to explain it, thetheory of existence is complete; and had a complete physical theory beenincorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked noneof its parts. Democritus, however, appeared too late, when ideal sciencehad overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialecticalphysics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies, built his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunderstanding, andcondemned thought to confusion for two thousand years. 

[Sidenote: Socrates and the autonomy of mind. ]

If the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them thefirst natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them thefirst moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenianagora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any otherscene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence, intellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Idealscience lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise ofreason, in signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Itssum total is to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology mightdescribe a man, but to know, as the saying is, one's own mind. Nor is hewho knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician hasnothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyonebut the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; itsonly object is its own intent. Having developed in the spirit theconsciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic andethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he mademan the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, asthey neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which hadfirst raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heavenand earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion anduse, so that man's works might justify themselves to his mind, now foundin Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally where the Lifeof Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived. 

[Sidenote: Plato gave the ideal its full expression. ]

Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and hisutilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to whatgives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism--if we choose totake it symbolically--was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece werenot honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appearedthere in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, becauseyou knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul mightharbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problemthat seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato tobring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit fromthe depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which hadinspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civictraditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk ofevening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtuesthat brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in sosad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made himcensure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished tosee beauty flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that madehim harsh to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough topreserve the liberal life. And when he broke away from politicalpreoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations provedthe absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothingpertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality. 

[Sidenote: Aristotle supplied its natural basis. ]

Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever beencarried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precisionto many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour andmore enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety andadequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race. Plato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certainprophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and therational; he saw human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physicaldangers that he wished to give it mythical sanctions, and his fondnessfor transmigration and nether punishments was somewhat more thanplayful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the firstplace, Aristotle's has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyedexpression of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature isperfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everythingnatural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested andweighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato'smore discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. TheLife of Reason finds there its classic explication. 

[Sidenote: Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement. ]

As it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free frompreoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable inconsequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbablethat a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle's scope, judgment, orauthority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted. Itmight seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been donebefore with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferiorthings at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler toread and to propagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justnessand masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles ofreason remain the same the facts of human life and of human consciencealter. A new background, a new basis of application, appears for logic, and it may be useful to restate old truths in new words, the better toprove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek, concise, and elementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the ideal argumentillustrations, appreciations, and conceptions which are not inseparablefrom its essence. In themselves, no doubt, these accessories are betterthan what in modern times would be substituted for them, being lesssophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise whatis profound and universal in natural morality by embodying it in imageswhich do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the lastsanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world, because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish tous. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, andhonour. 

The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most, things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constantself-sacrifice--piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might addthat his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours areextravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged hisgreater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back andbecome like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality andlittle sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do notwish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we canadopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of theirdevelopment; their foundation in all the extant forces of human natureand their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. Theseforces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relativepower. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs tofight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of consciencehas veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character. 

Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics isthe impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent historyhas afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of whichAristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarifyeven his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments andclarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialecticwith physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy isthe aggravated extension. Socrates' pupils could not abandon his idealprinciples, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theologywas afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being nonaturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond themythical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much asAristotle's judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Theirrelative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had nophysics and that Aristotle's physics was false; so that ideal science inthe one suffered from want of environment and control, while in theother it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application. 

[Sidenote: Plato's myths in lieu of physics. ]

What had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts ofphilosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied toleave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. Headopted, accordingly, Heraclitus's doctrine of the immediate, which henow called the realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, ifyou arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of somelogical essence, such as discourse might define; in every fact some ideamakes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is aphenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep impression onPlato's mind and had helped to develop Socratic definitions: Parmenideshad called the concept of pure Being the only reality; and to satisfythe strong dialectic by which this doctrine was supported and at thesame time to bridge the infinite chasm between one formless substanceand many appearances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the manySocratic ideas, all of which were relevant to appearance, for the oneconcept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired what is calledmetaphysical subsistence; for they stood in the place of the EleaticAbsolute, and at the same time were the realities that phenomenamanifested. 

The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat istechnical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to sayon any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful inmisunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were nowconceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it andcaused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitionscould thus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a substantialphysical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until goodsense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imaginedpeopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth. Aristotle rejected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thoughtthey might still be essences operative in nature, if only they wereidentified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thuslost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for thesense in which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purelydialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world; but theappearance of these characters and values here and now is what needsexplanation in physics, an explanation which can be furnished, ofcourse, only by the physical concatenation and distribution of causes. 

[Sidenote: Aristotle's final causes. Modern science can avoid suchexpedients. ]

Aristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle's make this necessarydistinction between efficient cause and formal essence; but as hisscience was only natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility inhis eyes, the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, toits ideal quality; as in heredity the father's human character, not hisphysical structure, might seem to warrant the son's humanity. Everyideal, before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some otherembodiment; but as when the ultimate purpose of the cosmos is consideredit seems to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal mustsomehow exist disembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, inorder to supply, by way of magic attraction, a physical cause forperpetual movement in the world. 

It must be confessed, in justice to this consummate philosopher, who isnot less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination, that the transformation of the highest good into a physical power ismerely incidental with him, and due to a want of faith (at that timeexcusable) in mechanism and evolution. Aristotle's deity is always amoral ideal and every detail in its definition is based ondiscrimination between the better and the worse. No accommodation to theways of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of heaven; thisdeity is not condemned to do whatever happens nor to absorb whateverexists. It is mythical only in its physical application; in moralphilosophy it remains a legitimate conception. 

Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute forthat eternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnantto physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well beidentified with an impassible intellect, which should do nothing butpossess all truth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and notransitive process. Such an intellect and truth are expressions having adifferent metaphorical background and connotation, but, when thoughtout, an identical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standardwhich human thought proposes to itself. This function is their effectiveessence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surelyendows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantasticis only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, whichobliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world. Even this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much aspossible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object oflove or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy isimputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in thefunctioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal, endowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absoluteintellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent tothe Life of Reason as Plato's idea of the good. Though lesscomprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from allpassion and mortality), it is more adequate and distinct in the regionit dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking;which is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and toabsorb and be absorbed in the truth. 

The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests inphysics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breathwhich had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longerinspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events, they took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics becamea matter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mouldthe state or give any positive aim to existence. The time wasapproaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the otherworld; reason had abdicated the throne, and religion, after that briefinterregnum, resumed it for long ages. 

[Sidenote: Transcendentalism true but inconsequential. ]

Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observerwho at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideallytogether. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of theconditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of hisinterests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus andDemocritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago apicture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day, has done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics stillrepeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a moreradical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, inspite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing takenfor granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling, like man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, neededconstructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in hisunstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To havereverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is aninteresting achievement; but the construction is already made bycommon-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germansto propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospectiveself-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect andembarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it hasknown perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising ordialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we aremen thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is adream, and how should thinking be more? Yet the thinking must go on, and the only vital question is to what practical or poetic conceptionsit is able to lead us. 

[Sidenote: Verbal ethics. ]

Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account ofwhat goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so muchto help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs tomodern moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art ofits attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts orsome theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the idealsreigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with thesecondary question What ought I to do? without having answered theprimary question, What ought to be? They attach morals to religionrather than to politics, and this religion unhappily long ago ceased tobe wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaidwith reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less theyleave in the one labelled "morality" the more sublime they think theirmorality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so farthat nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad regionwhich should contain all human goods. 

[Sidenote: Spinoza and the Life of Reason. ]

Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial viewsabout the conditions of welfare; the basis is laid in authority ratherthan in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than inhappiness. One great modern philosopher, however, was free from thesepreconceptions, and might have reconstituted the Life of Reason had hehad a sufficient interest in culture. Spinoza brought man back intonature, and made him the nucleus of all moral values, showing how he mayrecognise his environment and how he may master it. But Spinoza'ssympathy with mankind fell short of imagination; any noble political orpoetical ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned seemed to him insane, everything human necessarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal, with the stars shining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinozacultivated mysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet inspeculation, he remained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing wouldneed to be changed in his system if the Life of Reason, in its higherranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is notnecessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep andgenerosity in Spinoza's practical ideals. 

[Sidenote: Modern and classic sources of inspiration. ]

For moral philosophy we are driven back, then, upon the ancients; butnot, of course, for moral inspiration. Industrialism and democracy, theFrench Revolution, the Renaissance, and even the Catholic system, whichin the midst of ancient illusions enshrines so much tenderness andwisdom, still live in the world, though forgotten by philosophers, andpoint unmistakably toward their several goals. Our task is not toconstruct but only to interpret ideals, confronting them with oneanother and with the conditions which, for the most part, they alikeignore. There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which isbehind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself be refuted; butit may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent, when itssatisfaction is seen to be either naturally impossible or inconsistentwith better things. The age of controversy is past; that ofinterpretation has succeeded. 

Here, then, is the programme of the following work: Starting with theimmediate flux, in which all objects and impulses are given, to describethe Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to beprimary, to show how the conception of nature and life gathers aroundthem, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which areapproached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A greattask, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age eitherto execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlinesof an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present andindividual intelligence more resolute and free. 

REASON IN COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER I--THE BIRTH OF REASON

[Sidenote: Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatiblewith a chosen good. ]

Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question oncemuch debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so muchbecause it had been solved as because one party had been silenced bysocial pressure. The question is bound to recur in an age whenobservation and dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalistslook back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds andshifting its character in regeneration. The order now established in theworld may be traced back to a situation in which it did not appear. Dialecticians, on the other hand, refute this presumption by urging thatevery collocation of things must have been preceded by anothercollocation in itself no less definite and precise; and further thatsome principle of transition or continuity must always have obtained, else successive states would stand in no relation to one another, notably not in the relation of cause and effect, expressed in a naturallaw, which is presupposed in this instance. Potentialities aredispositions, and a disposition involves an order, as does also thepassage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus the world, we aretold, must always have possessed a structure. 

The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with aqualification. Chaos doubtless has existed and will return--nay, itreigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of theuniverse--if by chaos we understand a nature containing none of theobjects we are wont to distinguish, a nature such that human life andhuman thought would be impossible in its bosom; but this nature must bepresumed to have an order, an order directly importing, if the tendencyof its movement be taken into account, all the complexities andbeauties, all the sense and reason which exist now. Order is accordinglycontinual; but only when order means not a specific arrangement, favourable to a given form of life, but any arrangement whatsoever. Theprocess by which an arrangement which is essentially unstable graduallyshifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment itinvolves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all theforms which may have arrested attention and generated love; its initialenergy defeats every purpose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor isit here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their owncauses is always preposterous; for in this case even the mythical sensewhich might be attached to such language is inapplicable. Here theprocess, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity, support the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realisedfor a moment only; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to begethis children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them. 

[Sidenote: Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent. ]

Of course the various states of the world, when we survey themretrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historictruth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. Ifwe wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an "Absolute"where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyondit, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists, and that the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately;but such language involves an after-image of motion and life, ofpreparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures allpre-supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth byits very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have isto shield confusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought forthe Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous aboutus, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe canwish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them;only in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in itsrelative capacity can it be good for anything. 

The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in theworld and out of which the next moment's order is developed, mayaccordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the valuessuggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged tothe first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probablycarried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral andeulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue ofits momentum, a basis for the second moment's values as well. 

[Sidenote: In experience order is relative to interests, which determinethe moral status of all powers. ]

Human life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipientorder in the midst of what seems a vast though, to some extent, avanishing chaos. This reputed chaos can be deciphered and appreciated byman only in proportion as the order in himself is confirmed andextended. For man's consciousness is evidently practical; it clings tohis fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature ofhis fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on whichthose fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness hasnot been fulfilled at all, consciousness is wholly confused; the worldit envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if experience has falleninto shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects inhuman discourse, the inference is drawn that the original dispositionof things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to justthose feats of instinct and intelligence which have been sinceaccomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws maythus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the furthermarch of events. It will be observed, however, that what is crediblyasserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself ableto make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracularfashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rationalconstruction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogencyfor the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although theuniverse, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience certainlyhas begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which itstill only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of thisawakening is of course not the same as that of the environing worldultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discoveryitself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed. We may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to thereal universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall maketheir acquaintance in due season and better appreciate their moralstatus, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retracethe visions and reflections out of which those apparitions have grown. 

[Sidenote: The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning. ]

To revert to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration, not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology, retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appearand write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantialevidence. Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a worldalready wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in whatis called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, andits function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensationsharmonious with one another and with the outer world on which theydepend. It did not arise until the will or conscious stress, by whichany modification of living bodies' inertia seems to be accompanied, began to respond to represented objects, and to maintain that inertianot absolutely by resistance but only relatively and indirectly throughlabour. Reason has thus supervened at the last stage of an adaptationwhich had long been carried on by irrational and even unconsciousprocesses. Nature preceded, with all that fixation of impulses andconditions which gives reason its tasks and its _point-d'appui_. Nevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason belongs only externallyto its life. The description of conditions involves their previousdiscovery and a historian equipped with many data and many analogies ofthought. Such scientific resources are absent in those first moments ofrational living which we here wish to recall; the first chapter inreason's memoirs would no more entail the description of its realenvironment than the first chapter in human history would include trueaccounts of astronomy, psychology, and animal evolution. 

[Sidenote: The flux first. ]

In order to begin at the beginning we must try to fall back onuninterpreted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect, however, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feelingrejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds. They often think, when they fall back on elements necessarilyindescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they aremystics, distrusting thought and craving the largeness of indistinction, they may embrace this alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seempositively painful, hoping to find rest there through self-abnegation. If on the contrary they are rationalists they may reject the immediatewith scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books theycannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however, are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even ifdialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is thesubstrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality ofmatter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one whoattempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist, dealing with thin after-images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinksinto the immediate much better appreciated the situation. This immediateis not God but chaos; its nothingness is pregnant, restless, andbrutish; it is that from which all things emerge in so far as they haveany permanence or value, so that to lapse into it again is a dullsuicide and no salvation. Peace, which is after all what the mysticseeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches it ina measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline he stillpractises, not by his heats or his languors. 

The seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the immediate, but what reasondraws thence is momentum and power to rise above its source. It is theperturbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks its peace inreason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of idealpermanence. When the flux manages to form an eddy and to maintain bybreathing and nutrition what we call a life, it affords some slightfoothold and object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark inthe desert, a moving habitation for the eternal. 

[Sidenote: Life the fixation of interests. ]

Life begins to have some value and continuity so soon as there issomething definite that lives and something definite to live for. Theprimacy of will, as Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythicalway of designating this situation. Of course a will can have no being inthe absence of realities or ideas marking its direction and contrastingthe eventualities it seeks with those it flies from; and tendency, noless than movement, needs an organised medium to make it possible, whileaspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet a principle of choice isnot deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formalrelations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; allvaluation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot bephysically arrested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of somepoint in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise itcould show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impossible toapproach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exertwill in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges thetranscendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definitepassions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outerworld--this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, ofall failure or success. 

[Sidenote: Primary dualities. ]

Those sensations in which a transition is contained need only analysisto yield two ideal and related terms--two points in space or twocharacters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, nowand then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accentuatessome term and so makes possible a discrimination of parts and directionsin its own movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient interests. What we first discover in ourselves, before the influence we obey hasgiven rise to any definite idea, is the working of instincts already inmotion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject first teach us the pointsof the compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home. 

[Sidenote: First gropings. Instinct the nucleus of reason. ]

The guide in early sensuous education is the same that conducts thewhole Life of Reason, namely, impulse checked by experiment, andexperiment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child todistinguish the nurse's breast from sundry blank or disquietingpresences? What induces him to arrest that image, to mark itsassociates, and to recognise them with alacrity? The discomfort of itsabsence and the comfort of its possession. To that image is attached thechief satisfaction he knows, and the force of that satisfactiondisentangles it before all other images from the feeble and fluidcontinuum of his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality iswhat first is able to appease his unrest. 

Had the group of feelings, now welded together in fruition, found noinstinct in him to awaken and become a signal for, the group would neverhave persisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass byunnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred. Experience would have remained absolute inexperience, as foolishlyperpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in agrove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as to be arousedby a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, whenit came, could have in consequence a meaning and an individuality. Itseemed by divine right to signify something interesting, something real, because by natural contiguity it flowed from something pertinent andimportant to life. Every accompanying sensation which shared thatprivilege, or in time was engrossed in that function, would ultimatelybecome a part of that conceived reality, a quality of that thing. 

The same primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but expressive ofbodily functions, is observable in the behaviour of animals, and inthose dreams, obsessions, and primary passions which in the midst ofsophisticated life sometimes lay bare the obscure groundwork of humannature. Reason's work is there undone. We can observe sporadic growths, disjointed fragments of rationality, springing up in a moral wilderness. In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instinctsaccidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man's gayety, dispelshis random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looksfor a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only inthe presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, heknows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that imagepursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unaccustomed tragicearnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion bestrong there is no previous interest or duty that will be rememberedbefore it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganised by it; itmay impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what isthe root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct, normallyintermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managedto dominate a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its moreor less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. Thismadness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, inhis life, the man has something to live for. The blind affinity thatlike a magnet draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting them, suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light. 

[Sidenote: Better and worse the fundamental categories. ]

Here, on a small scale and on a precarious foundation, we may seeclearly illustrated and foreshadowed that Life of Reason which is simplythe unity given to all existence by a mind _in love with the good_. Inthe higher reaches of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationalitydepends on distinguishing the excellent; and that distinction can bemade, in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse. As life is abetter form given to force, by which the universal flux is subdued tocreate and serve a somewhat permanent interest, so reason is a betterform given to interest itself, by which it is fortified and propagated, and ultimately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The substance to whichthis form is given remains irrational; so that rationality, like allexcellence, is something secondary and relative, requiring a naturalbeing to possess or to impute it. When definite interests are recognisedand the values of things are estimated by that standard, action at thesame time veering in harmony with that estimation, then reason has beenborn and a moral world has arisen. 

CHAPTER II--FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS

[Sidenote: Dreams before thoughts. ]

Consciousness is a born hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation, to spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at firstquite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire anotion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to loseits hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget thepresent with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive theabsent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make forself-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when nottoo rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action;but no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning andgenerous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of itsown interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire evenan indirect concern in its future, did not love of things externalattach it to their fortunes. Attachment to ideal terms is indeed whatgives consciousness its continuity; its parts have no relevance orrelation to one another save what they acquire by depending on the samebody or representing the same objects. Even when consciousness growssophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only forits ideals; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it mayincidentally prize itself also, when it has come to regard itself as apart of that world. Initially, however, it is free even from that honestselfishness; it looks straight out; it is interested in the movements itobserves; it swells with the represented world, suffers with itscommotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm. 

Natural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside, and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationalitywhich are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling fromhabit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspectsof feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are reallyperipheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream. Psychologists have discussed perception _ad nauseam_ and become horriblyentangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforceapproach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and allevidence is external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all ifthey did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasionsdramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject toexamination will yield nothing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such adream can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist hasinferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; itis an ulterior practical function acquired by a dream which has becomesymbolic of its conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny. Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; theirstatus cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms ofimagination happily grown significant. In imagination, not inperception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reasonare but its chastened and ultimate form. 

[Sidenote: The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces. ]

Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at timesmiss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while atother times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his ownbrain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we shouldhardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not toretain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention anduniversal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothinghuman alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involveperfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known tohistory nourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He isencased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keepshim from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; butthat integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest andhighest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreamingwithin his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusementwhich sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence isstill decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool atcourt. 

[Sidenote: Internal order supervenes. ]

If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct betterthan instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent forthat office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinctinvolves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. Thepredetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus ourattention on practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with anelastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alonecompels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity ofideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that all ideas come fromexperience; they never could have been poets and must have forgottenthat they were ever children. The great difficulty in education is toget experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continuallydisallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they buthabit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us todisregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversionsto a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant andhas escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being"out of their senses, " when they have in fact fallen back into them; orof those who have "lost their mind, " when they have lost merely thathabitual control over consciousness which prevented it from flaring intoall sorts of obsessions and agonies. Their bodies having becomederanged, their minds, far from correcting that derangement, instantlyshare and betray it. A dream is always simmering below the conventionalsurface of speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches andserenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through. Even therewe are seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural world;somewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic elements will slip into thescheme and baffle rational ambition. 

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with itsenvironment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering canset themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame thatsustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit. If they areunstable at all, it is because they ordinarily correspond to strains andconjunctions which a vigorous body overcomes, or which dissolve the bodyaltogether. A pain not incidental to the play of practical instincts mayeasily be recurrent, and it might be perpetual if even the worst habitswere not intermittent and the most useless agitations exhausting. Somerespite will therefore ensue upon pain, but no magic cure. Madness, inlike manner, if pronounced, is precarious, but when speculative enoughto be harmless or not strong enough to be debilitating, it too may lastfor ever. 

An imaginative life may therefore exist parasitically in a man, hardlytouching his action or environment. There is no possibility ofexorcising these apparitions by their own power. A nightmare does notdispel itself; it endures until the organic strain which caused it isrelaxed either by natural exhaustion or by some external influence. Therefore human ideas are still for the most part sensuous and trivial, shifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representingnothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature, moreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South Americanjungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothingbut bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there isno end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, flamingmythologies, metaphysical perspectives lost in infinity, arise inremarkable profusion. In time, however, there comes a change of climateand the whole forest disappears. 

It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired practical competence, toderide a merely imaginative life. Derision, however, is notinterpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is totrace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise theirown fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles oforder and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in theseprinciples the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting maybe its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as theIsraelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of thatdream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the goldenegg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science. 

[Sidenote: Intrinsic pleasure in existence. ]

[Sidenote: Pleasure a good, ]

Visionary experience has a first value in its possible pleasantness. Whyany form of feeling should be delightful is not to be explainedtranscendentally: a physiological law may, after the fact, render everyinstance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal qualityof an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby bedisclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states ofmind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for noreason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic whichcertain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain isintelligible when we remember that their chief interest is edification, and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable virtuein a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness. But to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesqueaffectation: it amounts to giving "good" and "evil" artificialdefinitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. Not onlyis good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure isthe basal example, and evil the corresponding rejection which is thevery essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense totheir highest embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain somethingwhich it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived anyperson of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptibleknave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, norcould the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse thatsentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhorsanything, no matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire aproportionate value which no chorus of contradiction ringing through allthe spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itselfremains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of thingscan only change that totality proportionately to the ingredientabsorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its owncolour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things beingequal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the morepains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its totaltemper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; forthere is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves tosuperstition; and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost. 

[Sidenote: but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object. ]

Pleasures differ sensibly in intensity; but the intensest pleasures areoften the blindest, and it is hard to recall or estimate a feeling withwhich no definite and complex object is conjoined. The first step inmaking pleasure intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make itpleasure in something. The object it suffuses acquires a value, andgives the pleasure itself a place in rational life. The pleasure can nowbe named, its variations studied in reference to changes in its object, and its comings and goings foreseen in the order of events. The morearticulate the world that produces emotion the more controllable andrecoverable is the emotion itself. Therefore diversity and order inideas makes the life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A voluminousdumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the pleasure spread thin over amultitude of tame perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in onescale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory and prospect, if not inexperience, diversified pleasure must needs carry the day. 

[Sidenote: Subhuman delights. ]

Here we come upon a crisis in human development which shows clearly howmuch the Life of Reason is a natural thing, a growth that a differentcourse of events might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to havesaid on his death-bed that science was mere trifling and that nothingwas real but love. Love, for such a man, doubtless involved objects andideas: it was love of persons. The same revulsion of feeling may, however, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a tormentbecause its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are mingledwith longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would bewithout ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life anunutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if acorpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath theLife of Reason for the substance and infinity of happiness. In all theserevulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuchas systematic living is after all an experiment, as is the formation ofanimal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out of which these growths havecome may very likely have had its own incommunicable values, itsabsolute thrills, which we vainly try to remember and to which, inmoments of dissolution, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures andstrains may be the substance of consciousness; and as matter seeks itsown level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returnshave a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passionsand ideas, when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and enlargetheir volume as they lose their form. This loss of form may not beunwelcome, if it is the formless that, by anticipation, speaks throughwhat is surrendering its being. Though to acquire or impart form isdelightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet aeuthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affectation in the poetwho says, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die"; and, without anypoetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and everyluxurious escape from humanity. 

The step by which pleasure and pain are attached to ideas, so as to bepredictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no meansirrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direction of reason; andthough reason's path is only one of innumerable courses perhaps open toexistence, it is the only one that we are tracing here; the only one, obviously, which human discourse is competent to trace. 

[Sidenote: Animal living. ]

When consciousness begins to add diversity to its intensity, its valueis no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt variations in its toneare attached to the observed movement of its objects; in these objectsits values are imbedded. A world loaded with dramatic values may thusarise in imagination; terrible and delightful presences may chase oneanother across the void; life will be a kind of music made by all thesenses together. Many animals probably have this form of experience;they are not wholly submerged in a vegetative stupor; they can discernwhat they love or fear. Yet all this is still a disordered apparitionthat reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Nowgorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the landscape brightens andfades with the day. If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, seesafar off his master arriving after long absence, the change in theanimal's feeling is not merely in the quantity of pure pleasure; a newcircle of sensations appears, with a new principle governing interestand desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead of freedom love. But the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he hascome again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at hisfeet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase--all thatis an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told indithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event isprovidential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolutehelplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yetthat unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. Thisis the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; andit lies in truth not far beneath the level of ordinary humanconsciousness. 

[Sidenote: Causes at last discerned. ]

The story which such animal experience contains, however, needs only tobe better articulated in order to disclose its underlying machinery. Thefigures even of that disordered drama have their exits and theirentrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capableof fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. Thereupon athird step is made in imaginative experience. As pleasures and painswere formerly distributed among objects, so objects are now marshalledinto a world. _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_, said a poetwho stood near enough to fundamental human needs and to the great answerwhich art and civilisation can make to them, to value the Life of Reasonand think it sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into knowledgeand motion into action. It is to fix the associates of things, so thattheir respective transformations are collated, and they becomesignificant of one another. In proportion as such understanding advanceseach moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of therest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms withresource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis orissue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because itsees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worstpredicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled withnothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes roomfor the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot ofthe whole. 

At the threshold of reason there is a kind of choice. Not allimpressions contribute equally to the new growth; many, in fact, whichwere formerly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure. Attentionignores them, in its haste to arrive at what is significant of somethingmore. Nor are the principles of synthesis, by which the aristocratic fewestablish their oligarchy, themselves unequivocal. The first principlesof logic are like the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have beenquite different and yet produced, by a now unthinkable method, alanguage no less significant than the one we speak. Twenty-six lettersmay suffice for a language, but they are a wretched minority among allpossible sounds. So the forms of perception and the categories ofthought, which a grammarian's philosophy might think primordialnecessities, are no less casual than words or their syntactical order. Why, we may ask, did these forms assert themselves here? What principlesof selection guide mental growth?

[Sidenote: Attention guided by bodily impulse. ]

To give a logical ground for such a selection is evidently impossible, since it is logic itself that is to be accounted for. A natural groundis, in strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connections, wherethought has not reduced them to a sort of equivalence and necessity, aremere data and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to leave thequestion altogether unanswered. By using our senses we may discover, notindeed why each sense has its specific quality or exists at all, butwhat are its organs and occasions. In like manner we may, by developingthe Life of Reason, come to understand its conditions. Whenconsciousness awakes the body has, as we long afterward discover, adefinite organisation. Without guidance from reflection bodily processeshave been going on, and most precise affinities and reactions have beenset up between its organs and the surrounding objects. 

On these affinities and reactions sense and intellect are grafted. Theplants are of different nature, yet growing together they bear excellentfruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate stimulations thatattention is riveted on definite sensations. It is as the systemexercises its natural activities that passion, will, and meditationpossess the mind. No syllogism is needed to persuade us to eat, noprophecy of happiness to teach us to love. On the contrary, the livingorganism, caught in the act, informs us how to reason and what to enjoy. The soul adopts the body's aims; from the body and from its instinctsshe draws a first hint of the right means to those accepted purposes. Thus reason enters into partnership with the world and begins to berespected there; which it would never be if it were not expressive ofthe same mechanical forces that are to preside over events and renderthem fortunate or unfortunate for human interests. Reason is significantin action only because it has begun by taking, so to speak, the body'sside; that sympathetic bias enables her to distinguish events pertinentto the chosen interests, to compare impulse with satisfaction, and, byrepresenting a new and circular current in the system, to preside overthe formation of better habits, habits expressing more instincts at onceand responding to more opportunities. 

CHAPTER III--THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS

[Sidenote: Nature man's home. ]

At first sight it might seem an idle observation that the first task ofintelligence is to represent the environing reality, a reality actuallyrepresented in the notion, universally prevalent among men, of a cosmosin space and time, an animated material engine called nature. In tryingto conceive nature the mind lisps its first lesson; natural phenomenaare the mother tongue of imagination no less than of science andpractical life. Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than asinhabitants of nature. Early experience knows no mystery which is notsomehow rooted in transformations of the natural world, and fancy canbuild no hope which would not be expressible there. But we are grown soaccustomed to this ancient apparition that we may be no longer aware howdifficult was the task of conjuring it up. We may even have forgottenthe possibility that such a vision should never have arisen at all. Abrief excursion into that much abused subject, the psychology ofperception, may here serve to remind us of the great work which thebudding intellect must long ago have accomplished unawares. 

[Sidenote: Difficulties in conceiving nature. ]

Consider how the shocks out of which the notion of material things is tobe built first strike home into the soul. Eye and hand, if we mayneglect the other senses, transmit their successive impressions, allvarying with the position of outer objects and with the other materialconditions. A chaos of multitudinous impressions rains in from all sidesat all hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses an originalprimacy. The taste, the smell, the alarming sounds of things arecontinually distracting attention. There are infinite reverberations inmemory of all former impressions, together with fresh fancies created inthe brain, things at first in no wise subordinated to external objects. All these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches' brew. Andmore: there are indications that inner sensations, such as those ofdigestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, whichhas not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that tothe whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of whatconsciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions andlethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings; trances such asfall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness. Against all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has tostruggle; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments anddisillusions of the past have not yet produced a completeenlightenment. 

[Sidenote: Transcendental qualms. ]

The onslaught made in the last century by the transcendental philosophyupon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed apertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing. Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for byenumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being eachits own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjointhemselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged commoncause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor woulda series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logicallyinvolve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point offact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there toacquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passingstates, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene. It is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association ofimages belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsicnecessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object havingthem for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group ofsensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of theelements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiarterm, a sort of personal presence. To this felt presence, certaininstinctive reactions are attached, and the sensations that may beinvolved in that apparition, when each for any reason becomes emphatic, are referred to it as its qualities or its effects. 

Such complications of course involve the gift of memory, with capacityto survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel theirimplication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, bythis sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have arepresentative function. And this is a great step. It manifests themind's powers. It illustrates those transformations of consciousness theprinciple of which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We mustaccordingly proceed with caution, for we are digging at the very rootsof reason. 

[Sidenote: Thought an aspect of life and transitive]

The chief perplexity, however, which besets this subject and makesdiscussions of it so often end in a cloud, is quite artificial. Thoughtis not a mechanical calculus, where the elements and the method exhaustthe fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on theanalogy of nutrition, generation, and art. Reason, as Hume said withprofound truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwiseif reason is to remain something transitive and existential; fortransition is unintelligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic ofexistence. Philosophers, however, having perceived that the function ofthought is to fix static terms and reveal eternal relations, haveinadvertently transferred to the living act what is true only of itsideal object; and they have expected to find in the process, treatedpsychologically, that luminous deductive clearness which belongs to theideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible, however, lies at theperiphery of experience, the surd at its core; and intelligence is butone centrifugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought mustexecute a metamorphosis; and while this is of course mysterious, it isone of those familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which are morenatural than dialectical lucidity itself; for dialectic grows cogent byfulfilling intent, but intent or meaning is itself vital andinexplicable. 

[Sidenote: Perception cumulative and synthetic]

The process of counting is perhaps as simple an instance as can be foundof a mental operation on sensible data. The clock, let us say, strikestwo: if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving thefirst blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retaining absolutelyno trace of that momentary oscillation and no altered habit, then it iscertain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could neverarise. The second stroke would be responded to with the same reactionwhich had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, nocomplication. However numerous the successive impressions might come tobe, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical incharacter with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonousresponse for ever. Just so generations of ephemeral insects thatsucceeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat thesame round of impressions--an everlasting progression without a shadowof progress. Such, too, is the idiot's life: his liquid brain transmitsevery impulse without resistance and retains the record of noimpression. 

Intelligence is accordingly conditioned by a modification of bothstructure and consciousness by dint of past events. To be aware that asecond stroke is not itself the first, I must retain something of theold sensation. The first must reverberate still in my ears when thesecond arrives, so that this second, coming into a consciousness stillfilled by the first, is a different experience from the first, whichfell into a mind perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the newcomer findsin the subsisting One a sponsor to christen it by the name of Two. Thefirst stroke was a simple 1. The second is not simply another 1, a mereiteration of the first. It is 1^{1}, where the coefficient representsthe reverberating first stroke, still persisting in the mind, andforming a background and perspective against which the new stroke may bedistinguished. The meaning of "two, " then, is "this after that" or "thisagain, " where we have a simultaneous sense of two things which have beenseparately perceived but are identified as similar in their nature. Repetition must cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative beforeit can give rise to the consciousness of repetition. 

The first condition of counting, then, is that the sensorium shouldretain something of the first impression while it receives the second, or (to state the corresponding mental fact) that the second sensationshould be felt together with a survival of the first from which it isdistinguished in point of existence and with which it is identified inpoint of character. 

[Sidenote: No identical agent needed. ]

Now, to secure this, it is not enough that the sensorium should bematerially continuous, or that a "spiritual substance" or a"transcendental ego" should persist in time to receive the secondsensation after having received and registered the first. A perfectlyelastic sensorium, a wholly unchanging soul, or a quite absolute egomight remain perfectly identical with itself through various experienceswithout collating them. It would then remain, in fact, more truly andliterally identical than if it were modified somewhat by thosesuccessive shocks. Yet a sensorium or a spirit thus unchanged would beincapable of memory, unfit to connect a past perception with one presentor to become aware of their relation. It is not identity in thesubstance impressed, but growing complication in the phenomenonpresented, that makes possible a sense of diversity and relation betweenthings. The identity of substance or spirit, if it were absolute, wouldindeed prevent comparison, because it would exclude modifications, andit is the survival of past modifications within the present that makescomparisons possible. We may impress any number of forms successively onthe same water, and the identity of the substance will not help thoseforms to survive and accumulate their effects. But if we have a surfacethat retains our successive stampings we may change the substance fromwax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labourwill survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actualplastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance oragent, that is efficacious in perpetuating thought and gatheringexperience. 

[Sidenote: Example of the sun. ]

Were not Nature and all her parts such models of patience andpertinacity, they never would have succeeded in impressing theirexistence on something so volatile and irresponsible as thought is. Asensation needs to be violent, like the sun's blinding light, to arrestattention, and keep it taut, as it were, long enough for the system toacquire a respectful attitude, and grow predisposed to resume it. Arepetition of that sensation will thereafter meet with a preparedresponse which we call recognition; the concomitants of the oldexperience will form themselves afresh about the new one and by theirconvergence give it a sort of welcome and interpretation. The movement, for instance, by which the face was raised toward the heavens wasperhaps one element which added to the first sensation, brightness, aconcomitant sensation, height; the brightness was not bright merely, but high. Now when the brightness reappears the face will more quicklybe lifted up; the place where the brightness shone will be looked for;the brightness will have acquired a claim to be placed somewhere. Theheat which at the same moment may have burned the forehead will also beexpected and, when felt, projected into the brightness, which will nowbe hot as well as high. So with whatever other sensations time mayassociate with this group. They will all adhere to the originalimpression, enriching it with an individuality which will render itbefore long a familiar complex in experience, and one easy to recogniseand to complete in idea. 

[Sidenote: His primitive divinity. ]

In the case of so vivid a thing as the sun's brightness many othersensations beside those out of which science draws the qualitiesattributed to that heavenly body adhere in the primitive mind to thephenomenon. Before he is a substance the sun is a god. He is beneficentand necessary no less than bright and high; he rises upon all happyopportunities and sets upon all terrors. He is divine, since all lifeand fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous revolutions. His coming andgoing are life and death to the world. As the sensations of light andheat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, sothe feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soulare projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more than toanything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originallyattributed. The emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate issueand term of his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of thoseemotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality. It is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies hisapparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. Thesubstance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore byno means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived tosupport the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It isa moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of allthe materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at handin our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which weare to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute thosemiscellaneous physical and psychical elements, and to divorce the godfrom the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a differentand more reflective stage in the Life of Reason. 

[Sidenote: Causes and essences contrasted. ]

When reflection, turning to the comprehension of a chaotic experience, busies itself about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some waythings coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events, that reflection is inevitably turned toward something dynamic andindependent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanicalscience. When on the other hand reflection stops to challenge andquestion the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possiblereturn as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned noless unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logicor the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in orderto normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order tonormalise their manifestations or constitution. Independence willultimately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes, essence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference indiscourse. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, theother their settled character. 

[Sidenote: Voracity of intellect. ]

We talk of recurrent perceptions, but materially considered noperception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holdsfor ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, whileit can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar, cannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has anative bias and inveterate preference for form and identification. Waterdoes not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experienceinto constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given inconsciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essenceitself--the character shared by those sundry perceptions--will stand andbecome a term in mental discourse. After a few strokes of the clock, the reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose countand perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. Ifthis is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as iscounting, how emphatically true must it be of continuous and infinitelyvaried perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses ofthe environment follow one another in quick succession, like a regimentof soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a newturn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our attention at somebreak. 

The senses in their natural play revert constantly to familiar objects, gaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. Theseslight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensationcomes to be not so much an addition of new items to consciousness as areburnishing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relationsare only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch thepassing phenomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work ofartifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectualinstinct and involves an æsthetic power of diving bodily into the streamof sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escapedat once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally everydatum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digestedfor the sake of its vital juices. The result is that what ordinarilyremains in memory is no representative of particular moments orshocks--though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreatedfrom within--but rather a logical possession, a sense of acquaintancewith a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of_knowledge_. 

[Sidenote: Can the transcendent be known?]

But what, we may ask, is this reality, which we boast to know? May notthe sceptic justly contend that nothing is so unknown and indeedunknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations whichreason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while theylasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what isthis new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever present, invisible butindispensable, unknowable yet alone interesting or important? Strangethat the only possible object or theme of our knowledge should besomething we cannot know. 

[Sidenote: Can the immediate be meant?]

An answer these doubts will perhaps appear if we ask ourselves what sortof contact with reality would satisfy us, and in what terms we expect ordesire to possess the subject-matter of our thoughts. Is it simplycorroboration that we look for? Is it a verification of truth in sense?It would be unreasonable, in that case, after all the evidence we demandhas been gathered, to complain that the ideal term thus concurrentlysuggested, the super-sensible substance, reality, or independent object, does not itself descend into the arena of immediate sensuouspresentation. Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devourand possess _what we mean_. Knowledge is recognition of somethingabsent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. It is an advance onsensation precisely because it is representative. The terms or goals ofthought have for their function to subtend long tracts of sensuousexperience, to be ideal links between fact and fact, invisible wiresbehind the scenes, threads along which inference may run in makingphenomena intelligible and controllable. An idea that should become animage would cease to be ideal; a principle that is to remain a principlecan never become a fact. A God that you could see with the eyes of thebody, a heaven you might climb into by a ladder planted at Bethel, wouldbe parts of this created and interpretable world, not terms in itsinterpretation nor objects in a spiritual sphere. Now external objectsare thought to be principles and sources of experience; they areaccordingly conceived realities on an ideal plane. We may look for allthe evidence we choose before we declare our inference to be warranted;but we must not ask for something more than evidence, nor expect to knowrealities without inferring them anew. They are revealed only tounderstanding. We cannot cease to think and still continue to know. 

[Sidenote: Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?]

It may be said, however, that principles and external objects areinteresting only because they symbolise further sensations, thatthought is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation is aghostly process which we crave to materialise into bodily possession. Wemay grow sick of inferring truth and long rather to become reality. Intelligence is after all no compulsory possession; and while some of uswould gladly have more of it, others find that they already have toomuch. The tension of thought distresses them and to represent what theycannot and would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. Tosuch minds experience that should merely corroborate ideas would prolongdissatisfaction. The ideas must be realised; they must pass intoimmediacy. If reality (a word employed generally in a eulogistic sense)is to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal of thought can be real. Allintelligible objects and the whole universe of mental discourse wouldthen be an unreal and conventional structure, impinging ultimately onsense from which it would derive its sole validity. 

There would be no need of quarrelling with such a philosophy, were notits use of words rather misleading. Call experience in its existentialand immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality; that will notprevent reality from having an ideal dimension. The intellectual worldwill continue to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bubbles ofconsciousness on which it is painted. Reality would not be, in thatcase, what thought aspires to reach. Consciousness is the least idealof things when reason is taken out of it. Reality would then needthought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, itwould have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lentmusic to throbs and significance to being. 

[Sidenote: Mens naturaliter platonica. ]

The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Isnot thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense, if it be the only reality, be sentient sometimes of the ideal? What thesite is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe ofdiscourse. The latter is all held materially within the limits definedby the former; but if immediate experience be the seat of the moralworld, the moral world is the only interesting possession of immediateexperience. When a waste is built on, however, it is a violent paradoxto call it still a waste; and an immediate experience that representsthe rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal harmonies read into thewhole in the act of representing it, is an immediate experience raisedto its highest power: it is the Life of Reason. In vain, then, will aphilosophy of intellectual abstention limit so Platonic a term asreality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the idealaspect that endows existence with character and value, together withrepresentative scope and a certain lien upon eternity. 

More legitimate, therefore, would be the assertion that knowledgereaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when, as in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed bythinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is nolonger in view; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. Ifnecessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he deems the fact anargument against the importance and validity of sensation, not in theleast a disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be found on earthfor the Platonic city, its constitution is none the less recorded andenshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not whereto lay its head. What in the sensualistic or mystical system was calledreality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as animaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear tobe a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for itsestimation. 

It is this rationalistic or Platonic system (little as most men maysuspect the fact) that finds a first expression in ordinary perception. When you distinguish your sensations from their cause and laugh at theidealist (as this kind of sceptic is called) who says that chairs andtables exist only in your mind, you are treating a figment of reason asa deeper and truer thing than the moments of life whose blind experiencethat reason has come to illumine. What you call the evidence of sense ispure confidence in reason. You will not be so idiotic as to make noinferences from your sensations; you will not pin your faith sounimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world existswhen you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has widerscope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes, many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It isthe fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you notonly look but _see_; for you understand. 

[Sidenote: Identity and independence predicated of things. ]

Now the practical burden of such understanding, if you take the troubleto analyse it, will turn out to be what the sceptic says it is:assurance of eventual sensations. But as these sensations, in memory andexpectation, are numerous and indefinitely variable, you are not able tohold them clearly before the mind; indeed, the realisation of all thepotentialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future is a taskabsolutely beyond imagination. Yet your present impressions, dependentas they are on your chance attitude and disposition and on a thousandtrivial accidents, are far from representing adequately all that mightbe discovered or that is actually known about the object before you. This object, then, to your apprehension, is not identical with any ofthe sensations that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all thesesensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothingassignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in yourfancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity, the sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which, underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their survivinglinkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part ofits present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous in itsmaterials and ideal in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared, and is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect which the objectpresents to a particular observer. Here are two identifications. In thefirst place various sensations and felt relations, which cannot be keptdistinct in the mind, fall together into one term of discourse, represented by a sign, a word, or a more or less complete sensuousimage. In the second place the new perception is referred to that idealentity of which it is now called a manifestation and effect. 

Such are the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is aterm of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations, and expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by theassertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation, recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is theideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation ofthat object. 

Thus the notion of an independent and permanent world is an ideal termused to mark and as it were to justify the cohesion in space and therecurrence in time of recognisable groups of sensations. This coherenceand recurrence force the intellect, if it would master experience at allor understand anything, to frame the idea of such a reality. If we wishto defend the use of such an idea and prove to ourselves its necessity, all we need do is to point to that coherence and recurrence in externalphenomena. That brave effort and flight of intelligence which in thebeginning raised man to the conception of reality, enabling him todiscount and interpret appearance, will, if we retain our trust inreason, raise us continually anew to that same idea, by a no lessspontaneous and victorious movement of thought. 

CHAPTER IV--ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY

[Sidenote: Psychology as a solvent. ]

The English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea of substance, and whose traces we have in general followed in the above account, didnot study the question wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of ascience that aims at nothing but a historical analysis of mind. They hada more or less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They thoughtthat if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they woulddiscredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If theyretained confidence in any notion--as Hobbes in body, Locke in matterand in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of thismalicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven--it wasmerely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of theirreasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideaswhose materials could all be accounted for in consciousness and referredto sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted anddeprived of further validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather theuncriticised, could be true. Consequently the advance of psychologymeant, in this school, the retreat of reason; for as one notion afteranother was clarified and reduced to its elements it was _ipso facto_deprived of its function. 

So far were these philosophers from conceiving that validity and truthare ideal relations, accruing to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use, that while on the one hand they pointed out vital affinities andpragmatic sanctions in the mind's economy they confessed on the otherthat the outcome of their philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could befound in the mind which was not a phenomenon there, and no inferencecould be drawn from these phenomena not based on some inherent "tendencyto feign. " The analysis which was in truth legitimising and purifyingknowledge seemed to them absolutely to blast it, and the closer theycame to the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they felt ofbuilding up anything upon it. Self-knowledge meant, they fancied, self-detection; the representative value of thought decreased as thoughtgrew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quiteserious and quite intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge insubjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it wasto sink back upon inarticulate and brutish instinct. 

In Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed. Philosophy discrediteditself; but a man of parts, who loved intellectual games even betterthan backgammon, might take a hand with the wits and historians of hisday, until the clock struck twelve and the party was over. Even in Kant, though the mood was more cramped and earnest, the mysticalsophistication was quite the same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottomhad been knocked out of the world; that in comparison with someunutterable sort of truth empirical truth was falsehood, and thatvalidity for all possible experience was weak validity, in comparisonwith validity of some other and unmentionable sort. Since space and timecould not repel the accusation of being the necessary forms ofperception, space and time were not to be much thought of; and when thesad truth was disclosed that causality and the categories wereinstruments by which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if suchan idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up andwere dishonoured together; so that, the soul's occupation being gone, she must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract andirrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courageof an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematicalillusion into some green and infantile paradise beyond. 

[Sidenote: Misconceived rôle of intelligence. ]

What idea, we may well ask ourselves, did these modern philosophersentertain regarding the pretensions of ancient and mediæval metaphysics?What understanding had they of the spirit in which the natural organs ofreason had been exercised and developed in those schools? Frankly, verylittle; for they accepted from ancient philosophy and from common-sensethe distinction between reality and appearance, but they forgot thefunction of that distinction and dislocated its meaning, which wasnothing but to translate the chaos of perception into the regular playof stable natures and objects congenial to discursive thought and validin the art of living. Philosophy had been the natural science ofperception raised to the reflective plane, the objects maintainingthemselves on this higher plane being styled realities, and those stillfloundering below it being called appearances or mere ideas. Thefunction of envisaging reality, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus, had been universally attributed to the intellect. When the moderns, therefore, proved anew that it was the mind that framed that idea, andthat what we call reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reachedonly by an operation of reason, they made no very novel or damagingdiscovery. 

Of course, it is possible to disregard the suggestions of reason in anyparticular case and it is quite possible to believe, for instance, thatthe hypothesis of an external material world is an erroneous one. Butthat this hypothesis is erroneous does not follow from the fact that itis a hypothesis. To discard it on that ground would be to discard allreasoned knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of thought. Ifintelligence is assumed to be an organ of cognition and a vehicle fortruth, a given hypothesis about the causes of perception can only bediscarded when a better hypothesis on the same subject has beensupplied. To be better such a hypothesis would have to meet themultiplicity of phenomena and their mutations with a more intelligiblescheme of comprehension and a more useful instrument of control. 

[Sidenote: All criticism dogmatic. ]

Scepticism is always possible while it is partial. It will remain theprivilege and resource of a free mind that has elasticity enough todisintegrate its own formations and to approach its experience from avariety of sides and with more than a single method. But the methodchosen must be coherent in itself and the point of view assumed must beadhered to during that survey; so that whatever reconstruction the novelview may produce in science will be science still, and will involveassumptions and dogmas which must challenge comparison with the dogmasand assumptions they would supplant. People speak of dogmatism as if itwere a method to be altogether outgrown and something for which somenon-assertive philosophy could furnish a substitute. But dogmatism ismerely a matter of degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreatfurther than others into the stratum beneath current conventions andmake us more conscious of the complex machinery which, working silentlyin the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile operations ofreason. The deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic thephilosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must alwaysremain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if wethought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin, we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, ablank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actualexperience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformationand constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobleredifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison forexperience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since itwould be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process ofinference underived but inevitable. 

[Sidenote: A choice of hypotheses. ]

No doubt Aristotle and the scholastics were often uncritical. They weretoo intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broadhuman or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursedthe comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained waseternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of theworld's intelligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride thatconfidence of theirs; their system may have been their system andnothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewdsuspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate conviction andto prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one, perhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in the mindout of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theorywill make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If allour ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, thiswill become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn theother hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is thecommon fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for havingbeen a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not followingnecessarily nor intelligibly out of the facts, nor leading to asatisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice. 

[Sidenote: Critics disguised enthusiasts. ]

Now this is in truth exactly the conviction which those maliciouspsychologists secretly harboured. Their critical scruples andtranscendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled byauthority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, "thefrequency of insignificant speech is one. " Their psychology was notmerely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent intothe world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in itsold age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some ofthose reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of aphysical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute forthe cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition. Their criticismstopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent; they did notcare to ask how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whateverelse still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind ofpsychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individualessences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in adifferent quarter, used the same critical method in support of adifferent dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory ofProvidence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edificewhich reason and science had built upon spatial perception. He wishedthe lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature, lest consideration of her history and laws should breed "mathematicalatheists"; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dreamand to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faithwould be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men wouldbe bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer anyrival object left for serious or intelligent consideration. 

The psychological analysis on which these partial or total negationswere founded was in a general way admirable; the necessary artifices towhich it had recourse in distinguishing simple and complex ideas, principles of association and inference, were nothing but premonitionsof what a physiological psychology would do in referring the mentalprocess to its organic and external supports; for experience has noother divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguishing itsobjects and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldomexplicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to anintrospection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them;as, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction betweenimpressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally onrelative vividness and priority in time, but really on causationrespectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in the brain. 

[Sidenote: Hume's gratuitous scepticism. ]

Hume it was who carried this psychological analysis to its goal, givingit greater simplicity and universal scope; and he had also the furtheradvantage of not nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own tosubstitute for the legitimate offspring of human understanding. Hiscuriosity was purer and his scepticism more impartial, so that he laidbare the natural habits and necessary fictions of thought with singularlucidity, and sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the maliceof a psychology intended as a weapon against superstition here recoilson science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarcefive-and-twenty, when he wrote his most incisive work; he was not readyto propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which inpractice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. Anulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him satisfactory, forthough inclined to rebellion and positivism he was still the pupil ofthat mythical philosophy which attributed the value of things to theirorigin rather than to their uses, because it had first, in its parabolicway, erected the highest good into a First Cause. Still breathing, inspite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised Platonism, Hume couldnot discover the true origin of anything without imagining that he haddestroyed its value. A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one;his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of that French lady whoasked if all children were not natural. The outcome of his psychologyand criticism seemed accordingly to be an inhibition of reason; he wasleft free to choose between the distractions of backgammon and "sittingdown in a forlorn scepticism. "

In his first youth, while disintegrating reflection still overpoweredthe active interests of his mind, Hume seems to have had some moments ofgenuine suspense and doubt: but with years and prosperity the normalhabits of inference which he had so acutely analysed asserted themselvesin his own person and he yielded to the "tendency to feign" so far atleast as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the complimentshe received, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind ofcourtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against politeconventions to press our doubts too far and question the permanence ofour estates, our neighbours' independent existence, or even thejustification of a good bishop's faith and income. Againstmetaphysicians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without itssavour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man ofthe world. Hume found no obstacle in his speculations to the adoption ofall necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limitedhis mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believeinto more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to avoluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in therationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as helaboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility towhich his interests happened to attach. 

[Sidenote: Kant's substitute for knowledge. ]

Kant, like Berkeley, had a private mysticism in reserve to raise uponthe ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed tomake way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivocationinvolved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with whichGerman metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waverbetween the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. Tosubstitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellecthumility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as afaculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge ofmethodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, betweenendeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling overus, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that ourthoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles andproducts of an immortal vitality in God and in nature, which fosters andillumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms. 

Had Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into a practical faith _thesame natural ideas_ which had previously been taken for absoluteknowledge, his intention would have been innocent, his conclusions wise, and his analysis free from venom and _arrière-pensée_. Man, because ofhis finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and atraveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith: the absent, thehidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But whatelse shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of hisperception present to him and what the indispensable categories of hisunderstanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there forfaith except objects of a possible experience? What else should apractical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except thegovernance and betterment of the real world? It is surely by using hisonly possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories ofunderstanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already, to live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant's criticism amountedsimply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, andhypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been whollyacceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothingbut an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticismof knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance withself. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion toreason's support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith inthe intellect, a faith naturally expressing man's practical and idealnature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits. 

[Sidenote: False subjectivity attributed to reason. ]

Side by side with this reinstatement of reason, however, which was notabsent from Kant's system in its critical phase and in its applicationto science, there lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledgeanother and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant, because "subjective, " the whole structure of human intelligence, withall the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, andto attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristicreligious education. These notions were surely just as subjective, andfar more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought; andit was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity thatthey remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of successor of happiness. The "categorical imperative" was a shadow of the tencommandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenetsof the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountablyimbedded in the old man's mind, he regarded as the evidences of aninward but supernatural revelation. 

[Sidenote: Chimerical reconstruction. ]

Only the quaint severity of Kant's education and character can makeintelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernaturalpostulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and aGod to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had beenPuritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied toother cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which it mightnot justify in the eyes of men accustomed to see in that superstitionthe sanction of their morality. For the "practical" proofs of freedom, immortality, and Providence--of which all evidence in reason orexperience had previously been denied--exceed in perfunctory sophistryanything that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truththe guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved afigment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mockallegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any worldwe chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of ournature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mindwas to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to externaland eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be ableto do so! Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in oursenses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves throughmany generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion, these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which allknowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someonepossesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and incontrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form ofknowledge is this? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are andnot as they appear, we must remember that reality means what theintellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of suchinference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality isfirst instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded assubjective and of merely empirical validity. 

"Merely empirical" is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical isless than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience issomething given only in present fancy. The gods of genuine religion, forinstance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may seeGod. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the morallaw, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importanceand true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, thatit expresses interests and aspirations in which man's fate in time andspace, with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical feelings, isconcerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for thisis a part of the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was a personalsuperstition, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. Hisnotions of the supernatural were those of his sect and generation, anddid not pass to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted wassimply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice, authorised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the greatclearing which the Critique was supposed to have made. 

It is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant thatas the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychologicalmachinery increased in volume and value. In Hobbes and Locke, with thebeginnings of empirical psychology, there is mixed an abstractmaterialism; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic criticism, apopular and childlike theology, entirely without rational development;in Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of ideation, awithdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conceptionof the creative understanding firmly grasped and elaborately worked out, a flight from the natural world altogether. 

[Sidenote: The Critique a word on mental architecture. ]

The Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries inarrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the richarchitecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation, comparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web ofintentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. Thedynamic logic of intelligence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas, if not always correctly traced, was at least manifested in itsprinciple. It was as great an enlargement of Hume's work as Hume's hadbeen of Locke's or Locke's of Hobbes's. And the very fact that themetaphysical residuum practically disappeared--for the weakreconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed asirrelevant--renders the work essentially valid, essentially adescription of something real. It is therefore a great source ofinstruction and a good compendium or store-house for the problems ofmind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of aconfused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merelyincidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man canat once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictionsabsolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between thetranscendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or thatbetween the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their unknowability. Kant's assumptions and his conclusions, his superstitions and hiswisdom, alternate without neutralising each other. 

[Sidenote: Incoherences. ]

That experience is a product of two factors is an assumption made byKant. It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the fact thatorgan and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience isthe substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought, is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Hereexperience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and withoutconditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkableobjects. The relation between the transcendental function of experienceand its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalismwhich--if we have it at all--must be fundamental, he made derivative;and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute. Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism scepticalor malicious. 

Ask what can be meant by "conditions of experience" and Kant'sbewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, isa term that covers a confusion between dialectical and naturalconnections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, arethe characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience;in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience beused in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness ingeneral, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used, as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, itsconditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable ofstimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and mostpregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, thecondition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this lastsense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fashion thatonly by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledgeof an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is avista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a giventhought of a diffused and articulated landscape. The categories are theprinciples of interpretation by which the flat datum acquires thisperspective in thought and becomes representative of a whole system ofsuccessive or collateral existences. 

The circumstance that experience, in the second sense, is a termreserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the sparkflying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to shift hispoint of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the senseof natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not anantecedent of thought and knowledge but their character and logicalenergy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition ofpregnant experience; it does not introduce such experience butconstitutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mouldof experience came to figure, in Kant's mythology, as machinery behindthe scenes, as a system of non-natural efficient forces, as a partner ina marriage the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thussuggest itself--favoured also by remembering inopportunely the actualpsychological situation--that all experience, in every sense of theword, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditionsof experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions ofexperience in the lowest. 

[Sidenote: Nature the true system of conditions. ]

It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have nonatural conditions. Existence in the abstract can have no cause; forevery real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience, and every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modestand non-exhaustive experience--that is, any particular sensation, thought, or life--which it would be preposterous to deny was subject tonatural conditions. Saint Lawrence's experience of being roasted, forinstance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of thecourt, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are otherparts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned, fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our gropingand inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting orsupposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions;the whole object, the parts observed _plus_ the parts interpolated, isthe self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part ofthis complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the otherobjects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe's casual sensation of light isa condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother's. The trueconditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we findby experience, sensations of light do not appear. 

Had Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might havefelt that the phrase "subjective conditions" is a contradiction interms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual andimagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are_ipso facto_ conceiving the potential, that is, the "objective" world. All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objectiveand all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds togetherthe episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition ofan object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentiallyobservable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically;and common-sense is right as against Kant's subjectivism in regardingnature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature. This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only givenexistence, from which the material part of nature, something essentiallydynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not"conditions" inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence, potentialities and powers? Kant's fabled conditions also are inferred;but they are inferred illegitimately since the "subjective" ones aredialectical characters turned into antecedents, while thething-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function. Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditionsare inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondaryposition of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes, objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions ofexperience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge toexperience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The formwas hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined toimpress that form on whatever happened to have it. 

All this was opposed to Kant's own discovery and to his criticaldoctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of thoseconditions which experience assigns to itself as it develops andprogresses in knowledge) is not before experience in the order ofknowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction layin not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the preciseand exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, havingone nature before experience and another after. The first thus becamemythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to conditionexperience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alonecould be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious. The truth is that the single nature or set of conditions for experiencewhich the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts andperceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. Itis, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts, hypothetical; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever pointwe test it, we find the experience we expect, and the inferences thencemade by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment ofexistence. 

[Sidenote: Artificial pathos in subjectivism. ]

The ambiguity in Kant's doctrine makes him a confusing representative ofthat criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer. When the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recognisedindependent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life, we need to know unequivocally whether this step is a false or a trueone. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesisindispensable in the intellectual mastery of experience is a falsehypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant'sanswer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discoveryin the field of experience; there were, scientifically speaking, causesfor perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. Butthis inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because therewas a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, notintellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might beobtained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterisedKant's system in its scientific and empirical application; so that thejustification for the use of such categories as that of cause andsubstance (categories by which the idea of reality is constituted) wasinvalidated by the counter-assertion that empirical reality was not truereality but, being an object reached by inferential thought, was merelyan idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crudeimmediacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present toa supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference ornon-discursive discourse. 

So that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing, that it is mind that discovers empirical reality by making inferencesfrom the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use ofunderstanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea ofnature so framed his empirical truth. There remained, however, a sensethat this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory. Understanding was a superficial faculty, and we might by other andoracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why anyreality--such as God, for instance--should not be just as empirical asthe other side of the moon, if experience suggested it and reasondiscovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered byreason, anything should be called a reality at all or should hold for amoment a man's waking attention--that is what Kant never tells us andnever himself knew. 

Clearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; wemay therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics whoseek to invalidate the discovery of material objects. 

[Sidenote: Berkeley's algebra of perception. ]

Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world waspatched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in ourminds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is ofcourse in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treatingsensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in apermanent space, he would reply that this means nothing, because"substance, " "permanence, " and "space" are non-existent ideas, _i. E. , _they are not images in sense. They might, however, be "notions" likethat of "spirit, " which Berkeley ingenuously admitted into his system, to be, mysteriously enough, _that which has_ ideas. Or they might be(what would do just as well for our purpose) that which he elsewherecalled them, algebraic signs used to facilitate the operations ofthought. This is, indeed, what they are, if we take the word algebraicin a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic signs in being, inrespect of their object or signification, not concrete images but termsin a mental process, elements in a method of inference. Why, then, denounce them? They could be used with all confidence to lead us backto the concrete values for which they stood and to the relations whichthey enabled us to state and discover. Experience would thus befurnished with an intelligible structure and articulation, and apsychological analysis would be made of knowledge into its sensuousmaterial and its ideal objects. What, then, was Berkeley's objection tothese algebraic methods of inference and to the notions of space, matter, independent existence, and efficient causality which thesemethods involve?

[Sidenote: Horror of physics. ]

What he abhorred was the belief that such methods of interpretingexperience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after thefashion of "mathematical atheists" we could understand experience aswell as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key toit than that system of associations and algebraic substitutions which iscalled the natural world we should indeed know just as well what toexpect in practice and should receive the same education in perceptionand reflection; but what difference would there be between such anidealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greaterwariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time--long before days of"Siris" and tar-water--was too ignorant and hasty to understand howinane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man'stragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom. He lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things nolonger served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared, those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical neverleads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand, amid irrational habits and passions. He was accordingly repelled bywhatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religiousprejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see nobetter way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny thereality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powersof reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that sciencehad nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed thevalue of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escapedhim altogether that only the free and contemplative expression ofreason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything elsehumane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man inphilosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work ofreason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral. 

[Sidenote: Puerility in morals. ]

Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish andperfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism couldsolve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large andmature minds, that there would be no intelligibility or value in thingsdivine were they not interpretations and sublimations of thingsnatural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promisingambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or tocajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout ofidealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values. Away with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of senseand reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven, an unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of God; as if therewere any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness thanto study the ways of nature and man. 

Converse with God has been the life of many a wiser and sadderphilosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, orSpinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language ofthat intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degreeof pertinence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine wassatisfied with the vaguest generalities; he made no effort to find outhow the consciousness that God is the direct author of our incidentalperceptions is to help us to deal with them; what other insights andprinciples are to be substituted for those that disclose the economy ofnature; how the moral difficulties incident to an absoluteprovidentialism are to be met, or how the existence and influence offellow-minds is to be defended. So that to a piety inspired byconventional theology and a psychology that refused to pass, exceptgrudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeleyhad nothing to add by way of philosophy. An insignificant repetition ofthe truism that ideas are all "in the mind" constituted his totalwisdom. To be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim by virtue ofwhich we were asked, if not to refrain from conceiving nature at all, which was perhaps impossible at so late a stage in human development, atleast to refrain from regarding our necessary thoughts on nature as trueor rational. Intelligence was but a false method of imagination by whichGod trained us in action and thought; for it was apparently impossibleto endow us with a true method that would serve that end. And what shallwe think of the critical acumen or practical wisdom of a philosopher whodreamed of some other criterion of truth than necessary implication inthought and action?

[Sidenote: Truism and sophism. ]

In the melodramatic fashion so common in what is called philosophy wemay delight ourselves with such flashes of lightning as this: _esse estpercipi_. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that throughperception alone can we get at being--a modest and familiar notion whichmakes, as Plato's "Theætetus" shows, not a bad point of departure for aserious theory of knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however, isto deny our right to make a distinction which in fact we do make andwhich the speaker himself is making as he utters the phrase; for hewould not be so proud of himself if he thought he was thundering atautology. If a thing were never perceived, or inferred from perception, we should indeed never know that it existed; but once perceived orinferred it may be more conducive to comprehension and practicalcompetence to regard it as existing independently of our perception; andour ability to make this supposition is registered in the differencebetween the two words _to be_ and _to be perceived_--words which are byno means synonymous but designate two very different relations of thingsin thought. Such idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse ofassertive intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-consciousness, has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancybetween two incompatible but irresistible meanings. The art of suchsophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken inone sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, byshowing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity hasalso been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locusof my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdityto say that I am the only object of my thought and perception. 

[Sidenote: Reality is the practical made intelligible. ]

To confuse the instrument with its function and the operation with itsmeaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thuscome about that the function of intelligence should be altogethermisconceived and in consequence denied, when it was discovered thatfigments of reason could never become elements of sense but must alwaysremain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, andtherefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tendto give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practicalintellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery ofexperience; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are calledillusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while theylast, they have no sustained function and no right to practicaldominion. 

Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animalconsciousness which first used the category of substance and passed fromits perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. "Beware, mychild, " he would have said, "you are taking a dangerous step, one whichmay hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical atheists, not to speakof cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only inyour mind; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised inmid-air and subsisting when you do not perceive them, you will commit agreat impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyesthe world continues to exist until you open them again, you willinevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles aboutthe discrete and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered anddeafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospelwill be extinguished in your soul. " "But, " that tender Peripatetic mightanswer, "I cannot forget the things about me when I shut my eyes: I knowand almost feel their persistent presence, and I always find them again, upon trial, just as they were before, or just in that condition to whichthe operation of natural causes would have brought them in my absence. If I believe they remain and suffer steady and imperceptibletransformation, I know what to expect, and the event does not deceiveme; but if I had to resolve upon action before knowing whether theconditions for action were to exist or no, I should never understandwhat sort of a world I lived in. "

"Ah, my child, " the good Bishop would reply, "you misunderstand me. Youmay indeed, nay, you must, live and think _as if_ everything remainedindependently real. That is part of your education for heaven, which Godin his goodness provides for you in this life. He will send into yoursoul at every moment the impressions needed to verify your necessaryhypotheses and support your humble and prudent expectations. Only youmust not attribute that constancy to the things themselves which is dueto steadfastness in the designs of Providence. _Think and act_ as if amaterial world existed, but do not for a moment _believe_ it to exist. "

[Sidenote: Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fictions. "]

With this advice, coming reassuringly from the combined forces ofscepticism and religion, we may leave the embryonic mind to its owndevices, satisfied that even according to the most maliciouspsychologists its first step toward the comprehension of experience isone it may congratulate itself on having taken and which, for thepresent at least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life of Reasonis not concerned with speculation about unthinkable and gratuitous"realities"; it seeks merely to attain those conceptions which arenecessary and appropriate to man in his acting and thinking. The firstamong these, underlying all arts and philosophies alike, is theindispensable conception of permanent external objects, forming in theircongeries, shifts, and secret animation the system and life of nature. 

 NOTE--There is a larger question raised by Berkeley's arguments which I have not attempted to discuss here, namely, whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether any mental representation can be supposed to inform us about anything. Berkeley of course assumed this power in that he continued to believe in God, in other spirits, in the continuity of experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to material objects, therefore, could not consistently be that they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings, exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It could only be that they are unthinkable and invalid objects, in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical criticism, such as that contained in Kant's antinomies, the royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked; to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive and representative value in that idea. The fact that material objects were represented or conceived would not of itself prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have augured ill for Berkeley's prejudices; what its result might have been we can see in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then, two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently, viz. , that nothing can be known which is different in character or nature from the object present to the thinking mind; the other, held incidentally and inconsistently, since it is destructive of all predication and knowledge, viz. , that nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature or character to the "ideas" within it; or, to put the same thing in other words, that nothing can be revealed by an idea which is different from that idea in point of existence. The first maxim does not contradict the existence of external objects in space; the second contradicts every conception that the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory represents his past experience by inward similarity and conscious intention, or, if he prefers this language, that the moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another and their general system. Else the idealist's philosophy itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion. 

CHAPTER V--NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED

[Sidenote: Man's feeble grasp of nature. ]

When the mind has learned to distinguish external objects and toattribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of thevariety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remainsa great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, viewof the world. An animal's customary habitat may have constant featuresand their relations in space may be learned by continuous exploration;but probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memoryand fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which wefind ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we takeit for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one space, in which they hold definite geometric relations to one another; and ifwe have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in thesingle map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatinglyrelegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields andthe Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we callthese places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to havevisited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in thissingle and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity andcommon-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown togeography and filling no part of the conventional space in threedimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in somepart of this space, and no court of law would admit evidence relating toevents in some other sphere. 

This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive, since primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detachedscenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes donot hang together in any local contiguity. To construct a chart of theworld is a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be performedwithout speculative boldness and a heroic insensibility to the claims offancy. Even now most people live without topographical ideas and have noclear conception of the spatial relations that keep together the worldin which they move. They feel their daily way about like animals, following a habitual scent, without dominating the range of theirinstinctive wanderings. Reality is rather a story to them than a systemof objects and forces, nor would they think themselves mad if at anytime their experience should wander into a fourth dimension. Vaguedramatic and moral laws, when they find any casual application, seem tosuch dreaming minds more notable truths, deeper revelations ofefficacious reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case, whichthey scarcely conceive of; and in this primordial prejudice they areconfirmed by superstitious affinities often surviving in their religionand philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs they are likelandsmen at sea, incapable of an intellectual conception of theirposition: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles ofnavigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflectare reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a knownuniverse or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not requiresuperhuman eloquence in some prophetic passenger to persuade them tothrow compass and quadrant overboard and steer enthusiastically for ElDorado. The theory of navigation is essentially as speculative as thatof salvation, only it has survived more experiences of the judgment andrepeatedly brought those who trust in it to their promised land. 

[Sidenote: Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought. ]

The theory that all real objects and places lie together in one even andhomogeneous space, conceived as similar in its constitution to the partsof extension of which we have immediate intuition, is a theory of thegreatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on allour affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is thebest proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline whichsuch a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension andcertitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance tonature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man notto exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic monstersin unattainable lairs from which they might issue to disturb humanlabours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men tomake this genial discovery and take so fundamental a step toward tamingexperience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is aweapon needed in many subsequent conflicts. To conceive that all naturemakes one system is only a beginning: the articulation of natural lifehas still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similararticulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the veryact that constitutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at herside or rather in her bosom. 

That the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a pointuseful to remember: else the relation of the natural world to poetry, metaphysics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalande, orwhoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and couldfind no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched thebrain with a microscope. Yet God existed in man's apprehension longbefore mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; forthe objectification of the whole mind, with its passions and motives, naturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a materialworld is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction whichculminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is nowfamiliar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, isnot derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancientconcomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract. Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal interests, are collateralprojections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect orthe other as it develops various functions and dominates itself tovarious ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuumsubsists in that primeval quarry in which it originally lay. The failureto find God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, doesnot indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea ofGod--for history proves the contrary--but indicates rather the atrophyin this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race hadattained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, andGod would in that case disappear from human experience as music woulddisappear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is madeconceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which isobservable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human facultydo not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist;and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancientfountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does notremove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experiencemay have suggested to men. 

What enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification oftheir own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, withoutintellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like ananimal, forgetting each satisfaction in the next and banishing from hisfrivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to killhim would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had nevercrossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidencewould never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a newworld with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion, some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point ofreference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then thelaws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment willbecome a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable orunfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keenobservation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will bechiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishmentsand warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers thedramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in termsof passion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this gloriouschaos a deeper mechanical order. Men's thoughts, like the weather, arenot so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, theman guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolvingabout their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and theprinciple of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes. Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding orsteady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so faras it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, inits pregnant sense, impossible. 

[Sidenote: Mind the erratic residue of existence. ]

We have said that those objects which cannot be incorporated into theone space which the understanding envisages are relegated to anothersphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. Asmaterial objects, making a single system which fills space and evolvesin time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuousexperience, so, _pari passu_, the rest of experience, with all its otheroutgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and formsthe sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the passions. Wehave in this discrimination the _genesis of mind_, not of course in thetranscendental sense in which the word mind is extended to mean the sumtotal and mere fact of existence--for mind, so taken, can have no originand indeed no specific meaning--but the genesis of mind as a determinateform of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known toexperience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation, inhabits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology. 

Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, theleavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material worldhas been cut out of the whole cloth. Reflection underlines in thechaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practicalsignificance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the world. Thetrustworthy object which is thus retained in thought, the complex ofconnected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is notsoon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed andhalting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge isa step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matterclings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy anddripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficaciouspassions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is atfirst conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of theunintelligible, sporadic habit of animal experience itself. But asattention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firmand stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanicalprocess, the efficacious infallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath. Meantime the incidental effects, the "secondary qualities, " arerelegated to a personal inconsequential region; they constitute therealm of appearance, the realm of mind. 

[Sidenote: Ghostly character of mind. ]

Mind is therefore sometimes identified with the unreal. We oppose, in anantithesis natural to thought and language, the imaginary to the true, fancy to fact, idea to thing. But this thing, fact, or external realityis, as we have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain portions ofexperience, packed into such shapes as prove cogent in thought andpractice. The stuff of external reality, the matter out of which itsidea is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and matter of ourown minds. Their common substance is the immediate flux. This livingworm has propagated by fission, and the two halves into which it hasdivided its life are mind and nature. Mind has kept and clarified thecrude appearance, the dream, the purpose that seethed in the mass;nature has appropriated the order, the constant conditions, the causalsubstructure, disclosed in reflection, by which the immediate flux isexplained and controlled. The chemistry of thought has precipitatedthese contrasted terms, each maintaining a recognisable identity andhaving the function of a point of reference for memory and will. Some ofthese terms or objects of thought we call things and marshal in alltheir ideal stability--for there is constancy in their motions andtransformations--to make the intelligible external world of practice andscience. Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this construction, whatever facts of sensation, ideation, or will, do not coalesce with thenewest conception of reality, we then call the mind. 

Raw experience, then, lies at the basis of the idea of nature andapproves its reality; while an equal reality belongs to the residue ofexperience, not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this residualsensuous reality often seems comparatively unreal because what itpresents is entirely without practical force apart from its mechanicalassociates. This inconsequential character of what remains over followsof itself from the concretion of whatever is constant and efficaciousinto the external world. If this fact is ever called in question, it isonly because the external world is vaguely conceived, and loose willsand ideas are thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways fallingshort of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamicor, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is thefirst flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed offfirst and proving so nutritious, it leaves the liquid below somewhatthin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science isstill unpruned and mythical, so that what passes into the idea ofmaterial nature is much more than the truly causal network of forces, and includes many spiritual and moral functions. 

The material world, as conceived in the first instance, had not thatclear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest, which they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions ofman's soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactilesensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish termsto natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmthand beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it stilldoes in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for humanpassion and reflection were attributed to every object and made afairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in thosevery places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when somuch of the burden of experience took wing into space, and the soulherself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is nomarvel that the poor remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, anuninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should haveseemed a sad and unsubstantial accident. The inner world was all themore ghostly because the outer world was so much alive. 

[Sidenote: Hypostasis and criticism both need control. ]

This movement of thought, which clothed external objects in all thewealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded toa contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms in experienceis sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised canserve as causes and explanations for the order of events, so thecriticism which tends to retract that hypostasis is sanctioned by reasonwhen the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external objectconceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental andfunctional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated bythe headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow ofobjectification goes on blindly and impulsively, and is carried toabsurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity;reason being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reactionagainst imagination has left the external world, as represented in manyminds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities whichmatter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to anirresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation changeslowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions, such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead ofa thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it hasproduced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusionmay perhaps repay a moment's attention; they may enable us, when seen intheir logical sequence, to understand somewhat better the hypostasisingintellect that is trying to assert itself and come to the light throughall these gropings. 

[Sidenote: Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas]

What helps in the first place to disclose a permanent object is apermanent sensation. There is a vast and clear difference between afloating and a fixed feeling; the latter, in normal circumstances, ispresent only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment. Attention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease toradiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed tolose the modification which those influences provoke. The consequentperception is therefore always at hand and in its repetitionssubstantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way bycontinuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rarevisitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of thehousehold. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is theobject of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continuallyrecover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that mayoriginally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call themind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to piercethem, and as friendly communication can be established with the realworld. Moreover, perceptions not sustained by a constant externalstimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to bechanged unaccountably, whereas external things show some method andproportion in their variations. Even when not much changed inthemselves, mere ideas fall into a new setting, whereas things, unlesssomething else has intervened to move them, reappear in their oldplaces. Finally things are acted upon by other men, but thoughts arehidden from them by divine miracle. 

Existence reveals reality when the flux discloses something permanentthat dominates it. What is thus dominated, though it is the primaryexistence itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Perceptions causedby external objects are, as we have just seen, long sustained incomparison with thoughts and fancies; but the objects are themselves influx and a man's relation to them may be even more variable; so thatvery often a memory or a sentiment will recur, almost unchanged incharacter, long after the perception that first aroused it has becomeimpossible. The brain, though mobile, is subject to habit; itsformations, while they lapse instantly, return again and again. Theseideal objects may accordingly be in a way more real and enduring thanthings external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what ismost real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds, rather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itselfseems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginningand placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than materialthings, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality andindependence than material objects are credited with. It is divine. 

When agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts have given men someknowledge of nature, the world thus recognised and dominated is far fromseeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between two others, both nowoften called mental, but in their original quality altogether disparate:the world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous appearance. Thenotions of permanence and independence by which material objects areconceived apply also, of course, to everything spiritual; and while thedominion exercised by spirits may be somewhat precarious, they are asremote as possible from immediacy and sensation. They come and go; theygovern nature or, if they neglect to do so, it is from aversion or highindifference; they visit man with obsessions and diseases; they hastento extricate him from difficulties; and they dwell in him, constitutinghis powers of conscience and invention. Sense, on the other hand, is amere effect, either of body or spirit or of both in conjunction. Itgives a vitiated personal view of these realities. Its pleasures aredangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes. 

[Sidenote: Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature. ]

Such are, for primitive apperception, the three great realms of being:nature, sense, and spirit. Their frontiers, however, always remainuncertain. Sense, because it is insignificant when made an object, islong neglected by reflection. No attempt is made to describe itsprocesses or ally them systematically to natural changes. Itsillusions, when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated to fosterscepticism. The spiritual world is, on the other hand, a constant themefor poetry and speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it can beconceived only in myths, which are naturally as shifting andself-contradictory as they are persistent. They acquire no fixedcharacter until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with referenceto natural events, foretold or reported. Nature is what first acquires aform and then imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits definitionand distribution only as an effect of nature and spirit only as itsprinciple. 

[Sidenote: Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit. ]

The form nature acquires is, however, itself vague and uncertain and canill serve, for long ages, to define the other realms which depend on itfor definition. Hence it has been common, for instance, to treat thespiritual as a remote or finer form of the natural. Beyond the mooneverything seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine and declaredto preside over the rest. The breath that escaped from the lips atdeath, since it took away with it the spiritual control and miraculouslife that had quickened the flesh, was itself the spirit. On the otherhand, natural processes have been persistently attributed to spiritualcauses, for it was not matter that moved itself but intent that movedit. Thus spirit was barbarously taken for a natural substance and anatural force. It was identified with everything in which it wasmanifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for thatoperation. 

[Sidenote: Sense and spirit the life of nature, which scienceredistributes but does not deny. ]

If the unification of nature were complete sense would evidently fallwithin it; it is to subtend and sustain the sensible flux thatintelligence acknowledges first stray material objects and then theirgeneral system. The elements of experience not taken up into theconstitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In theend the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would beclothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of astronomy allowed meto believe that the sun, sinking into the sea, was extinguished everyevening, and that what appeared the next morning was his youngerbrother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Easternregions. My theory would have robbed yesterday's sun of its life andbrightness; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existedanywhere; but it would have added the sun's qualities afresh to a matterthat did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg thatwould produce a sun for to-morrow. Suppose we substitute for thatastronomy the one that now prevails: we have deprived the singlesun--which now exists and spreads its influences withoutinterruption--of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It hasbecome a congeries of chemical substances. The facts revealed toperception have partly changed their locus and been differently deployedthroughout nature. Some have become attached to operations in the humanbrain. Nature has not thereby lost any quality she had ever manifested;these have merely been redistributed so as to secure a more systematicconnection between them all. They are the materials of the system, whichhas been conceived by making existences continuous, whenever thisextension of their being was needful to render their recurrencesintelligible. Sense, which was formerly regarded as a sad distortion ofits objects, now becomes an original and congruent part of nature, fromwhich, as from any other part, the rest of nature might bescientifically inferred. 

Spirit is not less closely attached to nature, although in a differentmanner. Taken existentially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it isthe form or value which nature acquires when viewed from thevantage-ground of any interest. Individual objects are recognisable fora time not because the flux is materially arrested but because itsomewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens an interest and bringsdifferent parts of the surrounding process into definable and prolongedrelations with that interest. Particular objects may perish yet othersmay continue, like the series of suns imagined by Heraclitus, to performthe same office. The function will outlast the particular organ. Thatinterest in reference to which the function is defined will essentiallydetermine a perfect world of responsive extensions and conditions. Theseideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in naturein so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfectand eternal realm, merely potential in existence but definite inconstitution, will thus subtend nature and be what a rational philosophymight call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so faras it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spiritwould be the part of nature's fertility by which such expression wassecured. 

CHAPTER VI--DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS

[Sidenote: Another background for current experience may be found inalien minds. ]

When a ghostly sphere, containing memory and all ideas, has beendistinguished from the material world, it tends to grow at the expenseof the latter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematicalskeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connectcalculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred tomind and identified with the scientific thought in which it isrepresented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered momentsof life cannot connect those episodes among which it is itself the lastand the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even tothe most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort ofreputed reality--the minds of others--which could serve, even after thesupposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independentorder and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediateconsciousness nodded. But other men's minds, being themselves precariousand ineffectual, would never have seemed a possible substitute fornature, to be in her stead the background and intelligible object ofexperience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fertile isneeded to support and connect the given chaos. Just these properties, however, are actually attributed to one of the minds supposed toconfront the thinker, namely, the mind of God. The divine mind hastherefore always constituted in philosophy either the alternative tonature or her other name: it is _par excellence_ the seat of allpotentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all ignorance. 

Speculative problems would be greatly clarified, and what is genuine inthem would be more easily distinguished from what is artificial, if wecould gather together again the original sources for the belief inseparate minds and compare these sources with those we have alreadyassigned to the conception of nature. But speculative problems are notalone concerned, for in all social life we envisage fellow-creaturesconceived to share the same thoughts and passions and to be similarlyaffected by events. What is the basis of this conviction? What are theforms it takes, and in what sense is it a part or an expression ofreason?

This question is difficult, and in broaching it we cannot expect muchaid from what philosophers have hitherto said on the subject. For themost part, indeed, they have said nothing, as by nature's kindlydisposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer donot occur to him at all. The suggestions which have actually been madein the matter may be reduced to two: first, that we conceive other men'sminds by projecting into their bodies those feelings which weimmediately perceive to accompany similar operations in ourselves, thatis, we infer alien minds by analogy; and second, that we are immediatelyaware of them and feel them to be friendly or hostile counterparts ofour own thinking and effort, that is, we evoke them by dramaticimagination. 

[Sidenote: Two usual accounts of this conception criticised:]

[Sidenote: analogy between bodies, ]

The first suggestion has the advantage that it escapes solipsism by areasonable argument, provided the existence of the material world hasalready been granted. But if the material world is called back into theprivate mind, it is evident that every soul supposed to inhabit it or tobe expressed in it must follow it thither, as inevitably as thecharacters and forces in an imagined story must remain with it in theinventor's imagination. When, on the contrary, nature is left standing, it is reasonable to suppose that animals having a similar origin andsimilar physical powers should have similar minds, if any of them was tohave a mind at all. The theory, however, is not satisfactory on othergrounds. We do not in reality associate our own grimaces with thefeelings that accompany them and subsequently, on recognising similargrimaces in another, proceed to attribute emotions to him like those weformerly experienced. Our own grimaces are not easily perceived, andother men's actions often reveal passions which we have never had, atleast with anything like their suggested colouring and intensity. Thisfirst view is strangely artificial and mistakes for the natural originof the belief in question what may be perhaps its ultimate test. 

[Sidenote: and dramatic dialogue in the soul. ]

The second suggestion, on the other in hand, takes us into a mysticregion. That we evoke the felt souls of our fellows by dramaticimagination is doubtless true; but this does not explain how we come todo so, under what stimulus and in what circumstances. Nor does it avoidsolipsism; for the felt counterparts of my own will are echoes withinme, while if other minds actually exist they cannot have for theiressence to play a game with me in my own fancy. Such society would bemythical, and while the sense for society may well be mythical in itsorigin, it must acquire some other character if it is to have practicaland moral validity. But practical and moral validity is above all whatsociety seems to have. This second theory, therefore, while its feelingfor psychological reality is keener, does not make the recognition ofother minds intelligible and leaves our faith in them withoutjustification. 

[Sidenote: Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms. ]

In approaching the subject afresh we should do well to remember thatcrude experience knows nothing of the distinction between subject andobject. This distinction is a division in things, a contrastestablished between masses of images which show differentcharacteristics in their modes of existence and relation. If this truthis overlooked, if subject and object are made conditions of experienceinstead of being, like body and mind, its contrasted parts, the revengeof fate is quick and ironical; either subject or object must immediatelycollapse and evaporate altogether. All objects must become modificationsof the subject or all subjects aspects or fragments of the object. 

[Sidenote: Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiaryqualities. ]

Now the fact that crude experience is innocent of modern philosophy hasthis important consequence: that for crude experience all data whateverlie originally side by side in the same field; extension is passionate, desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by avisible metamorphosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythology istherefore no artifice. Passions naturally reside in the object theyagitate--our own body, if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars, if the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only a long and stillunfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things andideas from their objects. This education was needed because crudeexperience is a chaos, and the qualities it jumbles together do notmarch together in time. Reflection must accordingly separate them, ifknowledge (that is, ideas with eventual application and practicaltranscendence) is to exist at all. In other words, action must beadjusted to certain elements of experience and not to others, and thosechiefly regarded must have a certain interpretation put upon them bytrained apperception. The rest must be treated as moonshine and taken noaccount of except perhaps in idle and poetic revery. In this way crudeexperience grows reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of reality. 

The fundamental reason, then, why we attribute consciousness to naturalbodies is that those bodies, before they are conceived to be merelymaterial, are conceived to possess all the qualities which our ownconsciousness possesses when we behold them. Such a supposition is farfrom being a paradox, since only this principle justifies us to this dayin believing in whatever we may decide to believe in. The qualitiesattributed to reality must be qualities found in experience, and if wedeny their presence in ourselves (_e. G. _, in the case of omniscience), that is only because the idea of self, like that of matter, has alreadybecome special and the region of ideals (in which omniscience lies) hasbeen formed into a third sphere. But before the idea of self is wellconstituted and before the category of ideals has been conceived at all, every ingredient ultimately assigned to those two regions is attractedinto the perceptual vortex for which such qualities as pressure andmotion supply a nucleus. The moving image is therefore impregnated notonly with secondary qualities--colour, heat, etc. --but with qualitieswhich we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice, feebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these tertiary qualities areattributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt. Thus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round, but by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, andall-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through uswhen we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. Thefact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impedethe instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experiencewhatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matterhow soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things havemost numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, forcrude experience, the moment when they are most adequately manifestedand when their inner essence is best revealed; for it is then that theyappear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for theireventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterioreffects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spiritthan when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentiveand devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are revealed, stands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel onlythe sun's material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in toone born blind, who cannot add the sun's brightness to its warmthexcept by faith in some happier man's reported intuition. Themythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man oftruest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heartand soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference oranalogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honestcontemplation. 

[Sidenote: Tertiary qualities transposed. ]

More often, however, tertiary qualities are somewhat transposed inprojection, as sound in being lodged in the bell is soon translated intosonority, made, that is, into its own potentiality. In the same waypainfulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate, and every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is inexperience its more quiescent or potential form. So religion, whichremains for the most part on the level of crude experience, attributesto the gods not only happiness--the object's direct tertiaryquality--but goodness--its tertiary quality transposed and madepotential; for goodness is that disposition which is fruitful inhappiness throughout imagined experience. The devil, in like manner, iscruel and wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science stillattributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythicalnotion of force, for instance, being a transposed sensation of effort. In this case we may distinguish two stages or degrees in thetransposition: first, before we think of our own pulling, we say theobject itself pulls; in the first transposition we say it pulls againstus, its pull is the counterpart or rival of ours but it is stillconceived in the same direct terms of effort; and in the secondtransposition this intermittent effort is made potential or slumberingin what we call strength or force. 

[Sidenote: Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceivedbody. ]

It is obvious that the feelings attributed to other men are nothing butthe tertiary qualities of their bodies. In beings of the same species, however, these qualities are naturally exceedingly numerous, variable, and precise. Nature has made man man's constant study. His thought, frominfancy to the drawing up of his last will and testament, is busy abouthis neighbour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a moment'ssympathetic attention, wins a heart and gives the friend's presence avoluminous and poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing afriend. For the tertiary values, the emotions attached to a given image, the moral effluence emanating from it, pervade the whole present world. The sense of union, though momentary, is the same that later returns tothe lover or the mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart oflife's mystery and penetrated to the peaceful centre of things. What themystic beholds in his ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, whatthe lover pursues and adores, what the child cries for when left alone, is much more a spirit, a person, a haunting mind, than a set of visualsensations; yet the visual sensations are connected inextricably withthat spirit, else the spirit would not withdraw when the sensationsfailed. We are not dealing with an articulate mind whose possessions arediscriminated and distributed into a mastered world where everything hasits department, its special relations, its limited importance; we aredealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion, keenly sensitive to passinginfluences and reacting on them massively and without reserve. 

This mind is feeble, passionate, and ignorant. Its sense for presentspirit is no miracle of intelligence or of analogical reasoning; on thecontrary, it betrays a vagueness natural to rudimentary consciousness. Those visual sensations suddenly cut off cannot there be recognised forwhat they are. The consequences which their present disappearance mayhave for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated, much less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to thatretreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by theloss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out ofgear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell openingbefore him. All this is a present sensuous commotion, a derangement inan actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in thisdrunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externalityof the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded notby a blue sky or an earth known to geographers but by unutterable andmost personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-decipheredimages of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. Weendow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and anydramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that highpressure--and crude experience is rich in dreams--becomes our notion ofthe life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life, because it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attachesitself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it isconsequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, orthose creatures' souls. 

[Sidenote: "Pathetic fallacy" normal yet ordinarily fallacious. ]

The pathetic fallacy is accordingly what originally peoples the imaginedworld. All the feelings aroused by perceived things are merged in thosethings and made to figure as the spiritual and invisible part of theiressence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceivedas their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be tobetray a wholly sophisticated view of experience and its articulation. They do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from thebeginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any morethan those objects, been "subjectified" or localised in the thinker'sbody, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known tohave in that body its seat and thermometer. The thermometer for thesepassions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dreamin us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception ofhis motions, is our perception of his thoughts. 

A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a completeillusion. The thought is one's own, it is associated with an imagemoving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part ofthat image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion andactually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy. A complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in thepoetic forms of love and religion. A better mastery of experience willin such cases dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamentaldivergence which at once manifests itself between the course ofphenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyondquestion that those feelings were private fancies merged withobservation in an undigested experience. They indicated nothing in theobject but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations inthe mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poeticdistortion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables, metaphors employed merely in conventional expression. In the end evenpoetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the poet himself willsoon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent humanemotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actualsphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil andoccasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys ofthe soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and thesteady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents andcollocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate itsmajesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucretius and Dante, whileits pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth. 

[Sidenote: Case where it is not a fallacy. ]

A primary habit producing widespread illusions may in certain casesbecome the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surpriseno one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and lifeare tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothingexceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image andemotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, thishabit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, underspecial circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There isevidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, thecase in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to theobserver and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herdare swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each, as he runs, attributesto the others is, as usual, the emotion he feels himself; but thisemotion, fear, is the same which in fact the others are then feeling. Their aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feelingwhich really accompanies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the intentionand passion which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels;but the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkablycontagious and monotonous passion. It is awakened by the slightesthostile suggestion and is greatly intensified by example and emulation;those we fight against and those we fight with arouse it concurrentlyand the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that each maninstinctively emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what is passingin all their souls. 

Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an animal similar to thepercipient and similarly employed the attribution is mutual and correct. Contagion and imitation are great causes of feeling, but in so far asthey are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestalland correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into avehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight. 

[Sidenote: Knowledge succeeds only by accident. ]

Let the reader meditate for a moment upon the following point: to knowreality is, in a way, an impossible pretension, because knowledge meanssignificant representation, discourse about an existence not containedin the knowing thought, and different in duration or locus from theideas which represent it. But if knowledge does not possess its objecthow can it intend it? And if knowledge possesses its object, how can itbe knowledge or have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective value?Consciousness is not knowledge unless it indicates or signifies whatactually it is not. This transcendence is what gives knowledge itscognitive and useful essence, its transitive function and validity. Inknowledge, therefore, there must be some such thing as a justifiedillusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shothitting the mark. For dead logic would stick at solipsism; yetirrational life, as it stumbles along from moment to moment, andmultiplies itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable to logicand finds uses for the reason it breeds. 

Now, in the relation of a natural being to similar beings in the samehabitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing amiraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solipsism which, though not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continualjustification. For tertiary qualities are imputed to objects bypsychological or pathological necessity. Something not visible in theobject, something not possibly revealed by any future examination ofthat object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, itsmetaphysical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts presentin the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connectedwith their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet relegated tohis private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation. To take these private feelings for the substance of other beings isevidently a gross blunder; yet this blunder, without ceasing to be onein point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the otherbeing happens to be similar in nature and situation to the mythologisthimself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughtswhich lie in the mythologist's bosom and are attributed by him to hisfellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to graspan independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itselfaccidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in itslottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begottenknowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of otherbeings will have been revealed to private intuition. 

[Sidenote: Limits of insight]

This miracle of insight, as it must seem to those who have notunderstood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far asdoes the analogy between the object and the instrument of perception. The gift of intuition fails in proportion as the observer's bodily habitdiffers from the habit and body observed. Misunderstanding begins withconstitutional divergence and deteriorates rapidly into falseimputations and absurd myths. The limits of mutual understandingcoincide with the limits of similar structure and common occupation, sothat the distortion of insight begins very near home. It is hard tounderstand the minds of children unless we retain unusual plasticity andcapacity to play; men and women do not really understand each other, what rules between them being not so much sympathy as habitual trust, idealisation, or satire; foreigners' minds are pure enigmas, and thoseattributed to animals are a grotesque compound of Æsop and physiology. When we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attributedto nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober critic can look tosuch fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need;while, even apart from the gods, each religion itself is quiteunintelligible to infidels who have never followed its worshipsympathetically or learned by contagion the human meaning of itssanctions and formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of insight commonlyshown in what calls itself the history of religions. We hear, forinstance, that Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic awe andmomentous practical and poetic truths escape the Christian historianaccustomed to a catechism and a religious morality; and similarlyCatholic piety seems to the Protestant an æsthetic indulgence, areligion appealing to sense, because such is the only emotion itsexternals can awaken in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economyreaching down into the incidents and affections of daily life. 

Language is an artificial means of establishing unanimity andtransferring thought from one mind to another. Every symbol or phrase, like every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude to which acertain idea corresponded in the speaker; to fall exactly into thespeaker's attitude is exactly to understand. Every impediment tocontagion and imitation in expression is an impediment to comprehension. For this reason language, like all art, becomes pale with years; wordsand figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power; thefeeling they once expressed can no longer be restored by theirrepetition. Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without arelative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages ascarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, alearned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch evena vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind. 

 Unsure the ebb and flood of thought, The moon comes back, the spirit not. 

[Sidenote: Perception of character]

There is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method ofreading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by thatname. This method is to read character. Any object with which we arefamiliar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which weshould be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes aregoing on and what promptings are simmering in the organism. Hence theexpression of a face or figure; hence the traces of habit and passionvisible in a man and that indescribable something about him whichinspires confidence or mistrust. The gift of reading character is partlyinstinctive, partly a result of experience; it may amount to foresightand is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action. Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, namesindicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition beingmythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waitingto whisper suggestions in a man's ear). We may accordingly deludeourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicateshabit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, ifconceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort ofreverberation or penumbra surrounding the pictured activities. 

[Sidenote: Conduct divined, consciousness ignored. ]

It is a mark of the connoisseur to be able to read character and habitand to divine at a glance all a creature's potentialities. This sort ofpenetration characterises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, thedog-fancier, and men and women of the world. It guides the born leaderin the judgments he instinctively passes on his subordinates andenemies; it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs or ofnatural phenomena, who is quick to detect small but telling indicationsof events past or brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the heavens sothe man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less thantheir consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sureof their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usuallyunsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful, he does not yield himself to animal contagion or re-enact other people'sinward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his ownpurposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation andinference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people's character anddestiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Suchapprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they knowthemselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is thediscourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of theirown capacity, situation, or fate. 

If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Confessions in whichcandour and ignorance of self are equally conspicuous, had heard someintelligent friend, like Hume, draw up in a few words an account oftheir author's true and contemptible character, he would have been loudin protestations that no such ignoble characteristics existed in hiseloquent consciousness; and they might not have existed there, becausehis consciousness was a histrionic thing, and as imperfect an expressionof his own nature as of man's. When the mind is irrational no practicalpurpose is served by stopping to understand it, because such a mind isirrelevant to practice, and the principles that guide the man's practicecan be as well understood by eliminating his mind altogether. So a wisegovernor ignores his subjects' religion or concerns himself only withits economic and temperamental aspects; if the real forces that controllife are understood, the symbols that represent those forces in the mindmay be disregarded. But such a government, like that of the British inIndia, is more practical than sympathetic. While wise men may endure itfor the sake of their material interests, they will never love it foritself. There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathised with, whilenothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to seeone's equation written out. 

[Sidenote: Consciousness untrustworthy. ]

Nevertheless this same algebraic sense for character plays a large partin human friendship. A chief element in friendship is trust, and trustis not to be acquired by reproducing consciousness but only bypenetrating to the constitutional instincts which, in determining actionand habit, determine consciousness as well. Fidelity is not a propertyof ideas. It is a virtue possessed pre-eminently by nature, from theanimals to the seasons and the stars. But fidelity gives friendship itsdeepest sanctity, and the respect we have for a man, for his force, ability, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked by his floatingthoughts but an assurance founded on our own observation that hisconduct and character are to be counted upon. Smartness and vivacity, much emotion and many conceits, are obstacles both to fidelity and tomerit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures independentof incidental consciousness. It consists in that ingrained virtue whichunder given circumstances would insure the noblest action and with thataction, of course, the noblest sentiments and ideas; ideas which wouldarise spontaneously and would make more account of their objects than ofthemselves. 

[Sidenote: Metaphorical mind. ]

The expression of habit in psychic metaphors is a procedure known alsoto theology. Whenever natural or moral law is declared to reveal thedivine mind, this mind is a set of formal or ethical principles ratherthan an imagined consciousness, re-enacted dramatically. What isconceived is the god's operation, not his emotions. In this way God'sgoodness becomes a symbol for the advantages of life, his wrath a symbolfor its dangers, his commandments a symbol for its laws. The deityspoken of by the Stoics had exclusively this symbolic character; itcould be called a city--dear City of Zeus--as readily as anintelligence. And that intelligence which ancient and ingenuousphilosophers said they saw in the world was always intelligence in thisalgebraic sense, it was intelligible order. Nor did the Hebrew prophets, in their emphatic political philosophy, seem to mean much more byJehovah than a moral order, a principle giving vice and virtue theirappropriate fruits. 

[Sidenote: Summary. ]

True society, then, is limited to similar beings living similar livesand enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts toattribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the otheractually endures. A fresh thought may be communicated to one who hasnever had it before, but only when the speaker so dominates theauditor's mind by the instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it thathe compels that mind to reproduce his experience. Analogy betweenactions and bodies is accordingly the only test of valid inferenceregarding the existence or character of conceived minds; but thiseventual test is far from being the source of such a conception. Itssource is not inference at all but direct emotion and the patheticfallacy. In the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to othersis something directly felt, a dream dreamed through and dramaticallyenacted, but uncritically attributed to the object by whose motions itis suggested and controlled. In a single case, however, tertiaryqualities happen to correspond to an experience actually animating theobject to which they are assigned. This is the case in which the objectis a body similar in structure and action to the percipient himself, whoassigns to that body a passion he has caught by contagion from it and byimitation of its actual attitude. Such are the conditions ofintelligible expression and true communion; beyond these limits nothingis possible save myth and metaphor, or the algebraic designation ofobserved habits under the name of moral dispositions. 

CHAPTER VII--CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE

[Sidenote: So-called abstract qualities primary. ]

Ideas of material objects ordinarily absorb the human mind, and theirprevalence has led to the rash supposition that ideas of all other kindsare posterior to physical ideas and drawn from the latter by a processof abstraction. The table, people said, was a particular and singlereality; its colour, form, and material were parts of its integralnature, qualities which might be attended to separately, perhaps, butwhich actually existed only in the table itself. Colour, form, andmaterial were therefore abstract elements. They might come before themind separately and be contrasted objects of attention, but they wereincapable of existing in nature except together, in the concrete realitycalled a particular thing. Moreover, as the same colour, shape, orsubstance might be found in various tables, these abstract qualitieswere thought to be general qualities as well; they were universal termswhich might be predicated of many individual things. A contrast couldthen be drawn between these qualities or ideas, which the mind mayenvisage, and the concrete reality existing beyond. Thus philosophycould reach the familiar maxim of Aristotle that the particular aloneexists in nature and the general alone in the mind. 

[Sidenote: General qualities prior to particular things. ]

Such language expresses correctly enough a secondary conventional stageof conception, but it ignores the primary fictions on which conventionitself must rest. Individual physical objects must be discovered beforeabstractions can be made from their conceived nature; the bird must becaught before it is plucked. To discover a physical object is to pack inthe same part of space, and fuse in one complex body, primary data likecoloured form and tangible surface. Intelligence, observing thesesensible qualities to evolve together, and to be controlled at once byexternal forces, or by one's own voluntary motions, identifies them intheir operation although they remain for ever distinct in their sensiblecharacter. A physical object is accordingly conceived by fusing orinterlacing spatial qualities, in a manner helpful to practicalintelligence. It is a far higher and remoter thing than the elements itis compacted of and that suggest it; what habits of appearance anddisappearance the latter may have, the object reduces to permanent andcalculable principles. It is altogether erroneous, therefore, to view anobject's sensible qualities as abstractions from it, seeing they are itsoriginal and component elements; nor can the sensible qualities beviewed as generic notions arising by comparison of several concreteobjects, seeing that these concretions would never have been made orthought to be permanent, did they not express observed variations andrecurrences in the sensible qualities immediately perceived and alreadyrecognised in their recurrence. These are themselves the trueparticulars. They are the first objects discriminated in attention andprojected against the background of consciousness. 

The immediate continuum may be traversed and mapped by two differentmethods. The prior one, because it is so very primitive and rudimentary, and so much a condition of all mental discourse, is usually ignored inpsychology. The secondary method, by which external things arediscovered, has received more attention. The latter consists in the factthat when several disparate sensations, having become recognisable intheir repetitions, are observed to come and go together, or in fixedrelation to some voluntary operation on the observer's part, they may beassociated by contiguity and merged in one portion of perceived space. Those having, like sensations of touch and sight, an essentially spatialcharacter, may easily be superposed; the surface I see and that I touchmay be identified by being presented together and being found to undergosimultaneous variations and to maintain common relations to otherperceptions. Thus I may come to attribute to a single object, the termof an intellectual synthesis and ideal intention, my experiences throughall the senses within a certain field of association, defined by itspractical relations. That ideal object is thereby endowed with as manyqualities and powers as I had associable sensations of which to make itup. This object is a concretion of my perceptions in space, so that theredness, hardness, sweetness, and roundness of the apple are all fusedtogether in my practical regard and given one local habitation and onename. 

[Sidenote: Universals are concretions in discourse. ]

This kind of synthesis, this superposition and mixture of images intonotions of physical objects, is not, however, the only kind to whichperceptions are subject. They fall together by virtue of theirqualitative identity even before their spatial superposition; for inorder to be known as repeatedly simultaneous, and associable bycontiguity, they must be associated by similarity and known asindividually repeated. The various recurrences of a sensation must berecognised as recurrences, and this implies the collection of sensationsinto classes of similars and the apperception of a common nature inseveral data. Now the more frequent a perception is the harder it willbe to discriminate in memory its past occurrences from one another, andyet the more readily will its present recurrence be recognised asfamiliar. The perception in sense will consequently be received as arepetition not of any single earlier sensation but of a familiar andgeneric experience. This experience, a spontaneous reconstruction basedon all previous sensations of that kind, will be the one habitual _idea_with which recurring sensations will be henceforth identified. Such aliving concretion of similars succeeding one another in time, is theidea of a nature or quality, the universal falsely supposed to be anabstraction from physical objects, which in truth are conceived byputting together these very ideas into a spatial and permanent system. 

Here we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin of the two terms mostprominent in human knowledge, ideas and things. Two methods ofconception divide our attention in common life; science and philosophydevelop both, although often with an unjustifiable bias in favour of oneor the other. They are nothing but the old principles of Aristotelianpsychology, association by similarity and association by contiguity. Only now, after logicians have exhausted their ingenuity in criticisingthem and psychologists in applying them, we may go back of thetraditional position and apply the ancient principles at a deeper stageof mental life. 

[Sidenote: Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yieldan idea. ]

Association by similarity is a fusion of impressions merging what iscommon in them, interchanging what is peculiar, and cancelling in theend what is incompatible; so that any excitement reaching that centrerevives one generic reaction which yields the idea. These concretegeneralities are actual feelings, the first terms in mental discourse, the first distinguishable particulars in knowledge, and the firstbearers of names. Intellectual dominion of the conscious stream beginswith the act of recognising these pervasive entities, which havingcharacter and ideal permanence can furnish common points of referencefor different moments of discourse. Save for ideas no perception couldhave significance, or acquire that indicative force which we callknowledge. For it would refer to nothing to which another perceptionmight also have referred; and so long as perceptions have no commonreference, so long as successive moments do not enrich by theircontributions the same object of thought, evidently experience, in thepregnant sense of the word, is impossible. No fund of valid ideas, nowisdom, could in that case be acquired by living. 

[Sidenote: Ideas are ideal. ]

Ideas, although their material is of course sensuous, are not sensationsnor perceptions nor objects of any possible immediate experience: theyare creatures of intelligence, goals of thought, ideal terms whichcogitation and action circle about. As the centre of mass is a body, while it may by chance coincide with one or another of its atoms, is noatom itself and no material constituent of the bulk that obeys itsmotion, so an idea, the centre of mass of a certain mental system, is nomaterial fragment of that system, but an ideal term of reference andsignification by allegiance to which the details of consciousness firstbecome parts of a system and of a thought. An idea is an ideal. Itrepresents a functional relation in the diffuse existences to which itgives a name and a rational value. An idea is an expression of life, and shares with life that transitive and elusive nature which defiesdefinition by mere enumeration of its materials. The peculiarity of lifeis that it lives; and thought also, when living, passes out of itselfand directs itself on the ideal, on the eventual. It is an activity. Activity does not consist in velocity of change but in constancy ofpurpose; in the conspiracy of many moments and many processes toward oneideal harmony and one concomitant ideal result. The most rudimentaryapperception, recognition, or expectation, is already a case ofrepresentative cognition, of transitive thought resting in a permanentessence. Memory is an obvious case of the same thing; for the past, inits truth, is a system of experiences in relation, a system nownon-existent and never, as a system, itself experienced, yet confrontedin retrospect and made the ideal object and standard for all historicalthinking. 

[Sidenote: So-called abstractions complete facts. ]

These arrested and recognisable ideas, concretions of similarssucceeding one another in time, are not abstractions; but they may cometo be regarded as such after the other kind of concretions inexperience, concretions of superposed perceptions in space, have becomethe leading objects of attention. The sensuous material for bothconcretions is the same; the perception which, recurring in differentobjects otherwise not retained in memory gives the idea of roundness, isthe same perception which helps to constitute the spatial concretioncalled the sun. Roundness may therefore be carelessly called anabstraction from the real object "sun"; whereas the peculiaroptical and muscular feelings by which the sense of roundness isconstituted--probably feelings of gyration and perpetual unbrokenmovement--are much earlier than any solar observations; they are aself-sufficing element in experience which, by repetition in variousaccidental contests, has come to be recognised and named, and to be acharacteristic by virtue of which more complex objects can bedistinguished and defined. The idea of the sun is a much later product, and the real sun is so far from being an original datum from whichroundness is abstracted, that it is an ulterior and quite idealconstruction, a spatial concretion into which the logical concretionroundness enters as a prior and independent factor. Roundness may befelt in the dark, by a mere suggestion of motion, and is a completeexperience in itself. When this recognisable experience happens to beassociated by contiguity with other recognisable experiences of heat, light, height, and yellowness, and these various independent objects areprojected into the same portion of a real space; then a concretionoccurs, and these ideas being recognised in that region and finding amomentary embodiment there, become the qualities of a thing. 

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by themind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. 

[Sidenote: Things concretions of concretions. ]

Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. Aconcretion in discourse occurs by repetition and mere emphasis on adatum, but a concretion in existence requires a synthesis of disparateelements and relations. An idea is nothing but a sensation apperceivedand rendered cognitive, so that it envisages its own recognisedcharacter as its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sensation ofyellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for itsown specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a terminto rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate ofpropositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discoveredonly when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can beobserved, and when various themes and strains of experience are woventogether into elaborate progressive harmonies. When consciousness firstbecomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when it becomes cognitive ofcauses, that is, when it becomes practical, it perceives things. 

[Sidenote: Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order ofnature. ]

Concretions of qualities recurrent in time and concretions of qualitiesassociated in existence are alike involved in daily life andinextricably ingrown into the structure of reason. In consciousness andfor logic, association by similarity, with its aggregations andidentifications of recurrences in time, is fundamental rather thanassociation by contiguity and its existential syntheses; forrecognition identifies similars perceived in succession, and withoutrecognition of similars there could be no known persistence ofphenomena. But physiologically and for the observer association bycontiguity comes first. All instinct--without which there would be nofixity or recurrence in ideation--makes movement follow impression in animmediate way which for consciousness becomes a mere juxtaposition ofsensations, a juxtaposition which it can neither explain nor avoid. Yetthis juxtaposition, in which pleasure, pain, and striving are prominentfactors, is the chief stimulus to attention and spreads before the mindthat moving and variegated field in which it learns to make its firstobservations. Facts--the burdens of successive moments--are allassociated by contiguity, from the first facts of perception and passionto the last facts of fate and conscience. We undergo events, we growinto character, by the subterraneous working of irrational forces thatmake their incalculable irruptions into life none the less wonderfullyin the revelations of a man's heart to himself than in the cataclysms ofthe world around him. Nature's placid procedure, to which we yield sowillingly in times of prosperity, is a concatenation of states which canonly be understood when it is made its own standard and law. A sort ofphilosophy without wisdom may seek to subjugate this natural life, thisblind budding of existence, to some logical or moral necessity; but thisvery attempt remains, perhaps, the most striking monument to thatirrational fatality that rules affairs, a monument which reason itselfis compelled to raise with unsuspected irony. 

[Sidenote: Aristotle's compromise. ]

Reliance on external perception, constant appeals to concrete fact andphysical sanctions, have always led the mass of reasonable men tomagnify concretions in existence and belittle concretions in discourse. They are too clever, as they feel, to mistake words for things. The mostauthoritative thinker on this subject, because the most mature, Aristotle himself, taught that things had reality, individuality, independence, and were the outer cause of perception, while generalideas, products of association by similarity, existed only in the mind. The public, pleased at its ability to understand this doctrine andoverlooking the more incisive part of the philosopher's teaching, couldgo home comforted and believing that material things were primary andperfect entities, while ideas were only abstractions, effects thoserealities produced on our incapable minds. Aristotle, however, had ajuster view of general concepts and made in the end the whole materialuniverse gravitate around them and feel their influence, though in ametaphysical and magic fashion to which a more advanced natural scienceneed no longer appeal. While in the shock of life man was always comingupon the accidental, in the quiet of reflection he could not but recasteverything in ideal moulds and retain nothing but eternal natures andintelligible relations. Aristotle conceived that while the origin ofknowledge lay in the impact of matter upon sense its goal was thecomprehension of essences, and that while man was involved by his animalnature in the accidents of experience he was also by virtue of hisrationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice wasthus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life, although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas, this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in itsbasis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience, preferred incoherence to partiality. 

[Sidenote: Empirical bias in favour of contiguity. ]

Active life and the philosophy that borrows its concepts from practicehas thus laid a great emphasis on association by contiguity. Hobbes andLocke made knowledge of this kind the only knowledge of reality, whilerecognising it to be quite empirical, tentative, and problematical. Itwas a kind of acquaintance with fact that increased with years andbrought the mind into harmony with something initially alien to it. Besides this practical knowledge or prudence there was a sort of verbaland merely ideal knowledge, a knowledge of the meaning and relation ofabstract terms. In mathematics and logic we might carry out long trainsof abstracted thought and analyse and develop our imaginations _adinfinitum_. These speculations, however, were in the air or--what forthese philosophers is much the same thing--in the mind; theirapplicability and their relevance to practical life and to objects givenin perception remained quite problematical. A self-developing science, asynthetic science _a priori_, had a value entirely hypothetical andprovisional; its practical truth depended on the verification of itsresults in some eventual sensible experience. Association was invoked toexplain the adjustment of ideation to the order of external perception. Association, by which association by contiguity was generallyunderstood, thus became the battle-cry of empiricism; if association bysimilarity had been equally in mind, the philosophy of pregnant reasoncould also have adopted the principle for its own. But logicians andmathematicians naturally neglect the psychology of their own processesand, accustomed as they are to an irresponsible and constructive use ofthe intellect, regard as a confused and uninspired intruder the criticwho, by a retrospective and naturalistic method, tries to give them alittle knowledge of themselves. 

[Sidenote: Artificial divorce of logic from practice. ]

Rational ideas must arise somehow in the mind, and since they are notmeant to be without application to the world of experience, it isinteresting to discover the point of contact between the two and thenature of their interdependence. This would have been found in themind's initial capacity to frame objects of two sorts, those compactedof sensations that are persistently similar, and those compacted ofsensations that are momentarily fused. In empirical philosophy theapplicability of logic and mathematics remains a miracle or becomes amisinterpretation: a miracle if the process of nature independentlyfollows the inward elaboration of human ideas; a misinterpretation ifthe bias of intelligence imposes _a priori_ upon reality a character andorder not inherent in it. The mistake of empiricists--among which Kantis in this respect to be numbered--which enabled them to disregard thisdifficulty, was that they admitted, beside rational thinking, anotherinstinctive kind of wisdom by which men could live, a wisdom theEnglishmen called experience and the Germans practical reason, spirit, or will. The intellectual sciences could be allowed to spin themselvesout in abstracted liberty while man practised his illogical and inspiredart of life. 

Here we observe a certain elementary crudity or barbarism which thehuman spirit often betrays when it is deeply stirred. Not only arechance and divination welcomed into the world but they are reverencedall the more, like the wind and fire of idolaters, precisely for notbeing amenable to the petty rules of human reason. In truth, however, the English duality between prudence and science is no more fundamentalthan the German duality between reason and understanding. [A] The truecontrast is between impulse and reflection, instinct and intelligence. When men feel the primordial authority of the animal in them and havelittle respect for a glimmering reason which they suspect to besecondary but cannot discern to be ultimate, they readily imagine theyare appealing to something higher than intelligence when in reality theyare falling back on something deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems tothem at such moments divine; and if they conceive a Life of Reason atall they despise it as a mass of artifices and conventions. Reason isindeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if living anyhow be thesole and indeterminate aim; as the existence of animals and of most mensufficiently proves. In so far as man is not a rational being and doesnot live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions anddreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or adjustment, inso far as his body takes the lead and even his galvanised action is aform of passivity, we may truly say that his life is not intellectualand not dependent on the application of general concepts to experience;for he lives by instinct. 

[Sidenote: Their mutual involution. ]

The Life of Reason, the comprehension of causes and pursuit of aims, begins precisely where instinctive operation ceases to be merely such bybecoming conscious of its purposes and representative of its conditions. Logical forms of thought impregnate and constitute practical intellect. The shock of experience can indeed correct, disappoint, or inhibitrational expectation, but it cannot take its place. The very firstlesson that experience should again teach us after our disappointmentwould be a rebirth of reason in the soul. Reason has the indomitablepersistence of all natural tendencies; it returns to the attack as wavesbeat on the shore. To observe its defeat is already to give it a newembodiment. Prudence itself is a vague science, and science, when itcontains real knowledge, is but a clarified prudence, a description ofexperience and a guide to life. Speculative reason, if it is not alsopractical, is not reason at all. Propositions irrelevant to experiencemay be correct in form, the method they are reached by may parodyscientific method, but they cannot be true in substance, because theyrefer to nothing. Like music, they have no object. They merely flow, andplease those whose unattached sensibility they somehow flatter. 

Hume, in this respect more radical and satisfactory than Kant himself, saw with perfect clearness that reason was an ideal expression ofinstinct, and that consequently no rational spheres could exist otherthan the mathematical and the empirical, and that what is not a datummust certainly be a construction. In establishing his "tendencies tofeign" at the basis of intelligence, and in confessing that he yieldedto them himself no less in his criticism of human nature than in hispractical life, he admitted the involution of reason--thatunintelligible instinct--in all the observations and maxims vouchsafedto an empiricist or to a man. He veiled his doctrine, however, in asomewhat unfair and satirical nomenclature, and he has paid the price ofthat indulgence in personal humour by incurring the immortal hatred ofsentimentalists who are too much scandalised by his tone ever tounderstand his principles. 

[Sidenote: Rationalistic suicide. ]

If the common mistake in empiricism is not to see the omnipresence ofreason in thought, the mistake of rationalism is not to admit itsvariability and dependence, not to understand its natural life. Parmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptivekind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him fromthe paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to hisdescendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. "Thewhole is one, " Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that samesense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logicalterms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that anindistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world. Parmenides carried association by similarity to such lengths that hearrived at the idea of what alone is similar in everything, viz. , thefact that it is. Being exists, and nothing else does; whereby everyrelation and variation in experience is reduced to a negligibleillusion, and reason loses its function at the moment of asserting itsabsolute authority. Notable lesson, taught us like so many others by thefirst experiments of the Greek mind, in its freedom and insight, a mindled quickly by noble self-confidence to the ultimate goals of thought. 

Such a pitch of heroism and abstraction has not been reached by anyrationalist since. No one else has been willing to ignore entirely allthe data and constructions of experience, save the highest conceptreached by assimilations in that experience; no one else has beenwilling to demolish all the scaffolding and all the stones of hisedifice, hoping still to retain the sublime symbol which he had plantedon the summit. Yet all rationalists have longed to demolish or todegrade some part of the substructure, like those Gothic architects whowished to hang the vaults of their churches upon the slenderest possiblesupports, abolishing and turning into painted crystal all the dead wallsof the building. So experience and its crowning conceptions were to restwholly on a skeleton of general natures, physical forces beingassimilated to logical terms, and concepts gained by identification ofsimilars taking the place of those gained by grouping disparate thingsin their historical conjunctions. These contiguous sensations, whichoccasionally exemplify the logical contrasts in ideas and give themincidental existence, were either ignored altogether and dismissed asunmeaning, or admitted merely as illusions. The eye was to be trained topass from that parti-coloured chaos to the firm lines and permanentdivisions that were supposed to sustain it and frame it in. 

Rationalism is a kind of builder's bias which the impartial publiccannot share; for the dead walls and glass screens which may have nofunction in supporting the roof are yet as needful as the roof itself toshelter and beauty. So the incidental filling of experience whichremains unclassified under logical categories retains all its primaryreality and importance. The outlines of it emphasised by logic, thoughthey may be the essential vehicle of our most soaring thoughts, are onlya method and a style of architecture. They neither absorb the wholematerial of life nor monopolise its values. And as each material imposesupon the builder's ingenuity a different type of construction, andstone, wood, and iron must be treated on different structuralprinciples, so logical methods of comprehension, spontaneous though theybe in their mental origin, must prove themselves fitted to the naturalorder and affinity of the facts. [B] Nor is there in this necessity anyviolence to the spontaneity of reason: for reason also has manifoldforms, and the accidents of experience are more than matched in varietyby the multiplicity of categories. Here one principle of order and thereanother shoots into the mind, which breeds more genera and species thanthe most fertile terrestrial slime can breed individuals. 

[Sidenote: Complementary character of essence and existence. ]

Language, then, with the logic imbedded in it, is a repository of termsformed by identifying successive perceptions, as the external world is arepository of objects conceived by superposing perceptions that existtogether. Being formed on different principles these two orders ofconception--the logical and the physical--do not coincide, and theattempt to fuse them into one system of demonstrable reality or moralphysics is doomed to failure by the very nature of the terms compared. When the Eleatics proved the impossibility--_i. E. _, theinexpressibility--of motion, or when Kant and his followers proved theunreal character of all objects of experience and of all naturalknowledge, their task was made easy by the native diversity between theconcretions in existence which were the object of their thought and theconcretions in discourse which were its measure. The two do not fit; andintrenched as these philosophers were in the forms of logic theycompelled themselves to reject as unthinkable everything not fullyexpressible in those particular forms. Thus they took their revenge uponthe vulgar who, being busy chiefly with material things and dwelling inan atmosphere of sensuous images, call unreal and abstract every productof logical construction or reflective analysis. These logical products, however, are not really abstract, but, as we have seen, concretionsarrived at by a different method than that which results in materialconceptions. Whereas the conception of a thing is a local conglomerateof several simultaneous sensations, logical entity is a homogeneousrevival in memory of similar sensations temporally distinct. 

Thus the many armed with prejudice and the few armed with logic fight aneternal battle, the logician charging the physical world withunintelligibility and the man of common-sense charging the logicalworld with abstractness and unreality. The former view is the moreprofound, since association by similarity is the more elementary andgives constancy to meanings; while the latter view is the morepractical, since association by contiguity alone informs the mind aboutthe mechanical sequence of its own experience. Neither principle can bedispensed with, and each errs only in denouncing the other and wishingto be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could make anybodyunderstand the history of events and the conjunction of objects, or onthe other hand as if cognitive and moral processes could have any otherterms than constant and ideal natures. The namable essence of things orthe standard of values must always be an ideal figment; existence mustalways be an empirical fact. The former remains always remote fromnatural existence and the latter irreducible to a logical principle. [C]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic: but Plato'sReason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt with phenomenalexperience) because it was a moral faculty defining those values andmeanings which in Platonic nomenclature took the title of reality. TheGerman Reason was only imagination, substituting a dialectical or poetichistory of the world for its natural development. German idealism, accordingly, was not, like Plato's, a moral philosophy hypostasised buta false physics adored. ]

[Footnote B: This natural order and affinity is something imputed to theultimate object of thought--the reality--by the last act of judgmentassuming its own truth. It is, of course, not observable byconsciousness before the first experiment in comprehension has beenmade; the act of comprehension which first imposes on the sensuousmaterial some subjective category is the first to arrive at the notionof an objective order. The historian, however, has a well-tried andmature conception of the natural order arrived at after many suchexperiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground of this latesthypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have made to understandevents and compares them with the objective order which he believeshimself to have discovered. This observation is made here lest thereader should confuse the natural order, imagined to exist before anyapplication of human categories, with the last conception of that orderattained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the former isfaith's ideal object. ]

[Footnote C: For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precedeconceptions of things have been mentioned here. After things arediscovered, however, they may be used as terms in a second idealsynthesis and a concretion in discourse on a higher plane may becomposed out of sustained concretions in existence. Proper names aresuch secondary concretions in discourse. "Venice" is a term coveringmany successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy, belonging to an object existing continuously in space and time. Each ofthese states of Venice constitutes a natural object, a concretion inexistence, and is again analysable into a mass of fused but recognisablequalities--light, motion, beauty--each of which was an originalconcretion in discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality isrecognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by itsconstituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion into an idealessence of the constant characters possessed by a thing. To raisenatural objects into historic entities it is necessary to repeat upon ahigher plane that concretion in discourse by which sensations wereraised to ideas. When familiar objects attain this ideal character theyhave become poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They thenpossess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is solidified intological terms, these into ideas of things, and these, recast and smeltedagain in imagination, into forms of spirit. ]

CHAPTER VIII--ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS

[Sidenote: Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle. ]

Those who look back upon the history of opinion for many centuriescommonly feel, by a vague but profound instinct, that certainconsecrated doctrines have an inherent dignity and spirituality, whileother speculative tendencies and other vocabularies seem wedded to allthat is ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this moral tone inphilosophy that people are usually more firmly convinced that theiropinions are precious than that they are true. They may avow, inreflective moments, that they may be in error, seeing that thinkers ofno less repute have maintained opposite opinions, but they are commonlyabsolutely sure that if their own views could be generally accepted, itwould be a boon to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of the raceare bound up, not with discovering what may chance to be true, but withdiscovering the truth to have a particular complexion. This predominanttrust in moral judgments is in some cases conscious and avowed, so thatphilosophers invite the world to embrace tenets for which no evidenceis offered but that they chime in with current aspirations ortraditional bias. Thus the substance of things hoped for becomes, evenin philosophy, the evidence of things not seen. 

Such faith is indeed profoundly human and has accompanied the mind inall its gropings and discoveries; preference being the primary principleof discrimination and attention. Reason in her earliest manifestationsalready discovered her affinities and incapacities, and loaded the ideasshe framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not strange that herlatest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and weshall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systemscorresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type ofidea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivatingconcretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge andthe last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasisingconcretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits ofnature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in thelast instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind tothat habit and plane of ideation. 

[Sidenote: Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions. ]

We have said that perceptions must be recognised before they can beassociated by contiguity, and that consequently the fusion of temporallydiffused experiences must precede their local fusion into materialobjects. It might be urged in opposition to this statement that concreteobjects can be recognised in practice before their general qualitieshave been distinguished in discourse. Recognition may be instinctive, that is, based on the repetition of a felt reaction or emotion, ratherthan on any memory of a former occasion on which the same perceptionoccurred. Such an objection seems to be well grounded, for it isinstinctive adjustments and suggested action that give cognitive valueto sensation and endow it with that transitive force which makes itconsciously representative of what is past, future, or absent. Ifpractical instinct did not stretch what is given into what is meant, reason could never recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object. 

[Sidenote: Idealism rudimentary. ]

This description of the case involves an application or extension of ourtheory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition isinstinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-mindedconfidence and without attending to the indications that justify thataction, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion inexperience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structuralsurvivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enoughto be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbeddedin the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact aheightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest andvaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of anembosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichtewould call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular eventsare recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. Wetrail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energyand movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoriacapriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omniscientand omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent theinertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as thecreative forces of nature. 

The first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at whichattention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions:such are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inabilityto descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empiricalbackground and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dreamfull of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses asyet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, ithas no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved andperpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, areconcretions in discourse, ideas combined in their æsthetic and logicalharmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. Thedisorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has notdiscovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysmsthat occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning. Though the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into anightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. Whatperceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences, they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear asparts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to thebarbaric prosody of an almost infant mind. 

This is the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems amatter of course and every hint of what is purely natural isdisregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, andremote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselvesinopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneousimagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien andperverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the oldpresences as confirmations or corollaries, become at once parts of thewarp and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem of the very substanceof spirit, obeying a vital momentum and flowing from the inmostprinciple of being; and they are so much akin to human presumptions thatthey pass for manifestations of necessary truth. Thus the demonstrationsof geometry being but the intent explication of a long-consolidatedideal concretion which we call space, are welcomed by the mind as in asense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, sothat Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatalwisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even ifexpected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; itassaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensationindividual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus may pleasein their way, yet the badge of the accidental and unmeaning adheres tothe thing. It is a trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. Theshock is superficial and were it repeated would soon fatigue. We shouldretire with relief into darkness and silence, to our permanent andrational thoughts. 

[Sidenote: Naturalism sad. ]

It is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinterpreted, that whileall the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be associated withexternal things, and all certain knowledge seems to describe materiallaws, yet a deified nature has generally inspired a religion ofmelancholy. Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeatreason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to blast our besthopes? Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and fruitful auniverse? Whence this persistent search for invisible regions and powersand for metaphysical explanations that can explain nothing, whilenature's voice without and within man cries aloud to him to look, act, and enjoy? And when someone, in protest against such senseless oracularprejudices, has actually embraced the life and faith of nature andtaught others to look to the natural world for all motives andsanctions, expecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invigoratehuman life, why have those innocent hopes failed so miserably? Why isthat sensuous optimism we may call Greek, or that industrial optimism wemay call American, such a thin disguise for despair? Why does each meltaway and become a mockery at the first approach of reflection? Why hasman's conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism andreverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?

[Sidenote: The soul akin to the eternal and ideal. ]

We may answer in the words of Saint Paul: because things seen aretemporal and things not seen are eternal. And we may add, rememberingour analysis of the objects inhabiting the mind, that the eternal is thetruly human, that which is akin to the first indispensable products ofintelligence, which arise by the fusion of successive images indiscourse, and transcend the particular in time, peopling the mind withpermanent and recognisable objects, and strengthening it with asynthetic, dramatic apprehension of itself and its own experience. Concretion in existence, on the contrary, yields essentially detachedand empirical unities, foreign to mind in spite of their order, andunintelligible in spite of their clearness. Reason fails to assimilatein them precisely that which makes them real, namely, their presencehere and now, in this order and number. The form and quality of them wecan retain, domesticate, and weave into the texture of reflection, buttheir existence and individuality remain a datum of sense needing to beverified anew at every moment and actually receiving continualverification or disproof while we live in this world. 

"This world" we call it, not without justifiable pathos, for many otherworlds are conceivable and if discovered might prove more rational andintelligible and more akin to the soul than this strange universe whichman has hitherto always looked upon with increasing astonishment. Thematerials of experience are no sooner in hand than they are transformedby intelligence, reduced to those permanent presences, those natures andrelations, which alone can live in discourse. Those materials, rearranged into the abstract summaries we call history or science, orpieced out into the reconstructions and extensions we call poetry orreligion, furnish us with ideas of as many dream-worlds as we please, all nearer to reason's ideal than is the actual chaos of perceptualexperience, and some nearer to the heart's desire. When an empiricalphilosophy, therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights ofimagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in thisalone we touch existence and come upon fact, we feel dispossessed of ournature and cramped in our life. The actuality possessed by externalexperience cannot make up for its instability, nor the applicability ofscientific principles for their hypothetical character. The dependenceupon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world ofexistences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential impotence andmortality, while the play of logical fancy, though it remain inevitable, is saddened by a consciousness of its own insignificance. 

[Sidenote: Her inexperience. ]

That dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas and their affinity tomoral enthusiasm, springs from their congruity with the primary habitsof intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or personality, whichin sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion andconcern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level onwhich it swims comes to be, by association and affinity, the region ofall the more vivid and massive human interests. The pleasures which liebeneath it are ignored, and the ideals which lie above it are notperceived. Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philosophyaccordingly expresses a sort of logical patriotism and attachment tohomespun ideas. The actual is too remote and unfriendly to the dreamer;to understand it he has to learn a foreign tongue, which his nativeprejudice imagines to be unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is, however, that nature's language is too rich for man; and the discomforthe feels when he is compelled to use it merely marks his lack ofeducation. There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had bymerely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and bydeclaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternaland necessary harmonies of the world. 

[Sidenote: Platonism spontaneous. ]

The thinker's bias is naturally favourable to logical ideas. The man ofreflection will attribute, as far as possible, validity and reality tothese alone. Platonism remains the classic instance of this way ofthinking. Living in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealtwith nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or mathematical, Platosaw in concretions in discourse the true elements of being. Definablemeanings, being the terms of thought, must also, he fancied, be theconstituents of reality. And with that directness and audacity which waspossible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans and Eleatics hadalready given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse, like the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities, existing before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmicartificer his models and the creature his goal. By some inexplicablenecessity the creation had taken place. The ideas had multipliedthemselves in a flux of innumerable images which could be recognised bytheir resemblance to their originals, but were at once cancelled andexpunged by virtue of their essential inadequacy. What sounds are towords and words to thoughts, that was a thing to its idea. 

[Sidenote: Its essential fidelity to the ideal. ]

Plato, however, retained the moral and significant essence of his ideas, and while he made them ideal absolutes, fixed meanings antecedent totheir changing expressions, never dreamed that they could be naturalexistences, or psychological beings. In an original thinker, in one whoreally thinks and does not merely argue, to call a thing supernatural, or spiritual, or intelligible is to declare that it is no _thing_ atall, no existence actual or possible, but a value, a term of thought, amerely ideal principle; and the more its reality in such a sense isinsisted on the more its incommensurability with brute existence isasserted. To express this ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle; avehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more freely that heinherited a religion still plastic and conscious of its poetic essence, and did not have to struggle, like his modern disciples, with thearrested childishness of minds that for a hundred generations havelearned their metaphysics in the cradle. His ideas, although theirnatural basis was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they alwaysrepresented meanings and functions and were never degraded from themoral to the physical sphere. The counterpart of this genuine idealitywas that the theory retained its moral force and did not degenerate intoa bewildered and idolatrous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul'sdestiny to be her emancipation from those material things which in thisillogical apparition were so alien to her essence. She should return, after her baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world of senseand accident, into the native heaven of her ideas. For animal desireswere no less illusory, and yet no less significant, than sensuousperceptions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the good and taught him, through disappointment, to look for it only in those satisfactions whichcan be permanent and perfect. Love, like intelligence, must rise fromappearance to reality, and rest in that divine world which is thefulfilment of the human. 

[Sidenote: Equal rights of empiricism. ]

A geometrician does a good service when he declares and explicates thenature of the triangle, an object suggested by many casual and recurringsensations. His service is not less real, even if less obvious, when hearrests some fundamental concretion in discourse, and formulates thefirst principles of logic. Mastering such definitions, sinking into thedry life of such forms, he may spin out and develop indefinitely, in thefreedom of his irresponsible logic, their implications and congruousextensions, opening by his demonstration a depth of knowledge which weshould otherwise never have discovered in ourselves. But if the geometerhad a fanatical zeal and forbade us to consider space and the trianglesit contains otherwise than as his own ideal science considers them:forbade us, for instance, to inquire how we came to perceive thosetriangles or that space; what organs and senses conspired in furnishingthe idea of them; what material objects show that character, and howthey came to offer themselves to our observation--then surely thegeometer would qualify his service with a distinct injury and while heopened our eyes to one fascinating vista would tend to blind them toothers no less tempting and beautiful. For the naturalist andpsychologist have also their rights and can tell us things well worthknowing; nor will any theory they may possibly propose concerning theorigin of spatial ideas and their material embodiments ever invalidatethe demonstrations of geometry. These, in their hypothetical sphere, areperfectly autonomous and self-generating, and their applicability toexperience will hold so long as the initial images they are applied tocontinue to abound in perception. 

If we awoke to-morrow in a world containing nothing but music, geometrywould indeed lose its relevance to our future experience; but it wouldkeep its ideal cogency, and become again a living language if anyspatial objects should ever reappear in sense. 

The history of such reappearances--natural history--is meantime a goodsubject for observation and experiment. Chronicler and critic can alwaysapproach experience with a method complementary to the deductive methodspursued in mathematics and logic: instead of developing the import of adefinition, he can investigate its origin and describe its relation toother disparate phenomena. The mathematician develops the import ofgiven ideas; the psychologist investigates their origin and describestheir relation to the rest of human experience. So the prophet developsthe import of his trance, and the theologian the import of the prophecy:which prevents not the historian from coming later and showing theorigin, the growth, and the possible function of that maniacal sort ofwisdom. True, the theologian commonly dreads a critic more than does thegeometer, but this happens only because the theologian has probably notdeveloped the import of his facts with any austerity or clearness, buthas distorted that ideal interpretation with all sorts of concessionsand side-glances at other tenets to which he is already pledged, so thathe justly fears, when his methods are exposed, that the religious heartwill be alienated from him and his conclusions be left with no footholdin human nature. If he had not been guilty of such misrepresentation, nohistory or criticism that reviewed his construction would do anythingbut recommend it to all those who found in themselves the primaryreligious facts and religious faculties which that construction hadfaithfully interpreted in its ideal deductions and extensions. All whoperceived the facts would thus learn their import; and theology wouldreveal to the soul her natural religion, just as Euclid reveals toarchitects and navigators the structure of natural space, so that theyvalue his demonstrations not only for their hypothetical cogency butfor their practical relevance and truth. 

[Sidenote: Logic dependent on fact for its importance, ]

Now, like the geometer and ingenuous theologian that he was, Platodeveloped the import of moral and logical experience. Even hisfollowers, though they might give rein to narrower and more fantasticenthusiasms, often unveiled secrets, hidden in the oracular intent ofthe heart, which might never have been disclosed but for their lessons. But with a zeal unbecoming so well grounded a philosophy they turnedtheir backs upon the rest of wisdom, they disparaged the evidence ofsense, they grew hot against the ultimate practical sanctions furnishedby impulse and pleasure, they proscribed beauty in art (where Plato hadproscribed chiefly what to a fine sensibility is meretricious ugliness), and in a word they sought to abolish all human activities other than theone pre-eminent in themselves. In revenge for their hostility the greatworld has never given them more than a distrustful admiration and, confronted daily by the evident truths they denied, has encourageditself to forget the truths they asserted. For they had the bias ofreflection and man is born to do more than reflect; they attributedreality and validity only to logical ideas, and man finds other objectscontinually thrusting themselves before his eyes, claiming his affectionand controlling his fortunes. 

The most legitimate constructions of reason soon become merelyspeculative, soon pass, I mean, beyond the sphere of practicalapplication; and the man of affairs, adjusting himself at every turn tothe opaque brutality of fact, loses his respect for the higher reachesof logic and forgets that his recognition of facts themselves is anapplication of logical principles. In his youth, perhaps, he pursuedmetaphysics, which are the love-affairs of the understanding; now he iswedded to convention and seeks in the passion he calls business or inthe habit he calls duty some substitute for natural happiness. He fearsto question the value of his life, having found that such questioningadds nothing to his powers; and he thinks the mariner would die of oldage in port who should wait for reason to justify his voyage. Reason isindeed like the sad Iphigenia whom her royal father, the Will, mustsacrifice before any wind can fill his sails. The emanation of allthings from the One involves not only the incarnation but thecrucifixion of the Logos. Reason must be eclipsed by its supposedexpressions, and can only shine in a darkness which does not comprehendit. For reason is essentially hypothetical and subsidiary, and can neverconstitute what it expresses in man, nor what it recognises in nature. 

[Sidenote: and for its subsistence. ]

If logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice and tosubordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately becomeirrational and forfeit its own justification. For it exists by virtueof a human impulse and in answer to a human need. To ask a man, in thesatisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego every other good is torender him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the sun in order thathe may see better by the star-light. The radical fault of rationalism isnot any incidental error committed in its deductions, although suchnecessarily abound in every human system. Its great original sin is itsdenial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its due place in theworld, an ignorant fear of being invalidated by its history anddishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only bastardsshould fear that fate, and criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastardphilosophy, to one that does not spring from practical reason and has noroots in life. But those products of reason which arise by reflection onfact, and those spontaneous and demonstrable systems of ideas which canbe verified in experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculableand articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by discovering theirlineage. So the idea of nature remains true after psychology hasanalysed its origin, and not only true, but beautiful and beneficent. For unlike many negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven outof recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which furtherperceptions can be deduced as they are actually experienced. 

Such a mechanism once discovered confirms itself at every breath wedraw, and surrounds every object in history and nature with infiniteand true suggestions, making it doubly interesting, fruitful, and potentover the mind. The naturalist accordingly welcomes criticism because hisconstructions, though no less hypothetical and speculative than theidealist's dreams, are such legitimate and fruitful fictions that theyare obvious truths. For truth, at the intelligible level where itarises, means not sensible fact, but valid ideation, verifiedhypothesis, and inevitable, stable inference. If the idealist fears anddeprecates any theory of his own origin and function, he is only obeyingthe instinct of self-preservation; for he knows very well that his pastwill not bear examination. He is heir to every superstition and byprofession an apologist; his deepest vocation is to rescue, by somelogical _tour de force_, what spontaneously he himself would have takenfor a consecrated error. Now history and criticism would involve, as heinstinctively perceives, the reduction of his doctrines to theirpragmatic value, to their ideal significance for real life. But hedetests any admission of relativity in his doctrines, all the morebecause he cannot avow his reasons for detesting it; and zeal, here asin so many cases, becomes the cover and evidence of a bad conscience. Bigotry and craft, with a rhetorical vilification of enemies, then cometo reinforce in the prophet that natural limitation of his interestswhich turns his face away from history and criticism; until his system, in its monstrous unreality and disingenuousness, becomes intolerable, and provokes a general revolt in which too often the truth of it isburied with the error in a common oblivion. 

[Sidenote: Reason and docility. ]

If idealism is intrenched in the very structure of human reason, empiricism represents all those energies of the external universe which, as Spinoza says, must infinitely exceed the energies of man. Ifmeditation breeds science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on thesubject of science itself. Docility to the facts makes the sanity ofscience. Reason is only half grown and not really distinguishable fromimagination so long as she cannot check and recast her own processeswherever they render the moulds of thought unfit for theirsubject-matter. Docility is, as we have seen, the deepest condition ofreason's existence; for if a form of mental synthesis were by chancedeveloped which was incapable of appropriating the data of sense, thesedata could not be remembered or introduced at all into a growing andcumulative experience. Sensations would leave no memorial; while logicalthoughts would play idly, like so many parasites in the mind, andultimately languish and die of inanition. To be nourished and employed, intelligence must have developed such structure and habits as willenable it to assimilate what food comes in its way; so that thepersistence of any intellectual habit is a proof that it has someapplicability, however partial, to the facts of sentience. 

[Sidenote: Applicable thought and clarified experience. ]

This applicability, the prerequisite of significant thought, is also itseventual test; and the gathering of new experiences, the consciousnessof more and more facts crowding into the memory and demandingco-ordination, is at once the presentation to reason of her legitimateproblem and a proof that she is already at work. It is a presentation ofher problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams but a method inliving; and by facing the flux of sensations and impulses thatconstitute mortal life with the gift of ideal construction and theaspiration toward eternal goods, she is only doing her duty andmanifesting what she is. To accumulate facts, moreover, is in itself toprove that rational activity is already awakened, because aconsciousness of multitudinous accidents diversifying experienceinvolves a wide scope in memory, good methods of classification, andkeen senses, so that all working together they may collect manyobservations. Memory and all its instruments are embodiments, on amodest scale, of rational activities which in theory and speculationreappear upon a higher level. The expansion of the mind in point ofretentiveness and wealth of images is as much an advance in knowledge asis its development in point of organisation. The structure may bewidened at the base as well as raised toward its ideal summit, and whilea mass of information imperfectly digested leaves something still forintelligence to do, it shows at the same time how much intelligence hasdone already. 

The function of reason is to dominate experience; and obviouslyopenness to new impressions is no less necessary to that end than is thepossession of principles by which new impressions may be interpreted. 

CHAPTER IX--HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL

[Sidenote: Functional relations of mind and body. ]

Nothing is more natural or more congruous with all the analogies ofexperience than that animals should feel and think. The relation of mindto body, of reason to nature, seems to be actually this: when bodieshave reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense beginsto inhabit them which is focussed upon the preservation of that body andon its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes reflective and expressiveof physical welfare, points more and more to its own persistence andharmony, and generates the Life of Reason. Nature is reason's basis andtheme; reason is nature's consciousness; and, from the point of view ofthat consciousness when it has arisen, reason is also nature'sjustification and goal. 

To separate things so closely bound together as are mind and body, reason and nature, is consequently a violent and artificial divorce, anda man of judgment will instinctively discredit any philosophy in whichit is decreed. But to avoid divorce it is well first to avoid unnaturalunions, and not to attribute to our two elements, which must bepartners for life, relations repugnant to their respective natures andoffices. Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, thewitness and reward of its operation. Mind is the body's entelechy, avalue which accrues to the body when it has reached a certainperfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it shouldremain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mindperfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulsesinto the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas. 

No connection could be closer than this reciprocal involution, as natureand life reveal it; but the connection is natural, not dialectical. Theunion will be denaturalised and, so far as philosophy goes, actuallydestroyed, if we seek to carry it on into logical equivalence. If weisolate the terms mind and body and study the inward implications ofeach apart, we shall never discover the other. That matter cannot, bytransposition of its particles, _become_ what we call consciousness, isan admitted truth; that mind cannot _become_ its own occasions ordetermine its own march, though it be a truth not recognised by allphilosophers, is in itself no less obvious. Matter, dialecticallystudied, makes consciousness seem a superfluous and unaccountableaddendum; mind, studied in the same way, makes nature an embarrassingidea, a figment which ought to be subservient to conscious aims andperfectly transparent, but which remains opaque and overwhelming. Inorder to escape these sophistications, it suffices to revert toimmediate observation and state the question in its proper terms: naturelives, and perception is a private echo and response to ambient motions. The soul is the voice of the body's interests; in watching them a mandefines the world that sustains him and that conditions all hissatisfactions. In discerning his origin he christens Nature by theeloquent name of mother, under which title she enters the universe ofdiscourse. Simultaneously he discerns his own existence and marks offthe inner region of his dreams. And it behooves him not to obliteratethese discoveries. By trying to give his mind false points of attachmentin nature he would disfigure not only nature but also that reason whichis so much the essence of his life. 

[Sidenote: They form one natural life. ]

Consciousness, then, is the expression of bodily life and the seat ofall its values. Its place in the natural world is like that of its ownideal products, art, religion, or science; it translates naturalrelations into synthetic and ideal symbols by which things areinterpreted with reference to the interests of consciousness itself. This representation is also an existence and has its place along withall other existences in the bosom of nature. In this sense itsconnection with its organs, and with all that affects the body or thatthe body affects, is a natural connection. If the word cause did notsuggest dialectical bonds we might innocently say that thought was alink in the chain of natural causes. It is at least a link in the chainof natural events; for it has determinate antecedents in the brain andsenses and determinate consequents in actions and words. But thisdependence and this efficacy have nothing logical about them; they arehabitual collocations in the world, like lightning and thunder. A moreminute inspection of psycho-physical processes, were it practicable, would doubtless disclose undreamed of complexities and harmonies inthem; the mathematical and dynamic relations of stimulus and sensationmight perhaps be formulated with precision. But the terms used in theequation, their quality and inward habit, would always remain data whichthe naturalist would have to assume after having learned them byinspection. Movement could never be deduced dialectically or graphicallyfrom thought nor thought from movement. Indeed no natural relation is ina different case. Neither gravity, nor chemical reaction, nor life andreproduction, nor time, space, and motion themselves are logicallydeducible, nor intelligible in terms of their limits. The phenomena haveto be accepted at their face value and allowed to retain a certainempirical complexity; otherwise the seed of all science is sterilisedand calculation cannot proceed for want of discernible and pregnantelements. 

How fine nature's habits may be, where repetition begins, and down towhat depth a mathematical treatment can penetrate, is a question forthe natural sciences to solve. Whether consciousness, for instance, accompanies vegetative life, or even all motion, is a point to bedecided solely by empirical analogy. When the exact physical conditionsof thought are discovered in man, we may infer how far thought isdiffused through the universe, for it will be coextensive with theconditions it will have been shown to have. Now, in a very rough way, weknow already what these conditions are. They are first the existence ofan organic body and then its possession of adaptable instincts, ofinstincts that can be modified by experience. This capacity is what anobserver calls intelligence; docility is the observable half of reason. When an animal winces at a blow and readjusts his pose, we say he feels;and we say he thinks when we see him brooding over his impressions, andfind him launching into a new course of action after a silent decoctionof his potential impulses. Conversely, when observation covers both themental and the physical process, that is, in our own experience, we findthat felt impulses, the conceived objects for which they make, and thevalues they determine are all correlated with animal instincts andexternal impressions. A desire is the inward sign of a physicalproclivity to act, an image in sense is the sign in most cases of somematerial object in the environment and always, we may presume, of somecerebral change. The brain seems to simmer like a caldron in which allsorts of matters are perpetually transforming themselves into all sortsof shapes. When this cerebral reorganisation is pertinent to theexternal situation and renders the man, when he resumes action, more amaster of his world, the accompanying thought is said to be practical;for it brings a consciousness of power and an earnest of success. 

Cerebral processes are of course largely hypothetical. Theory suggeststheir existence, and experience can verify that theory only in anindirect and imperfect manner. The addition of a physical substratum toall thinking is only a scientific expedient, a hypothesis expressing thefaith that nature is mechanically intelligible even beyond the reachesof minute verification. The accompanying consciousness, on the otherhand, is something intimately felt by each man in his own person; it isa portion of crude and immediate experience. That it accompanies changesin his body and in the world is not an inference for him but a datum. But when crude experience is somewhat refined and the soul, at firstmingled with every image, finds that it inhabits only her private body, to whose fortunes hers are altogether wedded, we begin to imagine thatwe know the cosmos at large better than the spirit; for beyond thenarrow limits of our own person only the material phase of things isopen to our observation. To add a mental phase to every part and motionof the cosmos is then seen to be an audacious fancy. It violates allempirical analogy, for the phenomenon which feeling accompanies in crudeexperience is not mere material existence, but reactive organisationand docility. 

[Sidenote: Artifices involved in separating them. ]

The limits set to observation, however, render the mental and materialspheres far from coincident, and even in a rough way mutuallysupplementary, so that human reflection has fallen into a habit ofinterlarding them. The world, instead of being a living body, a naturalsystem with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, halfmaterial and half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an automaton with aghost. These phases, taken in their abstraction, as they first forcedthemselves on human attention, have been taken for independent andseparable facts. Experience, remaining in both provinces quite sensuousand superficial, has accordingly been allowed to link this purely mentalevent with that purely mechanical one. The linkage is practically notdeceptive, because mental transformations are indeed signs of changes inbodies; and so long as a cause is defined merely as a sign, mental andphysical changes may truly be said to cause one another. But so soon asthis form of augury tries to overcome its crude empiricism and toestablish phenomenal laws, the mental factor has to fall out of theefficient process and be represented there by what, upon accurateexamination, it is seen to be really the sign of--I mean by somephysiological event. 

If philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken to heart, as theGerman transcendentalists did, the _cogito ergo sum_ of their master, and had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing butan instrument to explain sensations and their order, they might haveexpected this collapse of half their metaphysics at the approach oftheir positive science: for if mental existence was to be kept standingonly by its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the wholeworld from becoming presently a _bête-machine. _ Psychic events have nolinks save through their organs and their objects; the function of thematerial world is, indeed, precisely to supply their linkage. Theinternal relations of ideas, on the other hand, are dialectical; theirrealm is eternal and absolutely irrelevant to the march of events. If wemust speak, therefore, of causal relations between mind and body, weshould say that matter is the pervasive cause of mind's distribution, and mind the pervasive cause of matter's discovery and value. To ask foran efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate origins, is tohave already turned one's face in the direction of matter and mechanicallaws: no success in that undertaking can fail to be a triumph formaterialism. To ask for a justification, on the other hand, is to turnno less resolutely in the direction of ideal results and actualitiesfrom which instrumentality and further use have been eliminated. Spiritis useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alonerescues all else from vanity. It is called practical when it isprophetic of its own better fulfilments, which is the case wheneverforces are being turned to good uses, whenever an organism is exploringits relations and putting forth new tentacles with which to grasp theworld. 

[Sidenote: Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility. ]

We saw in the beginning that the exigences of bodily life gaveconsciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition orreproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousnessis a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, thechief episodes in the body's fortunes. The organs, by their structure, select the impressions possible to them from the divers influencesabroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned tofeed upon them, might plausibly have offered a basis for sensation. Every instinct or habitual impulse further selects from the passingbodily affections those that are pertinent to its own operation andwhich consequently adhere to it and modify its reactive machinery. Prevalent and notable sensations are therefore signs, presumably markingthe presence of objects important for the body's welfare or for theexecution of its predestined offices. So that not only are the soul'saims transcripts of the body's tendencies, but all ideas are graftedupon the interplay of these tendencies with environing forces. Earlyimages hover about primary wants as highest conceptions do aboutultimate achievements. 

[Sidenote: Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression]

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought nomotion would be an action, no change a progress; but thought is in noway instrumental or servile; it is an experience realised, not a forceto be used. That same spontaneity in nature which has suggested a goodmust be trusted to fulfil it. If we look fairly at the actual resourcesof our minds we perceive that we are as little informed concerning themeans and processes of action as concerning the reason why our motivesmove us. To execute the simplest intention we must rely on fate: our ownacts are mysteries to us. Do I know how I open my eyes or how I walkdown stairs? Is it the supervising wisdom of consciousness that guidesme in these acts? Is it the mind that controls the bewildered body andpoints out the way to physical habits uncertain of their affinities? Oris it not much rather automatic inward machinery that executes themarvellous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse ofthe operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotentrebellion? When impulses work themselves out unimpeded we say we act;when they are thwarted we say we are acted upon; but in neither case dowe in the least understand the natural history of what is occurring. Themind at best vaguely forecasts the result of action: a schematic verbalsense of the end to be accomplished possibly hovers in consciousnesswhile the act is being performed; but this premonition is itself thesense of a process already present and betrays the tendency at work; itcan obviously give no aid or direction to the unknown mechanical processthat produced it and that must realise its own prophecy, if thatprophecy is to be realised at all. 

That such an unknown mechanism exists, and is adequate to explain everyso-called decision, is indeed a hypothesis far outrunning detailedverification, although conceived by legitimate analogy with whatever isknown about natural processes; but that the mind is not the source ofitself or its own transformations is a matter of present experience; forthe world is an unaccountable datum, in its existence, in its laws, andin its incidents. The highest hopes of science and morality look only todiscovering those laws and bringing one set of incidents--facts ofperception--into harmony with another set--facts of preference. Thishoped-for issue, if it comes, must come about in the mind; but the mindcannot be its cause since, by hypothesis, it does not possess the ideasit seeks nor has power to realise the harmonies it desiderates. Thesehave to be waited for and begged of destiny; human will, not controllingits basis, cannot possibly control its effects. Its existence and itsefforts have at best the value of a good omen. They show in whatdirection natural forces are moving in so far as they are embodied ingiven men. 

[Sidenote: Thought's march automatic and thereby implicated in events. ]

Men, like all things else in the world, are products and vehicles ofnatural energy, and their operation counts. But their conscious will, inits moral assertiveness, is merely a sign of that energy and of thatwill's eventual fortunes. Dramatic terror and dramatic humour bothdepend on contrasting the natural pregnancy of a passion with itsconscious intent. Everything in human life is ominous, even thevoluntary acts. We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to ourstature, but we may build up a world without meaning it. Man is as fullof potentiality as he is of impotence. A will that represents manyactive forces, and is skilful in divination and augury, may long boastto be almighty without being contradicted by the event. 

[Sidenote: Contemplative essence of action. ]

That thought is not self-directive appears best in the most immaterialprocesses. In strife against external forces men, being ignorant oftheir deeper selves, attribute the obvious effects of their action totheir chance ideas; but when the process is wholly internal the realfactors are more evenly represented in consciousness and the magical, involuntary nature of life is better perceived. My hand, guided by Iknow not what machinery, is at this moment adding syllable to syllableupon this paper, to the general fulfilment, perhaps, of my felt intent, yet giving that intent an articulation wholly unforeseen, and oftendisappointing. The thoughts to be expressed simmer half-consciously inmy brain. I feel their burden and tendency without seeing their form, until the mechanical train of impulsive association, started by theperusal of what precedes or by the accidental emergence of some newidea, lights the fuse and precipitates the phrases. If this happens inthe most reflective and deliberate of activities, like this ofcomposition, how much more does it happen in positive action, "The dieis cast, " said Caesar, feeling a decision in himself of which he couldneither count nor weigh the multitudinous causes; and so says everystrong and clear intellect, every well-formed character, seizing at thesame moment with comprehensive instinct both its purposes and the meansby which they shall be attained. Only the fool, whose will signifiesnothing, boasts to have created it himself. 

We must not seek the function of thought, then, in any supposed power todiscover either ends not suggested by natural impulse or means to theaccomplishment of those irrational ends. Attention is utterly powerlessto change or create its objects in either respect; it rather registerswithout surprise--for it expects nothing in particular--and watcheseagerly the images bubbling up in the living mind and the processesevolving there. These processes are themselves full of potency andpromise; will and reflection are no more inconsequential than any otherprocesses bound by natural links to the rest of the world. Even if anatomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatenation of everything innature, including the mind, it cannot rob what it abstracts from of itsnatural weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to hold the pearlstogether is not the whole cause of the necklace. But this pregnancy andimplication of thought in relation to its natural environment is purelyempirical. Since natural connection is merely a principle of arrangementby which the contiguities of things may be described and inferred, thereis no difficulty in admitting consciousness and all its works into theweb and woof of nature. Each psychic episode would be heralded by itsmaterial antecedents; its transformations would be subject to mechanicallaws, which would also preside over the further transition from thoughtinto its material expression. 

[Sidenote: Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence. ]

This inclusion of mind in nature, however, is as far as possible fromconstituting the mind's function and value, or its efficacy in a moraland rational sense. To have prepared changes in matter would give norationality to mind unless those changes in turn paved the way to somebetter mental existence. The worth of natural efficacy is thereforealways derivative; the utility of mind would be no more precious thanthe utility of matter; both borrow all their worth from the part theymay play empirically in introducing those moral values which areintrinsic and self-sufficing. In so far as thought is instrumental it isnot worth having, any more than matter, except for its promise; it mustterminate in something truly profitable and ultimate which, being goodin itself, may lend value to all that led up to it. But this ultimategood is itself consciousness, thought, rational activity; so that whatinstrumental mentality may have preceded might be abolished withoutloss, if matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if thatinstrumental mentality is worth retaining, it is so only because italready contains some premonition and image of its own fulfilment. In aword, the value of thought is ideal. The material efficacy which may beattributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter--an efficacy whichmatter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism. And when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideasthey would appear in their proper form of expressions, realisations, ultimate fruits. 

[Sidenote: Consciousness transcendental. ]

The incongruity of making thought, in its moral and logical essence, aninstrument in the natural world will appear from a different point ofview if we shift the discussion for a moment to a transcendental level. Since the material world is an object for thought, and potential inrelation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane ofreality with the thought to which it appears. The spectator on this sideof the foot-lights, while surely regarded by the play as a whole, cannotexpect to figure in its mechanism or to see himself strutting among theactors on the boards. He listens and is served, being at once impotentand supreme. It has been well said that

 Only the free divine the laws, The causeless only know the cause. 

Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless and freewill evidently not be causal or determinant, being something altogetheruniversal and notional, without inherent determinations or specificaffinities. The objects figuring in consciousness will have implicationsand will require causes; not so the consciousness itself. The Ego towhich all things appear equally, whatever their form or history, is theground of nothing incidental: no specific characters or order found inthe world can be attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience isnot determined by the mere fact that experience exists. Anotherexperience, differently logical, might be equally real. Consciousness isnot itself dynamic, for it has no body, no idiosyncrasy or particularlocus, to be the point of origin for definite relationships. It ismerely an abstract name for the actuality of its random objects. Allforce, implication, or direction inhere in the constitution of specificobjects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought noless than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy isgenerated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulousobjects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the naturalorder lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possiblyintervene to fill the chasm--for these are parcels and expressions ofthe natural order--but only nothingness and pure chance. 

[Sidenote: and transcendent. ]

Thought is thus an expression of natural relations, as will is ofnatural affinities; yet consciousness of an object's value, while itdeclares the blind disposition to pursue that object, constitutes itsentire worth. Apart from the pains and satisfactions involved, animpulse and its execution would be alike destitute of importance. Itwould matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly the world became, orwhat animal bodies arose or perished there; any tendencies afoot innature, whatever they might construct or dissolve, would involve noprogress or disaster, since no preferences would exist to pronounce oneeventual state of things better than another. These preferences are inthemselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works ofsupererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue ofHercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they expressand depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in thecausal process. Expression gives value to power, and the strength ofHercules would have no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to artand civilisation. That conceived basis of all life which we call matterwould be a mere potentiality, an inferred instrument deprived of itsfunction, if it did not actually issue in life and consciousness. Whatgives the material world a legitimate status and perpetual pertinence inhuman discourse is the conscious life it supports and carries in its owndirection, as a ship carries its passengers or rather as a passioncarries its hopes. Conscious interests first justify and moralise themechanisms they express. Eventual satisfactions, while their form andpossibility must be determined by animal tendencies, alone render thesetendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in which benefit shalllie must be determined by irrational impulse, but the attainment ofbenefit consists in crowning that impulse with its ideal achievement. Nature dictates what men shall seek and prompts them to seek it; apossibility of happiness is thus generated and only its fulfilment wouldjustify nature and man in their common venture. 

[Sidenote: It is the seat of value. ]

Satisfaction is the touchstone of value; without reference to it alltalk about good and evil, progress or decay, is merely confusedverbiage, pure sophistry in which the juggler adroitly withdrawsattention from what works the wonder--namely, that human and moralcolouring to which the terms he plays with owe whatever efficacy theyhave. Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matterof no importance; not seldom they give that name to the sum of allevils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all naturaldemand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possiblefrom goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, broughtabout by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In excellence there isan essential bias, an opposition to the possible opposite; this biasexpresses a mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred the sensesand the will. Impulse makes value possible; and the value becomes actualwhen the impulse issues in processes that give it satisfaction and havea conscious worth. Character is the basis of happiness and happiness thesanction of character. [D]

That thought is nature's concomitant expression or entelechy, never oneof her instruments, is a truth long ago divined by the more judiciousthinkers, like Aristotle and Spinoza; but it has not met with generalacceptance or even consideration. It is obstructed by superficialempiricism, which associates the better-known aspects of events directlytogether, without considering what mechanical bonds may secretly unitethem; it is obstructed also by the traditional mythical idealism, intentas this philosophy is on proving nature to be the expression ofsomething ulterior and non-natural and on hugging the fatalmisconception that ideals and eventual goods are creative and miraculousforces, without perceiving that it thereby renders goods and idealsperfectly senseless; for how can anything be a good at all to which someexisting nature is not already directed? It may therefore be worthwhile, before leaving this phase of the subject, to consider one or twoprejudices which might make it sound paradoxical to say, as we propose, that ideals are ideal and nature natural. 

[Sidenote: Apparent utility of pain]

[Sidenote: Its real impotence. ]

Of all forms of consciousness the one apparently most useful is pain, which is also the one most immersed in matter and most opposite toideality and excellence. Its utility lies in the warning it gives: intrying to escape pain we escape destruction. That we desire to escapepain is certain; its very definition can hardly go beyond the statementthat pain is that element of feeling which we seek to abolish on accountof its intrinsic quality. That this desire, however, should know how toinitiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience and initself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us we should long ago havebeen saved. The bitterest quintessence of pain is its helplessness, andour incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are thosewe feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging themselvesindefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous in extreme agony, ispresent in all pain and is perhaps its essence. If we sought to describeby a circumlocution what is of course a primary sensation, we mightscarcely do better than to say that pain is consciousness at onceintense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no character, andarrests all satisfactions without offering anything in exchange. Thehorror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its intolerabletedium. It can accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment. In itself it has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and itsvacancy offers no expedients by which it might be unknotted andrelieved. 

Pain is not only impotent in itself but is a sign of impotence in thesufferer. Its appearance, far from constituting its own remedy, is likeall other organic phenomena subject to the law of inertia and tends onlyto its own continuance. A man's hatred of his own condition no morehelps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them. If we allowed ourselves to speak in such a case of efficacy at all, weshould say that pain perpetuates and propagates itself in various ways, now by weakening the system, now by prompting convulsive efforts, now byspreading to other beings through the contagion of sympathy orvengeance. In fact, however, it merely betrays a maladjustment whichhas more or less natural stability. It may be instantaneous only; by itslack of equilibrium it may involve the immediate destruction of one ofits factors. In that case we fabulously say that the pain hasinstinctively removed its own cause. Pain is here apparently usefulbecause it expresses an incipient tension which the self-preservingforces in the organism are sufficient to remove. Pain's appearance isthen the sign for its instant disappearance; not indeed by virtue of itsinner nature or of any art it can initiate, but merely by virtue ofmechanical associations between its cause and its remedy. The burnedchild dreads the fire and, reading only the surface of his life, fanciesthat the pain once felt and still remembered is the ground of his newprudence. Punishments, however, are not always efficacious, as everyoneknows who has tried to govern children or cities by the rod; sufferingdoes not bring wisdom nor even memory, unless intelligence and docilityare already there; that is, unless the friction which the pain betrayedsufficed to obliterate permanently one of the impulses in conflict. Thisreadjustment, on which real improvement hangs and which alone makes"experience" useful, does not correspond to the intensity or repetitionof the pains endured; it corresponds rather to such a plasticity in theorganism that the painful conflict is no longer produced. 

[Sidenote: Preformations involved. ]

Threatened destruction would not involve pain unless that threateneddestruction were being resisted; so that the reaction which pain issupposed to cause must already be taking place before pain can be felt. A will without direction cannot be thwarted; so that inhibition cannotbe the primary source of any effort or of any ideal. Determinateimpulses must exist already for their inhibition to have taken place orfor the pain to arise which is the sign of that inhibition. The child'sdread of the fire marks the acceleration of that impulse which, when hewas burned, originally enabled him to withdraw his hand; and if he didnot now shrink in anticipation he would not remember the pain nor knowto what to attach his terror. Sight now suffices to awaken the reactionwhich touch at first was needed to produce; the will has extended itsline of battle and thrown out its scouts farther afield; and pain hasbeen driven back to the frontiers of the spirit. The conflictingreactions are now peripheral and feeble; the pain involved in aversionis nothing to that once involved in the burn. Had this aversion to firebeen innate, as many aversions are, no pain would have been caused, because no profound maladjustment would have occurred. The survivingattraction, checked by fear, is a remnant of the old disorganisation inthe brain which was the seat of conflicting reactions. 

[Sidenote: Its untoward significance. ]

To say that this conflict is the guide to its own issue is to talkwithout thinking. The conflict is the sign of inadequate organisation, or of non-adaptation in the given organism to the various stimuli whichirritate it. The reconstruction which follows this conflict, when itindeed follows, is of course a new and better adaptation; so that whatinvolves the pain may often be a process of training which directsreaction into new and smoother channels. But the pain is present whethera permanent adaptation is being attained or not. It is present inprogressive dissolution and in hopeless and exhausting struggles farmore than in education or in profitable correction. Toothache andsea-sickness, birth-pangs and melancholia are not useful ills. Theintenser the pain the more probable its uselessness. Only in vanishingis it a sign of progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat, just asdisease is an omen of death, although, for those diseased already, medicine and convalescence may be approaches to health again. Where aman's nature is out of gear and his instincts are inordinate, sufferingmay be a sign that a dangerous peace, in which impulse was carrying himignorantly into paths without issue, is giving place to a peace withsecurity in which his reconstructed character may respond withoutfriction to the world, and enable him to gather a clearer experience andenjoy a purer vitality. The utility of pain is thus apparent only, anddue to empirical haste in collating events that have no regular norinward relation; and even this imputed utility pain has only inproportion to the worthlessness of those who need it. 

[Sidenote: Perfect function no unconscious. ]

A second current prejudice which may deserve notice suggests that anorgan, when its function is perfect, becomes unconscious, so that ifadaptation were complete life would disappear. The well-learned routineof any mechanical art passes into habit, and habit into unconsciousoperation. The virtuoso is not aware how he manipulates his instrument;what was conscious labour in the beginning has become instinct andmiracle in the end. Thus it might appear that to eliminate friction anddifficulty would be to eliminate consciousness, and therefore value, from the world. Life would thus be involved in a contradiction and moraleffort in an absurdity; for while the constant aim of practice isperfection and that of labour ease, and both are without meaning orstandard unless directed to the attainment of these ends, yet suchattainment, if it were actual, would be worthless, so that what alonejustifies effort would lack justification and would in fact be incapableof existence. The good musician must strive to play perfectly, but, alas, we are told, if he succeeded he would have become an automaton. The good man must aspire to holiness, but, alas, if he reached holinesshis moral life would have evaporated. 

These melodramatic prophecies, however, need not alarm us. They arefounded on nothing but rhetoric and small allegiance to any genuinegood. When we attain perfection of function we lose consciousness of themedium, to become more clearly conscious of the result. The eye thatdoes its duty gives no report of itself and has no sense of musculartension or weariness; but it gives all the brighter and steadier imageof the object seen. Consciousness is not lost when focussed, and thelabour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the musician, could heplay so divinely as to be unconscious of his body, his instrument, andthe very lapse of time, would be only the more absorbed in the harmony, more completely master of its unities and beauty. At such moments thebody's long labour at last brings forth the soul. Life from itsinception is simply some partial natural harmony raising its voice andbearing witness to its own existence; to perfect that harmony is toround out and intensify that life. This is the very secret of power, ofjoy, of intelligence. Not to have understood it is to have passedthrough life without understanding anything. 

The analogy extends to morals, where also the means may beadvantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure towhich work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would befulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pureactivity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utterpassivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between twoextremes: absolute want and complete satisfaction. The former limit isreached in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when the accidentalflux of things in contradiction has reached its maximum or vanishingpoint, so that the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear bydiremption. Such feeling denotes inward disorganisation and a hopelessconflict of reflex actions tending toward dissolution. The second limitis reached in contemplation, when anything is loved, understood, orenjoyed. Synthetic power is then at its height; the mind can survey itsexperience and correlate all the motions it suggests. Power in the mindis exactly proportionate to representative scope, and representativescope to rational activity. A steady vision of all things in their trueorder and worth results from perfection of function and is its index; itsecures the greatest distinctness in thought together with the greatestdecision, wisdom, and ease in action, as the lightning is brilliant andquick. It also secures, so far as human energies avail, its ownperpetuity, since what is perfectly adjusted within and without lastslong and goes far. 

[Sidenote: Inchoate ethics. ]

To confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for vitality is notunnatural to minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but can imagineneither the cause nor the fruits of that portentous commotion. Allfunctions, in such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions. It isthen supposed that what serves no further purpose can have no value, andthat he who suffers no offuscation can have no feeling and no life. Toattain an ideal seems to destroy its worth. Moral life, at that lowlevel, is a fantastic game only, not having come in sight of humane andliberal interests. The barbarian's intensity is without seriousness andhis passion without joy. His philosophy, which means to glorify allexperience and to digest all vice, is in truth an expression of patheticinnocence. It betrays a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoninghand, to assume that no adventure and no bewitchment can be anything butglorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one who has never seenanything worth seeing nor loved anything worth loving. Immaturity couldgo no farther than to acknowledge no limits defining will and happiness. When such limits, however, are gradually discovered and an authoritativeideal is born of the marriage of human nature with experience, happinessbecomes at once definite and attainable; for adjustment is possible to aworld that has a fruitful and intelligible structure. 

Such incoherences, which might well arise in ages without traditions, may be preserved and fostered by superstition. Perpetual servileemployments and subjection to an irrational society may render peopleincapable even of conceiving a liberal life. They may come to thinktheir happiness no longer separable from their misery and to fear thelarge emptiness, as they deem it, of a happy world. Like the prisoner ofChillon, after so long a captivity, they would regain their freedom witha sigh. The wholesome influences of nature, however, would soon revivetheir wills, contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision ofperfection would arise within them upon breathing a purer air. Freedomand perfection are synonymous with life. The peace they bring is one

 whose names are also rapture, power, Clear sight, and love; for these are parts of peace. 

[Sidenote: Thought the entelechy of being. ]

Thought belongs to the sphere of ultimate results. What, indeed, couldbe more fitting than that consciousness, which is self-revealing andtranscendentally primary, should be its own excuse for being and shouldcontain its own total value, together with the total value of everythingelse? What could be more proper than that the whole worth of ideasshould be ideal? To make an idea instrumental would be to prostitutewhat, being self-existent, should be self-justifying. That continualabsoluteness which consciousness possesses, since in it alone all heavenand earth are at any moment revealed, ought to convince any radical andheart-searching philosopher that all values should be continuallyintegrated and realised there, where all energies are being momentlyfocussed. Thought is a fulfilment; its function is to lend utility toits causes and to make actual those conceived and subterranean processeswhich find in it their ultimate expression. Thought is naturerepresented; it is potential energy producing life and becoming anactual appearance. 

[Sidenote: Its exuberance. ]

The conditions of consciousness, however, are far from being its onlytheme. As consciousness bears a transcendent relation to the dynamicworld (for it is actual and spiritual, while the dynamic is potentialand material) so it may be exuberant and irresponsibly rich. Althoughits elements, in point of distribution and derivation, are grounded inmatter, as music is in vibrations, yet in point of character the resultmay be infinitely redundant. The complete musician would devote but asmall part of his attention to the basis of music, its mechanism, psychology, or history. Long before he had represented to his mind thecauses of his art, he would have proceeded to practise and enjoy it. Sosense and imagination, passion and reason, may enrich the soil thatbreeds them and cover it with a maze of flowers. 

The theme of consciousness is accordingly far more than the materialworld which constitutes its basis, though this also is one of itsthemes; thought is no less at home in various expressions andembroideries with which the material world can be overlaid inimagination. The material world is conceived by digging beneathexperience to find its cause; it is the efficacious structure andskeleton of things. This is the subject of scientific retrospect andcalculation. The forces disclosed by physical studies are of course notdirected to producing a mind that might merely describe them. A force isexpressed in many other ways than by being defined; it may be felt, resisted, embodied, transformed, or symbolised. Forces work; they arenot, like mathematical concepts, exhausted in description. From thatmatter which might be describable in mechanical formulæ there issuenotwithstanding all manner of forms and harmonies, visible, audible, imaginable, and passionately prized. Every phase of the ideal worldemanates from the natural and loudly proclaims its origin by theinterest it takes in natural existences, of which it gives a rationalinterpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express natureexuberantly and in symbols long before science is added to represent, bya different abstraction, the mechanism which nature contains. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: Aristippus asked Socrates "whether he knew anything good, so that if he answered by naming food or drink or money or health orstrength or valour or anything of that sort, he might at once show thatit was sometimes an evil. Socrates, however, knew very well that ifanything troubles us what we demand is its cure, and he replied in themost pertinent fashion. 'Are you asking me, ' he said, 'if I knowanything good for a fever?' 'Oh, no, ' said the other. 'Or for soreeyes?' 'Not that, either. ' 'Or for hunger?' 'No, not for hunger. ' 'Well, then, ' said he, 'if you ask me whether I know a good that is good fornothing, I neither know it nor want to know it'"--Xenophon, Memorabilia, iii. , 8. ]

CHAPTER X--THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION

[Sidenote: Honesty in hedonism. ]

To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain asbalancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethicsa worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubtedhonesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the oppositeopinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite ofall logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justifyitself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided wouldnot justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desireis forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be apreponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear orweakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. Whowould not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?

By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or evenobliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already thesign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is tointerpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would beimpossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipientarrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment andtotally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foreseespain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly toact, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoilalready occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly toany impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. Aperfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only atwhat, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; andthis is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum ofsatisfaction eventually possible. 

[Sidenote: Necessary qualifications. ]

In spite, however, of this involution of pain and pleasure in alldeliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimatesources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that aneventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine anyact or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefsabout future experience, with all premonition of its emotional quality, is based on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source of value isnothing but the inner fountain of life and imagination, and the objectof pursuit nothing but the ideal object, counterpart of the presentdemand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued, but, if the will and theenvironment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt inachieving the object desired. A rejection of hedonistic psychology, therefore, by no means involves any opposition to eudæmonism in ethics. Eudæmonism is another name for wisdom: there is no other _moral_morality. Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolveitself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a dutyto secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity, and justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point out whatsuperstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had madethose persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter. Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existenceremains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, whathappiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, canonly be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; sothat while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justifytheir pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous, thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states inwhich satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, isthe principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible. 

[Sidenote: The will must judge. ]

The standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures andpains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to theirtotal bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values mustbe compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which tojudge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgmentpassed, whatever that judgment may be. Thus when Petrarch says that athousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal ofvalue deeper than either pleasure or pain, an ideal which makes a lifeof satisfaction marred by a single pang an offence and a horror to hissoul. If our demand for rationality is less acute and the miscellaneousaffirmations of the will carry us along with a well-fed indifference tosome single tragedy within us, we may aver that a single pang is onlythe thousandth part of a thousand pleasures and that a life so balancedis nine hundred and ninety-nine times better than nothing. Thisjudgment, for all its air of mathematical calculation, in truthexpresses a choice as irrational as Petrarch's. It merely means that, asa matter of fact, the mixed prospect presented to us attracts our willsand attracts them vehemently. So that the only possible criterion forthe relative values of pains and pleasures is the will that choosesamong them or among combinations of them; nor can the intensity ofpleasures and pains, apart from the physical violence of theirexpression, be judged by any other standard than by the power they have, when represented, to control the will's movement. 

[Sidenote: Injustice inherent in representation]

Here we come upon one of those initial irrationalities in the worldtheories of all sorts, since they are attempts to find rationality inthings, are in serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the value ofany experience, our endeavour, our pretension, is to weigh the valuewhich that experience possesses when it is actual. But to weigh is tocompare, and to compare is to represent, since the transcendentalisolation and self-sufficiency of actual experience precludes its lyingside by side with another datum, like two objects given in a singleconsciousness. Successive values, to be compared, must be represented;but the conditions of representation are such that they rob objects ofthe values they had at their first appearance to substitute the valuesthey possess at their recurrence. For representation mirrorsconsciousness only by mirroring its objects, and the emotional reactionupon those objects cannot be represented directly, but is approached byindirect methods, through an imitation or assimilation of will to willand emotion to emotion. Only by the instrumentality of signs, likegesture or language, can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some measurean absent experience and to feel some premonition of its absolute value. Apart from very elaborate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary, weshould always attribute to an event in every other experience the valuewhich its image now had in our own. But in that case the patheticfallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction upon an idea in onevital context is no index to what the volitional reaction would be inanother vital context upon the situation which that idea represents. 

[Sidenote: Æsthetic and speculative cruelty. ]

This divergence falsifies all representation of life and renders itinitially cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We dislike to trample on aflower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancywhich we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood andfeel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond ourhorizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contritethrill in our own bosom. The same cruelty appears in æsthetic pleasures, in lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire and memory; inthe unsympathetic quality of theory everywhere, which regards theuniformities of cause and effect and the beauties of law as ajustification for the inherent evils in the experience described; in theunjust judgments, finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks socompletely into its subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension ofall discriminating and representative faculties for a true union inthings, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. Thesepleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity andunintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their ownvalue. Æsthetic and speculative emotions make an important contributionto the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils ofthat experience on which they reflect with such ruthless satisfaction. The satisfaction is due to a private flood of emotion submerging theimages present in fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectualfunction, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or comparison. Such afaculty, when fully developed, is capable of yielding pleasures asintense and voluminous as those proper to rudimentary animal functions, wrongly supposed to be more vital. The acme of vitality lies in truth inthe most comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep, the impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain inthemselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed inengaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see thewhole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies ofimagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication thedetail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would besuggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transitionbetween them; and this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-topexperience, is supposed to be also the truest vision of reality. Absorption in a supervening function is mistaken for comprehension ofall fact, and this inevitably, since all consciousness of particularfacts and of their values is then submerged in the torrent of cerebralexcitement. 

[Sidenote: Imputed values: their inconstancy. ]

That luminous blindness which in these cases takes an extreme form ispresent in principle throughout all reflection. We tend to regard ourown past as good only when we still find some value in the memory of it. Last year, last week, even the feelings of the last five minutes, arenot otherwise prized than by the pleasure we may still have in recallingthem; the pulsations of pleasure or pain which they contained we do noteven seek to remember or to discriminate. The period is called happy orunhappy merely as its ideal representation exercises fascination orrepulsion over the present will. Hence the revulsion after physicalindulgence, often most violent when the pleasure--judged by itsconcomitant expression and by the desire that heralded it--was mostintense. For the strongest passions are intermittent, so that theunspeakable charm which their objects possess for a moment is lostimmediately and becomes unintelligible to a chilled and cheatedreflection. The situation, when yet unrealised, irresistibly solicitedthe will and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and perhaps ityields an indescribable moment of excitement and triumph--a moment onlyhalf-appropriated into waking experience, so fleeting is it, and sounfit the mind to possess or retain its tenser attitudes. The samesituation, if revived in memory when the system is in an opposite andrelaxed state, forfeits all power to attract and fills the mind ratherwith aversion and disgust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespearesays, are cruel and not to be trusted. 

 A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe: Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream ... Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted and, no sooner had, Past reason hated. 

[Sidenote: Methods of control. ]

Past reason, indeed. For although an impulsive injustice is inherent inthe very nature of representation and cannot be overcome altogether, yetreason, by attending to all the evidences that can be gathered and byconfronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarterof experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practicallyjust estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested bycomparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the sameconventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. Alove-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by variouslovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index to the fleetingsentiments once confronted with it. Reason has, to be sure, noindependent method of discovering values. They must be rated as thesensitive balance of present inclination, when completely laden, showsthem to stand. In estimating values reason is reduced to data furnishedby the mechanical processes of ideation and instinct, as in framing allknowledge; an absent joy can only be represented by a tinge of emotiondyeing an image that pictures the situation in which the joy was felt;but the suggested value being once projected into the potential world, that land of inferred being, this projection may be controlled andcorroborated by other suggestions and associations relevant to it, whichit is the function of reason to collect and compare. A right estimate ofabsent values must be conventional and mediated by signs. Directsympathies, which suffice for instinctive present co-operation, fail totransmit alien or opposite pleasures. They over-emphasise momentaryrelations, while they necessarily ignore permanent bonds. Therefore thesame intellect that puts a mechanical reality behind perception must puta moral reality behind sympathy. 

[Sidenote: Example of fame. ]

Fame, for example, is a good; its value arises from a certain movementof will and emotion which is elicited by the thought that one's namemight be associated with great deeds and with the memory of them. Theglow of this thought bathes the object it describes, so that fame isfelt to have a value quite distinct from that which the expectation offame may have in the present moment. Should this expectation be foolishand destined to prove false, it would have no value, and be indeed themore ludicrous and repulsive the more pleasure its dupe took in it, andthe longer his illusion lasted. The heart is resolutely set on itsobject and despises its own phenomena, not reflecting that its emotionshave first revealed that object's worth and alone can maintain it. Forif a man cares nothing for fame, what value has it?

This projection of interest into excellence takes place mechanically andis in the first instance irrational. Did all glow die out from memoryand expectation, the events represented remaining unchanged, we shouldbe incapable of assigning any value to those events, just as, if eyeswere lacking, we should be incapable of assigning colour to the world, which would, notwithstanding, remain as it is at present. So fame couldnever be regarded as a good if the idea of fame gave no pleasure; yetnow, because the idea pleases, the reality is regarded as a good, absolute and intrinsic. This moral hypostasis involved in the love offame could never be rationalised, but would subsist unmitigated or dieout unobserved, were it not associated with other conceptions and otherhabits of estimating values. For the passions are humanised only bybeing juxtaposed and forced to live together. As fame is not man's onlygoal and the realisation of it comes into manifold relations with otherinterests no less vivid, we are able to criticise the impulse to pursueit. 

Fame may be the consequence of benefits conferred upon mankind. In thatcase the abstract desire for fame would be reinforced and, as it were, justified by its congruity with the more voluminous and stable desire tobenefit our fellow-men. Or, again, the achievements which insure fameand the genius that wins it probably involve a high degree of vitalityand many profound inward satisfactions to the man of genius himself; sothat again the abstract love of fame would be reinforced by theindependent and more rational desire for a noble and comprehensiveexperience. On the other hand, the minds of posterity, whose homage iscraved by the ambitious man, will probably have very false conceptionsof his thoughts and purposes. What they will call by his name will be, in a great measure, a fiction of their own fancy and not his portrait atall. Would Caesar recognise himself in the current notions of him, drawnfrom some school-history, or perhaps from Shakespeare's satiricalportrait? Would Christ recognise himself upon our altars, or in theromances about him constructed by imaginative critics? And not only isremote experience thus hopelessly lost and misrepresented, but even thisnominal memorial ultimately disappears. 

The love of fame, if tempered by these and similar considerations, wouldtend to take a place in man's ideal such as its roots in human natureand its functions in human progress might seem to justify. It would berationalised in the only sense in which any primary desire can berationalised, namely, by being combined with all others in a consistentwhole. How much of it would survive a thorough sifting and criticism, may well remain in doubt. The result would naturally differ fordifferent temperaments and in different states of society. The wisestmen, perhaps, while they would continue to feel some love of honour andsome interest in their image in other minds, would yet wish thatposterity might praise them as Sallust praises Cato by saying: _Essequam videri bonus maluit_; he preferred worth to reputation. 

[Sidenote: Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic. ]

The fact that value is attributed to absent experience according to thevalue experience has in representation appears again in one of the mostcurious anomalies in human life--the exorbitant interest which thoughtand reflection take in the form of experience and the slight accountthey make of its intensity or volume. Sea-sickness and child-birth whenthey are over, the pangs of despised love when that love is finallyforgotten or requited, the travail of sin when once salvation isassured, all melt away and dissolve like a morning mist leaving a clearsky without a vestige of sorrow. So also with merely remembered and notreproducible pleasures; the buoyancy of youth, when absurdity is not yettedious, the rapture of sport or passion, the immense peace found in amystical surrender to the universal, all these generous ardours countfor nothing when they are once gone. The memory of them cannot cure afit of the blues nor raise an irritable mortal above some petty act ofmalice or vengeance, or reconcile him to foul weather. An ode of Horace, on the other hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written page ofmusic is a better antidote to melancholy than thinking on all thehappiness which one's own life or that of the universe may ever havecontained. Why should overwhelming masses of suffering and joy affectimagination so little while it responds sympathetically to æsthetic andintellectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects that, it mustbe confessed, are of almost no importance to the welfare of mankind? Whyshould we be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men whose workswe know only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society has beeninfinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard greatmerchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in comparison? Why shouldwe smile at the inscription in Westminster Abbey which calls theinventor of the spinning-jenny one of the _true_ benefactors of mankind?Is it not probable, on the whole, that he has had a greater and lessequivocal influence on human happiness than Shakespeare with all hisplays and sonnets? But the cheapness of cotton cloth produces noparticularly delightful image in the fancy to be compared with Hamlet orImogen. There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectlydeaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world. 

[Sidenote: Irrational religious allegiance. ]

The same æsthetic bias appears in the moral sphere. Utilitarians haveattempted to show that the human conscience commends precisely thoseactions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions ofjustice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economyand the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance is made forthe complexity of the subject, we may reasonably admit that the preceptsof obligatory morality bear this relation to the general welfare; thusvirtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastityin a woman. But if we turn from the morality required of all to the typeregarded as perfect and ideal, we find no such correspondence to thebenefits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes here andattributes an absolute and irrational value to those figures thatentertain it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. Thecharacter of Christ, for instance, which even the least orthodox amongus are in the habit of holding up as a perfect model, is not thecharacter of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher worldlacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending and perverseexistence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained byhis inner affinities to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchantedwith all earthly or political goods. Christ did not suffer, likePrometheus, for having bestowed or wished to bestow any earthlyblessing: the only blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself uponthe cross, whereby men might be comforted in their own sorrows, rebukedin their worldliness, driven to put their trust in the supernatural, andunited, by their common indifference to the world, in one mysticbrotherhood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly ready tolearn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus theirheaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience anddesperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring allcivic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the paganworld to decay, they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ. 

All natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted of course beneaththis theoretic asceticism, writhed under its unearthly control, andbroke out in frequent violent irruptions against it in the life of eachman as well as in the course of history. Yet the image of Christremained in men's hearts and retained its marvellous authority, so thateven now, when so many who call themselves Christians, being purechildren of nature, are without the least understanding of whatChristianity came to do in the world, they still offer his person andwords a sincere if inarticulate worship, trying to transform thatsacrificial and crucified spirit, as much as their bungling fancy can, into a patron of Philistia Felix. Why this persistent adoration of acharacter that is the extreme negation of all that these good soulsinwardly value and outwardly pursue? Because the image of Christ and theassociations of his religion, apart from their original import, remainrooted in the mind: they remain the focus for such wayward emotions andmystic intuitions as their magnetism can still attract, and the valuewhich this hallowed compound possesses in representation is transferredto its nominal object, and Christ is the conventional name for all theimpulses of religion, no matter how opposite to the Christian. 

[Sidenote: Pathetic idealizations. ]

Symbols, when their significance has been great, outlive their firstsignificance. The image of Christ was a last refuge to the world; it wasa consolation and a new ground for hope, from which no misfortune coulddrive the worshipper. Its value as an idea was therefore immense, as tothe lover the idea of his untasted joys, or to the dying man the idea ofhealth and invigorating sunshine. The votary can no more ask himselfwhether his deity, in its total operation, has really blessed him anddeserved his praise than the lover can ask if his lady is worth pursuingor the expiring cripple whether it would be, in very truth, a benefit tobe once more young and whole. That life is worth living is the mostnecessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossibleof conclusions. Experience, by its passive weight of joy and sorrow, canneither inspire nor prevent enthusiasm; only a present ideal will availto move the will and, if realised, to justify it. A saint's halo is anoptical illusion; it glorifies his actions whatever their eventualinfluence in the world, because they seem to have, when rehearseddramatically, some tenderness or rapture or miracle about them. 

Thus it appears that the great figures of art or religion, togetherwith all historic and imaginative ideals, advance insensibly on thevalues they represent. The image has more lustre than the original, andis often the more important and influential fact. Things are esteemed asthey weigh in representation. A _memorable thing_, people say in theireulogies, little thinking to touch the ground of their praise. Forthings are called great because they are memorable, they are notremembered because they were great. The deepest pangs, the highest joys, the widest influences are lost to apperception in its haste, and if insome rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged, are soon forgottenagain and cut off from living consideration. But the emptiestexperience, even the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in apicturesque image, if reverberating in the mind with a pleasant echo, isidolised and enshrined. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang ofhim, and fortunate the poets that make a public titillation out of theirsorrows and ignorance. This imputed and posthumous fortune is the onlyhappiness they have. The favours of memory are extended to those feeblerealities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. Whenlife dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits stillamong the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it oncepossessed but for the aspect it now wears. Yet this injustice inrepresentation, speculatively so offensive, is practically excusable;for it is in one sense right and useful that all things, whatever theiroriginal or inherent dignity, should be valued at each moment only bytheir present function and utility. 

[Sidenote: Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy. ]

[Sidenote: The test a controlled present ideal. ]

The error involved in attributing value to the past is naturallyaggravated when values are to be assigned to the future. In the lattercase imagination cannot be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and isconsequently the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of athing naturally evokes an emotion different from that involved in itspresence, ideals of what is desirable for the future contain no warrantthat the experience desired would, when actual, prove to be acceptableand good. An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisationwould be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal has rationalauthority and represents a better experience than the actual conditionit is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic image by as manycircumlocutions as possible. As in the case of fame, we must buttress ormodify our spontaneous judgment with all the other judgments that theobject envisaged can prompt: we must make our ideal harmonise with allexperience rather than with a part only. The possible error remains eventhen; but a practical mind will always accept the risk of error when ithas made every possible correction. A rational will is not a will thathas reason for its basis or that possesses any other proof that itsrealisation would be possible or good than the oracle which a livingwill inspires and pronounces. The rationality possible to the will liesnot in its source but in its method. An ideal cannot wait for itsrealisation to prove its validity. To deserve adhesion it needs only tobe adequate as an ideal, that is, to express completely what the soul atpresent demands, and to do justice to all extant interests. 

CHAPTER XI--SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL

[Sidenote: The ultimate end a resultant. ]

Reason's function is to embody the good, but the test of excellence isitself ideal; therefore before we can assure ourselves that reason hasbeen manifested in any given case we must make out the reasonableness ofthe ideal that inspires us. And in general, before we can convinceourselves that a Life of Reason, or practice guided by science anddirected toward spiritual goods, is at all worth having, we must makeout the possibility and character of its ultimate end. Yet each ideal isits own justification; so that the only sense in which an ultimate endcan be established and become a test of general progress is this: that aharmony and co-operation of impulses should be conceived, leading to themaximum satisfaction possible in the whole community of spirits affectedby our action. Now, without considering for the present any concreteUtopia, such, for instance, as Plato's Republic or the heavenlybeatitude described by theologians, we may inquire what formal qualitiesare imposed on the ideal by its nature and function and by the relationit bears to experience and to desire. 

[Sidenote: Demands the substance of ideals. ]

The ideal has the same relation to given demands that the reality has togiven perceptions. In the face of the ideal, particular demands forfeittheir authority and the goods to which a particular being may aspirecease to be absolute; nay, the satisfaction of desire comes to appear anindifferent or unholy thing when compared or opposed to the ideal to berealised. So, precisely, in perception, flying impressions come to beregarded as illusory when contrasted with a stable conception ofreality. Yet of course flying impressions are the only material out ofwhich that conception can be formed. Life itself is a flying impression, and had we no personal and instant experience, importuning us at eachsuccessive moment, we should have no occasion to ask for a reality atall, and no materials out of which to construct so gratuitous an idea. In the same way present demands are the only materials and occasions forany ideal: without demands the ideal would have no _locus standi_ orfoothold in the world, no power, no charm, and no prerogative. If theideal can confront particular desires and put them to shame, thathappens only because the ideal is the object of a more profound andvoluminous desire and embodies the good which they blindly and perhapsdeviously pursue. Demands could not be misdirected, goods sought couldnot be false, if the standard by which they are to be corrected werenot constructed out of them. Otherwise each demand would render itsobject a detached, absolute, and unimpeachable good. But when eachdesire in turn has singed its wings and retired before some disillusion, reflection may set in to suggest residual satisfactions that may stillbe possible, or some shifting of the ground by which much of what washoped for may yet be attained. 

[Sidenote: Discipline of the will. ]

[Sidenote: Demands made practical and consistent. ]

The force for this new trial is but the old impulse renewed; this newhope is a justified remnant of the old optimism. Each passion, in thissecond campaign, takes the field conscious that it has indomitableenemies and ready to sign a reasonable peace, and even to capitulatebefore superior forces. Such tameness may be at first merely aconsequence of exhaustion and prudence; but a mortal will, thoughabsolute in its deliverances, is very far from constant, and itssacrifices soon constitute a habit, its exile a new home. The oldambition, now proved to be unrealisable, begins to seem capricious andextravagant; the circle of possible satisfactions becomes the field ofconventional happiness. Experience, which brings about this humbler andmore prosaic state of mind, has its own imaginative fruits. Among thoseforces which compelled each particular impulse to abate its pretensions, the most conspicuous were other impulses, other interests active inoneself and in one's neighbours. When the power of these alien demandsis recognised they begin, in a physical way, to be respected; when anadjustment to them is sought they begin to be understood, for it is onlyby studying their expression and tendency that the degree of theirhostility can be measured. But to understand is more than to forgive, itis to adopt; and the passion that thought merely to withdraw into asullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel itself expanded by sympathieswhich in its primal vehemence it would have excluded altogether. Experience, in bringing humility, brings intelligence also. Personalinterests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminouswelfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds forwhatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each originalimpulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree ofsavageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, whensufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. Thefactors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much doesthe process of domestication transform them; but the interests thatanimated them survive this discipline and the new purpose is reallyesteemed; else the ideal would have no moral force. An idealrepresenting no living interest would be irrelevant to practice, just asa conception of reality would be irrelevant to perception which shouldnot be composed of the materials that sense supplies, or should notre-embody actual sensations in an intelligible system. 

[Sidenote: The ideal natural. ]

Here we have, then, one condition which the ideal must fulfil: it mustbe a resultant or synthesis of impulses already afoot. An ideal out ofrelation to the actual demands of living beings is so far from being anideal that it is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be not theacme but the atrophy of moral endeavour. Mysticism and asceticism runinto this danger, when the intent to be faithful to a supreme good toosymbolically presented breeds a superstitious repugnance towardeverything naturally prized. So also an artificial scepticism can regardall experience as deceptive, by contrasting it with the chimera of anabsolute reality. As an absolute reality would be indescribable andwithout a function in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme goodwhich was good for nobody would be without conceivable value. Respectfor such an idol is a dialectical superstition; and if zeal for thatshibboleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise of intelligentchoice or the development of appreciation for natural pleasures, itwould constitute a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persistentlyindulged in, could only issue in madness or revert to imbecility. 

[Sidenote: Need of unity and finality. ]

[Sidenote: Ideals of nothing. ]

No less important, however, than this basis which the ideal must have inextant demands, is the harmony with which reason must endow it. Ifwithout the one the ideal loses its value, without the other it losesits finality. Human nature is fluid and imperfect; its demands areexpressed in incidental desires, elicited by a variety of objects whichperhaps cannot coexist in the world. If we merely transcribe thesemiscellaneous demands or allow these floating desires to dictate to usthe elements of the ideal, we shall never come to a Whole or to an End. One new fancy after another will seem an embodiment of perfection, andwe shall contradict each expression of our ideal by every other. Acertain school of philosophy--if we may give that name to the systematicneglect of reason--has so immersed itself in the contemplation of thissort of inconstancy, which is indeed prevalent enough in the world, thatit has mistaken it for a normal and necessary process. The greatness ofthe ideal has been put in its vagueness and in an elasticity which makesit wholly indeterminate and inconsistent. The goal of progress, besidebeing thus made to lie at every point of the compass in succession, isremoved to an infinite distance, whereby the possibility of attaining itis denied and progress itself is made illusory. For a progress must bedirected to attaining some definite type of life, the counterpart of agiven natural endowment, and nothing can be called an improvement whichdoes not contain an appreciable benefit. A victory would be a mockerythat left us, for some new reason, as much impeded as before and as farremoved from peace. 

The picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends was drawn atfirst by satirists, unhappily with too much justification in the facts. Some grosser minds, too undisciplined to have ever pursued a good eithertruly attainable or truly satisfactory, then proceeded to mistake thatsatire on human folly for a sober account of the whole universe; andfinally others were not ashamed to represent it as the ideal itself--sosoon is the dyer's hand subdued to what it works in. A barbarous mindcannot conceive life, like health, as a harmony continually preserved orrestored, and containing those natural and ideal activities whichdisease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and lifewith continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, andstrife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There ispiety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking thatsince no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves tobe. There is inexperience in not considering that wherever interests andjudgments exist, the natural flux has fallen, so to speak, into avortex, and created a natural good, a cumulative life, and an idealpurpose. Art, science, government, human nature itself, areself-defining and self-preserving: by partly fixing a structure they fixan ideal. But the barbarian can hardly regard such things, for to havedistinguished and fostered them would be to have founded a civilisation. 

[Sidenote: Darwin on moral sense. ]

Reason's function in defining the ideal is in principle extremelysimple, although all time and all existence would have to be gathered inbefore the applications of that principle could be exhausted. A betterexample of its essential working could hardly be found than one whichDarwin gives to illustrate the natural origin of moral sense. A swallow, impelled by migratory instincts to leave a nest full of unfledged young, would endure a moral conflict. The more lasting impulse, memory beingassumed, would prompt a moral judgment when it emerged again after beingmomentarily obscured by an intermittent passion. "While the mother birdis feeding or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct isprobably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is morepersistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her youngones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrivedat the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases toact, what an agony of remorse each bird would feel if, from beingendowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the imagecontinually passing before her mind of her young ones perishing in thebleak north from cold and hunger. "[E] She would doubtless upbraidherself, like any sinner, for a senseless perfidy to her own dearestgood. The perfidy, however, was not wholly senseless, because theforgotten instinct was not less natural and necessary than theremembered one, and its satisfaction no less true. Temptation has thesame basis as duty. The difference is one of volume and permanence inthe rival satisfactions, and the attitude conscience will assume towardthese depends more on the representability of the demands compared thanon their original vehemence or ultimate results. 

[Sidenote: Conscience and reason compared. ]

A passionate conscience may thus arise in the play of impulses differingin permanence, without involving a judicial exercise of reason. Nor doessuch a conscience involve a synthetic ideal, but only the ideal presenceof particular demands. Conflicts in the conscience are thus quitenatural and would continually occur but for the narrowness that commonlycharacterises a mind inspired by passion. A life of sin and repentanceis as remote as possible from a Life of Reason. Yet the same situationwhich produces conscience and the sense of duty is an occasion forapplying reason to action and for forming an ideal, so soon as thedemands and satisfactions concerned are synthesised and balancedimaginatively. The stork might do more than feel the conflict of his twoimpulses, he might do more than embody in alternation the eloquence oftwo hostile thoughts. He might pass judgment upon them impartially and, in the felt presence of both, conceive what might be a union orcompromise between them. 

This resultant object of pursuit, conceived in reflection and in itselfthe initial goal of neither impulse, is the ideal of a mind occupied bythe two: it is the aim prescribed by reason under the circumstances. Itdiffers from the prescription of conscience, in that conscience is oftenthe spokesman of one interest or of a group of interests in oppositionto other primary impulses which it would annul altogether; while reasonand the ideal are not active forces nor embodiments of passion at all, but merely a method by which objects of desire are compared inreflection. The goodness of an end is felt inwardly by conscience; byreason it can be only taken upon trust and registered as a fact. Forconscience the object of an opposed will is an evil, for reason it is agood on the same ground as any other good, because it is pursued by anatural impulse and can bring a real satisfaction. Conscience, in fine, is a party to moral strife, reason an observer of it who, however, playsthe most important and beneficent part in the outcome by suggesting theterms of peace. This suggested peace, inspired by sympathy and byknowledge of the world, is the ideal, which borrows its value andpractical force from the irrational impulses which it embodies, andborrows its final authority from the truth with which it recognises themall and the necessity by which it imposes on each such sacrifices as arerequisite to a general harmony. 

[Sidenote: Reason imposes no new sacrifice. ]

Could each impulse, apart from reason, gain perfect satisfaction, it would doubtless laugh at justice. The divine, to exercisesuasion, must use an _argumentum ad hominem_; reason must justifyitself to the heart. But perfect satisfaction is what anirresponsible impulse can never hope for: all other impulses, though absent perhaps from the mind, are none the less present innature and have possession of the field through their physicalbasis. They offer effectual resistance to a reckless intruder. Todisregard them is therefore to gain nothing: reason, far fromcreating the partial renunciation and proportionate sacrificeswhich it imposes, really minimises them by making them voluntaryand fruitful. The ideal, which may seem to wear so severe a frown, really fosters all possible pleasures; what it retrenches isnothing to what blind forces and natural catastrophes wouldotherwise cut off; while it sweetens what it sanctions, adding tospontaneous enjoyments a sense of moral security and anintellectual light. 

[Sidenote: Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle. ]

Those who are guided only by an irrational conscience can hardlyunderstand what a good life would be. Their Utopias have to besupernatural in order that the irresponsible rules which they callmorality may lead by miracle to happy results. But such a magical andundeserved happiness, if it were possible, would be unsavoury: only onephase of human nature would be satisfied by it, and so impoverished anideal cannot really attract the will. For human nature has been mouldedby the same natural forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled, and, apart from a certain margin of wild hopes and extravagances, thethings man's heart desires are attainable under his natural conditionsand would not be attainable elsewhere. The conflict of desires andinterests in the world is not radical any more than man'sdissatisfaction with his own nature can be; for every particular ideal, being an expression of human nature in operation, must in the endinvolve the primary human faculties and cannot be essentiallyincompatible with any other ideal which involves them too. 

To adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust that ideal to its naturalconditions--in other words, to live the Life of Reason--is somethingperfectly possible; for those demands, being akin to one another inspite of themselves, can be better furthered by co-operation than byblind conflict, while the ideal, far from demanding any profoundrevolution in nature, merely expresses her actual tendency and forecastswhat her perfect functioning would be. 

[Sidenote: Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason. ]

Reason as such represents or rather constitutes a single formalinterest, the interest in harmony. When two interests are simultaneousand fall within one act of apprehension the desirability of harmonisingthem is involved in the very effort to realise them together. Ifattention and imagination are steady enough to face this implicationand not to allow impulse to oscillate between irreconcilable tendencies, reason comes into being. Henceforth things actual and things desired areconfronted by an ideal which has both pertinence and authority. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Descent of Man, chapter iii. ]

CHAPTER XII--FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE

[Sidenote: Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed. ]

A conception of something called human nature arises not unnaturally onobserving the passions of men, passions which under various disguisesseem to reappear in all ages and countries. The tendency of Greekphilosophy, with its insistence on general concepts, was to define thisidea of human nature still further and to encourage the belief that asingle and identical essence, present in all men, determined theirpowers and ideal destiny. Christianity, while it transposed the humanideal and dwelt on the superhuman affinities of man, did not abandon thenotion of a specific humanity. On the contrary, such a notion wasimplied in the Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in theuniversal validity of Christian doctrine and precept. For if humannature were not one, there would be no propriety in requiring all men topreserve unanimity in faith or conformity in conduct. Human nature waslikewise the entity which the English psychologists set themselves todescribe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by the notion of a fixedand universal human nature that its constancy, in his opinion, was thesource of all natural as well as moral laws. Had he doubted for a momentthe stability of human nature, the foundations of his system would havefallen out; the forms of perception and thought would at once have losttheir boasted necessity, since to-morrow might dawn upon new categoriesand a modified _a priori_ intuition of space or time; and the avenuewould also have been closed by which man was led, through hisunalterable moral sentiments, to assumptions about metaphysical truths. 

[Sidenote: Contrary currents of opinion. ]

[Sidenote: Evolution]

The force of this long tradition has been broken, however, by twoinfluences of great weight in recent times, the theory of evolution andthe revival of pantheism. The first has reintroduced flux into theconception of existence and the second into the conception of values. Ifnatural species are fluid and pass into one another, human nature ismerely a name for a group of qualities found by chance in certain tribesof animals, a group to which new qualities are constantly tending toattach themselves while other faculties become extinct, now in wholeraces, now in sporadic individuals. Human nature is therefore avariable, and its ideal cannot have a greater constancy than the demandsto which it gives expression. Nor can the ideal of one man or one agehave any authority over another, since the harmony existing in theirnature and interests is accidental and each is a transitional phase inan indefinite evolution. The crystallisation of moral forces at anymoment is consequently to be explained by universal, not by human, laws;the philosopher's interest cannot be to trace the implications ofpresent and unstable desires, but rather to discover the mechanical lawby which these desires have been generated and will be transformed, sothat they will change irrevocably both their basis and their objects. 

[Sidenote: Pantheism. ]

To this picture of physical instability furnished by popular science areto be added the mystical self-denials involved in pantheism. These cometo reinforce the doctrine that human nature is a shifting thing with thesentiment that it is a finite and unworthy one: for every determinationof being, it is said, has its significance as well as its origin in theinfinite continuum of which it is a part. Forms are limitations, andlimitations, according to this philosophy, would be defects, so thatman's only goal would be to escape humanity and lose himself in thedivine nebula that has produced and must invalidate each of his thoughtsand ideals. As there would be but one spirit in the world, and thatinfinite, so there would be but one ideal and that indiscriminate. Thedespair which the naturalist's view of human instability might tend toproduce is turned by this mystical initiation into a sort of ecstasy;and the deluge of conformity suddenly submerges that Life of Reasonwhich science seemed to condemn to gradual extinction. 

[Sidenote: Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals. ]

Reason is a human function. Though the name of reason has been appliedto various alleged principles of cosmic life, vital or dialectical, these principles all lack the essence of rationality, in that they arenot conscious movements toward satisfaction, not, in other words, moraland beneficent principles at all. Be the instability of human naturewhat it may, therefore, the instability of reason is not less, sincereason is but a function of human nature. However relative andsubordinate, in a physical sense, human ideals may be, these idealsremain the only possible moral standards for man, the only tests whichhe can apply for value or authority, in any other quarter. And amongunstable and relative ideals none is more relative and unstable thanthat which transports all value to a universal law, itself indifferentto good and evil, and worships it as a deity. Such an idolatry wouldindeed be impossible if it were not partial and veiled, arrived at infollowing out some human interest and clung to by force of moral inertiaand the ambiguity of words. In truth mystics do not practise so entire arenunciation of reason as they preach: eternal validity and the capacityto deal with absolute reality are still assumed by them to belong tothought or at least to feeling. Only they overlook in their descriptionof human nature just that faculty which they exercise in theirspeculation; their map leaves out the ground on which they stand. Therest, which they are not identified with for the moment, they proceedto regard _de haut en bas_ and to discredit as a momentary manifestationof universal laws, physical or divine. They forget that this faith inlaw, this absorption in the blank reality, this enthusiasm for theultimate thought, are mere human passions like the rest; that theyendure them as they might a fever and that the animal instincts arepatent on which those spiritual yearnings repose. 

[Sidenote: Absolutist philosophy human and halting. ]

This last fact would be nothing against the feelings in question, ifthey were not made vehicles for absolute revelations. On the contrary, such a relativity in instincts is the source of their importance. Invirtue of this relativity they have some basis and function in theworld; for did they not repose on human nature they could never expressor transform it. Religion and philosophy are not always beneficent orimportant, but when they are it is precisely because they help todevelop human faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine that by meansof them we can escape from human nature and survey it from without is anostrich-like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it. Such apretension may cause admiration in the schools, where self-hypnotisationis easy, but in the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For intheir eagerness to empty their mind of human prejudices they reduce itsrational burden to a minimum, and if they still continue to dogmatise, it is sport for the satirist to observe what forgotten accident oflanguage or training has survived the crash of the universe and made theone demonstrable path to Absolute Truth. 

[Sidenote: All science a deliverance of momentary thought. ]

Neither the path of abstraction followed by the mystics, nor that ofdirect and, as it avers, unbiassed observation followed by thenaturalists, can lead beyond that region of common experience, traditional feeling, and conventional thought which all minds enter atbirth and can elude only at the risk of inward collapse and extinction. The fact that observation involves the senses, and the senses theirorgans, is one which a naturalist can hardly overlook; and when we addthat logical habits, sanctioned by utility, are needed to interpret thedata of sense, the humanity of science and all its constructions becomesclearer than day. Superstition itself could not be more human. The pathof unbiassed observation is not a path away from conventional life; itis a progress in conventions. It improves human belief by increasing theproportion of two of its ingredients, attentive perception and practicalcalculus. The whole resulting vision, as it is sustained from moment tomoment by present experience and instinct, has no value apart fromactual ideals. And if it proves human nature to be unstable, it canbuild that proof on nothing more stable than human faculty as at themoment it happens to be. 

[Sidenote: All criticism likewise. ]

Nor is abstraction a less human process, as if by becoming veryabstruse indeed we could hope to become divine. Is it not a commonplaceof the schools that to form abstract ideas is the prerogative of man'sreason? Is not abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence makeshaste? Is it not the makeshift of a mind overloaded with its experience, the trick of an eye that cannot master a profuse and ever-changingworld? Shall these diagrams drawn in fancy, this system of signals inthought, be the Absolute Truth dwelling within us? Do we attain realityby making a silhouette of our dreams? If the scientific world be aproduct of human faculties, the metaphysical world must be doubly so;for the material there given to human understanding is here worked overagain by human art. This constitutes the dignity and value of dialectic, that in spite of appearances it is so human; it bears to experience arelation similar to that which the arts bear to the same, where sensibleimages, selected by the artist's genius and already coloured by hisæsthetic bias, are redyed in the process of reproduction whenever he hasa great style, and saturated anew with his mind. 

There can be no question, then, of eluding human nature or of conceivingit and its environment in such a way as to stop its operation. We maytake up our position in one region of experience or in another, we may, in unconsciousness of the interests and assumptions that support us, criticise the truth or value of results obtained elsewhere. Ourcriticism will be solid in proportion to the solidity of the unnamedconvictions that inspire it, that is, in proportion to the deep rootsand fruitful ramifications which those convictions may have in humanlife. Ultimate truth and ultimate value will be reasonably attributed tothose ideas and possessions which can give human nature, as it is, thehighest satisfaction. We may admit that human nature is variable; butthat admission, if justified, will be justified by the satisfactionwhich it gives human nature to make it. We might even admit that humanideals are vain but only if they were nothing worth for the attainmentof the veritable human ideal. 

[Sidenote: Origins inessential. ]

The given constitution of reason, with whatever a dialectical philosophymight elicit from it, obviously determines nothing about the causes thatmay have brought reason to its present pass or the phases that may havepreceded its appearance. Certain notions about physics might no doubtsuggest themselves to the moralist, who never can be the whole man; hemight suspect, for instance, that the transitive intent of intellect andwill pointed to their vital basis. Transcendence in operation might seemappropriate only to a being with a history and with an organism subjectto external influences, whose mind should thus come to represent notmerely its momentary state but also its constitutive past and itseventual fortunes. Such suggestions, however, would be extraneous todialectical self-knowledge. They would be tentative only, and humannature would be freely admitted to be as variable, as relative, and astransitory as the natural history of the universe might make it. 

[Sidenote: Ideals functional. ]

The error, however, would be profound and the contradiction hopeless ifwe should deny the ideal authority of human nature because we haddiscovered its origin and conditions. Nature and evolution, let us say, have brought life to the present form; but this life lives, these organshave determinate functions, and human nature, here and now, in relationto the ideal energies it unfolds, is a fundamental essence, a collectionof activities with determinate limits, relations, and ideals. Theintegration and determinateness of these faculties is the condition forany synthetic operation of reason. As the structure of the steam-enginehas varied greatly since its first invention, and its attributions haveincreased, so the structure of human nature has undoubtedly varied sinceman first appeared upon the earth; but as in each steam-engine at eachmoment there must be a limit of mobility, a unity of function and aclear determination of parts and tensions, so in human nature, as foundat any time in any man, there is a definite scope by virtue of whichalone he can have a reliable memory, a recognisable character, a facultyof connected thought and speech, a social utility, and a moral ideal. Onman's given structure, on his activity hovering about fixed objects, depends the possibility of conceiving or testing any truth or makingany progress in happiness. 

[Sidenote: They are transferable to similar beings. ]

Thinkers of different experience and organisation have _pro tanto_different logics and different moral laws. There are limits tocommunication even among beings of the same race, and the faculties andideals of one intelligence are not transferable without change to anyother. If this historic diversity in minds were complete, so that eachlived in its own moral world, a science of each of these moral worldswould still be possible provided some inner fixity or constancy existedin its meanings. In every human thought together with an immortal intentthere is a mortal and irrecoverable perception: something in it perishesinstantly, the part that can be materially preserved being proportionateto the stability or fertility of the organ that produced it. If thefunction is imitable, the object it terminates in will reappear, and twoor more moments, having the same ideal, will utter comparable messagesand may perhaps be unanimous. Unanimity in thought involves identity offunctions and similarity in organs. These conditions mark off the sphereof rational communication and society; where they fail altogether thereis no mutual intelligence, no conversation, no moral solidarity. 

[Sidenote: Authority internal. ]

The inner authority of reason, however, is no more destroyed because ithas limits in physical expression or because irrational things exist, than the grammar of a given language is invalidated because otherlanguages do not share it, or because some people break its rules andothers are dumb altogether. Innumerable madmen make no difference to thelaws of thought, which borrow their authority from the inward intent andcogency of each rational mind. Reason, like beauty, is its own excusefor being. It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give reasonsatisfaction is made the measure of good. 

The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must beprepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like thebay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will ratherresemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by theaccidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal. In spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide. That universal soul sometimesspoken of, which is to harmonise and correct individual demands, if itwere a will and an intelligence in act, would itself be an individuallike the others; while if it possessed no will and no intelligence, suchas individuals may have, it would be a physical force or law, a dynamicsystem without moral authority and with a merely potential orrepresented existence. For to be actual and self-existent is to beindividual. The living mind cannot surrender its rights to any physicalpower or subordinate itself to any figment of its own art withoutfalling into manifest idolatry. 

[Sidenote: Reason autonomous. ]. 

Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundationof all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is nogeneral or abstract essence, the average of all men's characters, noreven the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechyof the living individual, be he typical or singular. That his typeshould be odd or common is merely a physical accident. If he can knowhimself by expressing the entelechy of his own nature in the form of aconsistent ideal, he is a rational creature after his own kind, even if, like the angels of Saint Thomas, he be the only individual of hisspecies. What the majority of human animals may tend to, or what thepast or future variations of a race may be, has nothing to do withdetermining the ideal of human nature in a living man, or in an idealsociety of men bound together by spiritual kinship. Otherwise Platocould not have reasoned well about the republic without adjustinghimself to the politics of Buddha or Rousseau, and we should not be ableto determine our own morality without making concessions to thecannibals or giving a vote to the ants. Within the field of ananthropology that tests humanity by the skull's shape, there might beroom for any number of independent moralities, and although, as we shallsee, there is actually a similar foundation in all human and even in allanimal natures, which supports a rudimentary morality common to all, yeta perfect morality is not really common to any two men nor to any twophases of the same man's life. 

[Sidenote: Its distribution. ]

The distribution of reason, though a subject irrelevant to pure logic ormorals, is one naturally interesting to a rational man, for he isconcerned to know how far beings exist with a congenial structure and anideal akin to his own. That circumstance will largely influence hishappiness if, being a man, he is a gregarious and sympathetic animal. His moral idealism itself will crave support from others, if not to giveit direction, at least to give it warmth and courage. The best part ofwealth is to have worthy heirs, and mind can be transmitted only to akindred mind. Hostile natures cannot be brought together by mutualinvective nor harmonised by the brute destruction and disappearance ofeither party. But when one or both parties have actually disappeared, and the combat has ceased for lack of combatants, natures not hostile toone another can fill the vacant place. In proportion to their inbredunanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and rejoice together inits embodiment. 

[Sidenote: Natural selection of minds. ]

This has happened to some extent in the whole world, on account ofnatural conditions which limit the forms of life possible in one region;for nature is intolerant in her laxity and punishes too greatoriginality and heresy with death. Such moral integration has occurredvery markedly in every good race and society whose members, by adaptingthemselves to the same external forces, have created and discoveredtheir common soul. Spiritual unity is a natural product. There are thosewho see a great mystery in the presence of eternal values and impersonalideals in a moving and animal world, and think to solve that dualism, asthey call it, by denying that nature can have spiritual functions orspirit a natural cause; but nothing can be simpler if we make, as weshould, existence the test of possibility. _Ab esse ad posse valetillatio_. Nature is a perfect garden of ideals, and passion is theperpetual and fertile soil for poetry, myth, and speculation. Nor isthis origin merely imputed to ideals by a late and cynical observer: itis manifest in the ideals themselves, by their subject matter andintent. For what are ideals about, what do they idealise, except naturalexistence and natural passions? That would be a miserable andsuperfluous ideal indeed that was nobody's ideal of nothing. Thepertinence of ideals binds them to nature, and it is only the worst andflimsiest ideals, the ideals of a sick soul, that elude nature's limitsand belie her potentialities. Ideals are forerunners or heralds ofnature's successes, not always followed, indeed, by their fulfilment, for nature is but nature and has to feel her way; but they are anearnest, at least, of an achieved organisation, an incipientaccomplishment, that tends to maintain and root itself in the world. 

To speak of nature's successes is, of course, to impute successretroactively; but the expression may be allowed when we consider thatthe same functional equilibrium which is looked back upon as a good bythe soul it serves, first creates individual being and with it createsthe possibility of preference and the whole moral world; and it is morethan a metaphor to call that achievement a success which has made asense of success possible and actual. That nature cannot intend orpreviously esteem those formations which are the condition of value orintention existing at all, is a truth too obvious to demand repetition;but when those formations arise they determine estimation, and fix thedirection of preference, so that the evolution which produced them, whenlooked back upon from the vantage-ground thus gained, cannot helpseeming to have been directed toward the good now distinguished andpartly attained. For this reason creation is regarded as a work of love, and the power that brought order out of chaos is called intelligence. 

[Sidenote: Living stability. ]

These natural formations, tending to generate and realise each itsideal, are, as it were, eddies in the universal flux, produced no lessmechanically, doubtless, than the onward current, yet seeming to arrestor to reverse it. Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a series ofphases with a recognisable rhythm; memory reverses it by modifying thisrhythm itself by the integration of earlier phases into those thatsupervene. Inheritance and memory make human stability. This stabilityis relative, being still a mode of flux, and consists fundamentally inrepetition. Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since itpreserves form and disregards time and matter. Inheritance is repetitionon a larger scale, not excluding spontaneous variations; while habit andmemory are a sort of heredity within the individual, since here an oldperception reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of a forwardmarch. Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field; muchas a note is enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inheritedfrom the preceding notes, which give it a new setting. 

[Sidenote: Continuity necessary to progress. ]

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Whenchange is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction isset for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, asamong savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind isfrivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing inconsecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children andbarbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In asecond stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits andsuggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which theythus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood andtrue progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted andall that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertilereadaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it todie down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a casemust have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plasticto the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old ageis as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the sameinattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating anddegenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp. 

[Sidenote: Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage. ]

Not all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal identity must notbe lost. The Latin language did not progress when it passed intoItalian. It died. Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure, but do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So everyindividual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long asthe increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisationalready attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered, growth goes on; but when the foundation itself shifts, when what isgained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears againand progress is not real. Thus a succession of generations or languagesor religions constitutes no progress unless some ideal present at thebeginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expressionthere; without this stability at the core no common standard exists andall comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary. Retentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress. 

The variation human nature is open to is not, then, variation in anydirection. There are transformations that would destroy it. So long asit endures it must retain all that constitutes it now, all that it hasso far gathered and worked into its substance. The genealogy of progressis like that of man, who can never repudiate a single ancestor. Itstarts, so to speak, from a single point, free as yet to take anydirection. When once, however, evolution has taken a single step, say inthe direction of vertebrates, that step cannot be retraced withoutextinction of the species. Such extinction may take place while progressin other lines is continued. All that preceded the forking of the deadand the living branch will be as well represented and as legitimatelycontinued by the surviving radiates as it could have been by thevertebrates that are no more; but the vertebrate ideal is lost for ever, and no more progress is possible along that line. 

[Sidenote: Perfectibility. ]

The future of moral evolution is accordingly infinite, but its characteris more and more determinate at every step. Mankind can never, withoutperishing, surrender its animal nature, its need to eat and drink, itssexual method of reproduction, its vision of nature, its faculty ofspeech, its arts of music, poetry, and building. Particular races cannotsubsist if they renounce their savage instincts, but die, like wildanimals, in captivity; and particular individuals die when not sufferedany longer to retain their memories, their bodies, or even their masterpassions. Thus human nature survives amid a continual fluctuation of itsembodiments. At every step twigs and leaves are thrown out that last butone season; but the underlying stem may have meantime grown stronger andmore luxuriant. Whole branches sometimes wither, but others may continueto bloom. Spiritual unity runs, like sap, from the common root to everyuttermost flower; but at each forking in the growth the branches partcompany, and what happens in one is no direct concern of the others. Theproducts of one age and nation may well be unintelligible to another;the elements of humanity common to both may lie lower down. So that thehighest things are communicable to the fewest persons, and yet, amongthese few, are the most perfectly communicable. The more elaborate anddeterminate a man's heritage and genius are, the more he has in commonwith his next of kin, and the more he can transmit and implant in hisposterity for ever. Civilisation is cumulative. The farther it goes theintenser it is, substituting articulate interests for animal fumes andfor enigmatic passions. Such articulate interests can be shared; andthe infinite vistas they open up can be pursued for ever with theknowledge that a work long ago begun is being perfected and that anideal is being embodied which need never be outworn. 

[Sidenote: Nature and human nature. ]

So long as external conditions remain constant it is obvious that thegreater organisation a being possesses the greater strength he willhave. If indeed primary conditions varied, the finer creatures would diefirst; for their adaptation is more exquisite and the irreversible coreof their being much larger relatively; but in a constant environmenttheir equipment makes them irresistible and secures their permanence andmultiplication. Now man is a part of nature and her organisation may beregarded as the foundation of his own: the word nature is therefore lessequivocal than it seems, for every nature is Nature herself in one ofher more specific and better articulated forms. Man therefore representsthe universe that sustains him; his existence is a proof that the cosmicequilibrium that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium, capable ofbeing long maintained. Some of the ancients thought it eternal; physicsnow suggests a different opinion. But even if this equilibrium, by whichthe stars are kept in their courses and human progress is allowed toproceed, is fundamentally unstable, it shows what relative stabilitynature may attain. Could this balance be preserved indefinitely, no oneknows what wonderful adaptations might occur within it, and to whatexcellence human nature in particular might arrive. Nor is it unlikelythat before the cataclysm comes time will be afforded for moreimprovement than moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it isremarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias have generally been. Thispossibility is not uninspiring and may help to console those who thinkthe natural conditions of life are not conditions that a good life canbe lived in. The possibility of essential progress is bound up with thetragic possibility that progress and human life should some day endtogether. If the present equilibrium of forces were eternal alladaptations to it would have already taken place and, while no essentialcatastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential improvement could behoped for in all eternity. I am not sure that a humanity such as weknow, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a moreexhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticitytogether with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has itscompensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that bettertimes may come. 

[Sidenote: Human nature formulated. ]

Human nature, then, has for its core the substance of nature at large, and is one of its more complex formations. Its determination isprogressive. It varies indefinitely in its historic manifestations andfades into what, as a matter of natural history, might no longer betermed human. At each moment it has its fixed and determinateentelechy, the ideal of that being's life, based on his instincts, summed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, andshared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation. Hisperceptive and reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, asembodied in him; all objects of belief or desire, with all standards ofjustice and duty which he can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts ofit, conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expressions of itsinherent tendencies. 

[Sidenote: Its concrete description reserved for the sequel. ]

This definition of human nature, clear as it may be in itself and trueto the facts, will perhaps hardly make sufficiently plain how the Lifeof Reason, having a natural basis, has in the ideal world a creative andabsolute authority. A more concrete description of human nature mayaccordingly not come amiss, especially as the important practicalquestion touching the extension of a given moral authority over timesand places depends on the degree of kinship found among the creaturesinhabiting those regions. To give a general picture of human nature andits rational functions will be the task of the following books. Thetruth of a description which must be largely historical may not beindifferent to the reader, and I shall study to avoid bias in thepresentation, in so far as is compatible with frankness and brevity; yeteven if some bias should manifest itself and if the picture werehistorically false, the rational principles we shall be trying toillustrate will not thereby be invalidated. Illustrations might havebeen sought in some fictitious world, if imagination had not seemed somuch less interesting than reality, which besides enforces withunapproachable eloquence the main principle in view, namely, that naturecarries its ideal with it and that the progressive organisation ofirrational impulses makes a rational life. 

*** End of Volume One ***

REASON IN SOCIETY

Volume Two of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

This Dover edition, first published in 1980, is an unabridgedrepublication of volume two of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases ofHuman Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y. , in 1905. 

CONTENTS

BOOK II. --REASON IN SOCIETY

CHAPTER I

LOVE

Fluid existences have none but ideal goals. --Nutrition andreproduction. --Priority of the latter. --Love celebrates the initialtriumph of form and is deeply ideal. --Difficulty in describinglove. --One-sided or inverted theories about it. --Sexual functions itsbasis. --Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty. --Glory ofanimal love. --Its degradation when instincts become numerous andcompetitive. --Moral censure provoked. --The heart alienated from theworld. --Childish ideals. --Their light all focussed on the object oflove. --Three environments for love. --Subjectivity of thepassion. --Machinery regulating choice. --The choiceunstable. --Instinctive essence of love. --Its ideality. --Its universalscope. --Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34

CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY

The family arises spontaneously. --It harmonises naturalinterests. --Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth. --Thenaturally dull achieve intelligence. --It is more blessed to save than tocreate. --Parental instinct regards childhood only. --Handing on the torchof life. --Adventitious functions assumed by the family. --Inertia inhuman nature. --Family tyrannies. --Difficulty in abstracting from thefamily. --Possibility of substitutes. --Plato's heroiccommunism. --Opposite modern tendencies. --Individualism in a senserational. --The family tamed. --Possible readjustments andreversions. --The ideal includes generation. --Inner values already lodgedin this function. --Outward beneficence might be secured by experimentPages 35-59

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR

Patriarchal economy. --Origin of the state. --Three uses ofcivilisation. --Its rationality contingent. --Sources of wealth. --Excessof it possible. --Irrational industry. --Its jovial and ingeniousside. --Its tyranny. --An impossible remedy. --Basis of government. --Howrationality accrues. --Ferocious but useful despotisms. --Occasionaladvantage of being conquered. --Origin of free governments. --Theirdemocratic tendencies. --Imperial peace. --Nominal and real status ofarmies. --Their action irresponsible. --Pugnacity human. --Barrack-roomphilosophy. --Military virtues. --They are splendid vices. --Absolute valuein strife. --Sport a civilised way of preserving it. --Who shall found theuniversal commonwealth? Pages 60-87

CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

Eminence, once existing, grows by its own operation. --Its causes naturaland its privileges just. --Advantage of inequality. --Fable of the bellyand the members. --Fallacy in it. --Theism expresses better thearistocratic ideal. --A heaven with many mansions. --If God is defined asthe human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise. --When natures differperfections differ too. --Theory that stations actually correspond tofaculty. --Its falsity. --Feeble individuality the rule. --Sophisticalenvy. --Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is. --Mutilation bycrowding. --A hint to optimists. --How aristocracies might do good. --Manadds wrong to nature's injury. --Conditions of a just inequality Pages88-113

CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY

Democracy as an end and as a means. --Natural democracy leads tomonarchy. --Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege. --Idealsand expedients. --Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, ifrational, would serve common interests. --People jealous of eminence. --Itis representative, but subject to decay. --Ancient citizenship aprivilege. --Modern democracy industrial. --Dangers to currentcivilisation. --Is current civilisation a good?--Horrors of materialisticdemocracy. --Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy. --The difficulty thesame as in all Socialism. --The masses would have to be plebeian inposition and patrician in feeling. --Organisation for ideal ends breedsfanaticism. --Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages 114-136

CHAPTER VI

FREE SOCIETY

Primacy of nature over spirit. --All experience at bottomliberal. --Social experience has its ideality too. --The self anideal. --Romantic egotism. --Vanity. --Ambiguities of fame. --Its possibleideality. --Comradeship. --External conditions of friendship. --Identity insex required, and in age. --Constituents of friendship. --Personalliking. --The refracting human medium for ideas. --Affection based on therefraction. --The medium must also be transparent. --Common interestsindispensable. --Friendship between man and wife. --Between master anddisciple. --Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance. --Automaticidealisation of heroes Pages 137-159

CHAPTER VII

PATRIOTISM

The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must berepresented symbolically. --Ambiguous limits of a native country, geographical and moral. --Sentimental and political patriotism. --Theearth and the race the first objects of rational loyalty. --Race, whendistinct, the greatest of distinctions. --"Pure" races may be morallysterile. --True nationality direction on a definite ideal. --Country wellrepresented by domestic and civic religion. --Misleading identificationof country with government. --Sporting or belligerentpatriotism. --Exclusive patriotism rational only when the governmentsupported is universally beneficent. --Accidents of birth and trainingaffect the ideal. --They are conditions and may contributesomething. --They are not ends. --The symbol for country may be a man andmay become an idol. --Feudal representation sensitive butpartial. --Monarchical representation comprehensive buttreacherous. --Impersonal symbols no advantage. --Patriotism notself-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal Pages 160-183

CHAPTER VIII

IDEAL SOCIETY

The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense. --It gives riseto conscience or sympathy with the public voice. --Guises of publicopinion. --Oracles and revelations. --The ideal a measure for allexistences and no existence itself. --Contrast between natural andintellectual bonds. --Appeal from man to God, from real to idealsociety. --Significant symbols revert to the concrete. --Nature a symbolfor destiny. --Representative notions have also inherentvalues. --Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directlyideal. --Their opposite outlook. --In translating existence into humanterms they give human nature its highest exercise. --Science should bemathematical and religion anthropomorphic. --Summary of this book Pages184-205

REASON IN SOCIETY

CHAPTER I

LOVE

[Sidenote: Fluid existences have none but ideal goals. ]

If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thoughtto be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which allother interests would be subsumed. His acts would explain themselveswithout looking beyond his given essence, and his soul would be like amusical composition, which once written out cannot grow different andonce rendered can ask for nothing but, at most, to be rendered overagain. In truth, however, man is an animal, a portion of the naturalflux; and the consequence is that his nature has a moving centre, hisfunctions an external reference, and his ideal a true ideality. What hestrives to preserve, in preserving himself, is something which he neverhas been at any particular moment. He maintains his equilibrium bymotion. His goal is in a sense beyond him, since it is not hisexperience, but a form which all experience ought to receive. The inmosttexture of his being is propulsive, and there is nothing more intimatelybound up with his success than mobility and devotion to transcendentaims. If there is a transitive function in knowledge and an unselfishpurpose in love, that is only because, at bottom, there is aself-reproductive, flying essence in all existence. 

If the equilibrium of man's being were stable he would need neithernutrition, reproduction, nor sense. As it is, sense must renew his ideasand guide his instincts otherwise than as their inner evolution woulddemand; and regenerative processes must strive to repair beneath theconstant irreparable lapse of his substance. His business is to createand remodel those organisms in which ideals are bred. In order to have asoul to save he must perpetually form it anew; he must, so to speak, _earn his own living_. In this vital labour, we may ask, is nutrition orreproduction the deeper function? Or, to put the corresponding moralquestion, is the body or the state the primary good?

[Sidenote: Nutrition and reproduction]

If we view the situation from the individual's side, asself-consciousness might view it, we may reply that nutrition isfundamental, for if the body were not nourished every faculty woulddecay. Could nutrition only succeed and keep the body young, reproduction would be unnecessary, with its poor pretence at maintainingthe mobile human form in a series of examples. On the other hand, if weview the matter from above, as science and philosophy should, we may saythat nutrition is but germination of a pervasive sort, that the body isa tabernacle in which the transmissible human spirit is carried for awhile, a shell for the immortal seed that dwells in it and has createdit. This seed, however, for rational estimation, is merely a means tothe existence and happiness of individuals. Transpersonal and continuousin its own fluid being, the potential grows personal in its idealfulfilments. In other words, this potentiality is material (thoughcalled sometimes an idea) and has its only value in the particularcreatures it may produce. 

[Sidenote: Priority of the latter]

Reproduction is accordingly primary and more completely instrumentalthan nutrition is, since it serves a soul as yet non-existent, whilenutrition is useful to a soul that already has some actuality. Reproduction initiates life and remains at life's core, a functionwithout which no other, in the end, would be possible. It is morecentral, crucial, and representative than nutrition, which is in a wayperipheral only; it is a more typical and rudimentary act, marking theideal's first victory over the universal flux, before any higherfunction than reproduction itself has accrued to the animal. To nourishan existing being is to presuppose a pause in generation; the nucleus, before it dissolves into other individuals, gathers about itself, forits own glory, certain temporal and personal faculties. It lives foritself; while in procreation it signs its own death-warrant, makes itswill, and institutes its heir. 

[Sidenote: Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeplyideal. ]

This situation has its counterpart in feeling. Replenishment is a sortof delayed breathing, as if the animal had to hunt for air: itnecessitates more activity than it contains; it engages external sensesin its service and promotes intelligence. After securing a dumbsatisfaction, or even in preparing it, it leaves the habits it employedfree for observation and ideal exercise. Reproduction, on the contrary, depletes; it is an expense of spirit, a drag on physical and mentallife; it entangles rather than liberates; it fuses the soul again intothe impersonal, blind flux. Yet, since it constitutes the primary andcentral triumph of life, it is in itself more ideal and generous thannutrition; it fascinates the will in an absolute fashion, and thepleasures it brings are largely spiritual. For though theinstrumentalities of reproduction may seem gross and trivial from aconventional point of view, its essence is really ideal, the perfecttype, indeed, of ideality, since form and an identical life are thereinsustained successfully by a more rhythmical flux of matter. 

It may seem fanciful, even if not unmeaning, to say that a man's soulmore truly survives in his son's youth than in his own decrepitude; butthis principle grows more obvious as we descend to simpler beings, inwhich individual life is less elaborated and has not intrenched itselfin so many adventitious and somewhat permanent organs. In vegetablessoul and seed go forth together and leave nothing but a husk behind. Inthe human individual love may seem a mere incident of youth and asentimental madness; but that episode, if we consider the race, isindispensable to the whole drama; and if we look to the order in whichideal interests have grown up and to their superposition in moralexperience, love will seem the truly primitive and initiatory passion. Consciousness, amused ordinarily by the most superficial processes, itself bears witness to the underlying claims of reproduction and isdrawn by it for a moment into life's central vortex; and love, while itbetrays its deep roots by the imperative force it exerts and the silenceit imposes on all current passions, betrays also its ideal mission bycasting an altogether novel and poetic spell over the mind. 

[Sidenote: Difficulty in describing love. ]

The conscious quality of this passion differs so much in various racesand individuals, and at various points in the same life, that no accountof it will ever satisfy everybody. [A] Poets and novelists never tire ofdepicting it anew; but although the experience they tell of is freshand unparalleled in every individual, their rendering suffers, on thewhole, from a great monotony. Love's gesture and symptoms are noted andunvarying; its vocabulary is poor and worn. Even a poet, therefore, cangive of love but a meagre expression, while the philosopher, whorenounces dramatic representation, is condemned to be avowedlyinadequate. Love, to the lover, is a noble and immense inspiration; tothe naturalist it is a thin veil and prelude to the self-assertion oflust. This opposition has prevented philosophers from doing justice tothe subject. Two things need to be admitted by anyone who would not gowholly astray in such speculation: one, that love has an animal basis;the other, that it has an ideal object. Since these two propositionshave usually been thought contradictory, no writer has ventured topresent more than half the truth, and that half out of its truerelations. 

[Sidenote: One-sided or inverted theories about it. ]

Plato, who gave eloquent expression to the ideal burden of the passion, and divined its political and cosmic message, passed over its naturalhistory with a few mythical fancies; and Schopenhauer, into whosesystem a naturalistic treatment would have fitted so easily, allowed hismetaphysics to carry him at this point into verbal inanities; while, ofcourse, like all profane writers on the subject, he failed to appreciatethe oracles which Plato had delivered. In popular feeling, wheresentiment and observation must both make themselves felt somehow orother, the tendency is to imagine that love is an absolute, non-naturalenergy which, for some unknown reason, or for none at all, lights uponparticular persons, and rests there eternally, as on its ultimate goal. In other words, it makes the origin of love divine and its objectnatural: which is the exact opposite of the truth. If it were once seen, however, that every ideal expresses some natural function, and that nonatural function is incapable, in its free exercise, of evolving someideal and finding justification, not in some collateral animal, but inan inherent operation like life or thought, which being transmissible inits form is also eternal, then the philosophy of love should not provepermanently barren. For love is a brilliant illustration of a principleeverywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning thefriction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. There can beno philosophic interest in disguising the animal basis of love, or indenying its spiritual sublimations, since all life is animal in itsorigin and all spiritual in its possible fruits. 

[Sidenote: Sexual functions its basis. ]

Plastic matter, in transmitting its organisation, takes various courseswhich it is the part of natural history to describe. Even afterreproduction has become sexual, it will offer no basis for love if itdoes not require a union of the two parent bodies. Did germinalsubstances, unconsciously diffused, meet by chance in the externalmedium and unite there, it is obvious that whatever obsessions orpleasures maturity might bring they would not have the quality which mencall love. But when an individual of the opposite sex must be met with, recognised, and pursued, and must prove responsive, then each is hauntedby the possible other. Each feels in a generic way the presence andattraction of his fellows; he vibrates to their touch, he dreams oftheir image, he is restless and wistful if alone. When the vague needthat solicits him is met by the presence of a possible mate it isextraordinarily kindled. Then, if it reaches fruition, it subsidesimmediately, and after an interval, perhaps, of stupor and vitalrecuperation, the animal regains his independence, his peace, and hisimpartial curiosity. You might think him on the way to becomingintelligent; but the renewed nutrition and cravings of the sexualmachinery soon engross his attention again; all his sprightlyindifference vanishes before nature's categorical imperative. Thatfierce and turbid pleasure, by which his obedience is rewarded, hastenshis dissolution; every day the ensuing lassitude and emptiness give hima clearer premonition of death. It is not figuratively only that hissoul has passed into his offspring. The vocation to produce them was achief part of his being, and when that function is sufficientlyfulfilled he is superfluous in the world and becomes partly superfluouseven to himself. The confines of his dream are narrowed. He movesapathetically and dies forlorn. 

Some echo of the vital rhythm which pervades not merely the generationsof animals, but the seasons and the stars, emerges sometimes inconsciousness; on reaching the tropics in the mortal ecliptic, which thehuman individual may touch many times without much change in his outerfortunes, the soul may occasionally divine that it is passing through asupreme crisis. Passion, when vehement, may bring atavistic sentiments. When love is absolute it feels a profound impulse to welcome death, andeven, by a transcendental confusion, to invoke the end of theuniverse. [B] The human soul reverts at such a moment to what anephemeral insect might feel, buzzing till it finds its mate in the noon. Its whole destiny was wooing, and, that mission accomplished, it singsits _Nunc dimittis_, renouncing heartily all irrelevant things, now thatthe one fated and all-satisfying good has been achieved. Where parentalinstincts exist also, nature soon shifts her loom: a milder impulsesucceeds, and a satisfaction of a gentler sort follows in the birth ofchildren. The transcendental illusion is here corrected, and it is seenthat the extinction the lovers had accepted needed not to be complete. The death they welcomed was not without its little resurrection. Thefeeble worm they had generated bore their immortality within it. 

The varieties of sexual economy are many and to each may correspond, forall we know, a special sentiment. Sometimes the union established isintermittent; sometimes it crowns the end of life and dissolves italtogether; sometimes it remains, while it lasts, monogamous; sometimesthe sexual and social alertness is constant in the male, only periodicin the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation enduresthroughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herdtogether, as if normally they preferred their own society, until thetime of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession ofwhat they have just discovered to be the fair. 

[Sidenote: Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty. ]

A naturalist not ashamed to indulge his poetic imagination might easilypaint for us the drama of these diverse loves. It suffices for ourpurpose to observe that the varying passions and duties which life cancontain depend upon the organic functions of the animal. A fishincapable of coition, absolved from all care for its young, which itnever sees or never distinguishes from the casual swimmers dartingacross its path, such a fish, being without social faculties or calls toco-operation, cannot have the instincts, perceptions, or emotions whichbelong to social beings. A male of some higher species that feels onlyonce a year the sudden solicitations of love cannot be sentimental inall the four seasons: his head-long passion, exhausted upon its presentobject and dismissed at once without remainder, leaves his sensesperfectly free and colourless to scrutinise his residual world. Whateverfurther fears or desires may haunt him will have nothing mystical orsentimental about them. He will be a man of business all the year round, and a lover only on May-day. A female that does not suffice for therearing of her young will expect and normally receive her mate's aidlong after the pleasures of love are forgotten by him. Disinterestedfidelity on his part will then be her right and his duty. But a femalethat, once pregnant, needs, like the hen, no further co-operation on themale's part will turn from him at once with absolute indifference tobrood perpetually on her eggs, undisturbed by the least sense ofsolitude or jealousy. And the chicks that at first follow her and findshelter under her wings will soon be forgotten also and relegated to themechanical landscape. There is no pain in the timely snapping of thedearest bonds where society has not become a permanent organism, andperpetual friendship is not one of its possible modes. 

Transcendent and ideal passions may well judge themselves to have anincomparable dignity. Yet that dignity is hardly more than what everypassion, were it articulate, would assign to itself and to its objects. The dumbness of a passion may accordingly, from one point of view, becalled the index of its baseness; for if it cannot ally itself withideas its affinities can hardly lie in the rational mind nor itsadvocates be among the poets. But if we listen to the master-passionitself rather than to the loquacious arts it may have enlisted in itsservice, we shall understand that it is not self-condemned because it issilent, nor an anomaly in nature because inharmonious with human life. The fish's heartlessness is his virtue; the male bee's lasciviousness ishis vocation; and if these functions were retrenched or encumbered inorder to assimilate them to human excellence they would be merelydislocated. We should not produce virtue where there was vice, butdefeat a possible arrangement which would have had its own vitality andorder. 

[Sidenote: Glory of animal love. ]

Animal love is a marvellous force; and while it issues in acts that maybe followed by a revulsion of feeling, it yet deserves a moresympathetic treatment than art and morals have known how to accord it. Erotic poets, to hide their want of ability to make the dumb passionspeak, have played feebly with veiled insinuations and comic effects;while more serious sonneteers have harped exclusively on secondary andsomewhat literary emotions, abstractly conjugating the verb to love. Lucretius, in spite of his didactic turns, has been on this subject, too, the most ingenuous and magnificent of poets, although he chose toconfine his description to the external history of sexual desire. It isa pity that he did not turn, with his sublime sincerity, to the innerside of it also, and write the drama of the awakened senses, thepoignant suasion of beauty, when it clouds the brain, and makes theconventional earth, seen through that bright haze, seem a sorry fable. Western poets should not have despised what the Orientals, in theirfugitive stanzas, seem often to have sung most exquisitely: the joy ofgazing on the beloved, of following or being followed, of tacitunderstandings and avowals, of flight together into some solitude topeople it with those ineffable confidences which so naturally follow theoutward proofs of love. All this makes the brightest page of many alife, the only bright page in the thin biography of many a human animal;while if the beasts could speak they would give us, no doubt, endlessversions of the only joy in which, as we may fancy, the blood of theuniverse flows consciously through their hearts. 

The darkness which conventionally covers this passion is one of thesaddest consequences of Adam's fall. It was a terrible misfortune inman's development that he should not have been able to acquire thehigher functions without deranging the lower. Why should the depths ofhis being be thus polluted and the most delightful of nature's mysteriesbe an occasion not for communion with her, as it should have remained, but for depravity and sorrow?

[Sidenote: Its degradation when instincts become numerous andcompetitive. ]

This question, asked in moral perplexity, admits of a scientific answer. Man, in becoming more complex, becomes less stably organised. His sexualinstinct, instead of being intermittent, but violent and boldlydeclared, becomes practically constant, but is entangled in manycross-currents of desire, in many other equally imperfect adaptations ofstructure to various ends. Indulgence in any impulse can then easilybecome excessive and thwart the rest; for it may be aroused artificiallyand maintained from without, so that in turn it disturbs its neighbours. Sometimes the sexual instinct may be stimulated out of season byexample, by a too wakeful fancy, by language, by pride--for all theseforces are now working in the same field and intermingling theirsuggestions. At the same time the same instinct may derange others, andmake them fail at their proper and pressing occasions. 

[Sidenote: Moral censure provoked. ]

In consequence of such derangements, reflection and public opinion willcome to condemn what in itself was perfectly innocent. The corruption ofa given instinct by others and of others by it, becomes the ground forlong attempts to suppress or enslave it. With the haste and formalismnatural to language and to law, external and arbitrary limits are set toits operation. As no inward adjustment can possibly correspond to theseconventional barriers and compartments of life, a war between nature andmorality breaks out both in society and in each particular bosom--a warin which every victory is a sorrow and every defeat a dishonour. As oneinstinct after another becomes furious or disorganised, cowardly orcriminal, under these artificial restrictions, the public and privateconscience turns against it all its forces, necessarily without muchnice discrimination; the frank passions of youth are met with a grimaceof horror on all sides, with _rumores senum severiorum_, with aninsistence on reticence and hypocrisy. Such suppression is favourable tocorruption: the fancy with a sort of idiotic ingenuity comes to supplythe place of experience; and nature is rendered vicious and overlaidwith pruriency, artifice, and the love of novelty. Hereupon theauthorities that rule in such matters naturally redouble their vigilanceand exaggerate their reasonable censure: chastity begins to seemessentially holy and perpetual virginity ends by becoming an absoluteideal. Thus the disorder in man's life and disposition, when grownintolerable, leads him to condemn the very elements out of which ordermight have been constituted, and to mistake his total confusion for histotal depravity. 

[Sidenote: The heart alienated from the world. ]

Banished from the open day, covered with mockery, and publicly ignored, this necessary pleasure flourishes none the less in dark places and inthe secret soul. Its familiar presence there, its intimate habitation inwhat is most oneself, helps to cut the world in two and to separate theinner from the outer life. In that mysticism which cannot disguise itserotic affinities this disruption reaches an absolute and theoreticform; but in many a youth little suspected of mysticism it producesestrangement from the conventional moralising world, which heinstinctively regards as artificial and alien. It prepares him forexcursions into a private fairy-land in which unthought-of joys willblossom amid friendlier magic forces. The truly good then seems to bethe fantastic, the sensuous, the prodigally unreal. He gladly forgetsthe dreary world he lives in to listen for a thousand and one nights tohis dreams. 

[Sidenote: Childish ideals. ]

This is the region where those who have no conception of the Life ofReason place the ideal; and an ideal is indeed there but the ideal of asingle and inordinate impulse. A rational mind, on the contrary, movesby preference in the real world, cultivating all human interests in dueproportion. The love-sick and luxurious dream-land dear to irrationalpoets is a distorted image of the ideal world; but this distortion hasstill an ideal motive, since it is made to satisfy the cravings of aforgotten part of the soul and to make a home for those elements inhuman nature which have been denied overt existence. If the ideal ismeantime so sadly caricatured, the fault lies with the circumstances oflife that have not allowed the sane will adequate exercise. Lack ofstrength and of opportunity makes it impossible for man to preserve allhis interests in a just harmony; and his conscious ideal, springing upas it too often does in protest against suffering and tyranny, has notscope and range enough to include the actual opportunities for action. Nature herself, by making a slave of the body, has thus made a tyrant ofthe soul. 

[Sidenote: Their light all focussed on the object of love. ]

Fairy-land and a mystical heaven contain many other factors besides thatfurnished by unsatisfied and objectless love. All sensuous and verbalimages may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but thesefantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings andvaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate butmindless æstheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To broodon such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation forromantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back fromits loose reveries and fixes it upon a single object. Then the idealseems at last to have been brought down to earth. Its embodiment hasbeen discovered amongst the children of men. Imagination narrows herrange. Instead of all sorts of flatteries to sense and improbabledelicious adventures, the lover imagines but a single joy: to be masterof his love in body and soul. Jealousy pursues him. Even if he dreads nophysical betrayal, he suffers from terror and morbid sensitiveness atevery hint of mental estrangement. 

[Sidenote: Three environments for love. ]

This attachment is often the more absorbing the more unaccountable itseems; and as in hypnotism the subject is dead to all influences butthat of the operator, so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely tothe one being that has known how to touch it. That being is notselected; it is recognised and obeyed. Pre-arranged reactions in thesystem respond to whatever stimulus, at a propitious moment, happens tobreak through and arouse them pervasively. Nature has opened variousavenues to that passion in whose successful operation she has so much atstake. Sometimes the magic influence asserts itself suddenly, sometimesgently and unawares. One approach, which in poetry has usurped morethan its share of attention, is through beauty; another, less glorious, but often more efficacious, through surprised sense and premonitions ofpleasure; a third through social sympathy and moral affinities. Contemplation, sense, and association are none of them the essence noreven the seed of love; but any of them may be its soil and supply itwith a propitious background. It would be mere sophistry to pretend, forinstance, that love is or should be nothing but a moral bond, thesympathy of two kindred spirits or the union of two lives. For such aneffect no passion would be needed, as none is needed to perceive beautyor to feel pleasure. 

What Aristotle calls friendships of utility, pleasure, or virtue, allresting on common interests of some impersonal sort, are far frompossessing the quality of love, its thrill, flutter, and absolute swayover happiness and misery. But it may well fall to such influences toawaken or feed the passion where it actually arises. Whatevercircumstances pave the way, love does not itself appear until a sexualaffinity is declared. When a woman, for instance, contemplatingmarriage, asks herself whether she really loves her suitor or merelyaccepts him, the test is the possibility of awakening a sexual affinity. For this reason women of the world often love their husbands more trulythan they did their lovers, because marriage has evoked an elementaryfeeling which before lay smothered under a heap of coquetries, vanities, and conventions. 

[Sidenote: Subjectivity of the passion. ]

Man, on the contrary, is polygamous by instinct, although often keptfaithful by habit no less than by duty. If his fancy is left free, it isapt to wander. We observe this in romantic passion no less than in alife of mere gallantry and pleasure. Sentimental illusions may become ahabit, and the shorter the dream is the more often it is repeated, sothat any susceptible poet may find that he, like Alfred de Musset, "mustlove incessantly, who once has loved. " Love is indeed much less exactingthan it thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, forone-tenth that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally athand, an almost identical passion would probably have been felt forsomeone else; for although with acquaintance the quality of anattachment naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes thatperson its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow ofthe passion is much the same for every object. What really affects thecharacter of love is the lover's temperament, age, and experience. Theobjects that appeal to each man reveal his nature; but thoseunparalleled virtues and that unique divinity which the lover discoversthere are reflections of his own adoration, things that ecstasy is verycunning in. He loves what he imagines and worships what he creates. 

[Sidenote: Machinery regulating choice. ]

Those who do not consider these matters so curiously may feel that torefer love in this way chiefly to inner processes is at once ignominiousand fantastic. But nothing could be more natural; the soul accuratelyrenders, in this experience, what is going on in the body and in therace. Nature had a problem to solve in sexual reproduction which wouldhave daunted a less ruthless experimenter. She had to bring togetherautomatically, and at the dictation, as they felt, of theirirresponsible wills, just the creatures that by uniting might reproducethe species. The complete sexual reaction had to be woven together outof many incomplete reactions to various stimuli, reactions notspecifically sexual. The outer senses had to be engaged, and manysecondary characters found in bodies had to be used to attractattention, until the deeper instinctive response should have time togather itself together and assert itself openly. Many mechanicalpreformations and reflexes must conspire to constitute a determinateinstinct. We name this instinct after its ultimate function, lookingforward to the uses we observe it to have; and it seems to us inconsequence an inexplicable anomaly that many a time the instinct is setin motion when its alleged purpose cannot be fulfilled; as when loveappears prematurely or too late, or fixes upon a creature of the wrongage or sex. These anomalies show us how nature is built up and, far frombeing inexplicable, are hints that tend to make everything clear, whenonce a verbal and mythical philosophy has been abandoned. 

Responses which we may call sexual in view of results to which they mayultimately lead are thus often quite independent, and exist before theyare drawn into the vortex of a complete and actually generative act. External stimulus and present idea will consequently be altogetherinadequate to explain the profound upheaval which may ensue, if, as wesay, we actually fall in love. That the senses should be played upon isnothing, if no deeper reaction is aroused. All depends on the junctureat which, so to speak, the sexual circuit is completed and the emotionalcurrents begin to circulate. Whatever object, at such a critical moment, fills the field of consciousness becomes a signal and associate for thewhole sexual mood. It is breathlessly devoured in that pause andconcentration of attention, that rearrangement of the soul, which loveis conceived in; and the whole new life which that image is engulfed inis foolishly supposed to be its effect. For the image is inconsciousness, but not the profound predispositions which gave it placeand power. 

[Sidenote: The choice unstable. ]

This association between passion and its signals may be merelymomentary, or it may be perpetual: a Don Juan and a Dante are bothgenuine lovers. In a gay society the gallant addresses every woman as ifshe charmed him, and perhaps actually finds any kind of beauty, or merefemininity anywhere, a sufficient spur to his desire. These momentaryfascinations are not necessarily false: they may for an instant be quiteabsorbing and irresistible; they may genuinely suffuse the whole mind. Such mercurial fire will indeed require a certain imaginativetemperament; and there are many persons who, short of a life-longdomestic attachment, can conceive of nothing but sordid vice. But evenan inconstant flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturallycombustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just becausethey come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, inwhich it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope and in itsformative stage. 

Thus Plato did not hesitate to make the love of all wines, underwhatever guise, excuse, or occasion, the test of a true taste for wineand an unfeigned adoration of Bacchus; and, like Lucretius after him, hewittily compiled a list of names, by which the lover will flatter themost opposite qualities, if they only succeed in arousing hisinclination. To be omnivorous is one pole of true love: to be exclusiveis the other. A man whose heart, if I may say so, lies deeper, hiddenunder a thicker coat of mail, will have less play of fancy, and will befar from finding every charm charming, or every sort of beauty astimulus to love. Yet he may not be less prone to the tender passion, and when once smitten may be so penetrated by an unimagined tendernessand joy, that he will declare himself incapable of ever loving again, and may actually be so. Having no rivals and a deeper soil, love canripen better in such a constant spirit; it will not waste itself in acontinual patter of little pleasures and illusions. But unless thepassion of it is to die down, it must somehow assert its universality:what it loses in diversity it must gain in applicability. It must becomea principle of action and an influence colouring everything that isdreamt of; otherwise it would have lost its dignity and sunk into a deadmemory or a domestic bond. 

[Sidenote: Instinctive essence of love. ]

True love, it used to be said, is love at first sight. Manners have muchto do with such incidents, and the race which happens to set, at a giventime, the fashion in literature makes its temperament public andexercises a sort of contagion over all men's fancies. If women arerarely seen and ordinarily not to be spoken to; if all imagination hasto build upon is a furtive glance or casual motion, people fall in loveat first sight. For they must fall in love somehow, and any stimulus isenough if none more powerful is forthcoming. When society, on thecontrary, allows constant and easy intercourse between the sexes, afirst impression, if not reinforced, will soon be hidden and obliteratedby others. Acquaintance becomes necessary for love when it is necessaryfor memory. But what makes true love is not the information conveyed byacquaintance, not any circumstantial charms that may be thereindiscovered; it is still a deep and dumb instinctive affinity, aninexplicable emotion seizing the heart, an influence organising theworld, like a luminous crystal, about one magic point. So that althoughlove seldom springs up suddenly in these days into anything like afull-blown passion, it is sight, it is presence, that makes in time aconquest over the heart; for all virtues, sympathies, confidences willfail to move a man to tenderness and to worship, unless a poignanteffluence from the object envelop him, so that he begins to walk, as itwere, in a dream. 

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There are some peopleso indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must reston circumstantial evidence. But a finely constituted being is sensitiveto its deepest affinities. This is precisely what refinement consistsin, that we may feel in things immediate and infinitesimal a surepremonition of things ultimate and important. Fine senses vibrate atonce to harmonies which it may take long to verify; so sight is finerthan touch, and thought than sensation. Well-bred instinct meets reasonhalf-way, and is prepared for the consonances that may follow. Beautifulthings, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful. The grounds we may bring ourselves to assign for our preferences arediscovered by analysing those preferences, and articulate judgmentsfollow upon emotions which they ought to express, but which theysometimes sophisticate. So, too, the reasons we give for love eitherexpress what it feels or else are insincere, attempting to justify atthe bar of reason and convention something which is far more primitivethan they and underlies them both. True instinct can dispense with suchexcuses. It appeals to the event and is justified by the response whichnature makes to it. It is, of course, far from infallible; it cannotdominate circumstances, and has no discursive knowledge; but it ispresumably true, and what it foreknows is always essentially possible. Unrealisable it may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world, where the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a singleline to stand perfect and unmarred. 

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though athousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remaina background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out wesucceed. If we put them by, although in other respects we may callourselves happy, we inwardly know that we have dismissed the ideal, andall that was essentially possible has not been realised. Love in thatcase still owns a hidden and potential object, and we sanctify, perhaps, whatever kindnesses or partialities we indulge in by a secret loyalty tosomething impersonal and unseen. Such reserve, such religion, would nothave been necessary had things responded to our first expectations. Wemight then have identified the ideal with the object that happened tocall it forth. The Life of Reason might have been led instinctively, andwe might have been guided by nature herself into the ways of peace. 

[Sidenote: Its ideality. ]

As it is, circumstances, false steps, or the mere lapse of time, forceus to shuffle our affections and take them as they come, or as we aresuffered to indulge them. A mother is followed by a boyish friend, afriend by a girl, a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by anidea. A divinity passes through these various temples; they may allremain standing, and we may continue our cult in them without outwardchange, long after the god has fled from the last into his nativeheaven. We may try to convince ourselves that we have lost nothing whenwe have lost all. We may take comfort in praising the mixed andperfunctory attachments which cling to us by force of habit and duty, repeating the empty names of creatures that have long ceased to be whatwe once could love, and assuring ourselves that we have remainedconstant, without admitting that the world, which is in irreparableflux, has from the first been betraying us. 

Ashamed of being so deeply deceived, we may try to smile cynically atthe glory that once shone upon us, and call it a dream. But cynicism iswasted on the ideal. There is indeed no idol ever identified with theideal which honest experience, even without cynicism, will not some dayunmask and discredit. Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. Yet what the souldesires is nothing arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream, butcontinually embodies, with varying success, the potentialities itcontains and that prompt desire. Everything that satisfies at all, evenif partially and for an instant, justifies aspiration and rewards it. Existence, however, cannot be arrested; and only the transmissible formsof things can endure, to match the transmissible faculties which livingbeings hand down to one another. The ideal is accordingly significant, perpetual, and as constant as the nature it expresses; but it can neveritself exist, nor can its particular embodiments endure. 

[Sidenote: Its universal scope. ]

Love is accordingly only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived. His madness, as Plato taught, is divine; for though it befolly to identify the idol with the god, faith in the god is inwardlyjustified. That egregious idolatry may therefore be interpreted ideallyand given a symbolic scope worthy of its natural causes and of themystery it comes to celebrate. The lover knows much more about absolutegood and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless thelatter, too, be lovers in disguise. Logical universals are terms indiscourse, without vital ideality, while traditional gods are at bestnatural existences, more or less indifferent facts. What the lover comesupon, on the contrary, is truly persuasive, and witnesses to itself, sothat he worships from the heart and beholds what he worships. That thetrue object is no natural being, but an ideal form essentially eternaland capable of endless embodiments, is far from abolishing its worth; onthe contrary, this fact makes love ideally relevant to generation, bywhich the human soul and body may be for ever renewed, and at the sametime makes it a thing for large thoughts to be focussed upon, a thingrepresenting all rational aims. 

Whenever this ideality is absent and a lover sees nothing in hismistress but what everyone else may find in her, loving her honestly inher unvarnished and accidental person, there is a friendly and humorousaffection, admirable in itself, but no passion or bewitchment of love;she is a member of his group, not a spirit in his pantheon. Such anaffection may be altogether what it should be; it may bring a happinessall the more stable because the heart is quite whole, and no divineshaft has pierced it. It is hard to stanch wounds inflicted by a god. The glance of an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding deathand immortality together. Love could not be called divine withoutplatitude if it regarded nothing but its nominal object; to be divine itmust not envisage an accidental good but the principle of goodness, thatwhich gives other goods their ultimate meaning, and makes all functionsuseful. Love is a true natural religion; it has a visible cult, it iskindled by natural beauties and bows to the best symbol it may find forits hope; it sanctifies a natural mystery; and, finally, whenunderstood, it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure wastruly the principle of all good. 

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would nevertake so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound andelementary. It is accordingly most truly love when it is irresistibleand fatal. The substance of all passion, if we could gather it together, would be the basis of all ideals, to which all goods would have torefer. Love actually accomplishes something of the sort; beingprimordial it underlies other demands, and can be wholly satisfied onlyby a happiness which is ultimate and comprehensive. Lovers are vividlyaware of this fact: their ideal, apparently so inarticulate, seems tothem to include everything. It shares the mystical quality of allprimitive life. Sophisticated people can hardly understand how vagueexperience is at bottom, and how truly that vagueness supports whateverclearness is afterward attained. They cling to the notion that nothingcan have a spiritual scope that does not spring from reflection. But inthat case life itself, which brings reflection about, would neversupport spiritual interests, and all that is moral would be unnaturaland consequently self-destructive. In truth, all spiritual interestsare supported by animal life; in this the generative function isfundamental; and it is therefore no paradox, but something altogetherfitting, that if that function realised all it comprises, nothing humanwould remain outside. Such an ultimate fulfilment would differ, ofcourse, from a first satisfaction, just as all that reproductionreproduces differs from the reproductive function itself, and vastlyexceeds it. All organs and activities which are inherited, in a sense, grow out of the reproductive process and serve to clothe it; so thatwhen the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtuallycalled up and, so to speak, made consciously potential; and love yearnsfor the universe of values. 

[Sidenote: Its euthanasia. ]

This secret is gradually revealed to those who are inwardly attentiveand allow love to teach them something. A man who has truly loved, though he may come to recognise the thousand incidental illusions intowhich love may have led him, will not recant its essential faith. Hewill keep his sense for the ideal and his power to worship. The furtherobjects by which these gifts will be entertained will vary with thesituation. A philosopher, a soldier, and a courtesan will express thesame religion in different ways. In fortunate cases love may glideimperceptibly into settled domestic affections, giving them henceforth atouch of ideality; for when love dies in the odour of sanctity peoplevenerate his relics. In other cases allegiance to the ideal may appearmore sullenly, breaking out in whims, or in little sentimental practiceswhich might seem half-conventional. Again it may inspire a religiousconversion, charitable works, or even artistic labours. In all theseways people attempt more or less seriously to lead the Life of Reason, expressing outwardly allegiance to whatever in their minds has come tostand for the ideal. If to create was love's impulse originally, tocreate is its effort still, after it has been chastened and has receivedsome rational extension. The machinery which serves reproduction thusfinds kindred but higher uses, as every organ does in a liberal life;and what Plato called a desire for birth in beauty may be sublimatedeven more, until it yearns for an ideal immortality in a transfiguredworld, a world made worthy of that love which its children have so oftenlavished on it in their dreams. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: The wide uses of the English word love add to thedifficulty. I shall take the liberty of limiting the term here toimaginative passion, to being in love, excluding all other ways ofloving. It follows that love--like its shadow, jealousy--will often bemerely an ingredient in an actual state of feeling; friendship andconfidence, with satisfaction at being liked in return, will often bemingled with it. We shall have to separate physiologically things whichin consciousness exist undivided, since a philosophic description isbound to be analytic and cannot render everything at once. Where a poetmight conceive a new composite, making it live, a moralist must dissectthe experience and rest in its eternal elements. ]

[Footnote B: One example, among a thousand, is the cry of Siegfried andBrünhilde in Wagner:

 Lachend lass' uns verderben Lachend zu Grunde geh'n. Fahr hin, Walhall's Leuchtende Welt!... Leb' wohl, pragende Götter Pracht! Ende in Wonne, Du ewig Geschlecht!]

CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY

[Sidenote: The family arises spontaneously. ]

Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of theimpending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains neverthelessonly a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, beginspresently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtshipinto partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and halfplaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make itsconsequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclinations wehave woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which onceseemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortalcareer. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that inaccomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. Hesails henceforth for one point of the compass. 

[Sidenote: It harmonises natural interests. ]

The family is one of nature's masterpieces. It would be hard to conceivea system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituentsshould represent or support one another better. The husband has aninterest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weakergains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds ahelp-mate at home to take thought for his daily necessities. Parentslend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endowtheir parents with a vicarious immortality. 

[Sidenote: Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth. ]

The long childhood in the human race has made it possible and needful totransmit acquired experience: possible, because the child's brain, beingimmature, allows instincts and habits to be formed after birth, underthe influence of that very environment in which they are to operate; andalso needful, since children are long incapable of providing forthemselves and compel their parents, if the race is not to die out, tocontinue their care, and to diversify it. To be born half-made is animmense advantage. Structure performed is formed blindly; the _a priori_is as dangerous in life as in philosophy. Only the cruel workings ofcompulsion and extermination keep what is spontaneous in any creatureharmonious with the world it is called upon to live in. Nothing butcasual variations could permanently improve such a creature; and casualvariations will seldom improve it. But if experience can co-operate informing instincts, and if human nature can be partly a work of art, mastery can be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is thesecret of man's pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit for years tocontrol action advantageously. He has an age of play which is hisapprenticeship; and he is formed unawares by a series of selectiveexperiments, of curious gropings, while he is still under tutelage andsuffers little by his mistakes. 

[Sidenote: The naturally dull achieve intelligence. ]

Had all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it might have been, nothing essential could have been learned afterward. Mankind would havecontained nothing but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood stillfor ever. Capacity to learn comes with dependence on education; and asthat animal which at birth is most incapable and immature is the mostteachable, so too those human races which are most precocious are mostincorrigible, and while they seem the cleverest at first proveultimately the least intelligent. They depend less on circumstances, butdo not respond to them so well. In some nations everybody is by natureso astute, versatile, and sympathetic that education hardly makes anydifference in manners or mind; and it is there precisely thatgeneration, follows generation without essential progress, and no oneever remakes himself on a better plan. It is perhaps the duller races, with a long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes of theworld within them, if only nature avails to execute what she has plannedon so great a scale. 

[Sidenote: It is more blessed to save than to create. ]

Generation answers no actual demand except that existing in the parents, and it establishes a new demand without guaranteeing its satisfaction. Birth is a benefit only problematically and by anticipation, on thepresumption that the faculties newly embodied are to be exercisedsuccessfully. The second function of the family, to rear, is thereforehigher than the first. To foster and perfect a life after it has beenawakened, to co-operate with a will already launched into the world, isa positive good work. It has a moral quality and is not mere vegetation;for in expressing the agent and giving him ideal employment, it helpsthe creature affected to employ itself better, too, and to findexpression. In propagating and sowing broadcast precarious beings thereis fertility only, such as plants and animals may have; but there ischarity in furthering what is already rooted in existence and isstriving to live. 

This principle is strikingly illustrated in religion. When the Jews hadbecome spiritual they gave the name of Father to Jehovah, who had beforebeen only the Lord of Armies or the architect of the cosmos. A meresource of being would not deserve to be called father, unless it sharedits creatures' nature and therefore their interests. A deity not so muchresponsible for men's existence or situation as solicitous for theirwelfare, who pitied a weakness he could not have intended and waspleased by a love he could not command, might appropriately be called afather. It then becomes possible to conceive moral intercourse andmutual loyalty between God and man, such as Hebrew religion so earnestlyinsisted on; for both then have the same interests in the world and looktoward the same consummations. So the natural relations subsistingbetween parents and children become moral when it is not merelyderivation that unites them, but community of purpose. The father thenrepresents his children while they are under his tutelage, and afterwardthey represent him, carrying on his arts and inheriting his mind. 

[Sidenote: Parental instinct regards childhood only. ]

These arts in some cases are little more than retarded instincts, faculties that ripen late and that manifest themselves without specialinstruction when the system is mature. So a bird feeds her young untilthey are fledged and can provide for themselves. Parental functions insuch cases are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of theinstinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be reliedupon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children'sphysical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands thevegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in thechild have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill anddelights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness graduallyfade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal lifeof a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particulartact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuinecommunity in life and feeling between parents and their adult children. Often the parent's influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, themore cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and whatmakes the parents' claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it isfounded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once whollytheirs, that no longer exists in the man. 

To train character and mind would seem to be a father's natural office, but as a matter of fact he commonly delegates that task to society. Thefledgling venturing for the first time into the air may learn of hisfather and imitate his style of flight; but once launched into the openit will find the whole sky full of possible masters. The one ultimatelychosen will not necessarily be the nearest; in reason it should be themost congenial, from whom most can be learned. To choose an imitablehero is the boy's first act of freedom; his heart grows by finding itselective affinities, and it grows most away from home. It will grow alsoby returning there, when home has become a part of the world or a refugefrom it; but even then the profoundest messages will come from religionand from solitary dreams. A consequence is that parental influence, tobe permanent, requires that the family should be hedged about with highbarriers and that the father he endowed with political and religiousauthority. He can then exercise the immense influence due to alltradition, which he represents, and all law, which he administers; butit is not his bare instincts as a father that give him this ascendency. It is a social system that has delegated to him most of its functions, so that all authority flows through him, and he retails justice andknowledge, besides holding all wealth in his hand. When the father, apart from these official prerogatives, is eager and able to mould hischildren's minds, a new relation half natural and half ideal, which isfriendship, springs up between father and son. In this ties of bloodmerely furnish the opportunity, and what chiefly counts is a moralimpulse, on the one side, to beget children in the spirit, and on theother a youthful hunger for experience and ideas. 

[Sidenote: Handing on the torch of life. ]

If _Nunc dimittis_ is a psalm for love to sing, it is even moreappropriate for parental piety. On seeing heirs and representatives ofours already in the world, we are inclined to give them place and trustthem to realise our foiled ambitions. They, we fancy, will be morefortunate than we; we shall have screened them from whatever has mostmaimed our own lives. Their purer souls, as we imagine, will reachbetter things than are now possible to ours, distracted and abused solong. We commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly tothe flames, when we find the immortal text already half engrossed in afairer copy. In all this there is undoubtedly a measure of illusion, since little clear improvement is ordinarily possible in the world, andwhile our children may improve upon us in some respects, the devil willcatch them unprepared in another quarter. Yet the hope in question is atranscript of primary impersonal functions to which nature, at certainlevels, limits the animal will. To keep life going was, in thebeginning, the sole triumph of life. Even when nothing but reproductionwas aimed at or attained, existence was made possible and ideally stableby securing so much; and when the ideal was enlarged so as to includetraining and rearing the new generation, life was even better intrenchedand protected. Though further material progress may not be made easierby this development, since more dangers become fatal as beings growcomplex and mutually dependent, a great step in moral progress has atany rate been taken. 

In itself, a desire to see a child grow and prosper is just asirrational as any other absolute desire; but since the child alsodesires his own happiness, the child's will sanctions and supports thefather's. Thus two irrationalities, when they conspire, make onerational life. The father's instinct and sense of duty are nowvindicated experimentally in the child's progress, while the son, besides the joy of living, has the pious function of satisfying hisparent's hopes. Even if life could achieve nothing more than this, itwould have reached something profoundly natural and perfectly ideal. Inpatriarchal ages men feel it is enough to have inherited their humanpatrimony, to have enjoyed it, and to hand it down unimpaired. He who isnot childless goes down to his grave in peace. Reason may afterward cometo larger vistas and more spiritual aims, but the principle of love andresponsibility will not be altered. It will demand that wills be madeharmonious and satisfactions compatible. 

[Sidenote: Adventitious functions assumed by the family. ]

Life is experimental, and whatever performs some necessary function, andcannot be discarded, is a safe nucleus for many a parasite, astarting-point for many new experiments. So the family, in serving tokeep the race alive, becomes a point of departure for many institutions. It assumes offices which might have been allotted to some other agency, had not the family pre-empted them, profiting by its establishedauthority and annexing them to its domain. In no civilised community, for instance, has the union of man and wife been limited to its barelynecessary period. It has continued after the family was reared and hasremained life-long; it has commonly involved a common dwelling andreligion and often common friends and property. Again, the children'semancipation has been put off indefinitely. The Roman father had aperpetual jurisdiction and such absolute authority that, in the palmydays of the Roman family, no other subsisted over it. He alone was acitizen and responsible to the state, while his household were subjectto him in law, as well as in property and religion. In simple ruralcommunities the family has often been also the chief industrial unit, almost all necessaries being produced under domestic economy. 

[Sidenote: Inertia in human nature. ]

Now the instincts and delights which nature associates with reproductioncannot stretch so far. Their magic fails, and the political andindustrial family, which still thinks itself natural, is in truth casualand conventional. There is no real instinct to protect those who canalready protect themselves; nor have they any profit in obeying nor, inthe end, any duty to do so. A _patria potestas_ much prolonged orextended is therefore an abuse and prolific in abuses. The chieftain'smind, not being ruled by paternal instincts, will pursue arbitrarypersonal ends, and it is hardly to be expected that his own wealth orpower or ideal interests will correspond with those of his subjects. Thegovernment and supervision required by adults is what we call political;it should stretch over all families alike. To annex this politicalcontrol to fatherhood is to confess that social instinct is singularlybarren, and that the common mind is not plastic enough to devise neworgans appropriate to the functions which a large society involves. 

After all, the family is an early expedient and in many waysirrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to benurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, and if lovers had never been tied together by a bond less ethereal thanideal passion, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such adivision of labour would doubtless have involved evils of its own, butit would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family. For we pay a high price for our conquests in this quarter, and thesweets of home are balanced not only by its tenderer sorrows, but by athousand artificial prejudices, enmities, and restrictions. It takespatience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits preferunhappiness. Young men escape as soon as they can, at least in fancy, into the wide world; all prophets are homeless and all inspired artists;philosophers think out some communism or other, and monks put it inpractice. There is indeed no more irrational ground for living togetherthan that we have sprung from the same loins. They say blood is thickerthan water; yet similar forces easily compete while dissimilar forcesmay perhaps co-operate. It is the end that is sacred, not the beginning. A common origin unites reasonable creatures only if it involves commonthoughts and purposes; and these may bind together individuals of themost remote races and ages, when once they have discovered one another. It is difficulties of access, ignorance, and material confinement thatshut in the heart to its narrow loyalties; and perhaps greater mobility, science, and the mingling of nations will one day reorganise the moralworld. It was a pure spokesman of the spirit who said that whosoevershould do the will of his _Father who was in heaven_, the same was hisbrother and sister and mother. 

[Sidenote: Family tyrannies. ]

The family also perpetuates accidental social differences, exaggeratingand making them hereditary; it thus defeats that just moiety of thedemocratic ideal which demands that all men should have equalopportunities. In human society chance only decides what education a manshall receive, what wealth and influence he shall enjoy, even whatreligion and profession he shall adopt. People shudder at the system ofcastes which prevails in India; but is not every family a little caste?Was a man assigned to his family because he belonged to it in spirit, orcan he choose another? Half the potentialities in the human race arethus stifled, half its incapacities fostered and made inveterate. Thefamily, too, is largely responsible for the fierce prejudices thatprevail about women, about religion, about seemly occupations, aboutwar, death, and honour. In all these matters men judge in a blind way, inspired by a feminine passion that has no mercy for anything thateludes the traditional household, not even for its members' souls. 

[Sidenote: Difficulty in abstracting from the family. ]

At the same time there are insuperable difficulties in proposing anysubstitute for the family. In the first place, all society at presentrests on this institution, so that we cannot easily discern which of ourhabits and sentiments are parcels of it, and which are attached to itadventitiously and have an independent basis. A reformer hewing so nearto the tree's root never knows how much he may be felling. Possibly hisown ideal would lose its secret support if what it condemns had whollydisappeared. For instance, it is conceivable that a communist, abolishing the family in order to make opportunities equal and removethe more cruel injustices of fortune, might be drying up that milk ofhuman kindness which had fed his own enthusiasm; for the foundlingswhich he decreed were to people the earth might at once disown allsocialism and prove a brood of inhuman egoists. Or, as not whollycontemptible theories have maintained, it might happen that if fatherswere relieved of care for their children and children of all paternalsuasion, human virtue would lose its two chief stays. 

[Sidenote: Possibility of substitutes. ]

On the other hand, an opposite danger is present in this sort ofspeculation. Things now associated with the family may not depend uponit, but might flourish equally well in a different soil. The familybeing the earliest and closest society into which men enter, it assumesthe primary functions which all society can exercise. Possibly if anyother institution had been first in the field it might have had acomparable moral influence. One of the great lessons, for example, whichsociety has to teach its members is that society exists. The child, likethe animal, is a colossal egoist, not from a want of sensibility, butthrough his deep transcendental isolation. The mind is naturally its ownworld and its solipsism needs to be broken down by social influence. Thechild must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, ratherthan instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must becomecognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturallyis, sensitively, selfishly fanciful. 

To break down transcendental conceit is a function usually confided tothe family, and yet the family is not well fitted to perform it. Tomothers and nurses their darlings are always exceptional; even fathersand brothers teach a child that he is very different from othercreatures and of infinitely greater consequence, since he lies closer totheir hearts and may expect from them all sorts of favouring services. The whole household, in proportion as it spreads about the child abrooding and indulgent atmosphere, nurses wilfulness and illusion. Forthis reason the noblest and happiest children are those brought up, asin Greece or England, under simple general conventions by personstrained and hired for the purpose. The best training in character isfound in very large families or in schools, where boys educate oneanother. Priceless in this regard is athletic exercise; for here thetest of ability is visible, the comparison not odious, the need ofco-operation clear, and the consciousness of power genuine and thereforeennobling. Socratic dialectic is not a better means of learning to knowoneself. Such self-knowledge is objective and free fromself-consciousness; it sees the self in a general medium and measures itby a general law. Even the tenderer associations of home might, underother circumstances, attach to other objects. Consensus of opinion has adistorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values. A thing which almosteveryone agrees in prizing, because it has played some part in everylife, tends to be valued above more important elements in personalhappiness that may not have been shared. So wealth, religion, militaryvictory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. The family mightwell be, to some extent, a similar idol of the tribe. Everyone has had afather and a mother; but how many have had a friend? Everyone likes toremember many a joy and even sorrow of his youth which was linked withfamily occasions; but to name a man's more private memories, attached tospecial surroundings, would awaken no response in other minds. Yet theseother surroundings may have been no less stimulating to emotion, and iffamiliar to all might be spoken of with as much conventional effect. This appears so soon as any experience is diffused enough to enable atradition to arise, so that the sentiment involved can find a socialecho. Thus there is a loyalty, very powerful in certain quarters, towardschool, college, club, regiment, church, and country. Who shall say thatsuch associations, had they sprung up earlier and been more zealouslycultivated, or were they now reinforced by more general sympathy, wouldnot breed all the tenderness and infuse all the moral force which mostmen now derive from the family?

[Sidenote: Plato's heroic communism. ]

Nevertheless, no suggested substitute for the family is in the leastsatisfactory. Plato's is the best grounded in reason; but to succeed itwould have to count on a degree of virtue absolutely unprecedented inman. To be sure, the Platonic regimen, if it demands heroism for itsinception, provides in its scientific breeding and education a means ofmaking heroism perpetual. But to submit to such reforming regulationsmen would first have to be reformed; it would not suffice, as Platosuggested, merely to enslave them and to introduce scientificinstitutions by despotic decrees. For in such a case there would be allmanner of evasions, rebellions, and corruptions. If marriage founded oninclination and mutual consent is so often broken surreptitiously or byopen divorce, what should we expect amongst persons united and separatedby governmental policy? The love of home is a human instinct. Princeswho marry for political reasons often find a second household necessaryto their happiness, although every motive of honour, policy, religion, and patriotism makes with overwhelming force against suchirregularities; and the celibate priesthood, presumably taking its vowsfreely and under the influence of religious zeal, often revert inpractice to a sort of natural marriage. It is true that Plato's citizenswere not to be celibates, and the senses would have had no just causefor rebellion; but would the heart have been satisfied? Could passion orhabit submit to such regulation?

Even when every concession is made to the god-like simplicity and ardourwhich that Platonic race was to show, a greater difficulty appears. Apparently the guardians and auxiliaries, a small minority in the state, were alone to submit to this regimen: the rest of the people, slaves, tradesmen, and foreigners, were to live after their own devices andwere, we may suppose, to retain the family. So that, after all, Plato inthis matter proposes little more than what military and monastic ordershave actually done among Christians: to institute a privileged unmarriedclass in the midst of an ordinary community. Such a proposal, therefore, does not abolish the family. 

[Sidenote: Opposite modern tendencies. ]

Those forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion andpractice incline in these days tend to transform the family withoutabolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and thechildren in any case would remain with one or the other parent. Thefamily has already suffered greater transformations than that suggestedby this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals andsentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Noris it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invokeChristian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which arethus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is thecure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtueand the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with itsnon-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer, penance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. Ithas so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupationwould be gone if once the sin could be abolished. 

[Sidenote: Individualism in a sense rational. ]

While a desirable form of society entirely without the family is hard toconceive, yet the general tendency in historic times, and the markedtendency in periods of ripe development, has been toward individualism. Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whateversocial order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect onconscious individuals. Man is of course a social animal and needssociety first that he may come safely into being, and then that he mayhave something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal andhas neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of such things iseither to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, themore currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. Itwould be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form ofsociety in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which itlent to individual happiness. If the individual may be justlysubordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of a future freergeneration, but permanently and in the ideal society, the reason issimply that such subordination is a part of man's natural devotion tothings rational and impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can bepersonally happy. Society, in its future and its past, is a naturalobject of interest like art or science; it exists, like them, becauseonly when lost in such rational objects can a free soul be active andimmortal. But all these ideals are terms in some actual life, not alienends, important to nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to besacrificed. 

Individualism is therefore the only ideal possible. The excellence ofsocieties is measured by what they provide for their members. A cumbrousand sanctified social order manifests dulness, and cannot subsistwithout it. It immerses man in instrumentalities, weighs him down withatrophied organs, and by subjecting him eternally to fruitlesssacrifices renders him stupid and superstitious and ready to be himselftyrannical when the opportunity occurs. A sure sign of having escapedbarbarism is therefore to feel keenly the pragmatic values belonging toall institutions, to look deep into the human sanctions of things. Greece was on this ground more civilised than Rome, and Athens more thanSparta. Ill-governed communities may be more intelligent thanwell-governed ones, when people feel the motive and partial advantageunderlying the abuses they tolerate (as happens where slavery ornepotism is prevalent), but when on the other hand no reason isperceived for the good laws which are established (as when law is basedon revelation). The effort to adjust old institutions suddenly to feltneeds may not always be prudent, because the needs most felt may not bethe deepest, yet so far as it goes the effort is intelligent. 

[Sidenote: The family tamed. ]

The family in a barbarous age remains sacrosanct and traditional;nothing in its law, manners, or ritual is open to amendment. Theunhappiness which may consequently overtake individuals is hushed up orpositively blamed, with no thought of tinkering with the holyinstitutions which are its cause. Civilised men think more and cannotendure objectless tyrannies. It is inevitable, therefore, that asbarbarism recedes the family should become more sensitive to itsmembers' personal interests. Husband and wife, when they are happilymatched, are in liberal communities more truly united than before, because such closer friendship expresses their personal inclination. Children are still cared for, because love of them is natural, but theyare ruled less and sooner suffered to choose their own associations. They are more largely given in charge to persons not belonging to thefamily, especially fitted to supply their education. The whole, in aword, exists more and more for the sake of the parts, and the closeness, duration, and scope of family ties comes to vary greatly in differenthouseholds. Barbaric custom, imposed in all cases alike without respectof persons, yields to a regimen that dares to be elastic and will takepains to be just. 

[Sidenote: Possible readjustments and reversions. ]

How far these liberties should extend and where they would pass intolicense and undermine rational life, is another question. The pressureof circumstances is what ordinarily forces governments to be absolute. Political liberty is a sign of moral and economic independence. Thefamily may safely weaken its legal and customary authority so long asthe individual can support and satisfy himself. Children evidently nevercan; consequently they must remain in a family or in some artificialsubstitute for it which would be no less coercive. But to what extentmen and women, in a future age, may need to rely on ties ofconsanguinity or marriage in order not to grow solitary, purposeless, and depraved, is for prophets only to predict. If changes continue inthe present direction much that is now in bad odour may come to beaccepted as normal. It might happen, for instance, as a consequence ofwoman's independence, that mothers alone should be their children'sguardians and sole mistresses in their houses; the husband, if he wereacknowledged at all, having at most a pecuniary responsibility for hisoffspring. Such an arrangement would make a stable home for thechildren, while leaving marriage dissoluble at the will of either party. 

It may well be doubted, however, whether women, if given everyencouragement to establish and protect themselves, would not in the endfly again into man's arms and prefer to be drudges and mistresses athome to living disciplined and submerged in some larger community. Indeed, the effect of women's emancipation might well prove to be theopposite of what was intended. Really free and equal competition betweenmen and women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferioritythat, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they shouldfind themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would haveto begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction and tomen's fondness in order to regain their lost social position. 

[Sidenote: The ideal includes generation. ]

There is a certain order in progress which it is impossible to retract. An advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest whichit furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; hadagriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its ownrationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal inwhich those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which createdthe ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and deathwere abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: itspleasures would cease to charm the mind, and its results--pregnancy, child-birth, infancy--would seem positively horrible. But so long asreproduction is necessary the ideal of life must include it. Otherwisewe should be constructing not an ideal of life but some dream ofnon-human happiness, a dream whose only remnant of ideality would beborrowed from such actual human functions as it still expressedindirectly. The true ideal must speak for all necessary and compatiblefunctions. Man being an inevitably reproductive animal his reproductivefunction must be included in his perfect life. 

[Sidenote: Inner values already lodged in this function. ]

Now, any function to reach perfection it must fulfil two conditions: itmust be delightful in itself, endowing its occasions and results withideal interest, and it must also co-operate harmoniously with all otherfunctions so that life may be profitable and happy. In the matter ofreproduction nature has already fulfilled the first of these conditionsin its essentials. It has indeed super-abundantly fulfilled them, andnot only has love appeared in man's soul, the type and symbol of allvital perfection, but a tenderness and charm, a pathos passing into thefrankest joy, has been spread over pregnancy, birth, and childhood. Ifmany pangs and tears still prove how tentative and violent, even here, are nature's most brilliant feats, science and kindness may strive notunsuccessfully to diminish or abolish those profound traces of evil. Butreproduction will not be perfectly organised until the second conditionis fulfilled as well, and here nature has as yet been more remiss. Family life, as Western nations possess it, is still regulated in a verybungling, painful, and unstable manner. Hence, in the first rank ofevils, prostitution, adultery, divorce, improvident and unhappymarriages; and in the second rank, a morality compacted of threeinharmonious parts, with incompatible ideals, each in its waylegitimate: I mean the ideals of passion, of convention, and of reason;add, besides, genius and religion thwarted by family ties, single livesempty, wedded lives constrained, a shallow gallantry, and a dull virtue. 

[Sidenote: Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment. ]

How to surround the natural sanctities of wedlock with wise custom andlaw, how to combine the maximum of spiritual freedom with the maximum ofmoral cohesion, is a problem for experiment to solve. It cannot besolved, even ideally, in a Utopia. For each interest in play has itsrights and the prophet neither knows what interests may at a givenfuture time subsist in the world, nor what relative force they may have, nor what mechanical conditions may control their expression. Thestatesman in his sphere and the individual in his must find, as they go, the best practical solutions. All that can be indicated beforehand isthe principle which improvements in this institution would comply withif they were really improvements. They would reform and perfect thefunction of reproduction without discarding it; they would maintain thefamily unless they could devise some institution that combined intrinsicand representative values better than does that natural artifice, andthey would recast either the instincts or the laws concerned, or bothsimultaneously, until the family ceased to clash seriously with any ofthese three things: natural affection, rational nurture, and moralfreedom. 

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR

[Sidenote: Patriarchal economy. ]

We have seen that the family, an association useful in rearing theyoung, may become a means of further maintenance and defence. It is thefirst economic and the first military group. Children become servants, and servants, being adopted and brought up in the family, become likeother children and supply the family's growing wants. It was no smallpart of the extraordinary longing for progeny shown by patriarchal manthat children were wealth, and that by continuing in life-longsubjection to their father they lent prestige and power to his old age. The daughters drew water, the wives and concubines spun, wove, andprepared food. A great family was a great estate. It was augmentedfurther by sheep, goats, asses, and cattle. This numerous household, bound together by personal authority and by common fortunes, wassufficient to carry on many rude industries. It wandered from pasture topasture, practised hospitality, watched the stars, and seems (at leastin poetic retrospect) to have been not unhappy. A Roman adage hasdeclared that to know the world one household suffices; and onepatriarchal family, in its simplicity and grandeur, seems to have givenscope enough for almost all human virtues. And those early men, as Vicosays, were sublime poets. 

[Sidenote: Origin of the state. ]

Nevertheless, such a condition can only subsist in deserts where thosewho try to till the soil cannot grow strong enough to maintainthemselves against marauding herdsmen. Whenever agriculture yieldsbetter returns and makes the husbandman rich enough to support aprotector, patriarchal life disappears. The fixed occupation of landturns a tribe into a state. Plato has given the classic account of sucha passage from idyllic to political conditions. Growth in population andin requirements forces an Arcadian community to encroach upon itsneighbours; this encroachment means war; and war, when there are fieldsand granaries to protect, and slaves and artisans to keep at theirdomestic labours, means fortifications, an army, and a general. And tomatch the army in the field another must be maintained at home, composedof judges, priests, builders, cooks, barbers, and doctors. Such is theinception of what, in the literal sense of the word, may be calledcivilisation. 

[Sidenote: Three uses of civilisation. ]

Civilisation secures three chief advantages: greater wealth, greatersafety, and greater variety of experience. Whether, in spite of this, there is a real--that is, a moral--advance is a question impossible toanswer off-hand, because wealth, safety, and variety are not absolutegoods, and their value is great or small according to the further valuesthey may help to secure. This is obvious in the case of riches. Butsafety also is only good when there is something to preserve better thancourage, and when the prolongation of life can serve to intensify itsexcellence. An animal's existence is not improved when made safe byimprisonment and domestication; it is only degraded and rendered passiveand melancholy. The human savage likewise craves a freedom and many adanger inconsistent with civilisation, because independent of reason. Hedoes not yet identify his interests with any persistent and idealharmonies created by reflection. And when reflection is absent, lengthof life is no benefit: a quick succession of generations, with a smallchance of reaching old age, is a beautiful thing in purely animaleconomy, where vigour is the greatest joy, propagation the highestfunction, and decrepitude the sorriest woe. The value of safety, accordingly, hangs on the question whether life has become reflectiveand rational. But the fact that a state arises does not in itself implyrationality. It makes rationality possible, but leaves it potential. 

[Sidenote: Its rationality contingent. ]

Similar considerations apply to variety. To increase the number ofinstincts and functions is probably to produce confusion and to augmentthat secondary and reverberating kind of evil which consists inexpecting pain and regretting misfortune. On the other hand, a perfectlife could never be accused of monotony. All desirable variety lieswithin the circle of perfection. Thus we do not tire of possessing twolegs nor wish, for the sake of variety, to be occasionally lunatics. Accordingly, an increase in variety of function is a good only if aunity can still be secured embracing that variety; otherwise it wouldhave been better that the irrelevant function should have been developedby independent individuals or should not have arisen at all. Thefunction of seeing double adds more to the variety than to the spice oflife. Whether civilisation is a blessing depends, then, on its ulterioruses. Judged by those interests which already exist when it arises, itis very likely a burden and oppression. The birds' instinctive economywould not be benefited by a tax-gatherer, a recruiting-sergeant, a sector two of theologians, and the other usual organs of human polity. 

For the Life of Reason, however, civilisation is a necessary condition. Although animal life, within man and beyond him, has its wild beauty andmystic justifications, yet that specific form of life which we callrational, and which is no less natural than the rest, would never havearisen without an expansion of human faculty, an increase in mentalscope, for which civilisation is necessary. Wealth, safety, variety ofpursuits, are all requisite if memory and purpose are to be trainedincreasingly, and if a steadfast art of living is to supervene uponinstinct and dream. 

[Sidenote: Sources of wealth. ]

Wealth is itself expressive of reason for it arises whenever men, instead of doing nothing or beating about casually in the world, take togathering fruits of nature which they may have uses for in future, orfostering their growth, or actually contriving their appearance. Such isman's first industrial habit, seen in grazing, agriculture, and mining. Among nature's products are also those of man's own purposeless andimitative activity, results of his idle ingenuity and restlessness. Someof these, like nature's other random creations, may chance to have someutility. They may then become conspicuous to reflection, be strengthenedby the relations which they establish in life, and be henceforth calledworks of human art. They then constitute a second industrial habit andthat other sort of riches which is supplied by manufacture. 

[Sidenote: Excess of it possible. ]

The amount of wealth man can produce is apparently limited only by time, invention, and the material at hand. It can very easily exceed hiscapacity for enjoyment. As the habits which produce wealth wereoriginally spontaneous and only crystallised into reasonable processesby mutual checks and the gradual settling down of the organism intoharmonious action, so also the same habits may outrun their uses. Themachinery to produce wealth, of which man's own energies have become apart, may well work on irrespective of happiness. Indeed, the industrialideal would be an international community with universal free trade, extreme division of labour, and no unproductive consumption. Such anarrangement would undoubtedly produce a maximum of riches, and anyobjections made to it, if intelligent, must be made on other thanuniversal economic grounds. Free trade may be opposed, for instance(while patriotism takes the invidious form of jealousy and while peaceis not secure), on the ground that it interferes with vested interestsand settled populations or with national completeness andself-sufficiency, or that absorption in a single industry isunfavourable to intellectual life. The latter is also an obviousobjection to any great division of labour, even in liberal fields; whileany man with a tender heart and traditional prejudices might hesitate tocondemn the irresponsible rich to extinction, together with all paupers, mystics, and old maids living on annuities. 

Such attacks on industrialism, however, are mere skirmishes and expressprejudices of one sort or another. The formidable judgment industrialismhas to face is that of reason, which demands that the increase andspecification of labour be justified by benefits somewhere actuallyrealised and integrated in individuals. Wealth must justify itself inhappiness. Someone must live better for having produced or enjoyed thesepossessions. And he would not live better, even granting that thepossessions were in themselves advantages, if these advantages werebought at too high a price and removed other greater opportunities orbenefits. The belle must not sit so long prinking before the glass as tomiss the party, and man must not work so hard and burden himself with somany cares as to have no breath or interest left for things free andintellectual. Work and life too often are contrasted and complementarythings; but they would not be contrasted nor even separable if work werenot servile, for of course man can have no life save in occupation, andin the exercise of his faculties; contemplation itself can deal onlywith what practice contains or discloses. But the pursuit of wealth is apursuit of instruments. The division of labour when extreme doesviolence to natural genius and obliterates natural distinctions incapacity. What is properly called industry is not art or self-justifyingactivity, but on the contrary a distinctly compulsory and merelyinstrumental labour, which if justified at all must be justified by someulterior advantage which it secures. In regard to such instrumentalactivities the question is always pertinent whether they do not producemore than is useful, or prevent the existence of something that isintrinsically good. 

[Sidenote: Irrational industry. ]

Occidental society has evidently run in this direction into greatabuses, complicating life prodigiously without ennobling the mind. Ithas put into rich men's hands facilities and luxuries which they triflewith without achieving any dignity or true magnificence in living, while the poor, if physically more comfortable than formerly, are notmeantime notably wiser or merrier. Ideal distinction has been sacrificedin the best men, to add material comforts to the worst. Things, asEmerson said, are in the saddle and ride mankind. The means crowd outthe ends and civilisation reverts, when it least thinks it, tobarbarism. 

[Sidenote: Its jovial and ingenious side. ]

The acceptable side of industrialism, which is supposed to be inspiredexclusively by utility, is not utility at all but pure achievement. Ifwe wish to do such an age justice we must judge it as we should a childand praise its feats without inquiring after its purposes. That is itsown spirit: a spirit dominant at the present time, particularly inAmerica, where industrialism appears most free from alloy. There is acurious delight in turning things over, changing their shape, discovering their possibilities, making of them some new contrivance. Use, in these experimental minds, as in nature, is only incidental. There is an irrational creative impulse, a zest in novelty, inprogression, in beating the other man, or, as they say, in breaking therecord. There is also a fascination in seeing the world unbosom itselfof ancient secrets, obey man's coaxing, and take on unheard-of shapes. The highest building, the largest steamer, the fastest train, the bookreaching the widest circulation have, in America, a clear title torespect. When the just functions of things are as yet not discriminated, the superlative in any direction seems naturally admirable. Again, manypossessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected tomake his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind manyexertions. An experimental materialism, spontaneous and divorced fromreason and from everything useful, is also confused in some minds withtraditional duties; and a school of popular hierophants is not lackingthat turns it into a sort of religion and perhaps calls it idealism. Impulse is more visible in all this than purpose, imagination more thanjudgment; but it is pleasant for the moment to abound in invention andeffort and to let the future cash the account. 

[Sidenote: Its tyranny. ]

Wealth is excessive when it reduces a man to a middleman and a jobber, when it prevents him, in his preoccupation with material things, frommaking his spirit the measure of them. There are Nibelungen who toilunderground over a gold they will never use, and in their obsession withproduction begrudge themselves all holidays, all concessions toinclination, to merriment, to fancy; nay, they would even curtail asmuch as possible the free years of their youth, when they might see theblue, before rendering up their souls to the Leviathan. Visible signs ofsuch unreason soon appear in the relentless and hideous aspect whichlife puts on; for those instruments which somehow emancipate themselvesfrom their uses soon become hateful. In nature irresponsible wildnesscan be turned to beauty, because every product can be recomposed intosome abstract manifestation of force or form; but the monstrous in manhimself and in his works immediately offends, for here everything isexpected to symbolise its moral relations. The irrational in the humanhas something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see inthe maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape. A barbariccivilisation, built on blind impulse and ambition, should fear to awakena deeper detestation than could ever be aroused by those more beautifultyrannies, chivalrous or religious, against which past revolutions havebeen directed. 

[Sidenote: An impossible remedy. ]

Both the sordidness and the luxury which industrialism may involve, could be remedied, however, by a better distribution of the product. Theriches now created by labour would probably not seriously debauchmankind if each man had only his share; and such a proportionate returnwould enable him to perceive directly how far his interests required himto employ himself in material production and how far he could allowhimself leisure for spontaneous things--religion, play, art, study, conversation. In a world composed entirely of philosophers an hour ortwo a day of manual labour--a very welcome quantity--would provide formaterial wants; the rest could then be all the more competentlydedicated to a liberal life; for a healthy soul needs matter quite asmuch for an object of interest as for a means of sustenance. Butphilosophers do not yet people nor even govern the world, and so simplea Utopia which reason, if it had direct efficacy, would long ago havereduced to act, is made impossible by the cross-currents of instinct, tradition, and fancy which variously deflect affairs. 

[Sidenote: Basis of government. ]

What are called the laws of nature are so many observations made by manon a way things have of repeating themselves by replying always to theirold causes and never, as reason's prejudice would expect, to their newopportunities. This inertia, which physics registers in the first law ofmotion, natural history and psychology call habit. Habit is a physicallaw. It is the basis and force of all morality, but is not moralityitself. In society it takes the form of custom which, when codified, iscalled law and when enforced is called government. Government is thepolitical representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, ofinertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. But, like anymechanical complication, it may become rational, and many of its formsand operations may be defended on rational grounds. All naturalorganisms, from protoplasm to poetry, can exercise certain idealfunctions and symbolise in their structure certain ideal relations. Protoplasm tends to propagate itself, and in so doing may turn into aconscious ideal the end it already tends to realise; but there could beno desire for self-preservation were there not already a selfpreserved. So government can by its existence define the commonwealthit tends to preserve, and its acts may be approved from the point ofview of those eventual interests which they satisfy. But governmentneither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solelybecause it is inevitable. It becomes good in so far as the inevitableadjustment of political forces which it embodies is also a justprovision for all the human interests which it creates or affects. 

[Sidenote: How rationality accrues. ]

Suppose a cold and hungry savage, failing to find berries and gameenough in the woods, should descend into some meadow where a flock ofsheep were grazing and pounce upon a lame lamb which could not run awaywith the others, tear its flesh, suck up its blood, and dress himself inits skin. All this could not be called an affair undertaken in thesheep's interest. And yet it might well conduce to their interest in theend. For the savage, finding himself soon hungry again, andinsufficiently warm in that scanty garment, might attack the flock asecond time, and thereby begin to accustom himself, and also hisdelighted family, to a new and more substantial sort of raiment anddiet. Suppose, now, a pack of wolves, or a second savage, or a diseaseshould attack those unhappy sheep. Would not their primeval enemy defendthem? Would he not have identified himself with their interests to thisextent, that their total extinction or discomfiture would alarm himalso? And in so far as he provided for their well-being, would he nothave become a good shepherd? If, now, some philosophic wether, a loverof his kind, reasoned with his fellows upon the change in theircondition, he might shudder indeed at those early episodes and at thecontribution of lambs and fleeces which would not cease to be levied bythe new government; but he might also consider that such a contributionwas nothing in comparison with what was formerly exacted by wolves, diseases, frosts, and casual robbers, when the flock was much smallerthan it had now grown to be, and much less able to withstand decimation. And he might even have conceived an admiration for the remarkable wisdomand beauty of that great shepherd, dressed in such a wealth of wool; andhe might remember pleasantly some occasional caress received from himand the daily trough filled with water by his providential hand. And hemight not be far from maintaining not only the rational origin, but thedivine right of shepherds. 

Such a savage enemy, incidentally turned into a useful master, is calleda conqueror or king. Only in human experience the case is not so simpleand harmony is seldom established so quickly. The history of Asia isreplete with examples of conquest and extortion in which a ruralpopulation living in comparative plenty is attacked by some moreferocious neighbour who, after a round of pillage, establishes a quiteunnecessary government, raising taxes and soldiers for purposesabsolutely remote from the conquered people's interests. Such agovernment is nothing but a chronic raid, mitigated by the desire toleave the inhabitants prosperous enough to be continually despoiledafresh. Even this modicum of protection, however, can establish acertain moral bond between ruler and subject; an intelligent governmentand an intelligent fealty become conceivable. 

[Sidenote: Ferocious but useful despotisms. ]

Not only may the established régime be superior to any other that couldbe substituted for it at the time, but some security against totaldestruction, and a certain opportunity for the arts and for personaladvancement may follow subjugation. A moderate decrease in personalindependence may be compensated by a novel public grandeur; palace andtemple may make amends for hovels somewhat more squalid than before. Hence, those who cannot conceive a rational polity, or a co-operativegreatness in the state, especially if they have a luxurious fancy, cantake pleasure in despotism; for it does not, after all, make so muchdifference to an ordinary fool whether what he suffers from is another'soppression or his own lazy improvidence; and he can console himself bysaying with Goldsmith:

 How small, of all that human hearts endure, The part which laws or kings can cause or cure. 

At the same time a court and a hierarchy, with their interesting pompand historic continuity, with their combined appeal to greed andimagination, redeem human existence from pervasive vulgarity and allowsomebody at least to strut proudly over the earth. Serfs are not in aworse material condition than savages, and their spiritual opportunitiesare infinitely greater; for their eye and fancy are fed with visions ofhuman greatness, and even if they cannot improve their outward estatethey can possess a poetry and a religion. It suffices to watch anOriental rabble at prayer, or listening in profound immobility to somewandering story-teller or musician, to feel how much such a people mayhave to ruminate upon, and how truly Arabian days and Arabian Nights gotogether. The ideas evolved may be wild and futile and the emotionssavagely sensuous, yet they constitute a fund of inner experience, arich soil for better imaginative growths. To such Oriental cogitations, for instance, carried on under the shadow of uncontrollable despotisms, mankind owes all its greater religions. 

A government's origin has nothing to do with its legitimacy; that is, with its representative operation. An absolutism based on conquest or onreligious fraud may wholly lose its hostile function. It may become thenucleus of a national organisation expressing justly enough the people'srequirements. Such a representative character is harder to attain whenthe government is foreign, for diversity in race language and local tiesmakes the ruler less apt involuntarily to represent his subjects; hismeasures must subserve their interests intentionally, out of sympathy, policy, and a sense of duty, virtues which are seldom efficacious forany continuous period. A native government, even if based on initialoutrage, can more easily drift into excellence; for when a great manmounts the throne he has only to read his own soul and follow hisinstinctive ambitions in order to make himself the leader and spokesmanof his nation. An Alexander, an Alfred, a Peter the Great, are examplesof persons who with varying degrees of virtue were representativerulers: their policy, however irrationally inspired, happened to servetheir subjects and the world. Besides, a native government is lesseasily absolute. Many influences control the ruler in his aims andhabits, such as religion, custom, and the very language he speaks, bywhich praise and blame are assigned automatically to the objects lovedor hated by the people. He cannot, unless he be an intentional monster, oppose himself wholly to the common soul. 

[Sidenote: Occasional advantage of being conquered. ]

For this very reason, however, native governments are little fitted toredeem or transform a people, and all great upheavals and regenerationshave been brought about by conquest, by the substitution of one race andspirit for another in the counsels of the world. What the Orient owes toGreece, the Occident to Rome, India to England, native America to Spain, is a civilisation incomparably better than that which the conqueredpeople could ever have provided for themselves. Conquest is a good meansof recasting those ideals, perhaps impracticable and ignorant, which anative government at its best would try to preserve. Such inapt ideals, it is true, would doubtless remodel themselves if they could be partlyrealised. Progress from within is possible, otherwise no progress wouldbe possible for humanity at large. But conquest gives at once a freerfield to those types of polity which, since they go with strength, presumably represent the better adjustment to natural conditions, andtherefore the better ideal. Though the substance of ideals is the will, their mould must be experience and a true discernment of opportunity; sothat while all ideals, regarded _in vacuo_, are equal in ideality, theyare, under given circumstances, very diverse in worth. 

[Sidenote: Origin of free governments. ]

When not founded on conquest, which is the usual source of despotism, government is ordinarily based on traditional authority vested in eldersor patriarchal kings. This is the origin of the classic state, and ofall aristocracy and freedom. The economic and political unit is a greathousehold with its lord, his wife and children, clients and slaves. Inthe interstices of these households there may be a certain floatingresiduum--freedmen, artisans, merchants, strangers. These people, whilefree, are without such rights as even slaves possess; they have no sharein the religion, education, and resources of any established family. For purposes of defence and religion the heads of houses gather togetherin assemblies, elect or recognise some chief, and agree upon laws, usually little more than extant customs regulated and formallysanctioned. 

[Sidenote: Their democratic tendencies. ]

Such a state tends to expand in two directions. In the first place, itbecomes more democratic; that is, it tends to recognise other influencesthan that which heads of families--_patres conscripti_--possess. Thepeople without such fathers, those who are not patricians, also havechildren and come to imitate on a smaller scale the patriarchal economy. These plebeians are admitted to citizenship. But they have no suchreligious dignity and power in their little families as the patricianshave in theirs; they are scarcely better than loose individuals, representing nothing but their own sweet wills. This individualism andlevity is not, however, confined to the plebeians; it extends to thepatrician houses. Individualism is the second direction in which apatriarchal society yields to innovation. As the state grows the familyweakens; and while in early Rome, for instance, only the _paterfamilias_ was responsible to the city, and his children and slaves onlyto him, in Greece we find from early times individuals called to accountbefore public judges. A federation of households thus became a republic. The king, that chief who enjoyed a certain hereditary precedence insacrifices or in war, yields to elected generals and magistrates whosepower, while it lasts, is much greater; for no other comparable powernow subsists in the levelled state. 

Modern Europe has seen an almost parallel development of democracy andindividualism, together with the establishment of great artificialgovernments. Though the feudal hierarchy was originally based onconquest or domestic subjection, it came to have a fanciful orchivalrous or political force. But gradually the plebeian classes--theburghers--grew in importance, and military allegiance was weakened bybeing divided between a number of superposed lords, up to the king, emperor, or pope. The stronger rulers grew into absolute monarchs, representatives of great states, and the people became, in a politicalsense, a comparatively level multitude. Where parliamentary governmentwas established it became possible to subordinate or exclude the monarchand his court; but the government remains an involuntary institution, and the individual must adapt himself to its exigencies. The churchwhich once overshadowed the state has now lost its coercive authorityand the single man stands alone before an impersonal written law, aconstitutional government, and a widely diffused and contagious publicopinion, characterised by enormous inertia, incoherence, and blindness. Contemporary national units are strongly marked and stimulate onoccasion a perfervid artificial patriotism; but they are strangelyunrepresentative of either personal or universal interests and may yieldin turn to new combinations, if the industrial and intellectualsolidarity of mankind, every day more obvious, ever finds a fit organ toexpress and to defend it. 

[Sidenote: Imperial peace. ]

A despotic military government founded on alien force and aiming at itsown magnificence is often more efficient in defending its subjects thanis a government expressing only the people's energies, as the predatoryshepherd and his dog prove better guardians for a flock than its ownwethers. The robbers that at their first incursion brought terror tomerchant and peasant may become almost immediately representative organsof society--an army and a judiciary. Disputes between subjects arenaturally submitted to the invader, under whose laws and good-will alonea practical settlement can now be effected; and this alien tribunal, being exempt from local prejudices and interested in peace that taxesmay be undiminished, may administer a comparatively impartial justice, until corrupted by bribes. The constant compensation tyranny brings, which keeps it from at once exhausting its victims, is the silence itimposes on their private squabbles. One distant universal enemy is lessoppressive than a thousand unchecked pilferers and plotters at home. Forthis reason the reader of ancient history so often has occasion toremark what immense prosperity Asiatic provinces enjoyed between theperiods when their successive conquerors devastated them. Theyflourished exceedingly the moment peace and a certain order wereestablished in them. 

[Sidenote: Nominal and real status of armies. ]

Tyranny not only protects the subject against his kinsmen, thus takingon the functions of law and police, but it also protects him againstmilitary invasion, and thus takes on the function of an army. An army, considered ideally, is an organ for the state's protection; but it isfar from being such in its origin, since at first an army is nothing buta ravenous and lusty horde quartered in a conquered country; yet thecost of such an incubus may come to be regarded as an insurance againstfurther attack, and so what is in its real basis an inevitable burdenresulting from a chance balance of forces may be justified inafter-thought as a rational device for defensive purposes. Such anulterior justification has nothing to do, however, with the causes thatmaintain armies or military policies: and accordingly those virginalminds that think things originated in the uses they may have acquired, have frequent cause to be pained and perplexed at the abuses andover-development of militarism. An insurance capitalised may exceed thevalue of the property insured, and the drain caused by armies and naviesmay be much greater than the havoc they prevent. The evils against whichthey are supposed to be directed are often evils only in a cant andconventional sense, since the events deprecated (like absorption by aneighbouring state) might be in themselves no misfortune to the people, but perhaps a singular blessing. And those dreaded possibilities, evenif really evil, may well be less so than is the hateful actuality ofmilitary taxes, military service, and military arrogance. 

[Sidenote: Their action irresponsible. ]

Nor is this all: the military classes, since they inherit the blood andhabits of conquerors, naturally love war and their irrationalcombativeness is reinforced by interest; for in war officers can shineand rise, while the danger of death, to a brave man, is rather a spurand a pleasing excitement than a terror. A military class is thereforealways recalling, foretelling, and meditating war; it fosters artificialand senseless jealousies toward other governments that possess armies;and finally, as often as not, it precipitates disaster by bringing aboutthe objectless struggle on which it has set its heart. 

[Sidenote: Pugnacity human. ]

These natural phenomena, unintelligently regarded as anomalies andabuses, are the appanage of war in its pristine and proper form. Tofight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over theywill fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight becausethey dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking inopposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cockedat an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight for areason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warriordespises; even a coward might screw his courage up to such a reasonableconflict. The joy and glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity andconsequent generosity; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport andfor victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor. Iffighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinctcould never have established itself in any long-lived race. A few mencan live on plunder, just as there is room in the world for some beastsof prey; other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there arediligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory need have no goodfruits for the people whose army is victorious. That it sometimes doesso is an ulterior and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon. 

[Sidenote: Barrack-room philosophy. ]

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. Thereare panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a racedecays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to thisshameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes itsindustries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to begoverned by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly tobreed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, broughtabout the greatest set-back which the Life of Reason has ever suffered;it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of beingdescended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and itis not their bodies only that show it. After a long peace, if theconditions of life are propitious, we observe a people's energiesbursting their barriers; they become aggressive on the strength theyhave stored up in their remote and unchecked development. It is theunmutilated race, fresh from the struggle with nature (in which the bestsurvive, while in war it is often the best that perish) that descendsvictoriously into the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armiesat the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next epochand is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by luxury and battle, andmerged at last into the ignoble conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, insome other virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable ofvictory because unbled by war. To call war the soil of courage andvirtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love. 

[Sidenote: Military virtues. ]

Military institutions, adventitious and ill-adapted excrescences as theyusually are, can acquire rational values in various ways. Besidesoccasional defence, they furnish a profession congenial to many, and aspectacle and emotion interesting to all. Blind courage is an animalvirtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where acertain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipicewithout vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful ratherthan desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive ofvirtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form ofsteadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long asthere is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases tobe one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger isunavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary toface. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler's instinct, with a love ofhitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought alreadyto be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man. To delightin war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. 

Discipline, or the habit of obedience, is a better sort of courage whichmilitary life also requires. Discipline is the acquired faculty ofsurrendering an immediate personal good for the sake of a remote andimpersonal one of greater value. This difficult wisdom is made easier bytraining in an army, because the great forces of habit, example andsocial suasion, are there enlisted in its service. But these naturalaids make it lose its conscious rationality, so that it ceases to be avirtue except potentially; for to resist an impulse by force of habit orexternal command may or may not be to follow the better course. 

Besides fostering these rudimentary virtues the army gives the nation'ssoul its most festive and flaunting embodiment. Popular heroes, stirringepisodes, obvious turning-points in history, commonly belong to militarylife. 

[Sidenote: They are splendid vices. ]

Nevertheless the panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest level onwhich a moralist or patriot can stand and shows as great a want ofrefined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are allblood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combativeinstinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found inanother's evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral worldis the original sin of nature, whence flows every other wrong. He is awilling accomplice of that perversity in things who delights inanother's discomfiture or in his own, and craves the blind tension ofplunging into danger without reason, or the idiot's pleasure in facing apure chance. To find joy in another's trouble is, as man is constituted, not unnatural, though it is wicked; and to find joy in one's owntrouble, though it be madness, is not yet impossible for man. These arethe chaotic depths of that dreaming nature out of which humanity has togrow. 

[Sidenote: Absolute value in strife. ]

If war could be abolished and the defence of all interests intrusted tocourts of law, there would remain unsatisfied a primary and thereforeineradicable instinct--a love of conflict, of rivalry, and of victory. If we desire to abolish war because it tries to do good by doing harm, we must not ourselves do an injury to human nature while trying tosmooth it out. Now the test and limit of all necessary reform is vitalharmony. No impulse can be condemned arbitrarily or because some otherimpulse or group of interests is, in a Platonic way, out of sympathywith it. An instinct can be condemned only if it prevents therealisation of other instincts, and only in so far as it does so. War, which has instinctive warrant, must therefore be transformed only in sofar as it does harm to other interests. The evils of war are obviousenough; could not the virtues of war, animal courage, discipline, andself-knowledge, together with gaiety and enthusiasm, find some harmlessoccasion for their development?

[Sidenote: Sport a civilised way of preserving it. ]

Such a harmless simulacrum of war is seen in sport. The arduous andcompetitive element in sport is not harmful, if the discipline involvedbrings no loss of faculty or of right sensitiveness, and the rivalry norancour. In war states wish to be efficient in order to conquer, but insport men wish to prove their excellence because they wish to have it. If this excellence does not exist, the aim is missed, and to discoverthat failure is no new misfortune. To have failed unwittingly would havebeen worse; and to recognise superiority in another is consistent with arelatively good and honourable performance, so that even nominal failuremay be a substantial success. And merit in a rival should bring afriendly delight even to the vanquished if they are true lovers of sportand of excellence. Sport is a liberal form of war stripped of itscompulsions and malignity; a rational art and the expression of acivilised instinct. 

[Sidenote: Who shall found the universal commonwealth?]

The abolition of war, like its inception, can only be brought about by anew collocation of material forces. As the suppression of some nest ofpiratical tribes by a great emperor substitutes judicial for militarysanctions among them, so the conquest of all warring nations by someimperial people could alone establish general peace. The Romansapproached this ideal because their vast military power stood behindtheir governors and prætors. Science and commerce might conceivablyresume that lost imperial function. If at the present day two or threepowerful governments could so far forget their irrational origin as torenounce the right to occasional piracy and could unite in enforcing thedecisions of some international tribunal, they would thereby constitutethat tribunal the organ of a universal government and render warimpossible between responsible states. But on account of theirirrational basis all governments largely misrepresent the true interestsof those who live under them. They pursue conventional and captious endsto which alone public energies can as yet be efficiently directed. 

CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

[Sidenote: Eminence, once existing, grows by its own. ]

"To him that hath shall be given, " says the Gospel, representing as aprinciple of divine justice one that undoubtedly holds in earthlyeconomy. A not dissimilar observation is made in the proverb:"Possession is nine-tenths of the law. " Indeed, some triflingacquisition often gives an animal an initial advantage which may easilyroll up and increase prodigiously, becoming the basis of prolonged goodfortune. Sometimes this initial advantage is a matter of naturalstructure, like talent, strength, or goodness; sometimes an accidentalaccretion, like breeding, instruction, or wealth. Such advantages growby the opportunities they make; and it is possible for a man launchedinto the world at the right moment with the right equipment to mounteasily from eminence to eminence and accomplish very great thingswithout doing more than genially follow his instincts and respond withardour, like an Alexander or a Shakespeare, to his opportunities. Agreat endowment, doubled by great good fortune, raises men like theseinto supreme representatives of mankind. 

[Sidenote: Its causes natural and its privileges just. ]

It is no loss of liberty to subordinate ourselves to a natural leader. On the contrary, we thereby seize an opportunity to exercise ourfreedom, availing ourselves of the best instrument obtainable toaccomplish our ends. A man may be a natural either by his character orby his position. The advantages a man draws from that peculiar structureof his brain which renders him, for instance, a ready speaker or aningenious mathematician, are by common consent regarded as legitimateadvantages. The public will use and reward such ability without jealousyand with positive delight. In an unsophisticated age the same feelingprevails in regard to those advantages which a man may draw from moreexternal circumstances. If a traveller, having been shipwrecked in someexpedition, should learn the secrets of an unknown land, its arts andresources, his fellow-citizens, on his return, would not hesitate tofollow his direction in respect to those novel matters. It would besenseless folly on their part to begrudge him his adventitious eminenceand refuse to esteem him of more consequence than their uninitiatedselves. Yet when people, ignoring the natural causes of all that iscalled artificial, think that but for an unlucky chance they, too, mighthave enjoyed the advantages which raise other men above them, theysometimes affect not to recognise actual distinctions and abilities, orstudy enviously the means of annulling them. So long, however, as by theoperation of any causes whatever some real competence accrues to anyone, it is for the general interest that this competence should bear itsnatural fruits, diversifying the face of society and giving itspossessor a corresponding distinction. 

[Sidenote: Advantage of inequality. ]

Variety in the world is an unmixed blessing so long as each distinctfunction can be exercised without hindrance to any other. There is nogreater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, asif it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to knowthat many are, have been, and will be better than he. Grant that no oneis positively degraded by the great man's greatness and it follows thateveryone is exalted by it. Beauty, genius, holiness, even power andextraordinary wealth, radiate their virtue and make the world in whichthey exist a better and a more joyful place to live in. Hence theinsatiable vulgar curiosity about great people, and the strange way inwhich the desire for fame (by which the distinguished man sinks to thecommon level) is met and satisfied by the universal interest in whateveris extraordinary. This avidity not to miss knowledge of things notable, and to enact vicariously all singular rôles, shows the need men have ofdistinction and the advantage they find even in conceiving it. For it isthe presence of variety and a nearer approach somewhere to just andideal achievement that gives men perspective in their judgments andopens vistas from the dull foreground of their lives to sea, mountain, and stars. 

No merely idle curiosity shows itself in this instinct; rather a mark ofhuman potentiality that recognises in what is yet attained a sadcaricature of what is essentially attainable. For man's spirit isintellectual and naturally demands dominion and science; it craves inall things friendliness and beauty. The least hint of attainment inthese directions fills it with satisfaction and the sense of realisedexpectation. So much so that when no inkling of a supreme fulfilment isfound in the world or in the heart, men still cling to the notion of itin God or the hope of it in heaven, and religion, when it entertainsthem with that ideal, seems to have reached its highest height. Love ofuniformity would quench the thirst for new outlets, for perfect, even ifalien, achievements, and this, so long as perfection had not beenactually attained, would indicate a mind dead to the ideal. 

[Sidenote: Fable of the belly and the members. ]

[Sidenote: Fallacy in it. ]

Menenius Agrippa expressed very well the aristocratic theory of societywhen he compared the state to a human body in which the common peoplewere the hands and feet, and the nobles the belly. The people, when theyforgot the conditions of their own well-being, might accuse themselvesof folly and the nobles of insolent idleness, for the poor spent theirlives in hopeless labour that others who did nothing might enjoy all. But there was a secret circulation of substance in the body politic, andthe focussing of all benefits in the few was the cause of nutrition andprosperity to the many. Perhaps the truth might be even better expressedin a physiological figure somewhat more modern, by saying that thebrain, which consumes much blood, well repays its obligations to thestomach and members, for it co-ordinates their motions and preparestheir satisfactions. Yet there is this important difference between thehuman body and the state, a difference which renders Agrippa's fablewholly misleading: the hands and feet have no separate consciousness, and if they are ill used it is the common self that feels the wearinessand the bruises. But in the state the various members have a separatesensibility, and, although their ultimate interests lie, no doubt, inco-operation and justice, their immediate instinct and passion may leadthem to oppress one another perpetually. At one time the brain, forgetting the members, may feast on opiates and unceasing music; andagain, the members, thinking they could more economically shift forthemselves, may starve the brain and reduce the body politic to a colonyof vegetating microbes. In a word, the consciousness inhabiting thebrain embodies the functions of all the body's organs, and responds in ageneral way to all their changes of fortune, but in the state everycell has a separate brain, and the greatest citizen, by his existence, realises only his own happiness. 

[Sidenote: Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal. ]

For an ideal aristocracy we should not look to Plato's Republic, forthat Utopia is avowedly the ideal only for fallen and corrupt states, since luxury and injustice, we are told, first necessitated war, and theguiding idea of all the Platonic regimen is military efficiency. Aristocracy finds a more ideal expression in theism; for theism imaginesthe values of existence to be divided into two unequal parts: on the onehand the infinite value of God's life, on the other the finite values ofall the created hierarchy. According to theistic cosmology, there was ametaphysical necessity, if creatures were to exist at all, that theyshould be in some measure inferior to godhead; otherwise they would havebeen indistinguishable from the godhead itself according to theprinciple called the identity of indiscernibles, which declares that twobeings exactly alike cannot exist without collapsing into an undividedunit. The propagation of life involved, then, declension from purevitality, and to diffuse being meant to dilute it with nothingness. Thisdeclension might take place in infinite degrees, each retaining somevestige of perfection mixed, as it were, with a greater and greaterproportion of impotence and nonentity. Below God stood the angels, belowthem man, and below man the brute and inanimate creation. Each sphere, as it receded, contained a paler adumbration of the central perfection;yet even at the last confines of existence some feeble echo of divinitywould still resound. This inequality in dignity would be not only abeauty in the whole, to whose existence and order such inequalitieswould be essential, but also no evil to the creature and no injustice;for a modicum of good is not made evil simply because a greater good iselsewhere possible. On the contrary, by accepting that appointed placeand that specific happiness, each servant of the universal harmony couldfeel its infinite value and could thrill the more profoundly to a musicwhich he helped to intone. 

[Sidenote: A heaven with many mansions. ]

Dante has expressed this thought with great simplicity and beauty. Heasks a friend's spirit, which he finds lodged in the lowest circle ofparadise, if a desire to mount higher does not sometimes visit him; andthe spirit replies:

"Brother, the force of charity quiets our will, making us wish only forwhat we have and thirst for nothing more. If we desired to be in asublimer sphere, our desires would be discordant with the will of himwho here allots us our divers stations--something which you will seethere is no room for in these circles, if to dwell in charity be needfulhere, and if you consider duly the nature of charity. For it belongs tothe essence of that blessed state to keep within the divine purposes, that our own purposes may become one also. Thus, the manner in which weare ranged from step to step in this kingdom pleases the whole kingdom, as it does the king who gives us will to will with him. And his will isour peace; it is that sea toward which all things move that his willcreates and that nature fashions. "[C]

[Sidenote: If God is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the onlyparadise. ]

Such pious resignation has in it something pathetic and constrained, which Dante could not or would not disguise. For a theism which, likeAristotle's and Dante's, has a Platonic essence, God is really nothingbut the goal of human aspiration embodied imaginatively. This fact makesthese philosophers feel that whatever falls short of divinity hassomething imperfect about it. God is what man ought to be; and man, while he is still himself, must yearn for ever, like Aristotle's cosmos, making in his perpetual round a vain imitation of deity, and an eternalprayer. Hence, a latent minor strain in Aristotle's philosophy, thehopeless note of paganism, and in Dante an undertone of sorrow andsacrifice, inseparable from Christian feeling. In both, virtue implies acertain sense of defeat, a fatal unnatural limitation, as if a pristineideal had been surrendered and what remained were at best a compromise. Accordingly we need not be surprised if aspiration, in all these men, finally takes a mystical turn; and Dante's ghostly friends, afterpropounding their aristocratic philosophy, to justify God in other men'seyes, are themselves on the point of quitting the lower sphere to whichGod had assigned them and plunging into the "sea" of his absoluteecstasy. For, if the word God stands for man's spiritual ideal, heavencan consist only in apotheosis. This the Greeks knew very well. Theyinstinctively ignored or feared any immortality which fell short ofdeification; and the Christian mystics reached the same goal by lessovert courses. They merged the popular idea of a personal God in theirforetaste of peace and perfection; and their whole religion was aneffort to escape humanity. 

[Sidenote: When natures differ perfections differ too. ]

It is true that the theistic cosmology might hear a differentinterpretation. If by deity we mean not man's ideal--intellectual orsensuous--but the total cosmic order, then the universal hierarchy maybe understood naturalistically so that each sphere gives scope for onesort of good. God, or the highest being, would then be simply the lifeof nature as a whole, if nature has a conscious life, or that of itsnoblest portion. The supposed "metaphysical evil" involved in finitudewould then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good. Inrealising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectlyhappy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being. Such forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even ifconventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and theirsoul more complex. Nor would divine perfection itself be in any senseperfection unless it gave expression to some definite nature, theentelechy either of the celestial spheres, or of scientific thought, orof some other actual existence. Under these circumstances, inhabitantseven of the lowest heaven would be unreservedly happy, as happy in theirway as those of the seventh heaven could be in theirs. No pathetic notewould any longer disquiet their finitude. They would not have torenounce, in sad conformity to an alien will, what even for them wouldhave been a deeper joy. They would be asked to renounce nothing butwhat, for them, would be an evil. The overruling providence would thenin truth be fatherly, by providing for each being that which it inwardlycraved. Persons of one rank would not be improved by passing into theso-called higher sphere, any more than the ox would be improved by beingtransformed into a lark, or a king into a poet. 

Man in such a system could no more pine to be God than he could pine tobe the law of gravity, or Spinoza's substance, or Hegel's dialecticalidea. Such naturalistic abstractions, while they perhaps express someelement of reality or its total form, are not objects corresponding toman's purposes and are morally inferior to his humanity. Every man'sideal lies within the potentialities of his nature, for only byexpressing his nature can ideals possess authority or attraction overhim. Heaven accordingly has really many mansions, each truly heavenly tohim who would inhabit it, and there is really no room for discord inthose rounds. One ideal can no more conflict with another than truth canjostle truth; but men, or the disorganised functions within a givenindividual, may be in physical conflict, as opinion may wrestle withopinion in the world's arena or in an ignorant brain. Among idealsthemselves infinite variety is consistent with perfect harmony, butmatter that has not yet developed or discovered its organic affinitiesmay well show groping and contradictory tendencies. When, however, theseembryonic disorders are once righted, each possible life knows itsnatural paradise, and what some unintelligent outsider might say indispraise of that ideal will never wound or ruffle the self-justifiedcreature whose ideal it is, any more than a cat's aversion to water willdisturb a fish's plan of life. 

[Sidenote: Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty. ]

An aristocratic society might accordingly be a perfect heaven if thevariety and superposition of functions in it expressed a correspondingdiversity in its members' faculties and ideals. And, indeed, whataristocratic philosophers have always maintained is that men reallydiffer so much in capacity that one is happier for being a slave, another for being a shopkeeper, and a third for being a king. Allprofessions, they say, even the lowest, are or may be vocations. Somemen, Aristotle tells us, are slaves by nature; only physical functionsare spontaneous in them. So long as they are humanely treated, it is, we may infer, a benefit for them to be commanded; and the contributiontheir labour makes toward rational life in their betters is the highestdignity they can attain, and should be prized by them as a sufficientprivilege. 

Such assertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimismabout them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in thetragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In otherregions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station wouldoften entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldombenefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become aprima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much moresharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; andthen each caste or order of citizens would not be more commonlydissatisfied with its lot than men or women now are with their sex. Onetribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would singlike the lark; a third would show a devil's innate fondness for stokinga fiery furnace. 

[Sidenote: Its falsity. ]

Aristocracy logically involves castes. But such castes as exist inIndia, and the social classes we find in the western world, are not nowbased on any profound difference in race, capacity, or inclination. Theyare based probably on the chances of some early war, reinforced bycustom and perpetuated by inheritance. A certain circulation, corresponding in part to proved ability or disability, takes place inthe body politic, and, since the French Revolution, has taken placeincreasingly. Some, by energy and perseverance, rise from the bottom;some, by ill fortune or vice, fall from the top. But these readjustmentsare insignificant in comparison with the social inertia that perpetuatesall the classes, and even such shifts as occur at once re-establishartificial conditions for the next generation. As a rule, men's stationdetermines their occupation without their gifts determining theirstation. Thus stifled ability in the lower orders, and apathy orpampered incapacity in the higher, unite to deprive society of itsnatural leaders. 

[Sidenote: Feeble individuality the rule. ]

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by suchartificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not becharged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing theindividual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to misstheir vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing onthem some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort ofracial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of thehabits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayedin childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dyingwords that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave. But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint tosome typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, asSchopenhauer said, _Fabrikwaaren der Natur_. 

Variety in human dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed beinwardly very great, but it is not efficacious. To be socially importantand expressible in some common medium, initial differences in tempermust be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitatedand enforced. The only artists who can show great originality are thosetrained in distinct and established schools; for originality and geniusmust be largely fed and raised on the shoulders of some old tradition. Arich organisation and heritage, while they predetermine the core of allpossible variations, increase their number, since every advance opens upnew vistas; and growth, in extending the periphery of the substanceorganised, multiplies the number of points at which new growths maybegin. Thus it is only in recent times that discoveries in science havebeen frequent, because natural science until lately possessed no settledmethod and no considerable fund of acquired truths. So, too, inpolitical society, statesmanship is made possible by traditionalpolicies, generalship by military institutions, great financiers byestablished commerce. 

If we ventured to generalise these observations we might say that suchan unequal distribution of capacity as might justify aristocracy shouldbe looked for only in civilised states. Savages are born free and equal, but wherever a complex and highly specialised environment limits theloose freedom of those born into it, it also stimulates their capacity. Under forced culture remarkable growths will appear, bringing to lightpossibilities in men which might, perhaps, not even have beenpossibilities had they been left to themselves; for mulberry leaves donot of themselves develop into brocade. A certain personal idiosyncrasymust be assumed at bottom, else cotton damask would be as good as silkand all men having like opportunities would be equally great. Thisidiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state ofnature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, asit does among barbarians. 

[Sidenote: Sophistical envy. ]

Distinction is thus in one sense artificial, since it cannot becomeimportant or practical unless a certain environment gives play toindividual talent and preserves its originality; but distinctionnevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does theman in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he hadbeen born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him ashe is, but only as he might have been, if _per impossibile_ he had notbeen himself. There is a strange metaphysical illusion in imagining thata man might change his parents, his body, his early environment, andyet retain his personality. In its higher faculties his personality isproduced by his special relations. If Shakespeare had been born in Italyhe might, if you will, have been a great poet, but Shakespeare he couldnever have been. Nor can it be called an injustice to all of us who arenot Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time that Shakespeare had thatadvantage and was thereby enabled to exist. 

The sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the twoenvironments compared are really somewhat analogous, so that theillusion of a change of rôles without a change of characters may retainsome colour. It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fableto make the first rebel against God the chief among the angels, thespirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp. Lucifer's fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial. His perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting thehappiness proper to his nature. This was the maddest possible way ofrebelling against his true creator; for it is our particular finitudethat creates us and makes us be. No one, except in wilful fancy, wouldenvy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a GrandLama. An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidentlyleave each creature the very same that it was before; for after anominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no traceof a change would be perceptible. But the penny that one man finds andanother misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have transmutedeach man into the other. So adventitious a circumstance seems easilytransferable without undermining that personal distinction which it hadcome to embitter. Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in suchsuppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind anaccident, for instance, as sex is also adventitious and ideallytransferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could haveexchanged genders. 

What extends these invidious comparisons beyond all tolerable bounds isthe generic and vague nature proper to language and its terms. The firstpersonal pronoun "I" is a concept so thoroughly universal that it canaccompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate anindividual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which heshares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make uphis life. Each man's memory embraces a certain field, and if thelandscape open to his vision is sad and hateful he naturally wishes itto shift and become like that paradise in which, as he fancies, othermen dwell. A legitimate rebellion against evil in his own experiencebecomes an unthinkable supposition about what his experience might havebeen had _he_ enjoyed those other men's opportunities or even (so farcan unreason wander) had _he_ possessed their character. The whollydifferent creature, a replica of that envied ideal, which would haveexisted in that case would still have called itself "I"; and so, thedreamer imagines, that creature would have been himself in a differentsituation. 

If a new birth could still be called by a man's own name, the reasonwould be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basisfor the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came tofruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch asit realised his ideal. The poorer the reality, therefore, the meaner andvaguer the ideal it is able to project. Man is so tied to his personalendowment (essential to him though an accident in the world) that evenhis uttermost ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and hisfinitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initialidiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist inheaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his mostperversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what heinstinctively craves for himself. 

[Sidenote: Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is. ]

It is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to thearistocratic or theistic ideal. Could each person fulfil his own naturethe most striking differences in endowment and fortune would troublenobody's dreams. The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism areopen is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequentsuffering imposed on them all. Injustice in this world is not somethingcomparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each privatefate. A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for themoment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch hisunhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor canany compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expungeor justify that moment's bitterness. The pain may be whistled away andforgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a littlecoarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar withunrightable wrong. But ignoring that pain will not prevent its havingexisted; it must remain for ever to trouble God's omniscience and be apart of that hell which the creation too truly involves. 

[Sidenote: Mutilation by crowding. ]

The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa's ingenious parable and thejoyful humility of Dante's celestial friends, and renders both equallyirrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies asshe chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another's life. That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in thewhole. It would have been a truly admirable arrangement to have enabledevery living being, in attaining its own end, to make the attainments ofthe others' ends possible to them also. An approach to such anequilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the roughsifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatiblealone remained. But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produceeverything at once, and her distracted industry has brought aboutterrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice. She has been led topunish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites forthe honours they receive. She has imposed suffering on her creaturestogether with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated herbounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to someunsuspecting creature. 

This oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy andmakes it truly unjust. Every privilege that imposes suffering involves awrong. Not only does aristocracy lay on the world a tax in labour andprivation that its own splendours, intellectual and worldly, may arise, but by so doing it infects intelligence and grandeur with inhumanity andrenders corrupt and odious that pre-eminence which should have beendivine. The lower classes, in submitting to the hardship and meanness oftheir lives--which, to be sure, might have been harder and meaner had noaristocracy existed--must upbraid their fellow-men for profiting bytheir ill fortune and therefore having an interest in perpetuating it. Instead of the brutal but innocent injustice of nature, what they sufferfrom is the sly injustice of men; and though the suffering be less--forthe worst of men is human--the injury is more sensible. Theinclemencies and dangers men must endure in a savage state, in scourgingthem, would not have profited by that cruelty. But suffering has anadded sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to livelike the gods in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would havebeen innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painfulworld, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty. 

[Sidenote: A hint to optimists. ]

It would be a happy relief to the aristocrat's conscience, when hepossesses one, could he learn from some yet bolder Descartes that commonpeople were nothing but _bêtes-machines_, and that only a groundlessprejudice had hitherto led us to suppose that life could exist whereevidently nothing good could be attained by living. If all unfortunatepeople could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliantjustification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophywould not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion. Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysicianmight adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent andindubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must beself-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by sayingthat a slave's life was not its own excuse for being, nor were thelabours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by theconveniences which they supplied their masters with. _Ergo_, thoseservile operations could come to consciousness only where they attainedtheir end, and the world could contain nothing but perfect and universalhappiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by finite minds in sofar as they might attain perfection, would be the only life inexistence, and the notion that such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatredcould exist at all would forthwith vanish like the hideous andridiculous illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended toapologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, andinfinitely more consoling. 

[Sidenote: How aristocracies might do good. ]

But so long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist mightcall the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine thatwe exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified byradiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those aboveless would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion of benefitmight take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and militaryprotection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after allneedful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness. Anindustrial and political oligarchy might defend itself on that ground. Or the return might take the less positive form of opportunity, as itdoes when an aristocratic society has a democratic government. Here thepeople neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existenceof a rich and irresponsible class offers them an ideal, such as it is, in their ambitious struggles. For they too may grow rich, exercisefinancial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launchtheir daughters into fashionable society. Finally, if the onlyaristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if publicrewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might takethe form of participation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men. Holiness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society. Thefruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to bemonopolised or consumed in enjoyment. On the contrary, their widerdiffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation moreintense and successful. When an ideal interest is general the sharewhich falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious. Thesaints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers haveflourished in schools. 

At the same time ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some trainingand leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded bypopularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the peopleare able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this ofdiffused ideal possessions has little application in a societyaristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain theless able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a greatmind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give suchthings a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order toboast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of thisdilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it mustbecome mean. These alternatives can never be eluded until some purifiedand high-bred race succeeds the promiscuous bipeds that now blacken theplanet. 

[Sidenote: Man adds wrong to nature's injury. ]

Aristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save thatwhich mechanical causes endow it with. Its privileges are fruits ofinevitable advantages. Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehiclesfor nature's primeval cruelty, while the benefits it may also confer areonly further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony. Forit lies in the essence of a mechanical world, where the interests of itsproducts are concerned, to be fundamentally kind, since it has formedand on the whole maintains those products, and yet continually cruel, since it forms and maintains them blindly, without consideringdifficulties or probable failures. Now the most tyrannical government, like the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium ofnatural forces. It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to whichthe philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to theweather. But when the vehicle of nature's inclemency is a heartless man, even if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect. Thesource of injury is then not only natural but criminal as well, and theresult is a sense of wrong added to misfortune. It must needs be thatoffence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. He justlyarouses indignation and endures remorse. 

[Sidenote: Conditions of a just inequality. ]

Now civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes ofremorse and of just indignation. In the first place nature in her slowand ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges byperpetual friction. Where there is maladjustment there is no permanentphysical stability. Therefore the ideal of society can never involve theinfliction of injury on anybody for any purpose. Such an ideal wouldpropose for a goal something out of equilibrium, a society which even ifestablished could not maintain itself; but an ideal life must not tendto destroy its ideal by abolishing its own existence. In the secondplace, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsistin the ideal. The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in whichwrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection. The ideal stateand the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, butwhere all are happy. So that an aristocratic or theistic system in orderto deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil andclearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon theother, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. Theservices required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform themshould be made the servant's spontaneous and specific ideal. Theprivileges the system bestows on some must involve no outrage on therest, and must not be paid for by mutilating other lives or thwartingtheir natural potentialities. For the humble to give their labour wouldthen be blessed in reality, and not merely by imputation, while for thegreat to receive those benefits would be blessed also, not in fact onlybut in justice. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: Paradiso. Canto III. , 70-87. ]

CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY

[Sidenote: Democracy as an end and as a means. ]

[Sidenote: Natural democracy leads to monarchy. ]

The word democracy may stand for a natural social equality in the bodypolitic or for a constitutional form of government in which power liesmore or less directly in the people's hands. The former may be calledsocial democracy and the latter democratic government. The two differwidely, both in origin and in moral principle. Genetically considered, social democracy is something primitive, unintended, proper tocommunities where there is general competence and no marked personaleminence. It is the democracy of Arcadia, Switzerland, and the Americanpioneers. Such a community might be said to have also a democraticgovernment, for everything in it is naturally democratic. There will beno aristocracy, no prestige; but instead an intelligent readiness tolend a hand and to do in unison whatever is done, not so much underleaders as by a kind of conspiring instinct and contagious sympathy. Inother words, there will be that most democratic of governments--nogovernment at all. But when pressure of circumstances, danger, orinward strife makes recognised and prolonged guidance necessary to asocial democracy, the form its government takes is that of a rudimentarymonarchy, established by election or general consent. A natural leaderpresents himself and he is instinctively obeyed. He may indeed be freelycriticised and will not be screened by any pomp or traditional mystery;he will be easy to replace and every citizen will feel himself radicallyhis equal. Yet such a state is at the beginnings of monarchy andaristocracy, close to the stage depicted in Homer, where pre-eminencesare still obviously natural, although already over-emphasised by theforce of custom and wealth, and by the fission of society into divergentclasses. 

[Sidenote: Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege. ]

Political democracy, on the other hand, is a late and artificialproduct. It arises by a gradual extension of aristocratic privileges, through rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on thepeople's part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but thediscovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine andrepresentative. It is compatible with a very complex government, greatempire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably inEngland and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and lessdemocratic institutions. For under democratic governments the peoplehave not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicionsand jealousies are quieted by assigning to them a voice, perhaps only aveto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigiousself-created historical engine. Popular votes never established thefamily, private property, religious practices, or internationalfrontiers. Institutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such asthe popular classes could never have produced; but these products ofnatural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgentprotest is raised against them. The people's liberty consists not intheir original responsibility for what exists--for they are guiltless ofit--but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolishing anydetail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure, which, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itselffrom time to time to their instinct and mind. 

[Sidenote: Ideals and expedients. ]

If we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social andpolitical democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a generalethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, andinconsistent, in its radical form, with such institutions as the familyand hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, ismerely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoothergovernment of certain states at certain junctures. It involves nospecial ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether thegeneral interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhapsall women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arisingin great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy, and the questions actually submitted to the people can be only verylarge rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders. 

We may now add a few reflections about each kind of democracy, regardingdemocratic government chiefly in its origin and phases (for its functionis that of all government) and social democracy chiefly as an ideal, since its origin is simply that of society itself. 

[Sidenote: Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational, would serve common interests. ]

The possibility of intelligent selfishness and the prevalence of aselfishness far from intelligent unite to make men wary in intrustingtheir interests to one another's keeping. If passion never overcameprudence, and if private prudence always counselled what was profitablealso to others, no objection could arise to an aristocratic policy. Forif we assume a certain variety in endowments and functions among men, itwould evidently conduce to the general convenience that each man shouldexercise his powers uncontrolled by the public voice. The government, having facilities for information and ready resources, might be left todetermine all matters of policy; for its members' private interestswould coincide with those of the public, and even if prejudices andirrational habits prevented them from pursuing their own advantage, theywould surely not err more frequently or more egregiously in that respectthan would the private individual, to whose ignorant fancy everydecision would otherwise have to be referred. 

Thus in monarchy every expedient is seized upon to render the king's andthe country's interests coincident; public prosperity fills histreasury, the arts adorn his court, justice rendered confirms hisauthority. If reason were efficacious kings might well be left to governalone. Theologians, under the same hypothesis, might be trusted to drawup creeds and codes of morals; and, in fact, everyone with a gift formanagement or creation might be authorised to execute his plans. It isin this way, perhaps, that some social animals manage their affairs, forthey seem to co-operate without external control. That their instinctivesystem is far from perfect we may safely take for granted; butgovernment, too, is not always adequate or wise. What spoils such aspontaneous harmony is that people neither understand their owninterests nor have the constancy to pursue them systematically; andfurther, that their personal or animal interests may actually clash, inso far as they have not been harmonised by reason. 

To rationalise an interest is simply to correlate it with every otherinterest which it at all affects. In proportion as rational interestspredominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above allothers, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by hisaction, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worseand more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds injustice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he shouldbe doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, consciouseffort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform:only selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtuewhich would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, inexpressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is acondition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, andhates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted tosecure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt tothink him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knowsthat it was the force of circumstances and a certain pathetichelplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors. 

[Sidenote: People jealous of eminence. ]

These errors, when they are committed by a weak and passionate ruler, are not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligencehe probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is verylikely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see inevery calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests areradically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so. Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, theyclamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it. Democratic government is founded on the decay of representativeeminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merelybecause they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneousaction would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control. Men of talent may be needed and used in a democratic state; they may beoccasionally _hired_; but they will be closely watched and directed bythe people, who fear otherwise to suffer the penalty of foolishlyintrusting their affairs to other men's hands. 

A fool, says a Spanish proverb, knows more at home than a wise man athis neighbour's. So democratic instinct assumes that, unless all thoseconcerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business andfrequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to thefact that they have been ignored and enslaved. The implication is thateach man is the best judge of his own interests and of the means toadvance them; or at least that by making himself his own guide he can inthe end gain the requisite insight and thus not only attain hispractical aims, but also some political and intellectual dignity. 

[Sidenote: It is representative. ]

All just government pursues the general good; the choice betweenaristocratic and democratic forms touches only the means to that end. One arrangement may well be better fitted to one place and time, andanother to another. Everything depends on the existence or non-existenceof available practical eminence. The democratic theory is clearly wrongif it imagines that eminence is not naturally representative. Eminenceis synthetic and represents what it synthesises. An eminence notrepresentative would not constitute excellence, but merely extravaganceor notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, orfeeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for manydiffuse constituents reduced to harmony, so that the wise moment isfilled with an activity in which the upshot of the experience concernedis mirrored and regarded, an activity just to all extant interests andspeaking in their total behalf. But anything approaching such trueexcellence is as rare as it is great, and a democratic society, naturally jealous of greatness, may be excused for not expecting truegreatness and for not even understanding what it is. A government is notmade representative or just by the mechanical expedient of electing itsmembers by universal suffrage. It becomes representative only byembodying in its policy, whether by instinct or high intelligence, thepeople's conscious and unconscious interests. 

[Sidenote: But subject to decay. ]

Democratic theory seems to be right, however, about the actual failureof theocracies, monarchies, and oligarchies to remain representative andto secure the general good. The true eminence which natural leaders mayhave possessed in the beginning usually declines into a conventional andbaseless authority. The guiding powers which came to save and expresshumanity fatten in office and end by reversing their function. Thegovernment reverts to the primeval robber; the church stands in the wayof all wisdom. Under such circumstances it is a happy thing if thepeople possess enough initiative to assert themselves and, afterclearing the ground in a more or less summary fashion, allow some neworganisation, more representative of actual interests, to replace theold encumbrances and tyrannies. 

[Sidenote: Ancient citizenship a privilege. ]

In the heroic ages of Greece and Rome patriotism was stimulated inmanifold ways. The city was a fatherland, a church, an army, and almosta family. It had its own school of art, its own dialect, its own feasts, its own fables. Every possible social interest was either embodied inthe love of country or, like friendship and fame, closely associatedwith it. Patriotism could then be expected to sway every mind at allcapable of moral enthusiasm. Furthermore, only the flower of thepopulation were citizens. In rural districts the farmer might be afreeman; but he probably had slaves whose work he merely superintended. The meaner and more debasing offices, mining, sea-faring, domesticservice, and the more laborious part of all industries, were relegatedto slaves. The citizens were a privileged class. Military discipline andthe street life natural in Mediterranean countries, kept public eventsand public men always under everybody's eyes: the state was a bodilypresence. Democracy, when it arose in such communities, was stillaristocratic; it imposed few new duties upon the common citizens, whileit diffused many privileges and exemptions among them. 

[Sidenote: Modern democracy industrial. ]

The social democracy which is the ideal of many in modern times, on theother hand, excludes slavery, unites whole nations and even all mankindinto a society of equals, and admits no local or racial privileges bywhich the sense of fellowship may be stimulated. Public spirit could notbe sustained in such a community by exemptions, rivalries, or ambitions. No one, indeed, would be a slave, everyone would have an elementaryeducation and a chance to demonstrate his capacity; but he would beprobably condemned to those occupations which in ancient republics wereassigned to slaves. At least at the opening of his career he would findhimself on the lowest subsisting plane of humanity, and he wouldprobably remain on it throughout his life. In other words, the citizensof a social democracy would be all labourers; for even those who roseto be leaders would, in a genuine democracy, rise from the ranks andbelong in education and habits to the same class as all the others. 

[Sidenote: Dangers to current civilisation. ]

Under such circumstances the first virtue which a democratic societywould have to possess would be enthusiastic diligence. The motives forwork which have hitherto prevailed in the world have been want, ambition, and love of occupation: in a social democracy, after the firstwas eliminated, the last alone would remain efficacious. Love ofoccupation, although it occasionally accompanies and cheers every sortof labour, could never induce men originally to undertake arduous anduninteresting tasks, nor to persevere in them if by chance orwaywardness such tasks had been once undertaken. Inclination can neverbe the general motive for the work now imposed on the masses. Beforelabour can be its own reward it must become less continuous, morevaried, more responsive to individual temperament and capacity. Otherwise it would not cease to repress and warp human faculties. 

A state composed exclusively of such workmen and peasants as make up thebulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Everyliberal tradition would perish in it; and the rational and historicessence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt, would endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. Theypossess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for ingathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make upan aristocratic society. Civilisation has hitherto consisted indiffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centres. It hasnot sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variationfrom them, and it has afterward imposed itself on them from above. Allits founders in antiquity passed for demi-gods or were at least inspiredby an oracle or a nymph. The vital genius thus bursting forth andspeaking with authority gained a certain ascendency in the world; itmitigated barbarism without removing it. This is one fault, amongothers, which current civilisation has; it is artificial. If socialdemocracy could breed a new civilisation out of the people, this newcivilisation would be profounder than ours and more pervasive. But itdoubtless cannot. What we have rests on conquest and conversion, onleadership and imitation, on mastership and service. To abolisharistocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authoritywould be to cut off the source from which all culture has hithertoflowed. 

[Sidenote: Is current civilisation a good?]

Civilisation, however, although we are wont to speak the word with acertain unction, is a thing whose value may be questioned. One way ofdefending the democratic ideal is to deny that civilisation is a good. In one sense, indeed, social democracy is essentially a reversion to amore simple life, more Arcadian and idyllic than that which aristocracyhas fostered. Equality is more easily attained in a patriarchal age thanin an age of concentrated and intense activities. Possessions, ideal andmaterial, may be fewer in a simple community, but they are more easilyshared and bind men together in moral and imaginative bonds instead ofdividing them, as do all highly elaborate ways of living or thinking. The necessaries of life can be enjoyed by a rural people, living in asparsely settled country, and among these necessaries might be countednot only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fashion even inour society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellowship whichthe civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy shouldtriumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminishingthe amount of labour performed in the world. All instruments of luxury, many instruments of vain knowledge and art, would no longer be produced. We might see the means of communication, lately so marvellouslydeveloped, again disused; the hulks of great steamers rusting inharbours, the railway bridges collapsing and the tunnels choked; while arural population, with a few necessary and perfected manufactures, wouldspread over the land and abandon the great cities to ruin, calling themseats of Babylonian servitude and folly. 

Such anticipations may seem fantastic, and of course there is noprobability that a reaction against material progress should set in inthe near future, since as yet the tide of commercialism and populationcontinues everywhere to rise; but does any thoughtful man suppose thatthese tendencies will be eternal and that the present experiment incivilisation is the last the world will see?

[Sidenote: Horrors of materialistic democracy. ]

If social democracy, however, refused to diminish labour and wealth andproposed rather to accelerate material progress and keep every furnaceat full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. Bywhom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort ofpleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time andenergy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort ofreligion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how theyspend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic tradition and thepresence of a rich class still profoundly influence popular ideals. Imagine those aristocratic influences removed, and would any head belifted above a dead level of infinite dulness and vulgarity? Wouldmankind be anything but a trivial, sensuous, superstitious, custom-ridden herd? There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar andanonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts everybudding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fiercestupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the clawsof a dragon. Anyone would be a hero who should quell the monster. Aforeign invader or domestic despot would at least have steps to histhrone, possible standing-places for art and intelligence; hissupercilious indifference would discountenance the popular gods, andallow some courageous hand at last to shatter them. Social democracy athigh pressure would leave no room for liberty. The only freeman in itwould be one whose whole ideal was to be an average man. 

[Sidenote: Timocracy or socialistic democracy. ]

Perhaps, however, social democracy might take a more liberal form. Itmight allow the benefits of civilisation to be integrated in eminentmen, whose influence in turn should direct and temper the general life. This would be timocracy--a government by men of merit. The sameabilities which raised these men to eminence would enable them toapprehend ideal things and to employ material resources for the commonadvantage. They would formulate religion, cultivate the arts andsciences, provide for government and all public conveniences, andinspire patriotism by their discourse and example. At the same time anew motive would be added to common labour, I mean ambition. For therewould be not only a possibility of greater reward but a possibility ofgreater service. The competitive motive which socialism is supposed todestroy would be restored in timocracy, and an incentive offered toexcellence and industry. The country's resources would increase for thevery reason that somebody might conceivably profit by them; and everyonewould have at least an ideal interest in ministering to that completelife which he or his children, or whoever was most capable ofappreciation, was actually to enjoy. 

Such a timocracy (of which the Roman Church is a good example) woulddiffer from the social aristocracy that now exists only by the removalof hereditary advantages. People would be born equal, but they wouldgrow unequal, and the only equality subsisting would be equality ofopportunity. If power remained in the people's hands, the governmentwould be democratic; but a full development of timocracy would allow theproved leader to gain great ascendancy. The better security the lawoffered that the men at the top should be excellent, the less restraintwould it need to put upon them when once in their places. Their eminencewould indeed have been factitious and their station undeserved if theywere not able to see and do what was requisite better than the communityat large. An assembly has only the lights common to the majority of itsmembers, far less, therefore, than its members have when added togetherand less even than the wiser part of them. 

A timocracy would therefore seem to unite the advantages of all forms ofgovernment and to avoid their respective abuses. It would promotefreedom scientifically. It might be a monarchy, if men existed fit tobe kings; but they would have to give signs of their fitness and theirhonours would probably not be hereditary. Like aristocracy, it woulddisplay a great diversity of institutions and superposed classes, astimulating variety in ways of living; it would be favourable to art andscience and to noble idiosyncrasies. Among its activities theculminating and most conspicuous ones would be liberal. Yet there wouldbe no isolation of the aristocratic body; its blood would be drawn fromthe people, and only its traditions from itself. Like social democracy, finally, it would be just and open to every man, but it would notdepress humanity nor wish to cast everybody in a common mould. 

[Sidenote: The difficulty the same as in all Socialism. ]

There are immense difficulties, however, in the way of such a Utopia, some physical and others moral. Timocracy would have to begin byuprooting the individual from his present natural soil and transplantinghim to that in which his spirit might flourish best. This proposedtransfer is what makes the system ideally excellent, since nature is ameans only; but it makes it also almost impossible to establish, sincenature is the only efficacious power. Timocracy can arise only in thefew fortunate cases where material and social forces have driven men tothat situation in which their souls can profit most, and where they findno influences more persuasive than those which are most liberating. Itis clear, for instance, that timocracy would exclude the family orgreatly weaken it. Soul and body would be wholly transferred to thatmedium where lay the creature's spiritual affinities; his origins wouldbe disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecasthis disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate, conventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning, nor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We haveseen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution inthat ideal direction. 

Even less perfect polities, that leave more to chance, would require amoral transformation in mankind if they were to be truly successful. 

A motive which now generates political democracy, impatience ofsacrifice, must, in a good social democracy, be turned into itsopposite. Men must be glad to labour unselfishly in the spirit of art orof religious service: for if they labour selfishly, the higher organs ofthe state would perish, since only a few can profit by them materially;while if they neglect their work, civilisation loses that intensivedevelopment which it was proposed to maintain. Each man would need toforget himself and not to chafe under his natural limitations. He mustfind his happiness in seeing his daily task grow under his hands; andwhen, in speculative moments, he lifts his eyes from his labour, he mustfind an ideal satisfaction in patriotism, in love for that complexsociety to which he is contributing an infinitesimal service. He mustlearn to be happy without wealth, fame, or power, and with no rewardsave his modest livelihood and an ideal participation in his country'sgreatness. It is a spirit hardly to be maintained without a closeorganisation and much training; and as military and religioustimocracies have depended on discipline and a minute rule of life, so anindustrial timocracy would have to depend on guilds and unions, whichwould make large inroads upon personal freedom. 

[Sidenote: The masses would have to be plebeian in position andpatrician in feeling. ]

The question here suggests itself whether such a citizen, once havingaccepted his humble lot, would be in a different position from theplebeians in an aristocracy. The same subordination would be imposedupon him, only the ground assigned for his submission would be no longerself-interest and necessity, but patriotic duty. This patriotism wouldhave to be of an exalted type. Its end would not be, as in industrialsociety, to secure the private interests of each citizen; its end wouldbe the glory and perfection of the state as imagination or philosophymight conceive them. This glory and perfection would not be a benefit toanyone who was not in some degree a philosopher and a poet. They wouldseem, then, to be the special interests of an aristocracy, not indeed anaristocracy of wealth or power, but an aristocracy of noble minds. Those whose hearts could prize the state's ideal perfection would bethose in whom its benefits would be integrated. And the common citizenwould find in their existence, and in his own participation in theirvirtue, the sole justification for his loyalty. 

Ideal patriotism is not secured when each man, although without naturaleminence, pursues his private interests. What renders man an imaginativeand moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life whichcould not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art. All these aims, in a well-knit state, are covered bythe single passion of patriotism; and then a conception of one'scountry, its history and mission becomes the touchstone of every idealimpulse. Timocracy requires this kind of patriotism in everybody; sothat if public duty is not to become a sacrifice imposed on the many forthe sake of the few, as in aristocracy, the reason can only be that themany covet, appreciate, and appropriate their country's ideal glories, quite as much as the favoured class ever could in any aristocracy. 

[Sidenote: Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism. ]

Is this possible? What might happen if the human race were immenselyimproved and exalted there is as yet no saying; but experience has givenno example of efficacious devotion to communal ideals except in smallcities, held together by close military and religious bonds and havingno important relations to anything external. Even this antique virtuewas short-lived and sadly thwarted by private and party passion. Wherepublic spirit has held best, as at Sparta or (to take a very differenttype of communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid for by anotable lack of spontaneity and wisdom; such inhuman devotion to anarbitrary end has made these societies odious. We may say, therefore, that a zeal sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are nowconstituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes forthemselves people benefit their fellows more than in pursuing suchnarrow and irrational ideals as alone seem to be powerful in the world. To ambition, to the love of wealth and honour, to love of a libertywhich meant opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe whateverbenefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from Italy and England. It is doubtful whether a society which offered no personal prizes wouldinspire effort; and it is still more doubtful whether that effort, ifactually stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For anindoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanaticism; itimposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some abstract principle orhabit once, perhaps, useful; but that convention soon becomessuperstitious and ceases to represent general human excellence. 

[Sidenote: Public spirit the life of democracy. ]

Now it is in the spirit of social democracy to offer no prizes. Officein it, being the reward of no great distinction, brings no great honour, and being meanly paid it brings no great profit, at least while honestlyadministered. All wealth in a true democracy would be the fruit ofpersonal exertion and would come too late to be nobly enjoyed or toteach the art of liberal living. It would be either accumulatedirrationally or given away outright. And if fortunes could not betransmitted or used to found a great family they would lose their chiefimaginative charm. The pleasures a democratic society affords are vulgarand not even by an amiable illusion can they become an aim in life. Alife of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interestingor really conceivable. Intellectual and artistic greatness does not needprizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and a propitious environment. Genius, like goodness (which can stand alone), would arise in ademocratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be sowell fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificialand simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawlunbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance thanthat which he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsistingwould be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, andinwardly rewarded. For such excellence to grow general mankind must benotably transformed. If a noble and civilised democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the sametime how ominous, was Montesquieu's saying that the principle ofdemocracy is virtue. 

CHAPTER VI

FREE SOCIETY

[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit. ]

Natural society unites beings in time and space; it fixes affection onthose creatures on which we depend and to which our action must beadapted. Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, asmore and more things become tributary to our personal being. In marriageand the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is rivetedon temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural orcorporate. There is then a primacy of nature over spirit in social life;and this primacy, in a certain sense, endures to the end, since allspirit must be the spirit of something, and reason could not exist or beconceived at all unless a material organism, personal or social, laybeneath to give thought an occasion and a point of view, and to givepreference a direction. Things could not be near or far, worse orbetter, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodgedsomewhere in space and time. Reason is a principle of order appearing ina subject-matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be anirrational datum. Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse, and impulse expresses a natural body with self-equilibrating powers. 

At the same time, natural growths may be called achievements onlybecause, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience. Nature's works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke;mechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point ofview of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow growsimpassioned and vehement. Nature's values are imputed to herretroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logicaland moral primacy of its own. In themselves events are perfectlymechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal noravoiding what we call failures. And so they would always have remainedin crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no sciencehad come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance, arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest. 

Thus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancyin the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arisewhere an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself. Such anequilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity thatproduced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, itsustains in being an ideal form. This form is what consciousnesscorresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significantthoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seemsto serve. The being to whom they come is the most widely based andsynthetic of her creatures. The mind spreads and soars in proportion asthe body feeds on the surrounding world. Noble ideas, although rare anddifficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive. 

[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal. ]

Consciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is idealthrough and through. On one level as much as on another, it celebratesan attained balance in nature, or grieves at its collapse; it prophesiesand remembers, it loves and dreams. It sees even nature from the pointof view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by idealstandards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects, entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining, and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primarymathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successfulreactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousnessinto a stable grammar which has wide applicability and greatpersistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally intoprodigious abstract systems of thought. Every experience of victory, eloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and ifrepeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession. 

[Sidenote: Social experience has its ideality too. ]

Society also breeds its ideal harmonies. At first it establishesaffections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later itgrows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind andsympathetic purposes. These ideal affinities, although grounded like theothers on material relations (for sympathy presupposes communication), do not have those relations for their theme but rest on them merely ason a pedestal from which they look away to their own realm, as music, while sustained by vibrating instruments, looks away from them to itsown universe of sound. 

[Sidenote: The self an ideal. ]

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. Itspersonages are all mythical, beginning with that brave protagonist whocalls himself I and speaks all the soliloquies. When most nearlymaterial these personages are human souls--the ideal life of particularbodies--or floating mortal reputations--echoes of those ideal lives inone another. From this relative substantiality they fade into notions ofcountry, posterity, humanity, and the gods. These figures all representsome circle of events or forces in the real world; but suchrepresentation, besides being mythical, is usually most inadequate. Theboundaries of that province which each spirit presides over are vaguelydrawn, the spirit itself being correspondingly indefinite. Thisambiguity is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of thepersonages which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion--his ideaof himself. "There is society where none intrudes;" and for most mensympathy with their imaginary selves is a powerful and dominant emotion. True memory offers but a meagre and interrupted vista of pastexperience, yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mentaldiscourse to bandy about; a name with a few physical and socialconnotations is what must represent the man to his own thinkings. Orrather it is no memory, however eviscerated, that fulfils that office. Aman's notion of himself is a concretion in discourse for which his moreconstant somatic feelings, his ruling interests, and his socialrelations furnish most of the substance. 

[Sidenote: Romantic egotism. ]

The more reflective and self-conscious a man is the more completely willhis experience be subsumed and absorbed in his perennial "I. " Ifphilosophy has come to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may evenregard all nature as nothing but his half-voluntary dream and encouragehimself thereby to give even to the physical world a dramatic andsentimental colour. But the more successful he is in stuffing everythinginto his self-consciousness, the more desolate will the void becomewhich surrounds him. For self is, after all, but one term in a primitivedichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it nolonger contrasted with anything else. The egotist must therefore peoplethe desert he has spread about him, and he naturally peoples it withmythical counterparts of himself. Sometimes, if his imagination issensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he createsa poetic mythology; sometimes, when the inner life predominates, theyare projected into his own forgotten past or infinite future. He willthen say that all experience is really his own and that someinexplicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions in hisomniscient mind. 

[Sidenote: Vanity. ]

Philosophers less pretentious and more worldly than these have sometimesfelt, in their way, the absorbing force of self-consciousness. LaRochefoucauld could describe _amour propre_ as the spring of all humansentiments. _Amour propre_ involves preoccupation not merely with theidea of self, but with that idea reproduced in other men's minds; thesoliloquy has become a dialogue, or rather a solo with an echoingchorus. Interest in one's own social figure is to some extent a materialinterest, for other men's love or aversion is a principle read intotheir acts; and a social animal like man is dependent on other men'sacts for his happiness. An individual's concern for the attitude societytakes toward him is therefore in the first instance concern for his ownpractical welfare. But imagination here refines upon worldly interest. What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, whenknown, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. Nothing could betterprove the mythical character of self-consciousness than this extremesensitiveness to alien opinions; for if a man really knew himself hewould utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on asubject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation. Indeed, those opinions would hardly seem to him directed upon thereality at all, and he would laugh at them as he might at the stockfortune-telling of some itinerant gypsy. 

As it is, however, the least breath of irresponsible and anonymouscensure lashes our self-esteem and sometimes quite transforms our plansand affections. The passions grafted on wounded pride are the mostinveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age. We crave support invanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in thatsphere; for however persistent and passionate such prejudices may be, weknow too well that they are woven of thin air. A hostile word, bystarting a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely andthreatens to dissolve their being. 

[Sidenote: Ambiguities of fame. ]

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy toderide but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imaginationalmost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can haveno possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value whichreputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame. Thedirect object of this passion--that a name should survive in men'smouths to which no adequate idea of its original can be attached--seemsa thin and fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider howlittle we should probably sympathise with the creatures that are toremember us. What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read himat school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world fromwhich everything he loved has departed? Yet, beneath this desire fornominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an ideal ambitionof which the ancients cannot have been unconscious when they set so higha value on fame. They often identified fame with immortality, a subjecton which they had far more rational sentiments than have sinceprevailed. 

[Sidenote: Its possible ideality. ]

Fame, as a noble mind conceives and desires it, is not embodied in amonument, a biography, or the repetition of a strange name by strangers;it consists in the immortality of a man's work, his spirit, hisefficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world. WhenHorace--no model of magnanimity--wrote his _exegi monumentum_, he wasnot thinking that the pleasure he would continue to give would remindpeople of his trivial personality, which indeed he never particularlycelebrated and which had much better lie buried with his bones. He wasthinking, of course, of that pleasure itself; thinking that the delight, half lyric, half sarcastic, which those delicate cameos had given himto carve would be perennially renewed in all who retraced them. Nay, perhaps we may not go too far in saying that even that impersonalsatisfaction was not the deepest he felt; the deepest, very likely, flowed from the immortality, not of his monument, but of the subject andpassion it commemorated; that tenderness, I mean, and that disillusionwith mortal life which rendered his verse immortal. He had expressed, and in expressing appropriated, some recurring human moods, some mockingrenunciations; and he knew that his spirit was immortal, being linkedand identified with that portion of the truth. He had become a littlespokesman of humanity, uttering what all experience repeats more or lessarticulately; and even if he should cease to be honoured in men'smemories, he would continue to be unwittingly honoured and justified intheir lives. 

What we may conceive to have come in this way even within a Horace'sapprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame. With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expressioninvolves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truthgenius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward andfame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. When theVirgin in the Magnificat says, "Behold, from henceforth all generationsshall call me blessed, " the psalmist surely means to express aspiritual exaltation exempt from vanity; he merely translates into arhetorical figure the fact that what had been first revealed to Marywould also bless all generations. That the Church should in consequencedeem and pronounce her blessed is an incident describing, but notcreating, the unanimity in their religious joys. Fame is thus theoutward sign or recognition of an inward representative authorityresiding in genius or good fortune, an authority in which lies the wholeworth of fame. Those will substantially remember and honour us who keepour ideals, and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we haveanticipated. 

Free society differs from that which is natural and legal precisely inthis, that it does not cultivate relations which in the last analysisare experienced and material, but turns exclusively to unanimities inmeanings, to collaborations in an ideal world. The basis of free societyis of course natural, as we said, but free society has ideal goals. Spirits cannot touch save by becoming unanimous. At the same time publicopinion, reputation, and impersonal sympathy reinforce only very generalfeelings, and reinforce them vaguely; and as the inner play of sentimentbecomes precise, it craves more specific points of support orcomparison. It is in creatures of our own species that we chiefly scentthe aroma of inward sympathy, because it is they that are visibly movedon the same occasions as ourselves; and it is to those among ourfellow-men who share our special haunts and habits that we feel moreprecise affinities. Though the ground for such feeling is animal contactand contagion, its deliverance does not revert to those naturalaccidents, but concerns a represented sympathy in represented souls. Friendship, springing from accidental association, terminates in aconsciousness of ideal and essential agreement. 

[Sidenote: Comradeship. ]

Comradeship is a form of friendship still akin to general sociabilityand gregariousness. When men are "in the same boat together, " when acommon anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their humankinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinitysubsisting between them. The same effect is produced by a commonestrangement from the rest of society. For this reason comradeship lastsno longer than the circumstances that bring it about. Its constancy isproportionate to the monotony of people's lives and minds. There is alasting bond among schoolfellows because no one can become a boy againand have a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comradeship withone's countrymen, especially abroad, because seldom is a man pliable andpolyglot enough to be at home among foreigners, or really to understandthem. There is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breedingor profession, however bad these may be, because habits soon monopolisethe man. Nevertheless a greater buoyancy, a longer youth, a richerexperience, would break down all these limits of fellowship. Suchclingings to the familiar are three parts dread of the unfamiliar andwant of resource in its presence, for one part in them of genuineloyalty. Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for aman of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place likehome. 

[Sidenote: External conditions of friendship. ]

Though comradeship is an accidental bond, it is the condition of idealfriendship, for the ideal, in all spheres, is nothing but the accidentalconfirming itself and generating its own standard. Men must meet tolove, and many other accidents besides conjunction must conspire to makea true friendship possible. In order that friendship may fulfil theconditions even of comradeship, it is requisite that the friends havethe same social status, so that they may live at ease together and havecongenial tastes. They must further have enough community of occupationand gifts to give each an appreciation of the other's faculty; forqualities are not complementary unless they are qualities of the samesubstance. Nothing must be actual in either friend that is not potentialin the other. 

[Sidenote: Identity in sex required. ]

For this reason, among others, friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; theirreasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony betweenmen and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality liesprecisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding, but is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in thedark. As man's body differs from woman's in sex and strength, so hismind differs from hers in quality and function: they can co-operate butcan never fuse. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organisedlike the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, andessentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine isa queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, butpassive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions withoutjustice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or lessthan friendship: less, because there is no intellectual parity; more, because (even when the relation remains wholly dispassionate, as inrespect to old ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular abouta woman's mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and putsit out of the question to judge what she says by masculine standards. She has a kind of sibylline intuition and the right to be irrationally_à propos_. There is a gallantry of the mind which pervades allconversation with a lady, as there is a natural courtesy toward childrenand mystics; but such a habit of respectful concession, marking as itdoes an intellectual alienation as profound as that which separates usfrom the dumb animals, is radically incompatible with friendship. 

[Sidenote: and in age. ]

Friends, moreover, should have been young together. Much difference inage defeats equality and forbids frankness on many a fundamentalsubject; it confronts two minds of unlike focus: one near-sighted andwithout perspective, the other seeing only the background of presentthings. While comparisons in these respects may be interesting andborrowings sometimes possible, lending the older mind life and theyounger mind wisdom, such intercourse has hardly the value ofspontaneous sympathy, in which the spark of mutual intelligence flies, as it should, almost without words. Contagion is the only source ofvalid mind-reading: you must imitate to understand, and where theplasticity of two minds is not similar their mutual interpretations arenecessarily false. They idealise in their friends whatever they do notinvent or ignore, and the friendship which should have lived on energiesconspiring spontaneously together dies into conscious appreciation. 

[Sidenote: Constituents of friendship. ]

All these are merely permissive conditions for friendship; its positiveessence is yet to find. How, we may ask, does the vision of the general_socius_, humanity, become specific in the vision of a particular friendwithout losing its ideality or reverting to practical values? Of course, individuals might be singled out for the special benefits they may haveconferred; but a friend's only gift is himself, and friendship is notfriendship, it is not a form of free or liberal society, if it does notterminate in an ideal possession, in an object loved for its own sake. Such objects can be ideas only, not forces, for forces are subterraneanand instrumental things, having only such value as they borrow fromtheir ulterior effects and manifestations. To praise the utility offriendship, as the ancients so often did, and to regard it as apolitical institution justified, like victory or government, by itsmaterial results, is to lose one's moral bearings. The value of victoryor good government is rather to be found in the fact that, among otherthings, it might render friendship possible. We are not to look now forwhat makes friendship useful, but for whatever may be found infriendship that may lend utility to life. 

[Sidenote: Personal liking. ]

The first note that gives sociability a personal quality and raises thecomrade into an incipient friend is doubtless sensuous affinity. Whatever reaction we may eventually make on an impression, after it hashad time to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectualhabit, its first assault is always on the senses, and no sense is anindifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial rate ofvibration and gives its stimuli a varying welcome. Little as we mayattend to these instinctive hospitalities of sense, they betraythemselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons andthings, in the _je ne sais quoi_ that makes instinctive sympathy. Voice, manner, aspect, hints of congenial tastes and judgments, a jest in theright key, a gesture marking the right aversions, all these triflesleave behind a pervasive impression. We reject a vision we findindigestible and without congruity to our inner dream; we accept andincorporate another into our private pantheon, where it becomes alegitimate figure, however dumb and subsidiary it may remain. 

In a refined nature these sensuous premonitions of sympathy are seldommisleading. Liking cannot, of course, grow into friendship over night asit might into love; the pleasing impression, even if retained, will lieperfectly passive and harmless in the mind, until new and differentimpressions follow to deepen the interest at first evoked and to removeits centre of gravity altogether from the senses. In love, if the fieldis clear, a single glimpse may, like Tristan's potion, produce a violentand irresistible passion; but in friendship the result remains moreproportionate to the incidental causes, discrimination is preserved, jealousy and exclusiveness are avoided. That vigilant, besetting, insatiable affection, so full of doubts and torments, with which thelover follows his object, is out of place here; for the friend has noproperty in his friend's body or leisure or residual ties; he acceptswhat is offered and what is acceptable, and the rest he leaves in peace. He is distinctly not his brother's keeper, for the society of friends isfree. 

[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas. ]

Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking orcomradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moralappreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and toproduce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting, friendship does not arise. Recognition given to a man's talent or virtueis not properly friendship. Friends must desire to live as much aspossible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures. Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to givespiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would beindifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them, and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the humanmedium through which it beheld the good. 

[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction. ]

No natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is orshould be transparent. Transparency is a virtue only in artificialinstruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsicoperation is not itself a portion of human life. In looking through afield-glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbowsabout their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose itspigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns. The sense for colouris a vital endowment and an ingredient in human happiness; but novitality is added by the intervention of further media which are notthemselves living organs. 

A man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for theenergies he exerts. When a thought conveyed or a work done enters aloneinto the observer's experience, no friendship is possible. This isalways the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructedpersonality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceivednexus for the work he performed. In a philosopher or artist, too, personality is merely instrumental, for, although in a sense pervasive, a creative personality evaporates into its expression, and whatever partof it may not have been translated into ideas is completely negligiblefrom the public point of view. That portion of a man's soul which he hasnot alienated and objectified is open only to those who know himotherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his publicattributions. Such persons are his friends. Into their lives he hasentered not merely through an idea with which his name may beassociated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, butby awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion ofemotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partlyarrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homelyaccent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called idealsympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuousaffinity colouring a spiritual light. 

[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent. ]

If we approach friendship from above and compare it with more idealloyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis inchance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it withmere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence ofcommon ideal interests. That is a silly and effeminate friendship inwhich the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and ofhow each stands in the other's eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort, in which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rathera feeble form of love than properly a friendship. In extreme youth sucha weakness may perhaps indicate capacity for friendship of a noblertype, because when taste and knowledge have not yet taken shape, theonly way, often, in which ideal interests can herald themselves is inthe guise of some imagined union from which it is vaguely felt theymight be developed, just as in love sexual and social instincts maskthemselves in an unreasoning obsession, or as for mystic devotion everyideal masks itself in God. All these sentimental feelings are at anyrate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to morediscriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture maypossibly pitch on a higher key. 

[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable. ]

The necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests iswhat makes true friendship so rare. It is found chiefly in youth, foryouth best unites the two requisite conditions--affectionate comradeshipand ardour in pursuing such liberal aims as may be pursued in common. Life in camp or college is favourable to friendship, for there generousactivities are carried on in unison and yet leave leisure for playfulexpansion and opportunity for a choice in friends. The ancients, so longas they were free, spent their whole life in forum and palæstra, camp, theatre, and temple, and in consequence could live by friendship even intheir maturer years; but modern life is unfavourable to its continuance. What with business cares, with political bonds remote and invisible, with the prior claims of family, and with individualities both of mindand habit growing daily more erratic, early friends find themselves verysoon parted by unbridgeable chasms. For friendship to flourish personallife would have to become more public and social life more simple andhumane. 

[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife. ]

The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancientideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage. In spite ofintellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife arebound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affectionfor children, and, what is of great importance, common financialinterests. These bonds often suffice for substantial and lastingunanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called amarriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promiseof happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies itrequires. 

[Sidenote: Between master and disciple. ]

When the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strainbecome altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal likingmay be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more politicalfellowships. Discipleship is a union of this kind. Without claiming anyshare in the master's private life, perhaps without having ever seenhim, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support andguidance in following the ideal which links us together. Hero-worship isan imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapesand take actual persons for their symbols. Such companionship, perhapswholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society. The unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence isirrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to theidealising mind. There is or need be no comradeship, no actual force orinfluence transmitted from him. Certain capacities and tendencies in theworshipper are brought to a focus by the hero's image, who is therebyfirst discovered and deputed to be a hero. He is an unmoved mover, likeAristotle's God and like every ideal to which thought or action isdirected. 

The symbol, however, is ambiguous in hero-worship, being in one senseideal, the representation of an inner demand, and in another sense asensible experience, the representative of an external reality. Accordingly the symbol, when highly prized and long contemplated, mayeasily become an idol; that in it which is not ideal nor representativeof the worshipper's demand may be imported confusedly into the totaladored, and may thus receive a senseless worship. The devotion whichwas, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed infancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal. For thisreason it is very important that the first objects to fix the soul'sadmiration should be really admirable, for otherwise their accidentalblemishes will corrupt the mind to which they appear _sub specie boni_. 

[Sidenote: Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance. ]

Discipleship and hero-worship are not stable relations. Since themeaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and sincethe image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a realexternal object, meaning and image, as time goes on, will necessarilyfall apart. The idol will be discredited. An ideal, ideally conceivedand known to be an ideal, a spirit worshipped in spirit and in truth, will take the place of the pleasing phenomenon; and in regard to everyactual being, however noble, discipleship will yield to emulation, andworship to an admiration more or less selective and critical. 

[Sidenote: Automatic idealisation of heroes. ]

A disembodied ideal, however, is unmanageable and vague; it cannotexercise the natural and material suasion proper to a model we areexpected to imitate. The more fruitful procedure is accordingly toidealise some historical figure or natural force, to ignore or minimisein it what does not seem acceptable, and to retain at the same time allthe unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that canhelp to give that model a persuasive vitality. This poetic process isall the more successful for being automatic. It is in this way thatheroes and gods have been created. A legend or fable lying in the mindand continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some neweloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had alreadyawakened, and was destined to awake again. To measure the importance ofthis truth the reader need only conceive the distance traversed from theAchilles that may have existed to the hero in Homer, or from Jesus as hemight have been in real life, or even as he is in the gospels, to Christin the Church. 

CHAPTER VII

PATRIOTISM

[Sidenote: The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, mustbe represented symbolically. ]

The mythical social idea most potent over practical minds is perhaps theidea of country. When a tribe, enlarged and domiciled, has become astate, much social feeling that was before evoked by things visibleloses its sensuous object. Yet each man remains no less dependent thanformerly on his nation, although less swayed by its visible presence andexample; he is no less concerned, materially and ideally, in thefortunes of the community. If a sense for social relations is to endure, some symbol must take the place of the moving crowd, the visiblestronghold, and the outspread fields and orchards that once made up hiscountry; some intellectual figment must arise to focus politicalinterests, no longer confined to the crops and the priest's medicinalauguries. It is altogether impossible that the individual should have adiscursive and adequate knowledge of statecraft and economy. Whateveridea, then, he frames to represent his undistinguished politicalrelations becomes the centre of his patriotism. 

When intelligence is not keen this idea may remain sensuous. Thevisible instruments of social life--chieftains, armies, monuments, thedialect and dress of the district, with all customs and pleasurestraditional there--these are what a sensuous man may understand by hiscountry. Bereft of these sensations he would feel lost and incapable;the habits formed in that environment would be galled by any other. Thisfondness for home, this dread of change and exile, is all the love ofcountry he knows. If by chance, without too much added thought, he couldrise to a certain poetic sentiment, he might feel attachment also to thelandscape, to the memorable spots and aspects of his native land. Theseobjects, which rhetoric calls sacred, might really have a certainsanctity for him; a wave of pious emotion might run over him at thesight of them, a pang when in absence they were recalled. These verythings, however, like the man who prizes them, are dependent on a muchlarger system; and if patriotism is to embrace ideally what reallyproduces human well-being it should extend over a wider field and toless picturable objects. 

[Sidenote: Ambiguous limits of a native country, geographical andmoral. ]

To define one's country is not so simple a matter as it may seem. Thehabitat of a man's youth, to which actual associations may bind him, ishardly his country until he has conceived the political and historicalforces that include that habitat in their sphere of influence and havedetermined its familiar institutions. Such forces are numerous andtheir spheres include one another like concentric rings. France, forinstance, is an uncommonly distinct and self-conscious nation, with along historic identity and a compact territory. Yet what is the France aFrenchman is to think of and love? Paris itself has various quarters andmoral climates, one of which may well be loved while another isdetested. The provinces have customs, temperaments, political ideals, and even languages of their own. Is Alsace-Lorraine beyond the pale ofFrench patriotism? And if not, why utterly exclude French-speakingSwitzerland, the Channel Islands, Belgium, or Quebec? Or is a Frenchmanrather to love the colonies by way of compensation? Is an Algerian Mooror a native of Tonquin his true fellow-citizen? Is Tahiti a part of his"country"? The truth is, if we look at the heart of the matter, aProtestant born in Paris is less a Frenchman than is a Catholic born inGeneva. 

If we pass from geography to institutions the same vagueness exists. France to one man represents the Revolution, to another the Empire, to athird the Church, and the vestiges of the _ancien régime_. Furthermore, how far into the past is patriotism to look? Is Charlemagne one of theglories of French history? Is it Julius Cæsar or Vicingetorix that is towarm the patriotic heart? Want of reflection and a blind subservience tothe colours of the map has led some historians to call Roman victoriesdefeats suffered by their country, even when that country is essentiallyso Roman, for instance, as Spain. With as good reason might a Sicilianor a Florentine chafe under the Latin conquest, or an American blush atthe invasion of his country by the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, evengeographically, the limits and the very heart of a man's country areoften ambiguous. Was Alexander's country Macedon or Greece? Was GeneralLee's the United States or Virginia? The ancients defined their countryfrom within outward; its heart was the city and its limits those of thatcity's dominion or affinities. Moderns generally define their countryrather stupidly by its administrative frontiers; and yet an Austrianwould have some difficulty in applying even this conventional criterion. 

[Sidenote: Sentimental and political patriotism. ]

The object of patriotism is in truth something ideal, a moral entitydefinable only by the ties which a man's imagination and reason can atany moment recognise. If he has insight and depth of feeling he willperceive that what deserves his loyalty is the entire civilisation towhich he owes his spiritual life and into which that life will presentlyflow back, with whatever new elements he may have added. Patriotismaccordingly has two aspects: it is partly sentiment by which it looksback upon the sources of culture, and partly policy, or allegiance tothose ideals which, being suggested by what has already been attained, animate the better organs of society and demand further embodiment. Tolove one's country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, mustinvolve a distinction between the country's actual condition and itsinherent ideal; and this distinction in turn involves a demand forchanges and for effort. Party allegiance is a true form of patriotism. For a party, at least in its intent, is an association of personsadvocating the same policy. Every thoughtful man must advocate somepolicy, and unless he has the misfortune to stand quite alone in hisconception of public welfare he will seek to carry out that policy bythe aid of such other persons as advocate it also. 

[Sidenote: The earth and the race the first objects of rationalloyalty. ]

The springs of culture, which retrospective patriotism regards, go backin the last instance to cosmic forces. The necessity that marshals thestars makes possible the world men live in, and is the first general andlaw-giver to every nation. The earth's geography, its inexorableclimates with their flora and fauna, make a play-ground for the humanwill which should be well surveyed by any statesman who wishes to judgeand act, not fantastically, but with reference to the real situation. Geography is a most enlightening science. In describing the habitat ofman it largely explains his history. Animal battles give the right andonly key to human conflicts, for the superadded rational element in manis not partisan, but on the contrary insinuates into his economy thenovel principle of justice and peace. As this leaven, however, canmingle only with elements predisposed to receive it, the basis of reasonitself, in so far as it attains expression, must be sought in thenatural world. The fortunes of the human family among the animals thuscome to concern reason and to be the background of progress. 

Within humanity the next sphere of interest for a patriot is the racefrom which he is descended, with its traditional languages andreligions. Blood is the ground of character and intelligence. The fruitsof civilisation may, indeed, be transmitted from one race to another andconsequently a certain artificial homogeneity may be secured amongstdifferent nations; yet unless continual intermarriage takes place eachrace will soon recast and vitiate the common inheritance. The fall ofthe Roman Empire offered such a spectacle, when various types ofbarbarism, with a more or less classic veneer, re-established themselveseverywhere. Perhaps modern cosmopolitanism, if not maintained bycommerce or by permanent conquest, may break apart in the same way andyield to local civilisations no less diverse than Christendom and Islam. 

[Sidenote: Race, when distinct, the greatest of distinctions. ]

Community of race is a far deeper bond than community of language, education, or government. Where one political system dominates variousraces it forces their common culture to be external merely. This isperhaps the secret of that strange recrudescence of national feeling, apart often from political divisions, which has closely followed theFrench Revolution and the industrial era. The more two different peoplesgrow alike in externals the more conscious and jealous they become ofdiversity in their souls; and where individuals are too insignificant topreserve any personality or distinction of their own, they flocktogether into little intentional societies and factious groups, in thehope of giving their imagination, in its extremity, some little food andcomfort. Private nationalities and private religions are luxuries atsuch a time in considerable demand. The future may possibly see in theOccident that divorce between administrative and ideal groups which isfamiliar in the Orient; so that under no matter what government and withutter cosmopolitanism in industry and science, each race may guard itsown poetry, religion, and manners. Such traditions, however, wouldalways be survivals or revivals rather than genuine expressions of life, because mind must either represent nature and the conditions of actionor else be content to persist precariously and without a function, likea sort of ghost. 

[Sidenote: "Pure" races may be morally sterile. ]

Some races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustmentto the conditions of existence has given their spirit victory, scope, and a relative stability. It is therefore of the greatest importance notto obscure this superiority by intermarriage with inferior stock, andthus nullify the progress made by a painful evolution and a prolongedsifting of souls. Reason protests as much as instinct against anyfusion, for instance, of white and black peoples. Mixture is in itselfno evil if the two nations, being approximately equal, but havingcomplementary gifts, can modify them without ultimate loss, and possiblyto advantage. Indeed the so-called pure races, since their purity hasgone with isolation and inexperience, have borne comparatively littlespiritual fruit. Large contact and concentrated living bring out nativegenius, but mixture with an inferior stock can only tend to obliterateit. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great aswhen they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at thesame time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness failsinwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation. 

There is something unmistakably illiberal, almost superstitious, instanding on race for its own sake, as if origins and not results were ofmoral value. It matters nothing what blood a man has, if he has theright spirit; and if there is some ground for identifying the two (sincemonkeys, however educated, are monkeys still) it is only when bloodmeans character and capacity, and is tested by them, that it becomesimportant. Nor is it unjust to level the individual, in his politicaland moral status, with the race to which he belongs, if this race holdsan approved position. Individual gifts and good intentions have littleefficacy in the body politic if they neither express a great traditionnor can avail to found one; and this tradition, as religion shows, willfalsify individual insights so soon as they are launched into the publicmedium. The common soul will destroy a noble genius in absorbing it, andtherefore, to maintain progress, a general genius has to be invoked; anda general genius means an exceptional and distinct race. 

[Sidenote: True nationality direction on a definite ideal. ]

Environment, education, fashion, may be all powerful while they last andmay make it seem a prejudice to insist on race, turning its assumedefficacy into a sheer dogma, with fanatical impulses behind it; yet inpractice the question will soon recur: What shall sustain thatomnipotent fashion, education, or environment? Nothing is moretreacherous than tradition, when insight and force are lacking to keepit warm. Under Roman dominion, the inhabitants of Sparta still submittedto the laws of Lycurgus and their life continued to be a sort ofritualistic shadow of the past. Those enfranchised helots thought theywere maintaining a heroic state when, in fact, they were only turningits forms into a retrospective religion. The old race was practicallyextinct; ephors, gymnasia, and common meals could do nothing torevive it. The ways of the Roman world--a kindred promiscuouspopulation--prevailed over that local ritual and rendered itperfunctory, because there were no longer any living souls to understandthat a man might place his happiness in his country's life and carenothing for Oriental luxury or Oriental superstition, things coming toflatter his personal lusts and make him useless and unhappy. 

Institutions without men are as futile as men without institutions. Before race can be a rational object for patriotism there must exist a_traditional genius_, handed down by inheritance or else by adoption, when the persons adopted can really appreciate the mysteries they areinitiated into. Blood could be disregarded, if only the political idealremained constant and progress was sustained, the laws being modifiedonly to preserve their spirit. A state lives in any case by exchangingpersons, and all spiritual life is maintained by exchanging expressions. Life is a circulation; it can digest whatever materials will assume aform already determined ideally and enable that form to come forth moreclearly and be determined in more particulars. Stagnant matternecessarily decays and in effect is false to the spirit no less than aspirit that changes is false to itself. 

[Sidenote: Country well represented by domestic and civic religion. ]

The spirit of a race is a mythical entity expressing the individual soulin its most constant and profound instincts and expanding it in thedirection in which correct representation is most easily possible, inthe direction of ancestors, kinsmen, and descendants. In ancient cities, where patriotism was intense, it was expressed in a tribal and civicreligion. The lares, the local gods, the deified heroes associated withthem, were either ancestors idealised or ideals of manhood taking theform of patrons and supernatural protectors. Jupiter Capitolinus and theSpirit of Rome were a single object. To worship Jupiter in that Capitolwas to dedicate oneself to the service of Rome. A foreigner could nomore share that devotion than a neighbour could share the religion ofthe hearth without sharing by adoption the life of the family. Paganismwas the least artificial of religions and the most poetical; its mythswere comparatively transparent and what they expressed was comparativelyreal. In that religion patriotism and family duties could takeimaginable forms, and those forms, apart from the inevitable tinge ofsuperstition which surrounded them, did not materially vitiate theallegiance due to the actual forces on which human happiness depends. 

[Sidenote: Misleading identification of country with government. ]

[Sidenote: Sporting or belligerent patriotism. ]

What has driven patriotism, as commonly felt and conceived, so far fromrational courses and has attached it to vapid objects has been theinitial illegitimacy of all governments. Under such circumstances, patriotism is merely a passion for ascendency. Properly it animates thearmy, the government, the aristocracy; from those circles it canpercolate, not perhaps without the help of some sophistry andintimidation, into the mass of the people, who are told that theirgovernment's fortunes are their own. Now the rabble has a greatpropensity to take sides, promptly and passionately, in any spectacularcontest; the least feeling of affinity, the slightest emotionalconsonance, will turn the balance and divert in one directionsympathetic forces which, for every practical purpose, might just aswell have rushed the other way. Most governments are in truth privatesocieties pitted against one another in the international arena andgiving meantime at home exhibitions of eloquence and more rarely ofenterprise; but the people's passions are easily enlisted in such agame, of course on the side of their own government, just as eachcollege or region backs its own athletes, even to the extent of payingtheir bills. Nations give the same kind of support to their fightinggovernments, and the sporting passions and illusions concerned are what, in the national game, is called patriotism. 

Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages andcountries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart fromlocal ravages, whether its own army or the enemy's is victorious in war, nor does it really affect any man's welfare whether the party he happensto belong to is in office or not. These issues concern, in such cases, only the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at stake, or theofficial classes, who lose their places when their leaders fall frompower. The private citizen in any event continues in such countries topay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, amaximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless, because he has some sonat the front, some cousin in the government, or some historicalsentiment for the flag and the nominal essence of his country, theoppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardour, andwill decry as dead to duty and honour anyone who points out how perverseis this helpless allegiance to a government representing no publicinterest. 

[Sidenote: Exclusive patriotism rational only when the governmentsupported is universally beneficent. ]

In proportion as governments become good and begin to operate for thegeneral welfare, patriotism itself becomes representative and anexpression of reason; but just in the same measure does hostility tothat government on the part of foreigners become groundless andperverse. A competitive patriotism involves ill-will toward all otherstates and a secret and constant desire to see them thrashed andsubordinated. It follows that a good government, while it justifies thisgovernmental patriotism in its subjects, disallows it in all other men. For a good government is an international benefit, and the prosperityand true greatness of any country is a boon sooner or later to the wholeworld; it may eclipse alien governments and draw away local populationsor industries, but it necessarily benefits alien individuals in so faras it is allowed to affect them at all. 

Animosity against a well-governed country is therefore madness. Arational patriotism would rather take the form of imitating andsupporting that so-called foreign country, and even, if practicable, offusing with it. The invidious and aggressive form of patriotism, thoughinspired generally only by local conceit, would nevertheless be reallyjustified if such conceit happened to be well grounded. A dream ofuniversal predominance visiting a truly virtuous and intelligent peoplewould be an aspiration toward universal beneficence. For every man whois governed at all must be governed by others; the point is, that theothers, in ruling him, shall help him to be himself and give scope tohis congenial activities. When coerced in that direction he obeys aforce which, in the best sense of the word, _represents_ him, andconsequently he is truly free; nor could he be ruled by a more nativeand rightful authority than by one that divines and satisfies his truenecessities. 

[Sidenote: Accidents of birth and training affect the ideal. ]

A man's nature is not, however, a quantity or quality fixed unalterablyand _a priori_. As breeding and selection improve a race, so everyexperience modifies the individual and offers a changed basis for futureexperience. The language, religion, education, and prejudices acquiredin youth bias character and predetermine the directions in whichdevelopment may go on. A child might possibly change his country; a mancan only wish that he might change it. Therefore, among the trueinterests which a government should represent, nationality itself mustbe included. 

[Sidenote: They are conditions and may contribute something. ]

Mechanical forces, we must not weary of repeating, do not come merely tovitiate the ideal; they come to create it. The historical background oflife is a part of its substance and the ideal can never growindependently of its spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sourcesof our being, whether physical, social, or imaginative. The ancients whokissed the earth on returning to their native country expressed noblyand passionately what every man feels for those regions and thosetraditions whence the sap of his own life has been sucked in. There is aprofound friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, howeverthey may have been overlaid with later sophistications. For this reasonthe homelier words of a mother tongue, the more familiar assurances ofan ancestral religion, and the very savour of childhood's dishes, remainalways a potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained influences, intheir vague totality, make a man's true nationality. A government, inorder to represent the general interests of its subjects, must move insympathy with their habits and memories; it must respect theiridiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their lives. Ifparting from a single object of love be, as it is, true dying, how muchmore would a shifting of all the affections be death to the soul. 

[Sidenote: They are not ends. ]

Tenderness to such creative influences is a mark of profundity; it hasthe same relation to political life that transcendentalism has toscience and morals; it shrinks back into radical facts, into centres ofvital radiation, and quickens the sense for inner origins. Nationalityis a natural force and a constituent in character which should bereckoned with and by no means be allowed to miss those fruits which italone might bear; but, like the things it venerates, it is only astarting-point for liberal life. Just as to be always talking abouttranscendental points of reference, primordial reality, and the self towhich everything appears, though at first it might pass for spiritualinsight, is in the end nothing but pedantry and impotence, so to bealways harping on nationality is to convert what should be a recognitionof natural conditions into a ridiculous pride in one's own oddities. Nature has hidden the roots of things, and though botany must now andthen dig them up for the sake of comprehension, their place is stillunder ground, if flowers and fruits are to be expected. The privateloyalties which a man must have toward his own people, grounding as theyalone can his morality and genius, need nevertheless to be seldomparaded. Attention, when well directed, turns rather to making immanentracial forces blossom out in the common medium and express themselves inways consonant with practical reason and universal progress. A man'sfeet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey theworld. 

What a statesman might well aim at would be to give the specialsentiments and gifts of his countrymen such a turn that, whilecontinuing all vital traditions, they might find less and less of whatis human alien to their genius. Differences in nationality, founded onrace and habitat, must always subsist; but what has been superaddedartificially by ignorance and bigotry may be gradually abolished in viewof universal relations better understood. There is a certain plane onwhich all races, if they reach it at all, must live in common, the planeof morals and science; which is not to say that even in those activitiesthe mind betrays no racial accent. What is excluded from science andmorals is not variety, but contradiction. Any community which had begunto cultivate the Life of Reason in those highest fields would tend tolive rationally on all subordinate levels also; for with science andmorality rationally applied the best possible use would be made of everylocal and historical accident. Where traditions had some virtue ornecessity about them they would be preserved; where they were remediableprejudices they would be superseded. 

[Sidenote: The symbol for country may be a man and may become an idol. ]

At the birth of society instincts existed, needful to the animal andhaving a certain glorious impetuosity about them, which prompted commonaction and speech, and a public morality, and men were led to constructmyths that might seem to justify this co-operation. Paternal authoritycould easily suggest one symbol for social loyalty: the chief, probablya venerable and imperious personage, could be called a father and obeyedas a natural master. His command might by convention be regarded as anexpression of the common voice, just as the father's will is by naturethe representative of his children's interests. Again, the members ofeach community were distinguished from their enemies by many a sign andcustom; these signs and customs might also become a graphic symbol forthe common life. 

Both these cases suggest how easily a symbol takes the place of itsobject and becomes an idol. If the symbol happens to be a man there arenatural human sentiments awakened by him; and whatever respect hischaracter or gifts may inspire, whatever charm there may be in hisperson, whatever graciousness he may add to his official favours orcommands, increase immensely his personal ascendency. A king has a greatopportunity to make himself loved. This scope given to privateinclination is what, to ordinary fancy, makes royalty enviable; few envyits impersonal power and historic weight. Yet if a king were nothing buta man surrounded by flatterers, who was cheered when he drove abroad, there would be little stability in monarchy. A king is really thestate's hinge and centre of gravity, the point where all private andparty ambitions meet and, in a sense, are neutralised. It is not easyfor factions to overturn him, for every other force in the state willinstinctively support him against faction. His elevation above everyone, the identity of his sober interests with those of the state at large, iscalculated to make him the people's natural representative; his word hastherefore a genuine authority, and his ascendency, not being invidious, is able to secure internal peace, even when not enlightened enough toinsure prosperity or to avoid foreign wars. Accordingly, whenever amonarchy is at all representative time has an irresistible tendency toincrease its prestige; the king is felt to be the guardian as well asthe symbol of all public greatness. 

Meantime a double dislocation is possible here: patriotism may be whollyidentified with personal loyalty to the sovereign, while the sovereignhimself, instead of making public interests his own, may direct hispolicy so as to satisfy his private passions. The first confusion leadsto a conflict between tradition and reason; the second to the ruin ofeither the state or the monarchy. In a word, a symbol needs to remaintransparent and to become adequate; failing in either respect, it missesits function. 

[Sidenote: Feudal representation sensitive but partial. ]

The feudal system offers perhaps the best illustration of a patriotismwholly submerged in loyalty. The sense of mutual obligation and servicewas very clear in this case; the vassal in swearing fealty knewperfectly well what sort of a bargain he was striking. A feudalgovernment, while it lasted, was accordingly highly responsive andresponsible. If false to its calling, it could be readily disowned, forit is easy to break an oath and to make new military associations, especially where territorial units are small and their links accidental. But this personal, conscious, and jealous subordination of man to manconstituted a government of insignificant scope. Military functions werealone considered and the rest was allowed to shift for itself. Feudalismcould have been possible only in a barbarous age when the arts existedon sufferance and lived on by little tentative resurrections. The feudallord was a genuine representative of a very small part of his vassal'sinterests. This slight bond sufficed, however, to give him a greatprestige and to stimulate in him all the habits and virtues of aresponsible master; so that in England, where vestiges of feudalismabound to this day, there is an aristocracy not merely titular. 

[Sidenote: Monarchical representation comprehensive but treacherous. ]

A highly concentrated monarchy presents the exactly opposite phenomenon. Here subordination is involuntary and mutual responsibility largelyunconscious. On the other hand, the scope of representation is very wideand the monarch may well embody the whole life of the nation. A greatcourt, with officers of state and a standing army, is sensitive tonothing so much as to general appearances and general results. Theinvisible forces of industry, morality, and personal ambition thatreally sustain the state are not studied or fomented by such agovernment; so that when these resources begin to fail, the ensuingcatastrophes are a mystery to everybody. The king and his ministersnever cease wondering how they can be so constantly unfortunate. 

So long, however, as the nation's vital force is unspent and taxes andsoldiers are available in plenty, a great monarchy tends to turn thoseresources to notable results. The arts and sciences are encouraged bythe patronage of men of breeding and affairs; they are disciplined intoa certain firmness and amplitude which artists and scholars, if left tothemselves, are commonly incapable of. Life is refined; religion itself, unless fanaticism be too hopelessly in the ascendant, is co-ordinatedwith other public interests and compelled to serve mankind; a liberallife is made possible; the imagination is stimulated and set free bythat same brilliant concentration of all human energies which defeatspractical liberty. At the same time luxury and all manner of conceitsare part and parcel of such a courtly civilisation, and its bestproducts are the first to be lost; so that very likely the dumb forcesof society--hunger, conscience, and malice--will not do any great harmwhen they destroy those treacherous institutions which, after giving thespirit a momentary expression, had become an offence to both spirit andflesh. Observers at the time may lament the collapse of so muchelegance and greatness; but nature has no memory and brushes awaywithout a qualm her card-castle of yesterday, if a new constructiveimpulse possesses her to-day. 

[Sidenote: Impersonal symbols no advantage. ]

Where no suitable persons are found to embody the state's unity, othersymbols have to be chosen. Besides the gods and their temples, there arethe laws which may, as among the Jews and Mohammedans, become as much afetich as any monarch, and one more long-lived; or else some traditionalpolicy of revenge or conquest, or even the country's name or flag, mayserve this symbolic purpose. A trivial emblem, which no thinking man cansubstitute for the thing signified, is not so great an advantage as atfirst sight it might seem; for in the first place men are oftenthoughtless and adore words and symbols with a terrible earnestness;while, on the other hand, an abstract token, because of its naturalinsipidity, can be made to stand for anything; so that patriotism, whenit uses pompous words alone for its stimulus, is very apt to be a cloakfor private interests, which the speaker may sincerely conceive to bethe only interests in question. 

[Sidenote: Patriotism not self-interest, save to the social man whoseaims are ideal. ]

The essence of patriotism is thus annulled, for patriotism does notconsist in considering the private and sordid interests of others aswell as one's own, by a kind of sympathy which is merely vicarious orepidemic selfishness; patriotism consists rather in being sensitive toa set of interests which no one could have had if he had lived inisolation, but which accrue to men conscious of living in society, andin a society having the scope and history of a nation. It was the viceof liberalism to believe that common interests covered nothing but thesum of those objects which each individual might pursue alone; wherebyscience, religion, art, language, and nationality itself would cease tobe matters of public concern and would appeal to the individual merelyas instruments. The welfare of a flock of sheep is secured if each iswell fed and watered, but the welfare of a human society involves thepartial withdrawal of every member from such pursuits to attend insteadto memory and to ideal possessions; these involve a certain consciouscontinuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animalexistence. It is not for man's interest to live unless he can live inthe spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerateand derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls intothe same error into which despots fall when they declare war out ofpersonal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, notdiscerning their country's interests, which they might haveappropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share. 

Democracies, too, are full of patriots of this lordly stripe, men whosepatriotism consists in joy at their personal possessions and in desireto increase them. The resultant of general selfishness might conceivablybe a general order; but though intelligent selfishness, if universal, might suffice for good government, it could not suffice for nationality. Patriotism is an imaginative passion, and imagination is ingenuous. Thevalue of patriotism is not utilitarian, but ideal. It belongs to thefree forms of society and ennobles a man not so much because it nerveshim to work or to die, which the basest passions may also do, butbecause it associates him, in working or dying, with an immortal andfriendly companion, the spirit of his race. This he received from hisancestors tempered by their achievements, and may transmit to posterityqualified by his own. 

CHAPTER VIII

IDEAL SOCIETY

[Sidenote: The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense. ]

To many beings--to almost all that people the earth and sky--each soulis not attached by any practical interest. Some are too distant to beperceived; the proximity of others passes unnoticed. It is far fromrequisite, in pursuing safety, that every strange animal be regarded aseither a friend or an enemy. Wanton hostilities would waste ammunitionand idle attachments would waste time. Yet it often happens that some ofthese beings, having something in common with creatures we are wont tonotice, since we stand to them in sexual, parental, or hostilerelations, cannot well go unobserved. Their presence fills us with avague general emotion, the arrested possibility at once of sexual, ofparental, and of hostile actions. This emotion is gregarious orimpersonally social. The flock it commonly regards may be described asan aggregate in which parents and children have been submerged, in whichmates are not yet selected, and enemies not yet descried. 

Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerfuland indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. Itrenders solitude terrible without making society particularlydelightful. A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we canreasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishmentfrom an accustomed society is often unbearable. A creature separatedfrom his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and ofpossible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the timeactive; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, withall its supports. He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource andemployment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normalexistence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek. Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathebut insufficient to live on. 

Similar beings herding together in the same places are naturally subjectto simultaneous reactions, and the sense of this common reaction makespossible the conception of many minds having a common experience. Theelements of this experience they express to one another by signs. Forwhen spontaneous reactions occur together in many animals, each, knowingwell his own emotion, will inevitably take the perceived attitude andgesture of his fellows for its expression--for his own attitude andgesture he knows nothing of; and he will thus possess, without furtherinstruction, the outward sign for his inner experience. 

[Sidenote: It gives rise to conscience or sympathy with the publicvoice. ]

It is see how a moral world can grow out of these primary intuitions. Knowing, for instance, the expression of anger, a man may come to findanger directed against himself; together with physical fear in thepresence of attack, he will feel the contagion of his enemy's passion, especially if his enemy be the whole group whose reactions he is wont toshare, and something in him will strive to be angry together with therest of the world. He will perfectly understand that indignation againsthimself which in fact he instinctively shares. This self-condemningemotion will be his sense of shame and his conscience. Words soon cometo give definition to such a feeling, which without expression inlanguage would have but little stability. For when a man is attracted toan act, even if it be condemned by others, he views it as delightful andeligible in itself; but when he is forced, by the conventional use ofwords, to attach to that act an opprobrious epithet, an epithet which hehimself has always applied with scorn, he finds himself unable tosuppress the emotion connoted by the word; he cannot defend hisrebellious intuition against the tyranny of language; he is inwardlyconfused and divided against himself, and out of his own mouth convictedof wickedness. 

A proof of the notable influence that language has on these emotions maybe found in their transformations. The connivance of a very few personsis sufficient to establish among them a new application of eulogisticterms; it will suffice to suppress all qualms in the pursuance of theircommon impulse and to consecrate a new ideal of character. It isaccordingly no paradox that there should be honour among thieves, kindness among harlots, and probity among fanatics. They have not losttheir conscience; they have merely introduced a flattering heresy intothe conventional code, to make room for the particular passion indulgedin their little world. 

[Sidenote: Guises of public opinion. ]

Sympathy with the general mind may also take other forms. Publicopinion, in a vivacious and clear-headed community, may be felt to bethe casual and irresponsible thing which in truth it is. Homer, forinstance, has no more solemn vehicle for it than the indefinite andunaccountable [Greek: tis]. "So, " he tells us, "somebody or anybodysaid. " In the Greek tragedians this unauthoritative entity was replacedby the chorus, an assemblage of conventional persons, incapable of anyoriginal perception, but possessing a fund of traditional lore, a justif somewhat encumbered conscience, and the gift of song. This chorus wastherefore much like the Christian Church and like that celestial choirof which the church wishes to be the earthly echo. Like the church, thetragic chorus had authority, because it represented a wide, ifill-digested, experience; and it had solemnity, because it spoke inarchaic tropes, emotional and obscure symbols of prehistoric conflicts. These sacramental forms retained their power to move in spite of theirlittle pertinence to living issues, partly on account of the mysterywhich enshrouded their forgotten passion and partly on account of thefantastic interpretations which that pregnant obscurity allowed. 

[Sidenote: Oracles and revelations. ]

Far more powerful, however, are those embodiments of the generalconscience which religion furnishes in its first and spontaneous phase, as when the Hebrew prophets dared to cry, "So saith the Lord. " Suchfaith in one's own inspiration is a more pliable oracle than traditionor a tragic chorus, and more responsive to the needs and changes of thehour. Occidental philosophers, in their less simple and less eloquentmanner, have often repeated that arrogant Hebraic cry: they have told usin their systems what God thinks about the world. Such pretensions wouldbe surprising did we not remind ourselves of the obvious truth that whatmen attribute to God is nothing but the ideal they value and grope forin themselves, and that the commandments, mythically said to come fromthe Most High, flow in fact from common reason and local experience. 

If history did not enable us to trace this derivation, the ever-presentpractical standard for faith would sufficiently indicate it; for no onewould accept as divine a revelation which he felt to be immoral or foundto be pernicious. And yet such a deviation into the maleficent is alwayspossible when a code is uprooted from its rational soil andtransplanted into a realm of imagination, where it is subject to allsorts of arbitrary distortions. If the sexual instinct should attach us(as in its extensions and dislocations it sometimes does) to beingsincapable of satisfying it or of uniting with us in propagating therace, we should, of course, study to correct that aberration so that ourjoys and desires might march in step with the possible progress of theworld. In the same way, if the gregarious instinct should bring us intothe imagined presence of companions that really did not exist, or onwhose attitude and co-operation our successes in no way depended, weshould try to lead back our sense of fellowship to its naturalfoundations and possible sanctions. 

Society exists so far as does analogous existence and community of ends. We may, in refining the social instinct, find some fellowship in theclouds and in the stars, for these, though remote, are companions of ourcareer. By poetic analogy we may include in the social world whateverhelps or thwarts our development, and is auxiliary to the energies ofthe soul, even if that object be inanimate. Whatever spirit in the pastor future, or in the remotest regions of the sky, shares our love andpursuit, say of mathematics or of music, or of any ideal object, becomes, if we can somehow divine his existence, a partner in our joysand sorrows, and a welcome friend. 

[Sidenote: The ideal a measure for all existences and no existenceitself. ]

Those ideal objects, however, for whose sake all revolutions in spaceand time may be followed with interest, are not themselves members ofour society. The ideal to which all forces should minister is itself noforce or factor in its own realisation. Such a possible disposition ofthings is a mere idea, eternal and inert, a form life might possiblytake on and the one our endeavours, if they were consistent, would wishto impose on it. This ideal itself, however, has often been expressed insome mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge aninnocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the veryinnocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle ofbad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the realforces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into anillusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments;and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carrywith us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiatedcharacters. For to have taken our purposes for our helpers is to havedefeated the first and ignored the second; it is to have neglectedrational labour and at the same time debauched social sense. 

The religious extensions of society should therefore be carefullywatched; for while sometimes, as with the Hebrew prophets, religiongives dramatic expression to actual social forces and helps to intensifymoral feeling, it often, as in mystics of all creeds and ages, deadensthe consciousness of real ties by feigning ties which are purelyimaginary. This self-deception is the more frequent because there floatbefore men who live in the spirit ideals which they look to with therespect naturally rendered to whatever is true, beautiful, or good; andthe symbolic rendering of these ideals, which is the rational functionof religion, may be confused with its superstitious or utilitarianpart--with exploiting occult forces to aid us in the work of life. 

Occult forces may indeed exist, and they may even be so disposed thatthe ideal is served by their agency; but the most notable embodiment ofa principle is not itself a principle, being only an instance, and themost exact fulfilment of a law is not a law, being simply an event. Todiscover a law may meantime be the most interesting of events, and theimage or formula that expresses a principle may be the most welcome ofintellectual presences. These symbols, weighted with their widesignificance, may hold the mind and attract its energies into theirvortex; and human genius is certainly not at its worst when employed inframing a good myth or a good argument. The lover of representation, behe thinker or dramatist, moves by preference in an ideal society. Hiscommunion with the world is half a soliloquy, for the personages in hisdialogue are private symbols, and being symbols they stand for what isnot themselves; the language he imputes to them is his own, though itis their ways that prompt him to impute that language to them. Plasticimages of his own making and shifting are his sole means of envisagingeternal principles and ultimate substances, things ideal and potential, which can never become phenomenal in their own persons. 

[Sidenote: Contrast between natural and intellectual bonds. ]

It is an inspiring thought, and a true one, that in proportion as aman's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriatesand expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reachthe same impersonal level of ideas--a level which his own influence mayhelp them to maintain. Patriotism envisages this ideal life in so far asit is locally coloured and grounded in certain racial aptitudes andtraditions; but the community recognised in patriotism is imbedded in alarger one embracing all living creatures. While in some respects wefind sympathy more complete the nearer home we remain, in another sensethere is no true companionship except with the universe. Instinctivesociety, with its compulsory affections, is of course deeper and moreelementary than any free or intellectual union. Love is at once moreanimal than friendship and more divine; and the same thing may be saidof family affection when compared with patriotism. What lies nearer theroots of our being must needs enjoy a wider prevalence and engage thesoul more completely, being able to touch its depths and hush itsprimordial murmurs. 

On the other hand, the free spirit, the political and speculativegenius in man, chafes under those blind involutions and material bonds. Natural, beneficent, sacred, as in a sense they may be, they somehowoppress the intellect and, like a brooding mother, half stifle what theyfeed. Something drives the youth afield, into solitude, into alienfriendships; only in the face of nature and an indifferent world can hebecome himself. Such a flight from home and all its pieties grows moreurgent when there is some real conflict of temper or conscience betweenthe young man and what is established in his family; and this happensoften because, after all, the most beneficent conventions are butmechanisms which must ignore the nicer sensibilities and divergences ofliving souls. 

[Sidenote: Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal society. ]

Common men accept these spiritual tyrannies, weak men repine at them, and great men break them down. But to defy the world is a seriousbusiness, and requires the greatest courage, even if the defiance touchin the first place only the world's ideals. Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continualcomforting assurances from the same social consensus that originallysuggested them. To reverse this process, to consult one's own experienceand elicit one's own judgment, challenging those in vogue, seems toooften audacious and futile; but there are impetuous minds born todisregard the chances against them, even to the extent of denying thatthey are taking chances at all. For in the first instance it neveroccurs to the inventor that he is the source of his new insight; hethinks he has merely opened his eyes and seen what, by an inconceivablefolly, the whole world had grown blind to. Wise men in antiquity, heimagines, saw the facts as he sees them, as the gods see them now, andas all sane men shall see them henceforward. 

Thus, if the innovator be a religious soul, grown conscious of some newspiritual principle, he will try to find support for his inspiration insome lost book of the law or in some early divine revelation corrupted, as he will assert, by wicked men, or even in some direct voice fromheaven; no delusion will be too obvious, no re-interpretation tooforced, if it can help him to find external support somewhere for hisspontaneous conviction. To denounce one authority he needs to invokeanother, and if no other be found, he will invent or, as they say, hewill postulate one. His courage in facing the actual world is thussupported by his ability to expand the world in imagination. Inseparating himself from his fellow-men he has made a new companion outof his ideal. An impetuous spirit when betrayed by the world will cry, "I know that my redeemer liveth"; and the antiphonal response will comemore wistfully after reflection:

 "It fortifies my soul to know That though I wander, Truth is so. "

[Sidenote: Significant symbols revert to the concrete. ]

The deceptions which nature practises on men are not always cruel. Theseare also kindly deceptions which prompt him to pursue or expect his owngood when, though not destined to come in the form he looks for, thisgood is really destined to come in some shape or other. Such, forinstance, are the illusions of romantic love, which may really terminatein a family life practically better than the absolute and chimericalunions which that love had dreamed of. Such, again, are those illusionsof conscience which attach unspeakable vague penalties and repugnancesto acts which commonly have bad results, though these are impossible toforecast with precision. When disillusion comes, while it may bring amomentary shock, it ends by producing a settled satisfaction unknownbefore, a satisfaction which the coveted prize, could it have beenattained, would hardly have secured. When on the day of judgment, orearlier, a man perceives that what he thought he was doing for theLord's sake he was really doing for the benefit of the least, perhaps, of the Lord's creatures, his satisfaction, after a moment's surprise, will certainly be very genuine. 

[Sidenote: Nature a symbol for destiny. ]

Such kindly illusions are involved in the symbolic method by whichgeneral relations and the inconceivably diffuse reality of things haveto be apprehended. The stars are in human thought a symbol for thesilent forces of destiny, really embodied in forms beyond ourapprehension; for who shall say what actual being may or may notcorrespond to that potentiality of life or sensation which is all thatthe external world can be to our science? When astrology invented thehoroscope it made an absurdly premature translation of celestialhieroglyphics into that language of universal destiny which in the endthey may be made to speak. The perfect astronomer, when he understood atlast exactly what pragmatic value the universe has, and what fortunesthe stars actually forebode, would be pleasantly surprised to discoverthat he was nothing but an astrologer grown competent and honest. 

[Sidenote: Representative notions have also inherent values. ]

Ideal society belongs entirely to this realm of kindly illusion, for itis the society of symbols. Whenever religion, art, or science presentsus with an image or a formula, involving no matter how momentous atruth, there is something delusive in the representation. It needstranslation into the detailed experience which it sums up in our ownpast or prophecies elsewhere. This eventual change in form, far fromnullifying our knowledge, can alone legitimise it. A conception notreducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency notexchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but afraud. And yet there is another aspect to the matter. Symbols arepresences, and they are those particularly congenial presences which wehave inwardly evoked and cast in a form intelligible and familiar tohuman thinking. Their function is to give flat experience a rationalperspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and makingit representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, notonly for their representative or practical value, implying usefuladjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for theirimmediate or æsthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit theyenlighten and exercise. 

This is prevailingly true in the fine arts which seem to express maneven more than they express nature; although in art also the symbolwould lose all its significance and much of its inward articulation ifnatural objects and eventual experience could be disregarded inconstructing it. In music, indeed, this ulterior significance is reducedto a minimum; yet it persists, since music brings an ideal object beforethe mind which needs, to some extent, translation into terms no longermusical--terms, for instance, of skill, dramatic passion, or moralsentiment. But in music pre-eminently, and very largely in all the arts, external propriety is adventitious; so much can the mere presence andweight of a symbol fill the mind and constitute an absolute possession. 

[Sidenote: Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directlyideal. ]

In religion and science the overt purpose of symbols is to representexternal truths. The inventors of these symbols think they are merelyuncovering a self-existent reality, having in itself the very form seenin their idea. They do not perceive that the society of God or Natureis an ideal society, nor that these phantoms, looming in theirimagination, are but significant figments whose existent basis is aminute and indefinite series of ordinary perceptions. They consequentlyattribute whatever value their genial syntheses may have to the objectas they picture it. The gods have, they fancy, the aspect and passions, the history and influence which their myth unfolds; nature in its turncontains hypostatically just those laws and forces which are describedby theory. Consequently the presence of God or Nature seems to themythologist not an ideal, but a real and mutual society, as ifcollateral beings, endowed with the conceived characters, actuallyexisted as men exist. But this opinion is untenable. As Hobbes said, ina phrase which ought to be inscribed in golden letters over the head ofevery talking philosopher: _No discourse whatsoever can end in absoluteknowledge of fact_. Absolute knowledge of fact is immediate, it isexperiential. We should have to _become_ God or Nature in order to knowfor a fact that they existed. Intellectual knowledge, on the other hand, where it relates to existence, is faith only, a faith which in thesematters means trust. For the forces of Nature or the gods, if they hadcrude existence, so that we might conceivably become what they are, would lose that causal and that religious function which are theiressence respectively. They would be merely collateral existences, loadedwith all sorts of irrelevant properties, parts of the universal flux, members of a natural society; and while as such they would have theirrelative importance, they would be embraced in turn within anintelligible system of relations, while their rights and dignities wouldneed to be determined by some supervening ideal. A nature existing inact would require metaphysics--the account of a deeper nature--toexpress its relation to the mind that knew and judged it. Any actual godwould need to possess a religion of his own, in order to fix his idealof conduct and his rights in respect to his creatures or rather, as weshould then be, to his neighbours. This situation may have no terrorsfor the thoughtless; but it evidently introduces something deeper thanNature and something higher than God, depriving these words of the bestsense in which a philosopher might care to use them. 

[Sidenote: Their opposite outlook. ]

The divine and the material are contrasted points of reference requiredby the actual. Reason, working on the immediate flux of appearances, reaches these ideal realms and, resting in them, perforce calls themrealities. One--the realm of causes--supplies appearances with a basisand calculable order; the other--the realm of truth andfelicity--supplies them with a standard and justification. Naturalsociety may accordingly be contrasted with ideal society, not becauseNature is not, logically speaking, ideal too, but because in naturalsociety we ally ourselves consciously with our origins andsurroundings, in ideal society with our purposes. There is an immensedifference in spirituality, in ideality of the moral sort, betweengathering or conciliating forces for action and fixing the ends whichaction should pursue. Both fields are ideal in the sense thatintelligence alone could discover or exploit them; yet to call natureideal is undoubtedly equivocal, since its ideal function is precisely tobe the substance and cause of the given flux, a ground-work forexperience which, while merely inferred and potential, is none the lessmechanical and material. The ideality of nature is indeed of such a sortas to be forfeited if the trusty instrument and true antecedent of humanlife were not found there. We should be frivolous and inconstant, takingour philosophy for a game and not for method in living, if having setout to look for the causes and practical order of things, and havingfound them, we should declare that they were not _really_ casual orefficient, on the strange ground that our discovery of them had been afeat of intelligence and had proved a priceless boon. The absurditycould not be greater if in moral science, after the goal of all efforthad been determined and happiness defined, we declared that this was not_really_ the good. 

Those who are shocked at the assertion that God and Nature are ideal, and that their contrasted prerogatives depend on that fact, may, ofcourse, use the same words in a different way, making them synonymous, and may readily "prove" that God or Nature exists materially and hasabsolute being. We need but agree to designate by those terms the sum ofexistences, whatever they (or it) may be to their own feeling. Then theontological proof asserts its rights unmistakably. Science and religion, however, are superfluous if what we wish to learn is that there isSomething, and that All-there-is must assuredly be All-there-is. Ecstasies may doubtless ensue upon considering that Being is andNon-Being is not, as they are said to ensue upon long enough consideringone's navel; but the Life of Reason is made of more variegated stuff. Science, when it is not dialectical, describes an ideal order ofexistences in space and time, such that all incidental facts, as theycome, may fill it in and lend it body. Religion, when pure, contemplatessome pertinent ideal of intelligence and goodness. Both religion andscience live in imaginative discourse, one being an aspiration and theother a hypothesis. Both introduce into the mind an ideal society. 

The Life of Reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but theexpression of man alone. A theory of nature is nothing but a mass ofobservations, made with a hunter's and an artist's eye. A mortal has notime for sympathy with his victim or his model; and, beyond a certainrange, he has no capacity for such sympathy. As in order to live he mustdevour one-half the world and disregard the other, so in order to thinkand practically to know he must deal summarily and selfishly with hismaterials; otherwise his intellect would melt again into endless andirrevocable dreams. The law of gravity, because it so notably unifiesthe motions of matter, is something which these motions themselves knownothing of; it is a description of them in terms of human discourse. Such discourse can never assure us absolutely that the motions itforecasts will occur; the sensible proof must ensue spontaneously in itsown good time. In the interval our theory remains pure presumption andhypothesis. Reliable as it may be in that capacity, it is no replica ofanything on its own level existing beyond. It creates, like allintelligence, a secondary and merely symbolic world. 

[Sidenote: In translating existence into human terms they give humannature its highest exercise. ]

When this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact, between potential generalities and actual particulars, has beenthoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued inscience and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying thesecreations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activityitself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genialmind. Of course, if these symbols had no real points of reference, ifthey were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim toconsideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeablesensations. They are, however, at their best good symbols for adiffused experience having a certain order and tendency; they renderthat reality with a difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, inwhich its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed toadvantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may thus becomeeloquent, vivid, important, being endowed with both poetic grandeur andpractical truth. 

The facts from which this truth is borrowed, if they were rehearsedunimaginatively, in their own flat infinity, would be far from arousingthe same emotions. The human eye sees in perspective; its glory wouldvanish were it reduced to a crawling, exploring antenna. Not that itloves to falsify anything. That to the worm the landscape might possessno light and shade, that the mountain's atomic structure should beunpicturable, cannot distress the landscape gardener nor the poet; whatconcerns them is the effect such things may produce in the human fancy, so that the soul may live in a congenial world. 

Naturalist and prophet are landscape painters on canvases of their own;each is interested in his own perception and perspective, which, if hetakes the trouble to reflect, need not deceive him about what the worldwould be if not foreshortened in that particular manner. This specialinterpretation is nevertheless precious and shows up the world in thatlight in which it interests naturalists or prophets to see it. Theirfigments make their chosen world, as the painter's apperceptions arethe breath of his nostrils. 

[Sidenote: Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic. ]

While the symbol's applicability is essential to its worth--sinceotherwise science would be useless and religion demoralising--its powerand fascination lie in its acquiring a more and more profound affinityto the human mind, so long as it can do so without surrendering itsrelevance to practice. Thus natural science is at its best when it ismost thoroughly mathematical, since what can be expressed mathematicallycan speak a human language. In such science only the ultimate materialelements remain surds; all their further movement and complication canbe represented in that kind of thought which is most intimatelysatisfactory and perspicuous. And in like manner, religion is at itsbest when it is most anthropomorphic; indeed, the two most spiritualreligions, Buddhism and Christianity, have actually raised a man, overflowing with utterly human tenderness and pathos, to the placeusually occupied only by cosmic and thundering deities. The human heartis lifted above misfortune and encouraged to pursue unswervingly itsinmost ideal when no compromise is any longer attempted with what is notmoral or human, and Prometheus is honestly proclaimed to be holier thanZeus. At that moment religion ceases to be superstitious and becomes arational discipline, an effort to perfect the spirit rather than tointimidate it. 

[Sidenote: Summary of this book. ]

We have seen that society has three stages--the natural, the free, andthe ideal. In the natural stage its function is to produce theindividual and equip him with the prerequisites of moral freedom. Whenthis end is attained society can rise to friendship, to unanimity anddisinterested sympathy, where the ground of association is some idealinterest, while this association constitutes at the same time a personaland emotional bond. Ideal society, on the contrary, transcendsaccidental conjunctions altogether. Here the ideal interests themselvestake possession of the mind; its companions are the symbols it breedsand possesses for excellence, beauty, and truth. Religion, art, andscience are the chief spheres in which ideal companionship is found. Itremains for us to traverse these provinces in turn and see to whatextent the Life of Reason may flourish there. 

*** End of Volume Two ***

REASON IN RELIGION

Volume Three of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

This Dover edition, first published in 1982, is an unabridgedrepublication of volume three of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases ofHuman Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y. , in 1905. 

CONTENTS

REASON IN RELIGION

CHAPTER I

HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON

Religion is certainly significant, but not literally true. --All religionis positive and particular. --It aims at the Life of Reason, but largelyfails to attain it. --Its approach imaginative. --When its poetic methodis denied its value is jeopardised. --It precedes science rather thanhinders it. --It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. Pages 3-14

CHAPTER II

RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION

Felt causes not necessary causes. --Mechanism and dialectic ulteriorprinciples. --Early selection of categories. --Tentative rationalworlds. --Superstition a rudimentary philosophy. --A miracle, thoughunexpected, more intelligible than a regular process. --Superstitionscome of haste to understand. --Inattention suffers them tospread. --Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. Pages15-27

CHAPTER III

MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER

Fear created the gods. --Need also contributed. --The real evidences ofGod's existence. --Practice precedes theory in religion. --Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices. --Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice. --Ritualistic arts. --Thank-offerings. --Thesacrifice of a contrite heart. --Prayer is not utilitarian inessence. --Its supposed efficacy magical. --Theological puzzles. --A realefficacy would be mechanical. --True uses of prayer. --It clarifies theideal. --It reconciles to the inevitable. --It fosters spiritual life byconceiving it in its perfection. --Discipline and contemplation are theirown reward Pages 28-48

CHAPTER IV

MYTHOLOGY

Status of fable in the mind. --It requires genius. --It only halfdeceives. --Its interpretative essence. --Contrast withscience. --Importance of the moral factor. --Its submergence. --Mythjustifies magic. --Myths might be metaphysical. --They appear ready made, like parts of the social fabric. --They perplex theconscience. --Incipient myth in the Vedas. --Natural suggestions soonexhausted. --They will be carried out in abstract fancy. --They may becomemoral ideals. --The Sun-god moralised. --The leaven of religion is moralidealism Pages 49-68

CHAPTER V

THE HEBRAIC TRADITION

Phases of Hebraism. --Israel's tribal monotheism. --Problemsinvolved. --The prophets put new wine in old bottles. --Inspiration andauthority. --Beginnings of the Church. --Bigotry turned into aprinciple. --Penance accepted. --Christianity combines optimism andasceticism. --Reason smothered between the two. --Religion made aninstitution Pages 69-82

CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC

The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive. --A universalreligion must interpret the whole world. --Double appeal ofChristianity. --Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths. --Hebrew philosophyof history identified with Platonic cosmology. --The resulting orthodoxsystem. --The brief drama of things. --Mythology is a language and must beunderstood to convey something by symbols Pages 83-98

CHAPTER VII

PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY

Need of paganising Christianity. --Catholic piety more human than theliturgy. --Natural pieties. --Refuge taken in the supernatural. --Theepisodes of life consecrated mystically. --Paganism chastened, Hebraismliberalised. --The system post-rational and founded on despair. --Externalconversion of the barbarians. --Expression of the northern genius withinCatholicism, --Internal discrepancies between the two. --Tradition andinstinct at odds in Protestantism. --The Protestant spirit remote fromthat of the gospel. --Obstacles to humanism. --The Reformation andcounter-reformation. --Protestantism an expression of character. --It hasthe spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience. --Itsemancipation from Christianity Pages 99-126

CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH

Myth should dissolve with the advance of science. --But myth is confusedwith the moral values it expresses. --Neo-Platonic revision. --It mademythical entities of abstractions. --Hypostasis ruins ideals. --The Stoicrevision. --The ideal surrendered before the physical. --Parallelmovements in Christianity. --Hebraism, if philosophical, must bepantheistic. --Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals. --Trulydivine action limited to what makes for the good. --Need of an opposingprinciple. --The standard of value is human. --Hope for happiness makesbelief in God Pages 127-147

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

Suspense between hope and disillusion. --Superficial solution. --But fromwhat shall we be redeemed?--Typical attitude of St. Augustine. --Heachieves Platonism. --He identifies it with Christianity. --God thegood. --Primary and secondary religion. --Ambiguous efficacy of the goodin Plato. --Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job. --TheManicheans. --All things good by nature. --The doctrine of creationdemands that of the fall. --Original sin. --Forced abandonment of theideal. --The problem among the Protestants. --Pantheism accepted. --Plainerscorn for the ideal. --The price of mythology is superstition. Pages148-177

CHAPTER X

PIETY

The core of religion not theoretical. --Loyalty to the sources of ourbeing. --The pious Æneas. --An ideal background required. --Piety acceptsnatural conditions and present tasks. --The leadership of instinct isnormal. --Embodiment essential to spirit. --Piety to the gods takes formfrom current ideals. --The religion of humanity. --Cosmic piety Pages178-192

CHAPTER XI

SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS

To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal. --Spiritualitynatural. --Primitive consciousness may be spiritual. --Spirit crossed byinstrumentalities. --One foe of the spirit is worldliness. --The case forand against pleasure. --Upshot of worldly wisdom. --Two supposed escapesfrom vanity: fanaticism and mysticism. --Both are irrational. --Is there athird course?--Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienablevalues. --For these the religious imagination must supply an idealstandard Pages 193-213

CHAPTER XII

CHARITY

Possible tyranny of reason. --Everything has its rights. --Primary andsecondary morality. --Uncharitable pagan justice is not just. --The doomof ancient republics. --Rational charity. --Its limits. --Its mythicalsupports. --There is intelligence in charity. --Buddhist and Christianforms of it. --Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural Pages214-228

CHAPTER XIII

THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE

The length of life a subject for natural science. --"Psychical"phenomena. --Hypertrophies of sense. --These possibilities affect physicalexistence only. --Moral grounds for the doctrine. --The necessaryassumption of a future. --An assumption no evidence. --A solipsisticargument. --Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods. --Or toa divine principle in all beings. --In neither case is the individualimmortal. --Possible forms of survival. --Arguments from retribution andneed of opportunity. --Ignoble temper of both. --False optimisticpostulate involved. --Transition to ideality Pages 229-250

CHAPTER XIV

IDEAL IMMORTALITY

Olympian immortality the first ideal. --Its indirect attainment byreproduction. --Moral acceptance of this compromise. --Even vicariousimmortality intrinsically impossible. --Intellectual victory overchange. --The glory of it. --Reason makes man's divinity and hisimmortality. --It is the locus of all truths. --Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence. --Logical immortality, through objects ofthought. --Ethical immortality, through types of excellence Pages 251-273

CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

The failure of magic and of mythology. --Their imaginative value. --Pietyand spirituality justified. --Mysticism a primordial state offeeling. --It may recur at any stage of culture. --Form gives substanceits life and value. Pages 274-279

REASON IN RELIGION

CHAPTER I

HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON

[Sidenote: Religion certainly significant. ]

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's, that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth inphilosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. " In every age themost comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time andcountry something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating thatreligion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even theheretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after awhile to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel againstis a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident, and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but theyyearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of aworld interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end thattheir atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part oftheir thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world's faithwas that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, theenlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, whoplume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude ofreligion--something which the blindest half see--is not nearlyenlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible withreligious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits ofthought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, andtheir true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to facewith the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make himunderstand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense soprofoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary inan influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, thechief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of thebest human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is "so malapert as asplenetic religion, " a sour irreligion is almost as perverse. 

[Sidenote: But not literally true. ]

At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted heforgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men'sminds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estrangesthem. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no betterconceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together. Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by thepoet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated bythe philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life itsanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society thathas adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, andprobably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is ahistorical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. Inthe rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with somedifficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a newconvention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but whichis essentially as arbitrary as the old. 

[Sidenote: All religion is positive and particular. ]

The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is notmore hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be noreligion in particular. A courier's or a dragoman's speech may indeed beoften unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixtureof personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaningonly because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages andits obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion toanother, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may oftenretain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they mayegregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may theyremember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent whicha perfect religion should have. Yet a moment's probing of theconceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing butvestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of alldogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its firstunfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will befound either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselvesspontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to somefaith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by aconverted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a markedidiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising messageand in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opensand the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and anotherworld to live in--whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it orno--is what we mean by having a religion. 

[Sidenote: It aims at the Life of Reason. ]

What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we callreligion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the twois close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason isthe seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show usthat whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attainthe highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion. Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rationallife, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, theLife of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should besubordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere andmakes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the samething. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, andtransforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life ofReason. And a further function which is common to both is that ofemancipating man from his personal limitations. In different waysreligions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. Asupernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity uponearth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed byrepeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost inthe absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adorationin the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once lovedmay be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason inits way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to commonobjects, political and intellectual, in which an individual may losewhat is mortal and accidental in himself and immortalise what isrational and human; it teaches us how sweet and fortunate death may beto those whose spirit can still live in their country and in theirideas; it reveals the radiating effects of action and the eternalobjects of thought. 

Yet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it isphilosophy that speaks. That change should remind us that even if thefunction of religion and that of reason coincide, this function isperformed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many, reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourished by prayer. Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, onwhich, indeed, we may come to reflect, but which exists in us ideallyonly, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do notconform to it; it does not urge or chide us, nor call for any emotionson our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objectswhich it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion bringssome order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds tothe natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces intothem. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal constitution whichexperience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experienceitself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolateprinciple, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet thisstruggling and changing force of religion, seems to direct man towardsomething eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within thesoul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all the souldepends upon. So that religion, in its intent, is a more conscious anddirect pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art. For these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively andpiecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimatejustification of their instinctive aims. Religion also has aninstinctive and blind side, and bubbles up in all manner of chancepractices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward theheart of things, and, from whatever quarter it may come, veers in thedirection of the ultimate. 

[Sidenote: But largely fails to attain it. ]

Nevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life ofReason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of eachreligion may prevail upon themselves to express satisfaction with itsresults, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generousdraughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the variousreligions at once and comparing their achievements with what reasonrequires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they haveone and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offerimaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurableessentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directedeffort. The Greek oracles, for instance, pretended to heal our naturalignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while theChristian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our naturaldeath, the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing andconditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done forthe real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocatesentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuinghappiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and aone-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. Whenthese come, the real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxedvitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spiritsuntrained in any natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauchesthe morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought tofulfil. 

[Sidenote: Its approach imaginative. ]

What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near torationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture andin its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues, rationalitythrough the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, itgives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts, insinuates ideals, or remoulds aspiration, it is an imaginativesubstitute for wisdom--I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuitof all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented inreligion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literaltruth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence thedepth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than itscontradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as thatof reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by uncheckedpoetical conceits. These are repeated and vulgarised in proportion totheir original fineness and significance, till they pass for reports ofobjective truth and come to constitute a world of faith, superposed uponthe world of experience and regarded as materially enveloping it, if notin space at least in time and in existence. The only truth of religioncomes from its interpretation of life, from its symbolic rendering ofthat moral, experience which it springs out of and which it seeks toelucidate. Its falsehood comes from the insidious misunderstanding whichclings to it, to the effect that these poetic conceptions are not merelyrepresentations of experience as it is or should be, but are ratherinformation about experience or reality elsewhere--an experience andreality which, strangely enough, supply just the defects betrayed byreality and experience here. 

[Sidenote: When its poetic method is denied its value is jeopardised. ]

Thus religion has the same original relation to life that poetry has;only poetry, which never pretends to literal validity, adds a pure valueto existence, the value of a liberal imaginative exercise. The poeticvalue of religion would initially be greater than that of poetry itself, because religion deals with higher and more practical themes, with sidesof life which are in greater need of some imaginative touch and idealinterpretation than are those pleasant or pompous things which ordinarypoetry dwells upon. But this initial advantage is neutralised in part bythe abuse to which religion is subject, whenever its symbolic rightnessis taken for scientific truth. Like poetry, it improves the world onlyby imagining it improved, but not content with making this addition tothe mind's furniture--an addition which might be useful andennobling--it thinks to confer a more radical benefit by persuadingmankind that, in spite of appearances, the world is really such as thatrather arbitrary idealisation has painted it. This spurious satisfactionis naturally the prelude to many a disappointment, and the soul hasinfinite trouble to emerge again from the artificial problems andsentiments into which it is thus plunged. The value of religion becomesequivocal. Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolicrepresentation of moral reality which may have a most important functionin vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, thelessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuousincidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it isstrenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world andin the conscience. 

[Sidenote: It precedes science rather than hinders it. ]

On the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having takenthe place of anything better, but rather as having come to relievesituations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitelyworse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practicalslavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it. Natural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what mayhappen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it. We must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral andnatural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we mustrather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculativeinsight which it has introduced into the world. 

[Sidenote: It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. ]

We may therefore proceed to analyse the significance and the functionwhich religion has had at its different stages, and, without disguisingor in the least condoning its confusion with literal truth, we may allowourselves to enter as sympathetically as possible into its variousconceptions and emotions. They have made up the inner life of manysages, and of all those who without great genius or learning have livedsteadfastly in the spirit. The feeling of reverence should itself betreated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with whichalone, in the end, reverence is compatible. Nor have we any reason to beintolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religionsdisplay. Were we dealing with a science, such contradictions would haveto be instantly solved and removed; but when we are concerned with thepoetic interpretation of experience, contradiction means only variety, and variety means spontaneity, wealth of resource, and a nearer approachto total adequacy. 

If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin bytaking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which theHebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, andwhen their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated andjustified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and arabid intolerance. The question of monotheism, for instance, was aterrible question to the Jews. Idolatry did not consist in worshipping agod who, not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather inrecognising other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To theGreeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous, monotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible. Tosay God or the gods was only to use different expressions for the sameinfluence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with allexistence, now viewed in its various manifestations in moral life, innature, or in history. So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoicsmeets us at every step--the combination of monotheism withpolytheism--is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation ofphrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moralthings. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions andcontroversies lose all their bitterness. Each doctrine will simplyrepresent the moral plane on which they live who have devised or adoptedit. Religions will thus be better or worse, never true or false. Weshall be able to lend ourselves to each in turn, and seek to draw fromit the secret of its inspiration. 

CHAPTER II

RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION

We need not impose upon ourselves the endless and repulsive task ofdescribing all the superstitions that have existed in the world. In hisimpotence and laziness the natural man unites any notion with any otherin a loose causal relation. A single instance of juxtaposition, nay, themere notion and dream of such a combination, will suffice to arouse fearor to prompt experimental action. 

[Sidenote: Felt causes not necessary causes. ]

When philosophers have objected to Hume's account of causation that hegave no sufficient basis for the _necessary_ influence of cause oneffect, they have indulged in a highly artificial supposition. They haveassumed that people actually regard causes as necessary. They supposethat before we can feel the interdependence of two things in experiencewe must have an unshakable conviction that their connection is necessaryand universal. But causation in such an absolute sense is no category ofpractical thinking. It appears, if at all, only in dialectic, in idealapplications of given laws to cases artificially simplified, where theterms are so defined that their operation upon one another is involvedin the notion of them. So if we say that an unsupported weight _must_fall to the ground, we have included in the word "weight" the notion ofa downward strain. The proposition is really trifling and identical. Itmerely announces that things which tend to fall to the ground tend tofall to the ground, and that heavy things are heavy. So, when we havecalled a thing a cause, we have defined it as that which involves aneffect, and if the effect did not follow, the title of cause would nolonger belong to the antecedent. But the necessity of this sequence ismerely verbal. We have never, in the presence of the antecedent, theassurance that the title of cause will accrue to it. Our expectation isempirical, and we feel and assert nothing in respect to the necessity ofthe expected sequence. 

[Sidenote: Mechanism and dialectic ulterior principles. ]

A cause, in real life, means a justifying circumstance. We areabsolutely without insight into the machinery of causation, notably inthe commonest cases, like that of generation, nutrition, or theoperation of mind on matter. But we are familiar with the more notablesuperficial conditions in each case, and the appearance in part of anyusual phenomenon makes us look for the rest of it. We do not ordinarilyexpect virgins to bear children nor prophets to be fed by ravens norprayers to remove mountains; but we may believe any of these things atthe merest suggestion of fancy or report, without any warrant fromexperience, so loose is the bond and so external the relation betweenthe terms most constantly associated. A quite unprecedented occurrencewill seem natural and intelligible enough if it falls in happily withthe current of our thoughts. Interesting and significant events, however, are so rare and so dependent on mechanical conditionsirrelevant to their value, that we come at last to wonder at theirself-justified appearance apart from that cumbrous natural machinery, and to call them marvels, miracles, and things to gape at. We come toadopt scientific hypotheses, at least in certain provinces of ourthought, and we lose our primitive openness and simplicity of mind. Then, with an unjustified haste, we assert that miracles are impossible, i. E. , that nothing interesting and fundamentally natural can happenunless all the usual, though adventitious, _mise-en-scène_ has beenprepared behind the curtain. 

The philosopher may eventually discover that such machinery is reallyneeded and that even the actors themselves have a mechanism within them, so that not only their smiles and magnificent gestures, but their heatedfancy itself and their conception of their rôles are but outer effectsand dramatic illusions produced by the natural stage-carpentry in theirbrains. Yet such eventual scientific conclusions have nothing to do withthe tentative first notions of men when they begin to experiment in theart of living. As the seeds of lower animals have to be innumerable, sothat in a chance environment a few may grow to maturity, so the seedsof rational thinking, the first categories of reflection, have to bemultitudinous, in order that some lucky principle of synthesis maysomewhere come to light and find successful application. Science, whichthinks to make belief in miracles impossible, is itself belief inmiracles--in the miracles best authenticated by history and by dailylife. 

[Sidenote: Early selection of categories. ]

When men begin to understand things, when they begin to reflect and toplan, they divide the world into the hateful and the delightful, theavoidable and the attainable. And in feeling their way toward whatattracts them, or in escaping what they fear, they at first followpassively the lead of instinct: they watch themselves live, or rathersink without reserve into their living; their reactions are as littleforeseen and as naturally accepted as their surroundings. Their ideasare incidents in their perpetual oscillation between apathy and passion. The stream of animal life leaves behind a little sediment of knowledge, the sand of that auriferous river; a few grains of experience remain tomark the path traversed by the flood. These residual ideas andpremonitions, these first categories of thought, are of any and everysort. All the contents of the mind and all the threads of relation thatweave its elements together are alike fitted, for all we can then see, to give the clue to the labyrinth in which we find ourselves wandering. 

There is _prima facie_ no ground for not trying to apply to experiencesuch categories, for instance, as that of personal omnipotence, as ifeverything were necessarily arranged as we may command or require. Onthis principle children often seem to conceive a world in which they areastonished not to find themselves living. Or we may try aestheticcategories and allow our reproductive imagination--by which memory isfed--to bring under the unity of apperception only what can fall withinit harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding, impervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing initself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to whichit was attached. It would yield an experience--doubtless a highlyinteresting and elaborate experience--but one which could never serve asan index to successful action. It would totally fail to represent itsconditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continuedexistence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part, therefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of lovely vapid music orparasitic dream. 

Now such dreams are in fact among the first and most absorbingformations in the human mind. If we could penetrate into animalconsciousness we should not improbably find that what there accompaniesinstinctive motions is a wholly irrelevant fancy, whose flaring up andsubsidence no doubt coincide with the presence of objects interesting tothe organism and causing marked reactions within it; yet this fancy mayin no way represent the nature of surrounding objects nor the eventualresults, for the animal's consciousness, of its own present experience. 

[Sidenote: Tentative rational worlds. ]

The unlimited number of possible categories, their arbitrariness andspontaneity, may, however, have this inconvenience, that the categoriesmay be irrelevant to one another no less than to the natural life theyought to express. The experience they respectively synthesise maytherefore be no single experience. One pictured world may succeedanother in the sphere of sensibility, while the body whose sensibilitythey compose moves in a single and constant physical cosmos. Each littlemental universe may be intermittent, or, if any part of it endures whilea new group of ideas comes upon the stage, there may arisecontradictions, discords, and a sense of lurking absurdity which willtend to disrupt thought logically at the same time that the processes ofnutrition and the oncoming of new dreams tend to supplant itmechanically. Such drifting categories have no mutual authority. Theyreplace but do not dominate one another, and the general conditions oflife--by conceiving which life itself might be surveyed--remain entirelyunrepresented. 

What we mean, indeed, by the natural world in which the conditions ofconsciousness are found and in reference to which mind and its purposescan attain practical efficacy, is simply the world constructed bycategories found to yield a constant, sufficient, and consistent object. Having attained this conception, we justly call it the truth andmeasure the intellectual value of all other constructions by theiraffinity to that rational vision. 

Such a rational vision has not yet been attained by mankind, but itwould be absurd to say that because we have not fully nor evenproximately attained it, we have not gained any conception whatever of areliable and intelligible world. The modicum of rationality achieved inthe sciences gives us a hint of a perfect rationality which, ifunattainable in practice, is not inconceivable in idea. So, in stillmore inchoate moments of reflection, our ancestors nursed even moreisolated, less compatible, less adequate conceptions than those whichleave our philosophers still unsatisfied. The categories they employeddominated smaller regions of experience than do the categories ofhistory and natural science; they had far less applicability to theconduct of affairs and to the happy direction of life as a whole. Yetthey did yield vision and flashes of insight. They lighted men a stepahead in the dark places of their careers, and gave them at certainjunctures a sense of creative power and moral freedom. So that thenecessity of abandoning one category in order to use a better need notinduce us to deny that the worse category could draw the outlines of asort of world and furnish men with an approach to wisdom. If ourancestors, by such means, could not dominate life as a whole, neithercan we, in spite of all progress. If literal truth or finalapplicability cannot be claimed for their thought, who knows how manyand how profound the revolutions might be which our own thought wouldhave to suffer if new fields of perception or new powers of synthesiswere added to our endowment?

[Sidenote: Superstition a rudimentary philosophy. ]

[Sidenote: A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than aregular process. ]

We sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous wasdisbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganise experienceand defeat intelligence. No supposition could be more erroneous. Everysuperstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand, to foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis ischimerical, arbitrary, and founded on a confusion of efficient causeswith ideal results. But the same is true of many a renowned philosophy. To appeal to what we call the supernatural is really to rest in theimaginatively obvious, in what we ought to call the natural, if naturalmeant easy to conceive and originally plausible. Moral and individualforces are more easily intelligible than mechanical universal laws. Theformer domesticate events in the mind more readily and more completelythan the latter. A miracle is so far from being a contradiction to thecausal principle which the mind actually applies in its spontaneousobservations that it is primarily a better illustration of thatprinciple than an event happening in the ordinary course of nature. Forthe ground of the miracle is immediately intelligible; we see the mercyor the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some othersort that inspired it. A mechanical law, on the contrary, is only arecord of the customary but reasonless order of things. A merelyinexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be nomiracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that, contrary to what isusually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if thewater of Lourdes, bottled and sold by chemists, cured all diseases, there would be no miracle, but only a new scientific discovery. In sucha case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why wewere created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effectmorally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it befavourable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomesmiraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedienceof nature to the exigencies of spirit. Were there no known ground forsuch a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events, we should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have norelation to religion. 

[Sidenote: Superstitions come of haste to understand. ]

What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidencein the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as wehave laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous andcannot fulfil its function until it applies mechanical categories toexistence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moralintelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmonyin the world. For moral significance is relative to particular interestsand to natures having a constitutional and definite bias, and havingconsequently special preferences which it is chimerical to expect therest of the world to be determined by. The attempt to subsume thenatural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a governmentof the parent by the child--something children are not averse to. Butsuch follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature, restless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They arethe errors of reason, wanderings in the by-paths of philosophy, not dueto lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather to a prematurevivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequateinformation. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all falsephilosophy. The mind's reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficientnourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, sothat both materials and guidance are lacking for its precociousorganising force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deepand ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower--aninversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most patheticdisorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged and thehigher contaminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought tofollow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it oughtto feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hencethe deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorantof and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned toexercise. 

[Sidenote: Inattention suffers them to spread. ]

It is now generally acknowledged that workers of miracles, prophets, soothsayers, and inspired or divinely appointed men may, likemetaphysicians, be quite sincere and fully believe they possess thepowers which they pretend to display. In the case of the moreintelligent, however, this sincerity was seldom complete, but mixed witha certain pitying or scornful accommodation to the vulgar mind. Something unusual might actually have happened, in which case thereference of it to the will that welcomed it (without, of course, beingable to command it unconditionally) might well seem reasonable. Orsomething normal might have been interpreted fancifully, but to thegreater glory of God and edification of the faithful; in which case theincidental error might be allowed to pass unchallenged out of respectfor the essential truths thus fortified in pious minds. The power ofhabit and convention, by which the most crying inconsistencies andhypocrisies are soon put to sleep, would facilitate these accommodationsand render them soon instinctive; while the world at large, entirelyhypnotised by the ceremonious event and its imaginative echoes, couldnever come to close quarters with the facts at all, but could view themonly through accepted preconceptions. Thus elaborate machinery can ariseand long endure for the magical service of man's interests. How deeplyrooted such conventions are, how natural it is that they should havedominated even civilised society, may best be understood if we considerthe remnants of such habits in our midst--not among gypsies orprofessional wonder-workers but among reflecting men. 

[Sidenote: Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. ]

Some men of action, like Cæsar and Napoleon, are said to have beensuperstitious about their own destiny. The phenomenon, if true, would beintelligible. They were masterful men, men who in a remarkable degreepossessed in their consciousness the sign and sanction of what washappening in the world. This endowment, which made them dominate theircontemporaries, could also reveal the sources and conditions of theirown will. They might easily come to feel that it was destiny--the totalmovement of things--that inspired, crowned, and ruined them. But as theycould feel this only instinctively, not by a systematic view of all theforces in play, they would attach their voluminous sense of fatality tosome chance external indication or to some ephemeral impulse withinthemselves; so that what was essentially a profound but inarticulatescience might express itself in the guise of a superstition. 

In like manner Socrates' Demon (if not actually a playful fable by whichthe sage expressed the negative stress of conscience, the "thou shaltnot" of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom. Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a messagefrom heaven. He taught a feeble voice--senseless like all ghostlyvoices--to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element withinhimself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for someexternal sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man isobviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonablysubordinate reason at certain junctures. Its abdication, however, washalf playful, for he could always find excellent grounds for what thedemon commanded. 

In much the same manner the priests at Delphi, when they were prudent, made of the Pythia's ravings oracles not without elevation of tone andwith an obvious political tendency. Occasions for superstition whichbaser minds would have turned to sheer lunacy or silly fears ornecromantic clap-trap were seized by these nobler natures for a goodpurpose. A benevolent man, not inclined to scepticism, can always arguethat the gods must have commanded what he himself knows to be right; andhe thinks it religion on his part to interpret the oracle accordingly, or even to prompt it. In such ways the most arbitrary superstitions takea moral colour in a moral mind; something which can come about all themore easily since the roots of reason and superstition are intertwinedin the mind, and society has always expressed and cultivated themtogether. 

CHAPTER III

MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER

[Sidenote: Fear created the gods. ]

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so briefcould be on so great a subject. To recognise an external power it isrequisite that we should find the inner stream and tendency of lifesomehow checked or disturbed; if all went well and acceptably, we shouldattribute divinity only to ourselves. The external is therefore evilrather than good to early apprehension--a sentiment which still survivesin respect to matter; for it takes reflection to conceive that externalforces form a necessary environment, creating as well as limiting us, and offering us as many opportunities as rebuffs. The first things whicha man learns to distinguish and respect are things with a will of theirown, things which resist his casual demands; and so the first sentimentwith which he confronts reality is a certain animosity, which becomescruelty toward the weak and fear and fawning before the powerful. Towardmen and animals and the docile parts of nature these sentiments soonbecome defined accurately, representing the exact degree of friendlinessor use which we discover in these beings; and it is in practical terms, expressing this relation to our interests, that we define theircharacters. Much remains over, however, which we cannot easily define, indomitable, ambiguous regions of nature and consciousness which we knownot how to face; yet we cannot ignore them, since it is thence thatcomes what is most momentous in our fortunes--luck, disease, tempest, death, victory. Thence come also certain mysterious visitations to theinner mind--dreams, apparitions, warnings. To perceive these things isnot always easy, nor is it easy to interpret them, while the greatchanges in nature which, perhaps, they forebode may indeed be watchedbut cannot be met intelligently, much less prevented. The feeling withwhich primitive man walks the earth must accordingly be, for the mostpart, apprehension; and what he meets, beyond the well-conned ways ofhis tribe and habitat, can be nothing but formidable spirits. 

[Sidenote: Need also contributed. ]

Impotence, however, has a more positive side. If the lightning andthunder, startling us in our peace, suddenly reveal unwelcome powersbefore which we must tremble, hunger, on the contrary, will torment uswith floating ideas, intermittent impulses to act, suggesting thingswhich would be wholly delightful if only we could find them, but whichit becomes intolerable to remain without. In this case our fear, if westill choose to call it so, would be lest our cravings should remainunsatisfied, or rather fear has given place to need; we recognise ourdependence on external powers not because they threaten but because theyforsake us. 

[Sidenote: The real evidences of God's existence. ]

Obvious considerations like these furnish the proof of God's existence, not as philosophers have tried to express it after the fact and inrelation to mythical conceptions of God already current, but as mankindoriginally perceived it, and (where religion is spontaneous) perceivesit still. There is such an order in experience that we find our desiresdoubly dependent on something which, because it disregards our will, wecall an external power. Sometimes it overwhelms us with scourges andwonders, so that we must marvel at it and fear; sometimes it removes, orafter removing restores, a support necessary to our existence andhappiness, so that we must cling to it, hope for it, and love it. Whatever is serious in religion, whatever is bound up with morality andfate, is contained in those plain experiences of dependence and ofaffinity to that on which we depend. The rest is poetry, or mythicalphilosophy, in which definitions not warranted in the end by experienceare given to that power which experience reveals. To reject sucharbitrary definitions is called atheism by those who frame them; but aman who studies for himself the ominous and the friendly aspects ofreality and gives them the truest and most adequate expression he can isrepeating what the founders of religion did in the beginning. He istheir companion and follower more truly than are the apologists forsecond-hand conceptions which these apologists themselves have nevercompared with the facts, and which they prize chiefly formisrepresenting actual experience and giving it imaginary extensions. 

Religion is not essentially an imposture, though it might seem so if weconsider it as its defenders present it to us rather than as itsdiscoverers and original spokesmen uttered it in the presence of natureand face to face with unsophisticated men. Religion is an interpretationof experience, honestly made, and made in view of man's happiness andits empirical conditions. That this interpretation is poetical goeswithout saying, since natural and moral science, even to-day, areinadequate for the task. But the mythical form into which men cast theirwisdom was not chosen by them because they preferred to be imaginative;it was not embraced, as its survivals are now defended, out ofsentimental attachment to grandiloquent but inaccurate thoughts. Mythical forms were adopted because none other were available, nor couldthe primitive mind discriminate at all between the mythical and thescientific. Whether it is the myth or the wisdom it expresses that wecall religion is a matter of words. Certain it is that the wisdom isalone what gives the myth its dignity, and what originally suggested it. God's majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his image. 

[Sidenote: Practice precedes theory in religion. ]

Fear and need, then, bring us into the presence of external powers, conceived mythically, whose essential character is to be now terrible, now auspicious. The influence is real and directly felt; the gods'function is unmistakable and momentous, while their name and form, thefabulous beings to which that felt influence is imputed, vary with theresources of the worshipper's mind and his poetic habits. The work ofexpression, the creation of a fabulous environment to derive experiencefrom, is not, however, the first or most pressing operation employingthe religious mind. Its first business is rather the work ofpropitiation; before we stop to contemplate the deity we hasten toappease it, to welcome it, or to get out of its way. Cult precedes fableand helps to frame it, because the feeling of need or fear is apractical feeling, and the ideas it may awaken are only incidental tothe reactions it prompts. Worship is therefore earlier and nearer to theroots of religion than dogma is. 

[Sidenote: Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices. ]

At the same time, since those reactions which are directly efficaciousgo to form arts and industrial habits, and eventually put before us theworld of science and common-sense, religious practice and thought areconfined to the sphere in which direct manipulation of things isimpossible. Cultus is always distinguishable from industry, even whenthe worshipper's motives are most sordid and his notions most material;for in religious operations the changes worked or expected can never betraced consecutively. There is a break, often a complete diversity anddisproportion, between effort and result. Religion is a form of rationalliving more empirical, looser, more primitive than art. Man'sconsciousness in it is more immersed in nature, nearer to a vegetativeunion with the general life; it bemoans division and celebrates harmonywith a more passive and lyrical wonder. The element of action proper toreligion is extremely arbitrary, and we are often at a loss to see inwhat way the acts recommended conduce at all to the result foretold. 

As theoretical superstition stops at any cause, so practicalsuperstition seizes on any means. Religion arises under high pressure:in the last extremity, every one appeals to God. But in the lastextremity all known methods of action have proved futile; when resourcesare exhausted and ideas fail, if there is still vitality in the will itsends a supreme appeal to the supernatural. This appeal is necessarilymade in the dark: it is the appeal of a conscious impotence, of anavowed perplexity. What a man in such a case may come to do topropitiate the deity, or to produce by magic a result he cannot produceby art, will obviously be some random action. He will be driven back tothe place where instinct and reason begin. His movement will beabsolutely experimental, altogether spontaneous. He will have no reasonfor what he does, save that he must do something. 

[Sidenote: Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice. ]

What he will do, however, will not be very original; a die must fall onsome one of its six faces, shake it as much as you please. When DonQuixote, seeking to do good absolutely at a venture, let the reins dropon Rocinante's neck, the poor beast very naturally followed the highway;and a man wondering what will please heaven can ultimately light onnothing but what might please himself. It is pathetic to observe howlowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to thedeity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have beendrawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, tobe obeyed blindly and punctiliously--these have been thought points ofhonour with the gods, for which they would dispense favours andpunishments on the most exorbitant scale. Indeed, the widespreadpractice of sacrifice, like all mutilations and penances, suggests aneven meaner jealousy and malice in the gods; for the disciplinaryfunctions which these things may have were not aimed at in thebeginning, and would not have associated them particularly withreligion. In setting aside the fat for the gods' pleasure, insacrificing the first-born, in a thousand other cruel ceremonies, theidea apparently was that an envious onlooker, lurking unseen, mightpoison the whole, or revenge himself for not having enjoyed it, unless apart--possibly sufficient for his hunger--were surrendered to himvoluntarily. This onlooker was a veritable demon, treated as a mantreats a robber to whom he yields his purse that his life may be spared. 

To call the gods envious has a certain symbolic truth, in that earthlyfortunes are actually precarious; and such an observation might inspiredetachment from material things and a kind of philosophy. But what atfirst inspires sacrifice is a literal envy imputed to the gods, a spiritof vengeance and petty ill-will; so that they grudge a man even the goodthings which they cannot enjoy themselves. If the god is a tyrant, thevotary will be a tax-payer surrendering his tithes to secure immunityfrom further levies or from attack by other potentates. God and man willbe natural enemies, living in a sort of politic peace. 

[Sidenote: Ritualistic arts. ]

Sacrifices are far from having merely this sinister meaning. Onceinaugurated they suggest further ideas, and from the beginning they hadhappier associations. The sacrifice was incidental to a feast, and theplenty it was to render safe existed already. What was a bribe, offeredin the spirit of barter, to see if the envious power could not bemollified by something less than the total ruin of his victims, couldeasily become a genial distribution of what custom assigned to each: somuch to the chief, so much to the god, so much to the husbandman. Thereis a certain openness, and as it were the form of justice, in givingeach what is conventionally his due, however little he may reallydeserve it. In religious observances this sentiment plays an importantpart, and men find satisfaction in fulfilling in a seemly manner what isprescribed; and since they know little about the ground or meaning ofwhat they do, they feel content and safe if at least they have done itproperly. Sacrifices are often performed in this spirit; and when abeautiful order and religious calm have come to dignify the performance, the mind, having meantime very little to occupy it, may embroider on thegiven theme. It is then that fable, and new religious sentimentssuggested by fable, appear prominently on the scene. 

[Sidenote: Thank-offerings. ]

In agricultural rites, for instance, sacrifice will naturally be offeredto the deity presiding over germination; that is the deity that might, perhaps, withdraw his favour with disastrous results. He commonlyproves, however, a kindly and responsive being, and in offering to him afew sheaves of corn, some barley-cakes, or a libation from the vintage, the public is grateful rather than calculating; the sacrifice has becomean act of thanksgiving. So in Christian devotion (which often followsprimitive impulses and repeats the dialectic of paganism in a morespeculative region) the redemption did not remain merely expiatory. Itwas not merely a debt to be paid off and a certain quantum of sufferingto be endured which had induced the Son of God to become man and to takeup his cross. It was, so the subtler theologians declared, an act ofaffection as much as of pity; and the spell of the doctrine over thehuman heart lay in feeling that God wished to assimilate himself to man, rather than simply from above to declare him forgiven; so that theincarnation was in effect a rehabilitation of man, a redemption initself, and a forgiveness. Men like to think that God has sat at theirtable and walked among them in disguise. The idea is flattering; itsuggests that the courtesy may some day be returned, and for those whocan look so deep it expresses pointedly the philosophic truth of thematter. For are not the gods, too, in eternal travail after their ideal, and is not man a part of the world, and his art a portion of the divinewisdom? If the incarnation was a virtual redemption, the truestincarnation was the laborious creation itself. 

[Sidenote: The sacrifice of a contrite heart. ]

If sacrifice, in its more amiable aspect, can become thanksgiving and anexpression of profitable dependence, it can suffer an even noblertransformation while retaining all its austerity. Renunciation is thecorner-stone of wisdom, the condition of all genuine achievement. Thegods, in asking for a sacrifice, may invite us to give up not a part ofour food or of our liberty but the foolish and inordinate part of ourwills. The sacrifice may be dictated to us not by a jealous enemyneeding to be pacified but by a far-seeing friend, wishing we may not bedeceived. If what we are commanded to surrender is only what is doing usharm, the god demanding the sacrifice is our own ideal. He has nointerests in the case other than our own; he is no part of theenvironment; he is the goal that determines for us how we should proceedin order to realise as far as possible our inmost aspirations. Whenreligion reaches this phase it has become thoroughly moral. It hasceased to represent or misrepresent material conditions, and has learnedto embody spiritual goods. 

Sacrifice is a rite, and rites can seldom be made to embody ideasexclusively moral. Something dramatic or mystical will cling to theperformance, and, even when the effect of it is to purify, it will bringabout an emotional catharsis rather than a moral improvement. The massis a ritual sacrifice, and the communion is a part of it, having theclosest resemblance to what sacrifices have always been. Among thedevout these ceremonies, and the lyric emotions they awaken, have aquite visible influence; but the spell is mystic, the god soon recedes, and it would be purely fanciful to maintain that any permanent moraleffect comes from such an exercise. The Church has felt as much andintroduced the confession, where a man may really be asked to considerwhat sacrifices he should make for his part, and in what practicaldirection he should imagine himself to be drawn by the vague Dionysiacinfluences to which the ritual subjects him. 

[Sidenote: Prayer is not utilitarian in essence. ]

As sacrifice expresses fear, prayer expresses need. Common-sense thinksof language as something meant to be understood by another and toproduce changes in his disposition and behaviour, but language haspre-rational uses, of which poetry and prayer are perhaps the chief. Aman overcome by passion assumes dramatic attitudes surely not intendedto be watched and interpreted; like tears, gestures may touch anobserver's heart, but they do not come for that purpose. So the fund ofwords and phrases latent in the mind flow out under stress of emotion;they flow because they belong to the situation, because they fill outand complete a perception absorbing the mind; they do not flow primarilyto be listened to. The instinct to pray is one of the chief avenues tothe deity, and the form prayer takes helps immensely to define the powerit is addressed to; indeed, it is in the act of praying that menformulate to themselves what God must be, and tell him at great lengthwhat they believe and what they expect of him. The initial forms ofprayer are not so absurd as the somewhat rationalised forms of it. Unlike sacrifice, prayer seems to be justified by its essence and to bedegraded by the transformations it suffers in reflection, when men tryto find a place for it in their cosmic economy; for its essence ispoetical, expressive, contemplative, and it grows more and morenonsensical the more people insist on making it a prosaic, commercialexchange of views between two interlocutors. 

Prayer is a soliloquy; but being a soliloquy expressing need, and beingfurthermore, like sacrifice, a desperate expedient which men fly to intheir impotence, it looks for an effect: to cry aloud, to make vows, tocontrast eloquently the given with the ideal situation, is certainly aslikely a way of bringing about a change for the better as it would be tochastise one's self severely, or to destroy what one loves best, or toperform acts altogether trivial and arbitrary. Prayer also is magic, andas such it is expected to do work. The answer looked for, or one whichmay be accepted instead, very often ensues; and it is then thatmythology begins to enter in and seeks to explain by what machinery ofdivine passions and purposes that answering effect was produced. 

[Sidenote: Its supposed efficacy magical. ]

Magic is in a certain sense the mother of art, art being the magic thatsucceeds and can establish itself. For this very reason mere magic isnever appealed to when art has been found, and no unsophisticated manprays to have that done for him which he knows how to do for himself. When his art fails, if his necessity still presses, he appeals to magic, and he prays when he no longer can control the event, provided thisevent is momentous to him. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is adesperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range ofone's powers. It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer; thosepray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find itintolerable to be defeated. 

[Sidenote: Theological puzzles. ]

No chapter in theology is more unhappy than that in which a materialefficacy is assigned to prayer. In the first place the facts contradictthe notion that curses can bring evil or blessings can cure; and it isnot observed that the most orthodox and hard-praying army wins the mostbattles. The facts, however, are often against theology, which has torely on dialectical refinements to explain them away; but unfortunatelyin this instance dialectic is no less hostile than experience. God mustknow our necessities before we ask and, if he is good, must already havedecided what he would do for us. Prayer, like every other act, becomesin a providential world altogether perfunctory and histrionic; we arecompelled to go through it, it is set down for us in the play, but itlacks altogether that moral value which we assign to it. When ourprayers fail, it must be better than if they had succeeded, so thatprayer, with all free preference whatsoever, becomes an absurdity. Thetrouble is much deeper than that which so many people find indeterminism. A physical predetermination, in making all thingsnecessary, leaves all values entire, and my preferences, though theycannot be efficacious unless they express preformed natural forces, arenot invalidated ideally. It is still true that the world would have beenbetter to all eternity if my will also could have been fulfilled. Aprovidential optimism, on the contrary, not merely predetermines eventsbut discounts values; and it reduces every mortal aspiration, everypang of conscience; every wish that things should be better than theyare, to a blind impertinence, nay, to a sacrilege. Thus, you may notpray that God's kingdom may come, but only--what is not a prayer but adogma--that it has come already. The mythology that pretends to justifyprayer by giving it a material efficacy misunderstands prayer completelyand makes it ridiculous, for it turns away from the heart, which prayerexpresses pathetically, to a fabulous cosmos where aspirations have beenturned into things and have thereby stifled their own voices. 

[Sidenote: A real efficacy would be mechanical. ]

The situation would not be improved if we surrendered that mysticaloptimism, and maintained that prayer might really attract super-humanforces to our aid by giving them a signal without which they would nothave been able to reach us. If experience lent itself to such a theorythere would be nothing in it more impossible than in ordinary telepathy;prayer would then be an art like conversation, and the exact personagesand interests would be discoverable to which we might appeal. Acelestial diplomacy might then be established not very unlike primitivereligions. Religion would have reverted to industry and science, towhich the grosser spirits that take refuge under it have always wishedto assimilate it. But is it really the office of religion to work uponexternal powers and extract from them certain calculable effects? Is itan art, like empiric medicine, and merely a dubious and mysticindustry? If so, it exists only by imperfection; were it betterdeveloped it would coincide with those material and social arts withwhich it is identical in essence. Successful religion, like successfulmagic, would have passed into the art of exploiting the world. 

[Sidenote: True uses of prayer. ]

What successful religion really should pass into is contemplation, ideality, poetry, in the sense in which poetry includes all imaginativemoral life. That this is what religion looks to is very clear in prayerand in the efficacy which prayer consistently can have. In rationalprayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to itswelfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, itaccommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which itconceives. 

[Sidenote: It clarifies the ideal. ]

If prayer springs from need it will naturally dwell on what wouldsatisfy that necessity; sometimes, indeed, it does nothing else butarticulate and eulogise what is most wanted and prized. This object willoften be particular, and so it should be, since Socrates' prayer "forthe best" would be perfunctory and vapid indeed in a man whose life hadnot been spent, like Socrates', in defining what the best was. Yet anyparticular good lies in a field of relations; it has associates andimplications, so that the mind dwelling on it and invoking its presencewill naturally be enticed also into its background, and will wanderthere, perhaps to come upon greater goods, or upon evils which thecoveted good would make inevitable. An earnest consideration, therefore, of anything desired is apt to enlarge and generalise aspiration till itembraces an ideal life; for from almost any starting-point the limitsand contours of mortal happiness are soon descried. Prayer, inspired bya pressing need, already relieves its importunity by merging it in thegeneral need of the spirit and of mankind. It therefore calms thepassions in expressing them, like all idealisation, and tends to makethe will conformable with reason and justice. 

[Sidenote: It reconciles to the inevitable. ]

A comprehensive ideal, however, is harder to realise than a particularone: the rain wished for may fall, the death feared may be averted, butthe kingdom of heaven does not come. It is in the very essence of prayerto regard a denial as possible. There would be no sense in defining andbegging for the better thing if that better thing had at any rate to be. The possibility of defeat is one of the circumstances with whichmeditation must square the ideal; seeing that my prayer may not begranted, what in that case should I pray for next? Now the order ofnature is in many respects well known, and it is clear that allrealisable ideals must not transgress certain bounds. The practicalideal, that which under the circumstances it is best to aim at and prayfor, will not rebel against destiny. Conformity is an element in allreligion and submission in all prayer; not because what must be isbest, but because the best that may be pursued rationally lies withinthe possible, and can be hatched only in the general womb of being. Theprayer, "Thy will be done, " if it is to remain a prayer, must not bedegraded from its original meaning, which was that an unfulfilled idealshould be fulfilled; it expressed aspiration after the best, notwillingness to be satisfied with, anything. Yet the inevitable must beaccepted, and it is easier to change the human will than the laws ofnature. To wean the mind from extravagant desires and teach it to findexcellence in what life affords, when life is made as worthy aspossible, is a part of wisdom and religion. Prayer, by confronting theideal with experience and fate, tends to render that ideal humble, practical, and efficacious. 

[Sidenote: It fosters spiritual life by conceiving it in itsperfection. ]

A sense for human limitations, however, has its foil in the ideal ofdeity, which is nothing but the ideal of man freed from thoselimitations which a humble and wise man accepts for himself, but which aspiritual man never ceases to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, ismortal, and his whole animal and social economy is built on that fact, so that his practical ideal must start on that basis, and make the bestof it; but immortality is essentially better, and the eternal is in manyways constantly present to a noble mind; the gods therefore areimmortal, and to speak their language in prayer is to learn to see allthings as they do and as reason must, under the form of eternity. Thegods are furthermore no respecters of persons; they are just, for it isman's ideal to be so. Prayer, since it addresses deity, will in the endblush to be selfish and partial; the majesty of the divine mindenvisaged and consulted will tend to pass into the human mind. 

This use of prayer has not been conspicuous in Christian times, because, instead of assimilating the temporal to the eternal, men haveassimilated the eternal to the temporal, being perturbed fanatics inreligion rather than poets and idealists. Pagan devotion, on the otherhand, was full of this calmer spirit. The gods, being frankly natural, could be truly ideal. They embodied what was fairest in life and lovedmen who resembled them, so that it was delightful and ennobling to seetheir images everywhere, and to keep their names and story perpetuallyin mind. They did not by their influence alienate man from hisappropriate happiness, but they perfected it by their presence. Peoplingall places, changing their forms as all living things must according toplace and circumstance, they showed how all kinds of being, if perfectin their kind, might be perfectly good. They asked for a reverenceconsistent with reason, and exercised prerogatives that let man free. Their worship was a perpetual lesson in humanity, moderation, andbeauty. Something pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behindtheir serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there wascertainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions. The ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all, it rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them overto a steady expression of themselves and of the good. 

[Sidenote: Discipline and contemplation are their own reward. ]

Prayer, in fine, though it accomplishes nothing material, constitutessomething spiritual. It will not bring rain, but until rain comes it maycultivate hope and resignation and may prepare the heart for any issue, opening up a vista in which human prosperity will appear in itsconditioned existence and conditional value. A candle wasting itselfbefore an image will prevent no misfortune, but it may bear witness tosome silent hope or relieve some sorrow by expressing it; it may softena little the bitter sense of impotence which would consume a mind awareof physical dependence but not of spiritual dominion. Worship, supplication, reliance on the gods, express both these things in anappropriate parable. Physical impotence is expressed by man's appeal forhelp; moral dominion by belief in God's omnipotence. This belief mayafterwards seem to be contradicted by events. It would be so in truth ifGod's omnipotence stood for a material magical control of events by thevalues they were to generate. But the believer knows in his heart, inspite of the confused explanations he may give of his feelings, that amaterial efficacy is not the test of his faith. His faith will surviveany outward disappointment. In fact, it will grow by that discipline andnot become truly religious until it ceases to be a foolish expectationof improbable things and rises on stepping-stones of its materialdisappointments into a spiritual peace. What would sacrifice be but arisky investment if it did not redeem us from the love of those thingswhich it asks us to surrender? What would be the miserable fruit of anappeal to God which, after bringing us face to face with him, left usstill immersed in what we could have enjoyed without him? The real useand excuse for magic is this, that by enticing us, in the service ofnatural lusts, into a region above natural instrumentalities, itaccustoms us to that rarer atmosphere, so that we may learn to breatheit for its own sake. By the time we discover the mechanical futility ofreligion we may have begun to blush at the thought of using religionmechanically; for what should be the end of life if friendship with thegods is a means only? When thaumaturgy is discredited, the childishdesire to work miracles may itself have passed away. Before we weary ofthe attempt to hide and piece out our mortality, our concomitantimmortality may have dawned upon us. While we are waiting for thecommand to take up our bed and walk we may hear a voice saying: Thy sinsare forgiven thee. 

CHAPTER IV

MYTHOLOGY

[Sidenote: Status of fable in the mind. ]

Primitive thought has the form of poetry and the function of prose. Being thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that revealsthem and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, itattributes to those objects all the qualities which the experience ofthem contains, and builds them out imaginatively in all directions, without distinguishing what is constant and efficacious in them. Thisprimitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is anobservation of things encumbered with all they can suggest to a dramaticfancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the commonroot and raw material of both. Free poetry is a thing which early man istoo poor to indulge in; his wide-open eyes are too intently watchingthis ominous and treacherous world. For pure science he has not enoughexperience, no adequate power to analyse, remember, and abstract; hissoul is too hurried and confused, too thick with phantoms, to followabstemiously the practical threads through the labyrinth. His view ofthings is immensely overloaded; what he gives out for description ismore than half soliloquy; but his expression of experience is for thatvery reason adequate and quite sincere. Belief, which we have come toassociate with religion, belongs really to science; myths are notbelieved in, they are conceived and understood. To demand belief for anidea is already to contrast interpretation with knowledge; it is toassert that that idea has scientific truth. Mythology cannot flourish inthat dialectical air; it belongs to a deeper and more ingenuous level ofthought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminateinterest, accepting and recording the mind's vegetation no less thanthat observable in things, and mixing the two developments together inone wayward drama. 

[Sidenote: It requires genius. ]

A good mythology cannot be produced without much culture andintelligence. Stupidity is not poetical. Nor is mythology essentially ahalf-way house between animal vagueness in the soul and scientificknowledge. It is conceivable that some race, not so dreamful as ours, should never have been tempted to use psychic and passionate categoriesin reading nature, but from the first should have kept its observationssensuous and pure, elaborating them only on their own plane, mathematically and dialectically. Such a race, however, could hardlyhave had lyric or dramatic genius, and even in natural science, whichrequires imagination, they might never have accomplished anything. TheHebrews, denying themselves a rich mythology, remained without scienceand plastic art; the Chinese, who seem to have attained legality anddomestic arts and a tutored sentiment without passing through suchimaginative tempests as have harassed us, remain at the same timewithout a serious science or philosophy. The Greeks, on the contrary, precisely the people with the richest and most irresponsible myths, first conceived the cosmos scientifically, and first wrote rationalhistory and philosophy. So true it is that vitality in any mentalfunction is favourable to vitality in the whole mind. Illusions incidentto mythology are not dangerous in the end, because illusion finds inexperience a natural though painful cure. Extravagant error is unstable, unless it be harmless and confined to a limbo remote from allapplications; if it touches experience it is stimulating and brief, while the equipoise of dulness may easily render dulness eternal. Adeveloped mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interestboth in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, andinterpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue tophilosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both. Both are madeup of things admirable to consider. 

[Sidenote: It only half deceives. ]

Nor is the illusion involved in fabulous thinking always so complete andopaque as convention would represent it. In taking fable for fact, goodsense and practice seldom keep pace with dogma. There is always a raceof pedants whose function it is to materialise everything ideal, but thegreat world, half shrewdly, half doggedly, manages to escape theircontagion. Language may be entirely permeated with myth, since theaffinities of language have much to do with men gliding into suchthoughts; yet the difference between language itself and what itexpresses is not so easily obliterated. In spite of verbal traditions, people seldom take a myth in the same sense in which they would take anempirical truth. All the doctrines that have flourished in the worldabout immortality have hardly affected men's natural sentiment in theface of death, a sentiment which those doctrines, if taken seriously, ought wholly to reverse. Men almost universally have acknowledged aProvidence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversionsand fears in the presence of events; and yet, if Providence had everbeen really trusted, those preferences would all have lapsed, being seento be blind, rebellious, and blasphemous. Prayer, among sane people, hasnever superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proofthat the sphere of expression was never really confused with that ofreality. Indeed, such a confusion, if it had passed from theory topractice, would have changed mythology into madness. With rareexceptions this declension has not occurred and myths have been takenwith a grain of salt which not only made them digestible, but heightenedtheir savour. 

It is always by its applicability to things known, not by itsrevelation of things unknown and irrelevant, that a myth at its birthappeals to mankind. When it has lost its symbolic value and sunk to thelevel of merely false information, only an inert and stupid traditioncan keep it above water. Parables justify themselves but dogmas call foran apologist. The genial offspring of prophets and poets then has to bekept alive artificially by professional doctors. A thing born of fancy, moulded to express universal experience and its veritable issues, has tobe hedged about by misrepresentation, sophistry, and party spirit. Thevery apologies and unintelligent proofs offered in its defence in a wayconfess its unreality, since they all strain to paint in more plausiblecolours what is felt to be in itself extravagant and incredible. 

[Sidenote: Its interpretative essence. ]

Yet if the myth was originally accepted it could not be for this falsityplainly written on its face; it was accepted because it was understood, because it was seen to express reality in an eloquent metaphor. Itsfunction was to show up some phase of experience in its totality andmoral issue, as in a map we reduce everything geographically in order tooverlook it better in its true relations. Had those symbols for a momentdescended to the plane of reality they would have lost their meaning anddignity; they would tell us merely that they themselves existed bodily, which would be false, while about the real configuration of life theywould no longer tell us anything. Such an error, if carried through tothe end, would nullify all experience and arrest all life. Men would bereacting on expressions and meeting with nothing to express. They wouldall be like word-eating philosophers or children learning the catechism. 

The true function of mythical ideas is to present and interpret eventsin terms relative to spirit. Things have uses in respect to the willwhich are direct and obvious, while the inner machinery of these samethings is intricate and obscure. We therefore conceive things roughlyand superficially by their eventual practical functions and assign tothem, in our game, some counterpart of the interest they affect in us. This counterpart, to our thinking, constitutes their inward characterand soul. So conceived, soul and character are purely mythical, beingarrived at by dramatising events according to our own fancy andinterest. Such ideas may be adequate in their way if they cover all theuses we may eventually find in the objects they transcribe for usdramatically. But the most adequate mythology is mythology still; itdoes not, like science, set things before us in the very terms they willwear when they are gradually revealed to experience. Myth is expression, it is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mindrests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digestedand transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue. 

[Sidenote: Contrast with science. ]

Scientific formulas, on the contrary, cry aloud for retranslation intoperceptual terms; they are like tight-ropes, on which a man may walk buton which he cannot stand still. These unstable symbols lead, however, toreal facts and define their experimental relations; while the mindreposing contentedly in a myth needs to have all observation andexperience behind it, for it will not be driven to gather more. Theperfect and stable myth would rest on a complete survey and steadyfocussing of all interests really affecting the one from whose point ofview the myth was framed. Then each physical or political unit would beendowed with a character really corresponding to all its influence onthe thinker. This symbol would render the diffuse natural existenceswhich it represented in an eloquent figure; and since this figure wouldnot mislead practically it might be called true. But truth, in a myth, means a sterling quality and standard excellence, not a literal orlogical truth. It will not, save by a singular accident, represent theirproper internal being, as a forthright unselfish intellect would wish toknow it. It will translate into the language of a private passion thesmiles and frowns which that passion meets with in the world. 

[Sidenote: Importance of the moral factor. ]

There are accordingly two factors in mythology, a moral consciousnessand a corresponding poetic conception of things. Both factors arevariable, and variations in the first, if more hidden, are no lessimportant than variations in the second. Had fable started with a clearperception of human values, it would have gained immensely insignificance, because its pictures, however wrong the external notionsthey built upon, would have shown what, in the world so conceived, wouldhave been the ideals and prizes of life. Thus Dante's bad cosmographyand worse history do not detract from the spiritual penetration of histhought, though they detract from its direct applicability. Had natureand destiny been what Dante imagined, his conception of the valuesinvolved would have been perfect, for the moral philosophy he broughtinto play was Aristotelian and rational. So his poem contains a falseinstance or imaginary rehearsal of true wisdom. It describes the Life ofReason in a fantastic world. We need only change man's situation to thatin which he actually finds himself, and let the soul, fathomed andchastened as Dante left it, ask questions and draw answers from thissteadier dream. 

[Sidenote: Its submergence. ]

Myth travels among the people, and in their hands its poetic factortends to predominate. It is easier to carry on the dialectic or dramaproper to a fable than to confront it again with the facts and give thema fresh and more genial interpretation. The poet makes the fable; thesophist carries it on. Therefore historians and theologians discusschiefly the various forms which mythical beings have received, and theinternal logical or moral implications of those hypostases. They woulddo better to attend instead to the moral factor. However interesting afable may be in itself, its religious value lies wholly in its revealingsome function which nature has in human life. Not the beauty of the godmakes him adorable, but his dispensing benefits and graces. Side by sidewith Apollo (a god having moral functions and consequently inspiring afervent cult and tending himself to assume a moral character) there maybe a Helios or a Phaëthon, poetic figures expressing just as well thesun's physical operation, and no less capable, if the theologian tookhold of them, of suggesting psychological problems. The moral factor, however, was not found in these minor deities. Only a verbal andsensuous poetry had been employed in defining them; the needs and hopesof mankind had been ignored. Apollo, on the contrary, in personifyingthe sun, had embodied also the sun's relations to human welfare. Thevitality, the healing, the enlightenment, the lyric joy flowing intoman's heart from that highest source of his physical being are allbeautifully represented in the god's figure and fable. The religion ofApollo is therefore a true religion, as religions may be true: themythology which created the god rested on a deep, observant sense formoral values, and drew a vivid, if partial, picture of the ideal, attaching it significantly to its natural ground. 

[Sidenote: Myth justifies magic. ]

The first function of mythology is to justify magic. The weak hope onwhich superstition hangs, the gambler's instinct which divines inphenomena a magic solicitude for human fortunes, can scarcely bearticulated without seeking to cover and justify itself by some fable. Amagic function is most readily conceived and defined by attributing tothe object intentions hostile or favourable to men, together with humanhabits of passion and discourse. For lack of resources and observations, reason is seldom able to discredit magic altogether. Reasonable men areforced, therefore, in order to find some satisfaction, to make magic asintelligible as possible by assimilating it to such laws of human actionas may be already mastered and familiar. Magic is thus reduced to a sortof system, regulated by principles of its own and naturalised, as itwere, in the commonwealth of science. 

[Sidenote: Myths might be metaphysical. ]

Such an avowed and defended magic usually takes one of two forms. Whenthe miracle is interpreted dramatically, by analogy to human life, wehave mythology; when it is interpreted rationalistically, by analogy tocurrent logic or natural science, we have metaphysics or theosophy. Themetaphysical sort of superstition has never taken deep root in thewestern world. Pythagorean mysteries and hypnotisations, althoughperiodically fashionable, have soon shrivelled in our too salubrious andbiting air. Even such charming exotics as Plato's myths have not beenable to flourish without changing their nature and passing into ordinarydramatic mythology--into a magic system in which all the forces, onceterms in moral experience, became personal angels and demons. Similarlywith the Christian sacraments: these magic rites, had they beenestablished in India among a people theosophically minded, might havefurnished cues to high transcendental mysteries. Baptism might have beeninterpreted as a symbol for the purged and abolished will, and Communionas a symbol for the escape from personality. But European races, thoughcredulous enough, are naturally positivistic, so that, when they werecalled upon to elucidate their ceremonial mysteries, what they lit uponwas no metaphysical symbolism but a material and historical drama. Communion became a sentimental interview between the devout soul and theperson of Christ; baptism became the legal execution of a mythicalcontract once entered into between the first and second persons of theTrinity. Thus, instead of a metaphysical interpretation, the extantmagic received its needful justification through myths. 

[Sidenote: They appear ready made, like parts of the social fabric. ]

When mythology first appears in western literature it already possessesa highly articulate form. The gods are distinct personalities, withattributes and histories which it is hard to divine the source of andwhich suggest no obvious rational interpretation. The historian istherefore in the same position as a child who inherits a great religion. The gods and their doings are _prima facie_ facts in his world like anyother facts, objective beings that convention puts him in the presenceof and with which he begins by having social relations. He envisagesthem with respect and obedience, or with careless defiance, long beforehe thinks of questioning or proving their existence. The attitude heassumes towards them makes them in the first instance factors in hismoral world. Much subsequent scepticism and rationalising philosophywill not avail to efface the vestiges of that early communion withfamiliar gods. It is hard to reduce to objects of science what areessentially factors in moral intercourse. All thoughts on religionremain accordingly coloured with passion, and are felt to be, above all, a test of loyalty and an index to virtue. The more derivative, unfathomable, and opaque is the prevalent idea of the gods, the harderit is for a rational feeling to establish itself in their regard. Sometimes the most complete historical enlightenment will not suffice todispel the shadow which their moral externality casts over the mind. Invain do we discard their fable and the thin proofs of their existencewhen, in spite of ourselves, we still live in their presence. 

[Sidenote: They perplex the conscience. ]

This pathetic phenomenon is characteristic of religious minds that haveoutgrown their traditional faith without being able to restate thenatural grounds and moral values of that somehow precious system inwhich they no longer believe. The dead gods, in such cases, leaveghosts behind them, because the moral forces which the gods onceexpressed, and which, of course, remain, remain inarticulate; andtherefore, in their dumbness, these moral forces persistently suggesttheir only known but now discredited symbols. To regain moralfreedom--without which knowledge cannot be put to its rational use inthe government of life--we must rediscover the origin of the gods, reduce them analytically to their natural and moral constituents, andthen proceed to rearrange those materials, without any quantitativeloss, in forms appropriate to a maturer reflection. 

Of the innumerable and rather monotonous mythologies that haveflourished in the world, only the Græco-Roman and the Christian needconcern us here, since they are by far the best known to us and the bestdefined in themselves, as well as the only two likely to have anycontinued influence on the western mind. Both these systems pre-supposea long prior development. The gods of Greece and of Israel have afull-blown character when we first meet them in literature. In bothcases, however, we are fortunate in being able to trace somewhat furtherback the history of mythology, and do not depend merely on philosophicanalysis to reach the elements which we seek. 

[Sidenote: Incipient myth in the Vedas. ]

In the Vedic hymns there survives the record of a religion remarkablylike the Greek in spirit, but less dramatic and articulate in form. Thegods of the Vedas are unmistakably natural elements. Vulcan is therenothing but fire, Jupiter nothing but the sky. This patriarchal people, fresh from the highlands, had not yet been infected with the manias anddiseases of the jungle. It lived simply, rationally, piously, loving allnatural joys and delighted with all the instruments of a rude but purecivilisation. It saluted without servility the forces of nature whichministered to its needs. It burst into song in the presence of themagnificent panorama spread out before it--day-sky and night-sky, dawnand gloaming, clouds, thunder and rain, rivers, cattle and horses, grain, fruit, fire, and wine. Nor were the social sanctities neglected. Commemoration was made of the stages of mortal life, of the bonds oflove and kinship, of peace, of battle, and of mourning for the dead. Bya very intelligible figure and analogy the winds became shepherds, theclouds flocks, the day a conqueror, the dawn a maid, the night a wisesibyl and mysterious consort of heaven. These personifications weretentative and vague, and the consequent mythology was a system ofrhetoric rather than of theology. The various gods had interchangeableattributes, and, by a voluntary confusion, quite in the manner of laterHindu poetry, each became on occasion any or all of the others. 

Here the Indian pantheistic vertigo begins to appear. Many darksuperstitions, no doubt, bubbled up in the torrent of that plasticreverie; for this people, clean and natural as on the whole it appears, cannot have been without a long and ignoble ancestry. The Greeksthemselves, heirs to kindred general traditions, retained some childishand obscene practices in their worship. But such hobgoblins naturallyvanish under a clear and beneficent sun and are scattered by healthymountain breezes. A cheerful people knows how to take them lightly, playwith them, laugh at them, and turn them again into figures of speech. Among the early speakers of Sanskrit, even more than among the Greeks, the national religion seems to have been nothing but a poeticnaturalism. 

Such a mythology, however, is exceedingly plastic and unstable. If thepoet is observant and renews his impressions, his myths will become moreand more accurate descriptions of the facts, and his hypotheses aboutphenomena will tend to be expressed more and more in terms of thephenomena themselves; that is, will tend to become scientific. If, onthe contrary and as usually happens, the inner suggestions and fertilityof his fables absorb his interest, and he neglects to consult hisexternal perceptions any further, or even forgets that any suchperceptions originally inspired the myth, he will tend to become adramatic poet, guided henceforth in his fictions only by his knowledgeand love of human life. 

[Sidenote: Natural suggestions soon exhausted. ]

[Sidenote: They will be carried out in abstract fancy. ]

When we transport ourselves in fancy to patriarchal epochs and Arcadianscenes, we can well feel the inevitable tendency of the mind tomythologise and give its myths a more and more dramatic character. Thephenomena of nature, unintelligible rationally but immensely impressive, must somehow be described and digested. But while they compel attentionthey do not, after a while, enlarge experience. Husbandmen's lore isprofound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularlystagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and theploughman's mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods afterthe seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence, nothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection offield and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practicalknowledge with him is all instinct and tradition. His mythology can forthat very reason ride on nature with a looser rein. If at the same time, however, his circumstances are auspicious and he feels practicallysecure, he will have much leisure to ripen inwardly and to think. Hehasten to unfold in meditation the abstract potentialities of his mind. His social and ideal passions, his aptitude for art and fancy, willarouse within him a far keener and more varied experience than his outerlife can supply. Yet all his fortunes continue to be determined byexternal circumstances and to have for their theatre this given anduncontrollable world. Some conception of nature and the gods--that is, in his case, some mythology--must therefore remain before him always andstand in his mind for the real forces controlling experience. 

His moral powers and interests have meantime notably developed. Hissense for social relations has grown clear and full in proportion as hisobservation of nature has sunk into dull routine. Consequently, themyths by which reality is represented lose, so to speak, theirbirthright and first nationality. They pass under the empire of abstractcogitation and spontaneous fancy. They become naturalised in the mind. The poet cuts loose from nature and works out instead whatever hints ofhuman character or romantic story the myth already supplies. Analogiesdrawn from moral and passionate experience replace the furtherportraiture of outer facts. Human tastes, habits, and dreams enter thefable, expanding it into some little drama, or some mystic anagram ofmortal life. While in the beginning the sacred poet had transcribednothing but joyous perceptions and familiar industrial or martialactions, he now introduces intrigue, ingenious adventures, and heroicpassions. 

[Sidenote: They may become moral ideals. ]

When we turn from the theology of the Vedas to that of Homer we see thisrevolution already accomplished. The new significance of mythology hasobscured the old, and was a symbol for material facts has become adrama, an apologue, and an ideal. Thus one function of mythology hasbeen nothing less than to carry religion over from superstition intowisdom, from an excuse and apology for magic into an idealrepresentation of moral goods. In his impotence and sore need a manappeals to magic; this appeal he justifies by imagining a purpose and agod behind the natural agency. But after his accounts with the phenomenaare settled by his own labour and patience, he continues to befascinated by the invisible spirit he has evoked. He cherishes thisimage; it becomes his companion, his plastic and unaccountable witnessand refuge in all the exigencies of life. Dwelling in the mindcontinually, the deity becomes acclimated there; the worship it receivesendows it with whatever powers and ideal faculties are most feared orhonoured by its votary. Now the thunder and the pestilence which wereonce its essence come to be regarded as its disguises and its foils. Faith comes to consist in disregarding what it was once religion toregard, namely, the ways of fortune and the conditions of earthlyhappiness. Thus the imagination sets up its ideals over against theworld that occasioned them, and mythology, instead of cheating men withfalse and magic aids to action, moralises them by presenting an idealstandard for action and a perfect object for contemplation. 

[Sidenote: The sun-god moralised. ]

If we consider again, for instance, Apollo's various attributes and theendless myths connected with his name, we shall find him changing hisessence and forgetting to be the material sun in order to become thelight of a cultivated spirit. At first he is the sky's child, and hasthe moon for twin sister. His mother is an impersonation of darkness andmystery. He travels yearly from the hyperborean regions toward thesouth, and daily he traverses the firmament in a chariot. He sleeps in asea-nymph's bosom or rises from the dawn's couch. In all this we seeclearly a scarcely figurative description of the material sun and itsmotions. A quasi-scientific fancy spins these fables almost inevitablyto fill the vacuum not yet occupied by astronomy. Such myths are indeedcompacted out of wonders, not indeed to add wonder to them (for theoriginal and greatest marvel persists always in the sky), but toentertain us with pleasant consideration of them and with theirassimilation to our own fine feats. This assimilation is unavoidable ina poet ignorant of physics, whom human life must supply with all hisvocabulary and similes. Fortunately in this need of introducing romanceinto phenomena lies the leaven that is to leaven the lump, the subtleinfluence that is to moralise religion. For presently Apollo becomes aslayer of monsters (a function no god can perform until he has ceased tobe a monster himself), he becomes the lovely and valorous champion ofhumanity, the giver of prophecy, of music, of lyric song, even thepatron of medicine and gymnastics. 

[Sidenote: The leaven of religion is moral idealism. ]

What a humane and rational transformation! The spirit of Socrates wasolder than the man and had long been at work in the Greeks. Interesthad been transferred from nature to art, from the sources to the fruitsof life. We in these days are accustomed as a matter of course toassociate religion with ideal interests. Our piety, unlike our barbarouspantheistic theology, has long lost sight of its rudimentary materialobject, and habituated us to the worship of human sanctity and humanlove. We have need all the more to remember how slowly and reluctantlyreligion has suffered spiritualisation, how imperfectly as yet itssuperstitious origin has been outgrown. We have need to retrace with thegreatest attention the steps by which a moral value has been insinuatedinto what would otherwise be nothing but a medley of magic rites andpoetic physics. It is this submerged idealism which alone, in an agethat should have finally learned how to operate in nature and how toconceive her processes, could still win for religion a philosopher'sattention or a legislator's mercy. 

CHAPTER V

THE HEBRAIC TRADITION

[Sidenote: Phases of Hebraism. ]

As the Vedas offer a glimpse into the antecedents of Greek mythology, soHebrew studies open up vistas into the antecedents of Christian dogma. Christianity in its Patristic form was an adaptation of Hebrew religionto the Græco-Roman world, and later, in the Protestant movement, areadaptation of the same to what we may call the Teutonic spirit. In thefirst adaptation, Hebrew positivism was wonderfully refined, transformedinto a religion of redemption, and endowed with a semi-pagan mythology, a pseudo-Platonic metaphysics, and a quasi-Roman organisation. In thesecond adaptation, Christianity received a new basis and standard in thespontaneous faith of the individual; and, as the traditions thusundermined in principle gradually dropped away, it was reduced by theGerman theologians to a romantic and mystical pantheism. Throughout itstransformations, however, Christianity remains indebted to the Jews notonly for its founder, but for the nucleus of its dogma, cult, andethical doctrine. If the religion of the Jews, therefore, shoulddisclose its origin, the origin of Christianity would also be manifest. 

Now the Bible, when critically studied, clearly reveals the source, ifnot of the earliest religion of Israel, at least of those elements inlater Jewish faith which have descended to us and formed the kernel ofChristian revelation. The earlier Hebrews, as their own records depictthem, had a mythology and cultus extremely like that of other Semiticpeoples. It was natural religion--I mean that religion which naturallyexpresses the imaginative life of a nation according to the conceptionsthere current about the natural world and to the interest then uppermostin men's hearts. It was a religion without a creed or scripture orfounder or clergy. It consisted in local rites, in lunar feasts, insoothsayings and oracles, in legends about divine apparitionscommemorated in the spots they had made holy. These spots, as in all therest of the world, were tombs, wells, great trees, and, above all, thetops of mountains. 

[Sidenote: Israel's tribal monotheism. ]

A wandering tribe, at once oppressed and aggressive, as Israel evidentlywas from the beginning is conscious of nothing so much as of its tribalunity. To protect the tribe is accordingly the chief function of itsgod. Whatever character Jehovah may originally have had, whether astorm-god of Sinai or of Ararat, or a sacred bull, or each of these byaffinity and confusion with the other, when the Israelites had onceadopted him as their god they could see nothing essential in him but hispower to protect them in the lands they had conquered. To thisexclusive devotion of Jehovah to Israel, Israel responded by a devotionto Jehovah no less exclusive. They neglected, when at home, the worshipof every other divinity, and later even while travelling abroad; andthey tended to deny altogether, first the comparable power and finallyeven the existence of other gods. 

[Sidenote: Problems involved. ]

Israel was a small people overshadowed by great empires, and itspolitical situation was always highly precarious. After a brief periodof comparative vigour under David and Solomon (a period afterwardidealised with that oriental imagination which, creating so few glories, dreams of so many) they declined visibly toward an inevitable absorptionby their neighbours. But, according to the significance which religionthen had in Israel, the ruin of the state would have put Jehovah'shonour and power in jeopardy. The nation and its god were like body andsoul; it occurred to no one as yet to imagine that the one could survivethe other. A few sceptical and unpatriotic minds, despairing of therepublic, might turn to the worship of Baal or of the stars invoked bythe Assyrians, hoping thus to save themselves and their private fortunesby a timely change of allegiance. But the true Jew had a vehement andunshakable spirit. He could not allow the waywardness of events to upsethis convictions or the cherished habits of his soul. Accordingly hebethought himself of a new way of explaining and meeting the imminentcatastrophe. 

The prophets, for to them the revolution in question was due, conceivedthat the cause of Israel's misfortunes might be not Jehovah's weaknessbut his wrath--a wrath kindled against the immorality, lukewarmness, andinfidelity of the people. Repentance and a change of life, together witha purification of the cultus, would bring back prosperity. It was toolate, perhaps, to rescue the whole state. But a remnant might be savedlike a brand from the burning, to be the nucleus of a great restoration, the seed of a mighty people that should live for ever in godliness andplenty. Jehovah's power would thus be vindicated, even if Israel wereruined; nay, his power would be magnified beyond anything formerlyconceived, since now the great powers of Asia would be represented ashis instruments in the chastisement of his people. 

[Sidenote: The prophets put new wine in old bottles. ]

These views, if we regarded them from the standpoint common in theologyas attempts to re-express the primitive faith, would have to becondemned as absolutely heretical and spurious. But the prophets werenot interpreting documents or traditions; they were publishing their ownpolitical experience. They were themselves inspired. They saw theidentity of virtue and happiness, the dependence of success uponconduct. This new truth they announced in traditional language by sayingthat Jehovah's favour was to be won only by righteousness and that viceand folly alienated his goodwill. Their moral insight was genuine; yetby virtue of the mythical expression they could not well avoid and inrespect to the old orthodoxy, their doctrine was a subterfuge, the firstof those after-thoughts and ingenious reinterpretations by which faithis continually forced to cover up its initial blunders. For the Jews hadbelieved that with such a God they were safe in any case; but now theywere told that, to retain his protection, they must practice just thosevirtues by which the heathen also might have been made prosperous andgreat. It was a true doctrine, and highly salutary, but we need notwonder that before being venerated the prophets were stoned. 

The ideal of this new prophetic religion was still wholly material andpolitical. The virtues, emphasised and made the chief mark of areligious life, were recommended merely as magic means to propitiate thedeity, and consequently to insure public prosperity. The thought thatvirtue is a natural excellence, the ideal expression of human life, could not be expected to impress those vehement barbarians any more thanit has impressed their myriad descendants and disciples, Jewish, Christian, or Moslem. Yet superstitious as the new faith still remained, and magical as was the efficacy it attributed to virtue, the fact thatvirtue rather than burnt offerings was now endowed with miraculousinfluence and declared to win the favour of heaven, proved two thingsmost creditable to the prophets: in the first place, they themselvesloved virtue, else they would hardly have imagined that Jehovah lovedit, or have believed it to be the only path to happiness; and in thesecond place, they saw that public events depend on men's character andconduct, not on omens, sacrifices, or intercessions. There wasaccordingly a sense for both moral and political philosophy in theseinspired orators. By assigning a magic value to morality they gave amoral value to religion. The immediate aim of this morality--topropitiate Jehovah--was indeed imaginary, and its ultimate aim--torestore the kingdom of Israel--was worldly; yet that imaginary aimcovered, in the form of a myth, a sincere consecration to the ideal, while the worldly purpose led to an almost scientific conception of theprinciples and movement of earthly things. 

[Sidenote: Inspiration and authority. ]

To this transformation in the spirit of the law, another almost asimportant corresponded in the letter. Scripture was codified, proclaimed, and given out formally to be inspired by Jehovah and writtenby Moses. That all traditions, legends, and rites were inspired andsacred was a matter of course in antiquity. Nature was full of gods, andthe mind, with its unaccountable dreams and powers, could not be withoutthem. Its inventions could not be less oracular than the thunder or theflight of birds. Israel, like every other nation, thought its traditionsdivine. These traditions, however, had always been living and elastic;the prophets themselves gave proof that inspiration was still a vitaland human thing. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that whilethe prophets were preparing their campaign, under pressure of the samethreatened annihilation, the same puritanical party should have edited anew code of laws and attributed it retroactively to Moses. While theprophet's lips were being touched by the coal of fire, the priests andking in their conclave were establishing the Bible and the Church. It iseasy to suspect, from the accounts we have, that a pious fraud wasperpetrated on this occasion; but perhaps the finding of a forgottenbook of the Law and its proclamation by Josiah, after consulting acertain prophetess, were not so remote in essence from propheticsincerity. In an age when every prophet, seeing what was needfulpolitically, could cry, "So saith the Lord, " it could hardly beillegitimate for the priests, seeing what was expedient legally, todeclare, "So said Moses. " Conscience, in a primitive and impetuouspeople, may express itself in an apocryphal manner which in a criticalage conscience would altogether exclude. It would have been hardlyconceivable that what was obviously right and necessary should not bethe will of Jehovah, manifested of old to the fathers in the desert andnow again whispered in their children's hearts. To contrive a stricterobservance was an act at once of experimental prudence--a means ofmaking destiny, perhaps, less unfavourable--and an act of more ferventworship--a renewal of faith in Jehovah, to whose hands the nation wasintrusted more solemnly and irrevocably than ever. 

[Sidenote: Beginnings of the Church. ]

This pious experiment failed most signally. Jerusalem was taken, theTemple destroyed, and the flower of the people carried into exile. Theeffect of failure, however, was not to discredit the Law and theCovenant, now once for all adopted by the unshakable Jews. On thecontrary, when they returned from exile they re-established thetheocracy with greater rigour than ever, adding all the minuteobservances, ritualistic and social, enshrined in Leviticus. Israelbecame an ecclesiastical community. The Temple, half fortress, halfsanctuary, resounded with perpetual psalms. Piety was fed on a sense atonce of consecration and of guidance. All was prescribed, and to fulfilthe Law, precisely because it involved so complete and, as the worldmight say, so arbitrary a regimen, became a precious sacrifice, acontinual act of religion. 

[Sidenote: Bigotry turned into a principle. ]

Dogmas are at their best when nobody denies them, for then theirfalsehood sleeps, like that of an unconscious metaphor, and their moralfunction is discharged instinctively. They count and are not defined, and the side of them that is not deceptive is the one that comesforward. What was condemnable in the Jews was not that they asserted thedivinity of their law, for that they did with substantial sincerity andtruth. Their crime is to have denied the equal prerogative of othernations' laws and deities, for this they did, not from critical insightor intellectual scruples, but out of pure bigotry, conceit, andstupidity. They did not want other nations also to have a god. The moralgovernment of the world, which the Jews are praised for having firstasserted, did not mean for them that nature shows a generic benevolencetoward life and reason wherever these arise. Such a moral governmentmight have been conceived by a pagan philosopher and was not taught inIsrael until, selfishness having been outgrown, the birds and theheathen were also placed under divine protection. What the moralgovernment of things meant when it was first asserted was that Jehovahexpressly directed the destinies of heathen nations and the course ofnature itself for the final glorification of the Jews. 

No civilised people had ever had such pretensions before. They allrecognised one another's religions, if not as literally true (for somefamiliarity is needed to foster that illusion), certainly as more orless sacred and significant. Had the Jews not rendered themselves odiousto mankind by this arrogance, and taught Christians and Moslems the samefanaticism, the nature of religion would not have been falsified amongus and we should not now have so much to apologise for and to retract. 

[Sidenote: Penance accepted. ]

Israel's calamities, of which the prophets saw only the beginning, worked a notable spiritualisation in its religion. The happy thought ofattributing misfortune to wickedness remained a permanent element in thecreed; but as no scrupulous administration of rites, no puritanism, nogood conscience, could avail to improve the political situation, itbecame needful for the faithful to reconsider their idea of happiness. Since holiness must win divine favour, and Israel was undoubtedly holy, the marks of divine favour must be looked for in Israel's history. Tohave been brought in legendary antiquity out of Egypt was something; tohave been delivered from captivity in Babylon was more; yet these signsof favour could not suffice unless they were at the same time emblems ofhope. But Jewish life had meantime passed into a new phase: it hadbecome pietistic, priestly, almost ascetic. Such is the might ofsuffering, that a race whose nature and traditions were alikepositivistic could for the time being find it sweet to wash its handsamong the innocent, to love the beauty of the Lord's house, and topraise him for ever and ever. It was agreed and settled beyond cavilthat God loved his people and continually blessed them, and yet in theworld of men tribulation after tribulation did not cease to fall uponthem. There was no issue but to assert (what so chastened a spirit couldnow understand) that tribulation endured for the Lord was itselfblessedness, and the sign of some mystical election. Whom the Lordloveth he chasteneth; so the chosen children of God were, withoutparadox, to be looked for among the most unfortunate of earth'schildren. 

[Sidenote: Christianity combines optimism and asceticism. ]

The prophets and psalmists had already shown some beginnings of thisasceticism or inverted worldliness. The Essenes and the early Christiansmade an explicit reversal of ancient Jewish conceptions on this pointthe corner-stone of their morality. True, the old positivism remained inthe background. Tribulation was to be short-lived. Very soon the kingdomof God would be established and a dramatic exchange of places wouldensue between the proud and the humble. The mighty would be hurled fromtheir seat, the lowly filled with good things. Yet insensibly theconception of a kingdom of God, of a theocracy, receded or becamespiritualised. The joys of it were finally conceived as immaterialaltogether, contemplative, and reserved for a life after death. Althoughthe official and literal creed still spoke of a day of judgment, aresurrection of the body, and a New Jerusalem, these things wereinstinctively taken by Christian piety in a more or less symbolic sense. A longing for gross spectacular greatness, prolonged life, and manychildren, after the good old Hebraic fashion, had really nothing to dowith the Christian notion of salvation. Salvation consisted rather inhaving surrendered all desire for such things, and all expectation ofhappiness to be derived from them. Thus the prophet's doctrine that notprosperity absolutely and unconditionally, but prosperity merited byvirtue, was the portion of God's people changed by insensible gradationsto an ascetic belief that prosperity was altogether alien to virtue andthat a believer's true happiness would be such as Saint Francis paintsit: upon some blustering winter's night, after a long journey, to havethe convent door shut in one's face with many muttered threats andcurses. 

[Sidenote: Reason smothered between the two. ]

In the history of Jewish and Christian ethics the pendulum has swungbetween irrational extremes, without ever stopping at that point ofequilibrium at which alone rest is possible. Yet this point wassometimes traversed and included in the gyrations of our tormentedancestral conscience. It was passed, for example, at the moment when theprophets saw that it was human interest that governed right and wrongand conduct that created destiny. But the mythical form in which thisnovel principle naturally presented itself to the prophets' minds, andthe mixture of superstition and national bigotry which remained in theirphilosophy, contaminated its truth and were more prolific and contagiousthan its rational elements. Hence the incapacity of so much subsequentthinking to reach clear ideas, and the failure of Christianity, with itsprolonged discipline and opportunities, to establish a serious moraleducation. The perpetual painful readjustments of the last twentycenturies have been adjustments to false facts and imaginary laws; sothat neither could a worthy conception of prosperity and of the good besubstituted for heathen and Hebrew crudities on that subject, nor couldthe natural goals of human endeavour come to be recognised andformulated, but all was left to blind impulse or chance tradition. 

[Sidenote: Religion made an institution. ]

These defeats of reason are not to be wondered at, if we may indeedspeak of the defeat of what never has led an army. The primitivenaturalism of the Hebrews was not yet superseded by prophetic doctrineswhen a new form of materialism arose to stifle and denaturalise what wasrational in those doctrines. Even before hope of earthly empire to besecured by Jehovah's favour had quite vanished, claims had arisen tosupernatural knowledge founded on revelation. Mythology took a whollynew shape and alliance with God acquired a new meaning and implication. For mythology grew, so to speak, double; moral or naturalistic mythswere now reinforced by others of a historical character, to the effectthat the former myths had been revealed supernaturally. At the same timethe sign of divine protection and favour ceased to be primarilypolitical. Religion now chiefly boasted to possess the Truth, and withthe Truth to possess the secret of a perfectly metaphysical andposthumous happiness. Revelation, enigmatically contained in Scripture, found its necessary explication in theology, while the priests, nowguardians of the keys of heaven, naturally enlarged their authority overthe earth. In fine, the poetic legends and patriarchal worship that hadformerly made up the religion of Israel were transformed into twoconcrete and formidable engines--the Bible and the Church. 

CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC

[Sidenote: The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive. ]

Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generallyproportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorptionwithin them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have leftthe world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded anew institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenialabuses. What is capable of truly purifying the world is not the mereagitation of its elements, but their organisation into a natural bodythat shall exude what redounds and absorb or generate what is lacking tothe perfect expression of its soul. 

Whence fetch this seminal force and creative ideal? It must evidentlylie already in the matter it is to organise; otherwise it would have noaffinity to that matter, no power over it, and no ideality or value inrespect to the existences whose standard and goal it was to be. Therecan be no goods antecedent to the natures they benefit, no ideals priorto the wills they define. A revolution must find its strength andlegitimacy not in the reformer's conscience and dream but in the temperof that society which he would transform; for no transformation iseither permanent or desirable which does not forward the spontaneouslife of the world, advancing those issues toward which it is alreadyinwardly directed. How should a gospel bring glad tidings, save byannouncing what was from the beginning native to the heart?

[Sidenote: A universal religion must interpret the whole world. ]

No judgment could well be shallower, therefore, than that which condemnsa great religion for not being faithful to that local and partialimpulse which may first have launched it into the world. A greatreligion has something better to consider: the conscience andimagination of those it ministers to. The prophet who announced it firstwas a prophet only because he had a keener sense and clearer premonitionthan other men of their common necessities; and he loses his functionand is a prophet no longer when the public need begins to outrun hisintuitions. Could Hebraism spread over the Roman Empire and take thename of Christianity without adding anything to its native inspiration?Is it to be lamented that we are not all Jews? Yet what makes thedifference is not the teaching of Jesus--which is pure Hebraism reducedto its spiritual essence--but the worship of Christ--something perfectlyGreek. Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect had it not beenmade at once speculative, universal, and ideal by the infusion of Greekthought, and at the same time plastic and devotional by the adoption ofpagan habits. The incarnation of God in man, and the divinisation of manin God are pagan conceptions, expressions of pagan religious sentimentand philosophy. Yet what would Christianity be without them? It wouldhave lost not only its theology, which might be spared, but itsspiritual aspiration, its artistic affinities, and the secret of itsmetaphysical charity and joy. It would have remained unconscious, as theGospel is, that the hand or the mind of man can ever construct anything. Among the Jews there were no liberal interests for the ideal to express. They had only elementary human experience--the perpetual Oriental roundof piety and servitude in the bosom of a scorched, exhausted country. Adisillusioned eye, surveying such a world, could find nothing there todetain it; religion, when wholly spiritual, could do nothing but succourthe afflicted, understand and forgive the sinful, and pass through thesad pageant of life unspotted and resigned. Its pity for human illswould go hand in hand with a mystic plebeian insensibility to naturalexcellence. It would breathe what Tacitus, thinking of the liberal life, could call _odium generis humani_; it would be inimical to human genius. 

[Sidenote: Double appeal of Christianity. ]

There were, we may say, two things in Apostolic teaching which renderedit capable of converting the world. One was the later Jewish moralityand mysticism, beautifully expressed in Christ's parables and maxims, and illustrated by his miracles, those cures and absolutions which hewas ready to dispense, whatever their sins, to such as called upon hisname. This democratic and untrammelled charity could powerfully appealto an age disenchanted with the world, and especially to those lowerclasses which pagan polity had covered with scorn and condemned tohopeless misery. The other point of contact which early Christianity hadwith the public need was the theme it offered to contemplation, thephilosophy of history which it introduced into the western world, andthe delicious unfathomable mysteries into which it launched the fancy. Here, too, the figure of Christ was the centre for all eyes. Itslowliness, its simplicity, its humanity were indeed, for a while, obstacles to its acceptance; they did not really lend themselves to themetaphysical interpretation which was required. Yet even Greek fable wasnot without its Apollo tending flocks and its Demeter mourning for herlost child and serving in meek disguise the child of another. Feelingwas ripe for a mythology loaded with pathos. The humble life, thehomilies, the sufferings of Jesus could be felt in all theirincomparable beauty all the more when the tenderness and tragedy ofthem, otherwise too poignant, were relieved by the story of hismiraculous birth, his glorious resurrection, and his restored divinity. 

[Sidenote: Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths. ]

The gospel, thus grown acceptable to the pagan mind, was, however, but agrain of mustard-seed destined to branch and flower in its new soil ina miraculous manner. Not only was the Greek and Roman to refresh himselfunder its shade, but birds of other climates were to build their nests, at least for a season, in its branches. Hebraism, when thus expanded andpaganised, showed many new characteristics native to the minds which hadnow adopted and transformed it. The Jews, for instance, like otherOrientals, had a figurative way of speaking and thinking; their poetryand religion were full of the most violent metaphors. Now to the classicmind violent and improper metaphors were abhorrent. Uniting, as it did, clear reason with lively fancy, it could not conceive one thing to _be_another, nor relish the figure of speech that so described it, hoping bythat unthinkable phrase to suggest its affinities. But the classic mindcould well conceive transformation, of which indeed nature is full; andin Greek fables anything might change its form, become something else, and display its plasticity, not by imperfectly being many things atonce, but by being the perfection of many things in succession. Whilemetaphor was thus unintelligible and confusing to the Greek, metamorphosis was perfectly familiar to him. Wherever Hebrew tradition, accordingly, used violent metaphors, puzzling to the Greek Christian, herationalised them by imagining a metamorphosis instead; thus, forinstance, the metaphors of the Last Supper, so harmless and vaguelysatisfying to an Oriental audience, became the doctrine oftransubstantiation--a doctrine where images are indeed lacking toillustrate the concepts, but where the concepts themselves are notconfused. For that bread should _become_ flesh and wine blood is notimpossible, seeing that the change occurs daily in digestion; what theassertion in this case contradicts is merely the evidence of sense. 

Thus at many a turn in Christian tradition a metaphysical mystery takesthe place of a poetic figure; the former now expressing by a littlemiraculous drama the emotion which the latter expressed by a tentativephrase. And the emotion is thereby immensely clarified and strengthened;it is, in fact, for the first time really expressed. For the idea thatChrist stands upon the altar and mingles still with our human flesh isan explicit assertion that his influence and love are perpetual; whereasthe original parable revealed at most the wish and aspiration, contraryto fact, that they might have been so. By substituting embodiment forallegory, the Greek mind thus achieved something very congenial to itshabits: it imagined the full and adequate expression, not in words butin existences, of the emotion to be conveyed. The Eucharist is to theLast Supper what a centaur is to a horseman or a tragedy to a song. Similarly a Dantesque conception of hell and paradise embodies in livingdetail the innocent apologue in the gospel about a separation of thesheep from the goats. The result is a chimerical metaphysics, containing much which, in reference to existing facts, is absurd; butthat metaphysics, when taken for what it truly is, a new mythology, utters the subtler secrets of the new religion not less ingeniously andpoetically than pagan mythology reflected the daily shifts in nature andin human life. 

[Sidenote: Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platoniccosmology. ]

Metaphysics became not only a substitute for allegory but at the sametime a background for history. Neo-Platonism had enlarged, in a waysuited to the speculative demands of the time, the cosmos conceived byGreek science. In an intelligible region, unknown to cosmography andpeopled at first by the Platonic ideas and afterward by Aristotle'ssolitary God, there was now the Absolute One, too exalted for anypredicates, but manifesting its essence in the first place in a supremeIntelligence, the second hypostasis of a Trinity; and in the secondplace in the Soul of the World, the third hypostasis, already relativeto natural existence. Now the Platonists conceived these entities to bepermanent and immutable; the physical world itself had a meaning and anexpressive value, like a statue, but no significant history. When theJewish notion of creation and divine government of the world presenteditself to the Greeks, they hastened to assimilate it to their familiarnotions of imitation, expression, finality, and significance. And whenthe Christians spoke of Christ as the Son of God, who now sat at hisright hand in the heavens, their Platonic disciples immediately thoughtof the Nous or Logos, the divine Intelligence, incarnate as they hadalways believed in the whole world, and yet truly the substance andessence of divinity. To say that this incarnation had taken placepre-eminently, or even exclusively, in Christ was not an impossibleconcession to make to pious enthusiasm, at least if the philosophyinvolved in the old conception could be retained and embodied in the neworthodoxy. Sacred history could thus be interpreted as a temporalexecution of eternal decrees, and the plan of salvation as an idealnecessity. Cosmic scope and metaphysical meaning were given to Hebrewtenets, so unspeculative in their original intention, and it becamepossible even for a Platonic philosopher to declare himself a Christian. 

[Sidenote: The resulting orthodox system. ]

The eclectic Christian philosophy thus engendered constitutes one of themost complete, elaborate, and impressive products of the human mind. Theruins of more than one civilisation and of more than one philosophy wereransacked to furnish materials for this heavenly Byzantium. It was amyth circumstantial and sober enough in tone to pass for an account offacts, and yet loaded with enough miracle, poetry, and submerged wisdomto take the place of a moral philosophy and present what seemed at thetime an adequate ideal to the heart. Many a mortal, in all subsequentages, perplexed and abandoned in this ungovernable world, has set sailresolutely for that enchanted island and found there a semblance ofhappiness, its narrow limits give so much room for the soul and itspenitential soil breeds so many consolations. True, the brief time andnarrow argument into which Christian imagination squeezes the world mustseem to a speculative pantheist childish and poor, involving, as itdoes, a fatuous perversion of nature and history and a ridiculousemphasis laid on local events and partial interests. Yet just thisviolent reduction of things to a human stature, this half-innocent, half-arrogant assumption that what is important for a man must controlthe whole universe, is what made Christian philosophy originallyappealing and what still arouses, in certain quarters, enthusiasticbelief in its beneficence and finality. 

Nor should we wonder at this enduring illusion. Man is still in hischildhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on himagainst his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by hisown action. He is afraid of a universe that leaves him alone. Freedomappals him; he can apprehend in it nothing but tedium and desolation, soimmature is he and so barren does he think himself to be. He has toimagine what the angels would say, so that his own good impulses (whichcreate those angels) may gain in authority, and none of the dangers thatsurround his poor life make the least impression upon him until hehears that there are hobgoblins hiding in the wood. His moral life, totake shape at all, must appear to him in fantastic symbols. The historyof these symbols is therefore the history of his soul. 

[Sidenote: The brief drama of things. ]

There was in the beginning, so runs the Christian story, a greatcelestial King, wise and good, surrounded by a court of winged musiciansand messengers. He had existed from all eternity, but had alwaysintended, when the right moment should come, to create temporal beings, imperfect copies of himself in various degrees. These, of which man wasthe chief, began their career in the year 4004 B. C. , and they would liveon an indefinite time, possibly, that chronological symmetry might notbe violated, until A. D. 4004. The opening and close of this drama weremarked by two magnificent tableaux. In the first, in obedience to theword of God, sun, moon, and stars, and earth with all her plants andanimals, assumed their appropriate places, and nature sprang into beingwith all her laws. The first man was made out of clay, by a special actof God, and the first woman was fashioned from one of his ribs, extracted while he lay in a deep sleep. They were placed in an orchardwhere they often could see God, its owner, walking in the cool of theevening. He suffered them to range at will and eat of all the fruits hehad planted save that of one tree only. But they, incited by a devil, transgressed this single prohibition, and were banished from thatparadise with a curse upon their head, the man to live by the sweat ofhis brow and the woman to bear children in labour. These childrenpossessed from the moment of conception the inordinate natures whichtheir parents had acquired. They were born to sin and to find disorderand death everywhere within and without them. 

At the same time God, lest the work of his hands should wholly perish, promised to redeem in his good season some of Adam's children andrestore them to a natural life. This redemption was to come ultimatelythrough a descendant of Eve, whose foot should bruise the head of theserpent. But it was to be prefigured by many partial and specialredemptions. Thus, Noah was to be saved from the deluge, Lot from Sodom, Isaac from the sacrifice, Moses from Egypt, the captive Jews fromBabylon, and all faithful souls from heathen forgetfulness and idolatry. For a certain tribe had been set apart from the beginning to keep alivethe memory of God's judgments and promises, while the rest of mankind, abandoned to its natural depravity, sank deeper and deeper into crimesand vanities. The deluge that came to punish these evils did not availto cure them. "The world was renewed[A] and the earth rose again abovethe bosom of the waters, but in this renovation there remained eternallysome trace of divine vengeance. Until the deluge all nature had beenexceedingly hardy and vigorous, but by that vast flood of water whichGod had spread out over the earth, and by its long abiding there, allsaps were diluted; the air, charged with too dense and heavy a moisture, bred ranker principles of corruption. The early constitution of theuniverse was weakened, and human life, from stretching as it hadformerly done to near a thousand years, grew gradually briefer. Herbsand roots lost their primitive potency and stronger food had to befurnished to man by the flesh of other animals.... Death gained uponlife and men felt themselves overtaken by a speedier chastisement. Asday by day they sank deeper in their wickedness, it was but right theyshould daily, as it were, stick faster in their woe. The very change innourishment made manifest their decline and degradation, since as theybecame feebler they became also more voracious and blood-thirsty. "

Henceforth there were two spirits, two parties, or, as Saint Augustinecalled them, two cities in the world. The City of Satan, whatever itsartifices in art, war, or philosophy, was essentially corrupt andimpious. Its joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of asepulchre. It stood condemned before God and before man's betterconscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret misery, by its ignoranceof all that it truly behoved a man to know who was destined toimmortality. Lost, as it seemed, within this Babylon, or visible onlyin its obscure and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time theCity of God, the society of all the souls God predestined to salvation;a city which, however humble and inconspicuous it might seem on earth, counted its myriad transfigured citizens in heaven, and had itsdestinies, like its foundations, in eternity. To this City of Godbelonged, in the first place, the patriarchs and the prophets who, throughout their plaintive and ardent lives, were faithful to whatechoes still remained of a primeval revelation, and waited patiently forthe greater revelation to come. To the same city belonged the magi whofollowed a star till it halted over the stable in Bethlehem; Simeon, whodivined the present salvation of Israel; John the Baptist, who borewitness to the same and made straight its path; and Peter, to whom notflesh and blood, but the spirit of the Father in heaven, revealed theLord's divinity. For salvation had indeed come with the fulness of time, not, as the carnal Jews had imagined it, in the form of an earthlyrestoration, but through the incarnation of the Son of God in the VirginMary, his death upon a cross, his descent into hell, and hisresurrection at the third day according to the Scriptures. To the samecity belonged finally all those who, believing in the reality andefficacy of Christ's mission, relied on his merits and followed hiscommandment of unearthly love. 

All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict betweenthese two cities; two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural;two philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, onecorporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the othereternal; two institutions, one the world, the other the Church. These, whatever their momentary alliances or compromises, were radicallyopposed and fundamentally alien to one another. Their conflict was tofill the ages until, when wheat and tares had long flourished togetherand exhausted between them the earth for whose substance they struggled, the harvest should come; the terrible day of reckoning when those whohad believed the things of religion to be imaginary would behold withdismay the Lord visibly coming down through the clouds of heaven, theangels blowing their alarming trumpets, all generations of the deadrising from their graves, and judgment without appeal passed on everyman, to the edification of the universal company and his own unspeakablejoy or confusion. Whereupon the blessed would enter eternal bliss withGod their master and the wicked everlasting torments with the devil whomthey served. 

The drama of history was thus to close upon a second tableau: long-robedand beatified cohorts passing above, amid various psalmodies, into aninfinite luminous space, while below the damned, howling, writhing, andhalf transformed into loathsome beasts, should be engulfed in a fieryfurnace. The two cities, always opposite in essence, should thus befinally divided in existence, each bearing its natural fruits andmanifesting its true nature. 

Let the reader fill out this outline for himself with its thousanddetails; let him remember the endless mysteries, arguments, martyrdoms, consecrations that carried out the sense and made vital the beauty ofthe whole. Let him pause before the phenomenon; he can ill afford, if hewishes to understand history or the human mind, to let the apparitionfloat by unchallenged without delivering up its secret. What shall wesay of this Christian dream?

[Sidenote: Mythology is a language and must be understood to conveysomething by symbols. ]

Those who are still troubled by the fact that this dream is by manytaken for a reality, and who are consequently obliged to defendthemselves against it, as against some dangerous error in science or inphilosophy, may be allowed to marshal arguments in its disproof. Such, however, is not my intention. Do we marshal arguments against themiraculous birth of Buddha, or the story of Cronos devouring hischildren? We seek rather to honour the piety and to understand thepoetry embodied in those fables. If it be said that those fables arebelieved by no one, I reply that those fables are or have been believedjust as unhesitatingly as the Christian theology, and by men no lessreasonable or learned than the unhappy apologists of our own ancestralcreeds. Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. Weneither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we arejust, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is noindication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But whilewe acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need noarguments to dissuade us from sharing it. Each man may have his ownloves, but the object in each case is different. And so it is, or shouldbe, in religion. Before the rise of those strange and fraudulent Hebraicpretensions there was no question among men about the national, personal, and poetic character of religious allegiance. It could neverhave been a duty to adopt a religion not one's own any more than alanguage, a coinage, or a costume not current in one's own country. Theidea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation oftruth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it hasnot come within the region of profitable philosophising on that subject. His science is not wide enough to cover all existence. He has notdiscovered that there can be no moral allegiance except to the ideal. His certitude and his arguments are no more pertinent to the religiousquestion than would be the insults, blows, and murders to which, if hecould, he would appeal in the next instance. Philosophy may describeunreason, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: Bossuet: Discours sur l'histoire universelle, Part II, Chap. I. ]

CHAPTER VII

PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY

[Sidenote: Need of paganising Christianity. ]

The western intellect, in order to accept the gospel, had to sublimateit into a neo-Platonic system of metaphysics. In like manner the westernheart had to render Christianity congenial and adequate by a richinfusion of pagan custom and sentiment. This adaptation was more gentleand facile than might be supposed. We are too much inclined to impute anabstract and ideal Christianity to the polyglot souls of earlyChristians, and to ignore that mysterious and miraculous side of laterpaganism from which Christian cultus and ritual are chiefly derived. Inthe third century Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religioussense, closely akin; each differed much less from the other than fromthat religion which at other epochs had borne or should bear its ownname. Had Julian the Apostate succeeded in his enterprise he would nothave rescued anything which the admirers of classic paganism could atall rejoice in; a disciple of Iamblichus could not but plunge headlonginto the same sea of superstition and dialectic which had submergedChristianity. In both parties ethics were irrational and morals corrupt. The political and humane religion of antiquity had disappeared, and thequestion between Christians and pagans amounted simply to a choice offanaticisms. Reason had suffered a general eclipse, but civilisation, although decayed, still subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline, a certain speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usageremained in the world. The people could change their gods, but not thespirit in which they worshipped them. Christianity had insinuated itselfalmost unobserved into a society full of rooted traditions. The firstdisciples had been disinherited Jews, with religious habits which men ofother races and interests could never have adopted intelligently; theChurch was accordingly wise enough to perpetuate in its practice atleast an indispensable minimum of popular paganism. How considerablethis minimum was a glance at Catholic piety will suffice to convince us. 

[Sidenote: Catholic piety more human than the liturgy. ]

The Græco-Jewish system of theology constructed by the Fathers had itsliturgical counterpart in the sacraments and in a devout eloquence whichmay be represented to us fairly enough by the Roman missal and breviary. This liturgy, transfused as it is with pagan philosophy and removedthereby from the Oriental directness and formlessness of the Bible, keeps for the most part its theological and patristic tone. Psalmsabound, Virgin, and saints are barely mentioned, a certain universalismand concentration of thought upon the Redemption and its speculativemeaning pervades the Latin ritual sung behind the altar-rails. But anyone who enters a Catholic church with an intelligent interpreter will atonce perceive the immense distance which separates that official andimpersonal ritual from the daily prayers and practices of Catholicpeople. The latter refer to the real exigences of daily life and serveto express or reorganise personal passions. While mass is beingcelebrated the old woman will tell her beads, lost in a vague ruminationover her own troubles; while the priests chant something unintelligibleabout Abraham or Nebuchadnezzar, the housewife will light herwax-candles, duly blessed for the occasion, before Saint Barbara, to beprotected thereby from the lightning; and while the preacher isrepeating, by rote, dialectical subtleties about the union of the twonatures in Christ's person, a listener's fancy may float sadly over themystery of love and of life, and (being himself without resources in thepremises) he may order a mass to be said for the repose of some departedsoul. 

In a Catholic country, every spot and every man has a particular patron. These patrons are sometimes local worthies, canonised by tradition or bythe Roman see, but no less often they are simply local appellations ofChrist or the Virgin, appellations which are known theoretically torefer all to the same _numen_, but which practically possess diversereligious values; for the miracles and intercessions attributed to theVirgin under one title are far from being miracles and intercessionsattributable to her under another. He who has been all his life devoutto Loreto will not place any special reliance on the Pillar atSaragossa. A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conceptionfor comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Eachreligious order and all the laity more or less affiliated to it willcultivate special saints and special mysteries. There are alsoparticular places and days on which graces are granted, as not onothers, and the quantity of such graces is measurable by canonicstandards. So many days of remitted penance correspond to a work of acertain merit, for there is a celestial currency in which mulcts andremissions may be accurately summed and subtracted by angelic recorders. One man's spiritual earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed toanother, a belief which may seem arbitrary and superstitious but whichis really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines like theatonement, the communion of saints, and intercession for the dead andliving. 

[Sidenote: Natural pieties. ]

Another phase of the same natural religion is seen in frequentfestivals, in the consecration of buildings, ships, fields, labours, andseasons; in intercessions by the greater dead for the living and by theliving for the lesser dead--a perfect survival of heroes and penates onthe one hand and of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on theother. Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints' and allsouls', Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint Agnes's andSaint Valentine's days with their profane associations, a saint forfinding lost objects and another for prospering amourettes, since allgreat and tragic loves have their inevitable patrons in Christ and theVirgin, in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable. This, withwhat more could easily be rehearsed, makes a complete paganism withinChristian tradition, a paganism for which little basis can be found inthe gospel, the mass, the breviary, or the theologians. 

Yet these accretions were as well authenticated as the substructure, forthey rested on human nature. To feel, for instance, the special efficacyof your village Virgin or of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage isperched on the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principleof it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the festivalsassociated with them, have entered your mind together with your earliestfeelings. Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided withthe awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those _numina_ wereinvoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reachesof irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they constitute a mysticresource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge. Whenthe doctors blunder--as they commonly do--the saints may find a cure;after all, the saints' success in medicine seems to a crude empiricismalmost as probable as the physicians'. Special and local patrons are theoriginal gods, and whatever religious value speculative and cosmicdeities retain they retain surreptitiously, by virtue of those verybonds with human interests and passionate desires which ancestral demonsonce borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the mountain they haunted, or the sacrifice they inhaled with pleasure, until their hearts softenedtoward their worshippers. In itself, and as a minimised and retreatingtheology represents it, a universal power has no specific energy, nodeterminate interest at heart; there is nothing friendly about it norallied to your private necessities; no links of place and time fortifyand define its influence. Nor is it rational to appeal for a mitigationof evils or for assistance against them to the very being that hasdecreed and is inflicting them for some fixed purpose of its own. 

[Sidenote: Refuge taken in the supernatural. ]

Paganism or natural religion was at first, like so many crude religiousnotions, optimistic and material; the worshipper expected his piety tomake his pot boil, to cure his disease, to prosper his battles, and torender harmless his ignorance of the world in which he lived. But suchfaith ran up immediately against the facts; it was discountenanced atevery turn by experience and reflection. The whole of nature and life, when they are understood at all, have to be understood on an oppositeprinciple, on the principle that fate, having naturally furnished uswith a determinate will and a determinate endowment, gives us a freefield and no favour in a natural world. Hence the retreat of religion tothe supernatural, a region to which in its cruder forms it was far frombelonging. Now this retreat, in the case of classic paganism, took placewith the decay of military and political life and would have produced anascetic popular system, some compound of Oriental and Greek traditions, even if Christianity had not intervened at that juncture and opportunelypre-empted the ground. 

[Sidenote: The episodes of life consecrated mystically. ]

Christianity, as we have seen, had elements in it which gave it adecisive advantage; its outlook was historical, not cosmic, andconsequently admitted a non-natural future for the individual and forthe Church; it was anti-political and looked for progress only in thatregion in which progress was at that time possible, in the private soul;it was democratic, feminine, and unworldly; its Oriental deity andprophets had a primitive simplicity and pathos not found in pagan heroesor polite metaphysical entities; its obscure Hebrew poetry opened, likemusic, an infinite field for brooding fancy and presumption. Theconsequence was a doubling of the world, so that every Christian led adual existence, one full of trouble and vanity on earth, which it waspiety in him to despise and neglect, another full of hope andconsolation in a region parallel to earth and directly above it, everypart of which corresponded to something in earthly life and could bereached, so to speak, by a Jacob's ladder upon which aspiration andgrace ascended and descended continually. Birth had its sacramentalconsecration to the supernatural in baptism, growth in confirmation, self-consciousness in confession, puberty in communion, effort inprayer, defeat in sacrifice, sin in penance, speculation in revealedwisdom, art in worship, natural kindness in charity, poverty inhumility, death in self-surrender and resurrection. When the mind grewtired of contemplation the lips could still echo some pious petition, keeping the body's attitude and habit expressive of humility andpropitious to receiving grace; and when the knees and lips werethemselves weary, a candle might be left burning before the altar, towitness that the desire momentarily forgotten was not extinguished inthe heart. Through prayer and religious works the absent could bereached and the dead helped on their journey, and amid earthlyestrangements and injustices there always remained the church open toall and the society of heaven. 

[Sidenote: Paganism chastened, Hebraism liberalised. ]

Nothing is accordingly more patent than that Christianity was paganisedby the early Church; indeed, the creation of the Church was itself whatto a Hebraising mind must seem a corruption, namely, a mixing of paganphilosophy and ritual with the Gospel. But this sort of constitutivecorruption would more properly be called an adaptation, an absorption, or even a civilisation of Hebraism; for by this marriage with paganismChristianity fitted itself to live and work in the civilised world. Bythis corruption it was completed and immensely improved, likeAnglo-Saxon by its corruption through French and Latin; for it is alwaysan improvement in religion, whose business is to express and inspirespiritual sentiment, that it should learn to express and inspire thatsentiment more generously. Paganism was nearer than Hebraism to the Lifeof Reason because its myths were more transparent and its temper lessfanatical; and so a paganised Christianity approached more closely thatideality which constitutes religious truth than a bare and intenseHebraism, in its hostility to human genius, could ever have done ifisolated and unqualified. 

[Sidenote: The system post-rational and founded on despair. ]

The Christianity which the pagans adopted, in becoming itself pagan, remained a religion natural to their country and their heart. Itconstituted a paganism expressive of their later and calamitousexperience, a paganism acquainted with sorrow, a religion that hadpassed through both civilisation and despair, and had been reduced totranslating the eclipsed values of life into supernatural symbols. Itbecame a post-rational religion. Of course, to understand such a systemit is necessary to possess the faculties it exercises and the experienceit represents. Where life has not reached the level of reflection, religion and philosophy must both be pre-rational; they must remaincrudely experimental, unconscious of the limits of excellence and life. Under such circumstances it is obviously impossible that religion shouldbe reconstituted on a supernatural plane, or should learn to expressexperience rather than impulse. Now the Christianity of the gospels wasitself post-rational; it had turned its back on the world. In thisrespect the mixture with paganism altered nothing; it merely reinforcedthe spiritualised and lyric despair of the Hebrews with the personal andmetaphysical despair of the Romans and Greeks. For all the later classicphilosophy--Stoic, Sceptic, or Epicurean--was founded on despair and waspost-rational. Pagan Christianity, or Catholicism, may accordingly besaid to consist of two elements: first, the genius of paganism, thefaculty of expressing spiritual experience in myth and external symbol, and, second, the experience of disillusion, forcing that paganimagination to take wing from earth and to decorate no longer thepolitical and material circumstances of life, but rather to removebeyond the clouds and constitute its realm of spirit beyond the veil oftime and nature, in a posthumous and metaphysical sphere. A mythicaleconomy abounding in points of attachment to human experience and ingenial interpretations of life, yet lifted beyond visible nature andfilling a reported world, a world believed in on hearsay or, as it iscalled, on faith--that is Catholicism. 

When this religion was established in the Roman Empire, that empire wasitself threatened by the barbarians who soon permeated and occupied itand made a new and unhappy beginning to European history. They adoptedChristianity, not because it represented their religious needs orinspiration, but because it formed part of a culture and a socialorganisation the influence of which they had not, in their simplicity, the means to withstand. During several ages they could only modify bytheir misunderstandings and inertia arts wholly new to their lives. 

[Sidenote: External conversion of the barbarians. ]

What sort of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyondour accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radicallydifferent from the Græco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquelyconceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from whichreligious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind, like a child's, is easy to convert and to people with what stories youwill. The Northmen drank in with pleased astonishment what the monkstold them about hell and heaven, God the Father and God the Son, theVirgin and the beautiful angels; they accepted the sacraments with vaguedocility; they showed a qualified respect, often broken upon, it istrue, by instinctive rebellions, for a clergy which after allrepresented whatever vestiges of learning, benevolence, or art stilllingered in the world. But this easy and boasted conversion was fancifulonly and skin-deep. A non-Christian ethics of valour and honour, anon-Christian fund of superstition, legend, and sentiment, subsistedalways among mediæval peoples. Their soul, so largely inarticulate, might be overlaid with churchly habits and imprisoned for the moment inthe panoply of patristic dogma; but pagan Christianity always remained areligion foreign to them, accepted only while their minds continued in astate of helpless tutelage. Such a foreign religion could never beunderstood by them in its genuine motives and spirit. They were withoutthe experience and the plastic imagination which had given it birth. Itmight catch them unawares and prevail over them for a time, but evenduring that period it could not root out from barbarian souls anythingopposed to it which subsisted there. It was thus that the Roman Churchhatched the duck's egg of Protestantism. 

[Sidenote: Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism. ]

In its native seats the Catholic system prompts among those who inwardlyreject it satire and indifference rather than heresy, because on thewhole it expresses well enough the religious instincts of the people. Only those strenuously oppose it who hate religion itself. But amongconverted barbarians the case was naturally different, and opposition tothe Church came most vehemently from certain religious natures whoseinstincts it outraged or left unsatisfied. Even before heresy burstforth this religious restlessness found vent in many directions. Itendowed Christianity with several beautiful but insidious gifts, severalincongruous though well-meant forms of expression. Among these we maycount Gothic art, chivalrous sentiment, and even scholastic philosophy. These things came, as we know, ostensibly to serve Christianity, whichhas learned to regard them as its own emanations. But in truth theybarbarised Christianity just as Greek philosophy and worship and Romanhabits of administration had paganised it in the beginning. Andbarbarised Christianity, even before it became heretical, was somethingnew, something very different in temper and beauty from the paganChristianity of the South and East. 

In the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, as it flourished in the North, the barbarian soul, apprenticed to monkish masters, appeared in all itschildlike trust, originality, and humour. There was something touchingand grotesque about it. We seem to see a child playing with the toys ofage, his green hopes and fancies weaving themselves about an antiquemetaphysical monument, the sanctuary of a decrepit world. The structureof that monument was at first not affected, and even when it had beenundermined and partially ruined, its style could not be transformed, but, clad in its northern ivy, it wore at once a new aspect. To raceswithout experience--that is, without cumulative traditions or a visiblepast--Christianity could be nothing but a fairy story and a gratuitoushope, as if they had been told about the Sultan of Timbuctoo andpromised that they should some day ride on his winged Arabian horses. The tragic meaning of the Christian faith, its immense renunciation ofall things earthly and the merely metaphysical glory of its transfiguredlife, commonly escaped their apprehension, as it still continues to do. They listened open-mouthed to the missionary and accepted hisasseverations with unsuspecting emotion, like the Anglo-Saxon king wholikened the soul to a bird flying in and out of a tent at night, aboutwhose further fortunes any account would be interesting to hear. A seedplanted in such a virgin and uncultivated soil must needs bring forthfruit of a new savour. 

[Sidenote: Internal discrepancies between the two. ]

In northern Christianity a fresh quality of brooding tendernessprevailed over the tragic passion elsewhere characteristic of Catholicdevotion. Intricacy was substituted for dignity and poetry for rhetoric;the basilica became an abbey and the hermitage a school. The feudal ageswere a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors werethere mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It washere a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there analchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish. Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister;gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about thecross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity wasthe theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and jollity, theircuriosity and tenderness; it was far from being the source of thosedelightful inventions. The Crusades were not inspired by the Prince ofPeace, to whose honour they were fancifully and passionately dedicated;so chivalry, Gothic architecture, and scholastic philosophy were profaneexpressions of a self-discovering genius in a people incidentallyChristian. The barbarians had indeed been indoctrinated, they had beenintroduced into an alien spiritual and historic medium, but they had notbeen made over or inwardly tamed. It had perhaps been rendered easierfor them, by contact with an existing or remembered civilisation, tomature their own genius, even in the act of confusing its expressionthrough foreign accretions. They had been thereby stimulated to civilisethemselves and encouraged also to believe themselves civilised somewhatprematurely, when they had become heirs merely to the titles andtrappings of civilisation. 

The process of finding their own art and polity, begun under foreignguidance, was bound on the whole to diverge more and more from its Latinmodel. It consisted now of imitation, now of revulsion and fancifuloriginality; never was a race so much under the sway of fashions. Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation withoutreason and imitation without benefit. It marks very clearly that marginof irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which among a peopleartificially civilised may so easily be larger than the solid core. Itis characteristic of occidental society in mediæval and modern times, because this society is led by people who, being educated in a foreignculture, remain barbarians at heart. To this day we have not achieved areally native civilisation. Our art, morals, and religion, though deeplydyed in native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed, conceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among thenorthern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced thanamong the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery insociety, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educatedand the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live ondifferent intellectual planes and often have different religions. Someeducated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; theysit at the feet of a past which, not being really theirs, can produce nofruit in them but sentimentality. Others are merely _protestants_; theyare active in the moral sphere only by virtue of an inward rebellionagainst something greater and overshadowing, yet repulsive and alien. They are conscious truants from a foreign school of life. 

[Sidenote: Tradition and instinct at odds in Protestantism. ]

In the Protestant religion it is necessary to distinguish innerinspiration from historical entanglements. Unfortunately, as the wholedoctrinal form of this religion is irrelevant to its spirit and imposedfrom without, being due to the step-motherly nurture it received fromthe Church, we can reach a conception of its inner spirit only bystudying its tendency and laws of change or its incidental expression inliterature and custom. Yet these indirect symptoms are so striking thateven an outsider, if at all observant, need not fear to misinterpretthem. Taken externally, Protestantism is, of course, a form ofChristianity; it retains the Bible and a more or less copious selectionof patristic doctrines. But in its spirit and inward inspiration it issomething quite as independent of Judea as of Rome. It is simply thenatural religion of the Teutons raising its head above the flood ofRoman and Judean influences. Its character may be indicated by sayingthat it is a religion of pure spontaneity, of emotional freedom, deeplyrespecting itself but scarcely deciphering its purposes. It is theself-consciousness of a spirit in process of incubation, jealous of itspotentialities, averse to definitions and finalities of any kind becauseit can itself discern nothing fixed or final. It is adventurous andpuzzled by the world, full of rudimentary virtues and clear fire, energetic, faithful, rebellious to experience, inexpert in all mattersof art and mind. It boasts, not without cause, of its depth and purity;but this depth and purity are those of any formless and primordialsubstance. It keeps unsullied that antecedent integrity which is at thebottom of every living thing and at its core; it is not acquainted withthat ulterior integrity, that sanctity, which might be attained at thesummit of experience through reason and speculative dominion. Itaccordingly mistakes vitality, both in itself and in the universe, forspiritual life. 

[Sidenote: The Protestant spirit remote from that of the gospel. ]

This underlying Teutonic religion, which we must call Protestantism forlack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can survive it. To identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible so long as, inopposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic spirit could appeal tothe Gospel for support. The Gospel has indeed nothing pagan about it, but it has also nothing Teutonic; and the momentary alliance of two suchdisparate forces must naturally cease with the removal of the commonenemy which alone united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; it treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt, conforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a danger, earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition; it revels inmiracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves contemplation, poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy and heartfeltforgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, itis a product of the Orient, where all things are old and equal and aprofound indifference to the business of earth breeds a silent dignityand high sadness in the spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite ofall this. It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness, solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonourable punishment. Itis constrained and punctilious in righteousness; it regards a marriedand industrious life as typically godly, and there is a sacredness toit, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which suchan existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental, its ritual ismeagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin topiety, and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as asort of moral vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes, so prominentin the gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Itsbenevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventionalwell-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which, being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation andlooks to spiritual freedom and peace. 

Protestantism was therefore attached from the first to the OldTestament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in its worldly andpre-rational form. It is not democratic in the same sense aspost-rational religions, which see in the soul an exile from some othersphere wearing for the moment, perhaps, a beggar's disguise: it isdemocratic only in the sense of having a popular origin and bendingeasily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion, it isnecessarily conventional in its conception of duty and earnestlymaterialistic; for the meaning of the word vanity never crosses thevulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion of a race young, wistful, andadventurous, feeling its latent potentialities, vaguely assured of anearthly vocation, and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthychild, pure but unchastened energies. Thus in the Protestant religionthe faith natural to barbarism appears clothed, by force of historicalaccident, in the language of an adapted Christianity. 

[Sidenote: Obstacles to humanism. ]

As the Middle Ages advanced the new-born human genius which constitutedtheir culture grew daily more playful, curious, and ornate. It wasnaturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganismprincipally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be takenphilosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that itwas a poetic expression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigiousvested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous thepath of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not beeasily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with whichfor a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Scepticism, instead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency tosincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind toexperience--scepticism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation, which still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into howartificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind. If scepticism, under such circumstances, by chance penetrated among the clergy, it wasnot favourable to consistency of life, and it was the more certain topenetrate among them in that their ranks, in a fat and unscrupulous age, would naturally be largely recruited by men without conscience or idealambitions. It became accordingly necessary to reform something; eitherthe gay world to suit the Church's primitive austerity and asceticism, or the Church to suit the world's profane and general interests. Thelatter task was more or less consciously undertaken by the humanists whowould have abated the clergy's wealth and irrational authority, advancedpolite learning, and, while of course retaining Christianity--for whyshould an ancestral religion be changed?--would have retained it as aform of paganism, as an ornament and poetic expression of human life. This movement, had it not been overwhelmed by the fanatical Reformationand the fanatical reaction against it, would doubtless have met withmany a check from the Church's sincere zealots; but it could haveovercome them and, had it been allowed to fight reason's battle withreason's weapons, would ultimately have led to general enlightenmentwithout dividing Christendom, kindling venomous religious and nationalpassions, or vitiating philosophy. 

[Sidenote: The Reformation and counter-reformation. ]

It was not humanism, however, that was destined to restrain and softenthe Church, completing by critical reflection that paganisation ofChristianity which had taken place at the beginning instinctively and ofnecessity. There was now another force in the field, the virginconscience and wilfulness of the Teutonic races, sincerely attached towhat they had assimilated in Christianity and now awakening to the factthat they inwardly abhorred and rejected the rest. This situation, in souncritical an age, could be interpreted as a return to primitiveChristianity, though this had been in truth, as we may now perceive, utterly opposed to the Teutonic spirit. Accordingly, the humanisticmovement was crossed and obscured by another, specifically religious andostensibly more Christian than the Church. Controversies followed, aspuerile as they were bloody; for it was not to be expected that thepeoples once forming the Roman Empire were going to surrender theirancestral religion without a struggle and without resisting this newbarbarian invasion into their imaginations and their souls. They mighthave suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldlyprosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from theirsupernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they toabandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by aforeign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own? Whathappened was that they intrenched themselves in their system, cutthemselves off from the genial influences that might have rendered itinnocuous, and became sectaries, like their opponents. Enlightenment wasonly to come after a recrudescence of madness and by the mutualslaughter of a fresh crop of illusions, usurpations, and tyrannies. 

[Sidenote: Protestantism an expression of character. ]

It would be easy to write, in a satirical vein, the history ofProtestant dogma. Its history was foreseen from the beginning byintelligent observers. It consisted in a gradual and inevitable descentinto a pious scepticism. The attempt to cling to various intermediatepositions on the inclined plane that slopes down from ancient revelationto private experience can succeed only for a time and where localinfluences limit speculative freedom. You must slide smilingly down tothe bottom or, in horror at that eventuality, creep up again and reachout pathetically for a resting-place at the top. To insist on thisrather obvious situation, as exhibited for instance in the AnglicanChurch, would be to thresh straw and to study in Protestantism only itsfeeble and accidental side. Its true essence is not constituted by theChristian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by thespirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expressionit gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to humaninstinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance, against the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewardsand punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well asby divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to anindependent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, itsays, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with allmeddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall beby faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to thespirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shallbe invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faithand by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusionmay not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment toother facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with indaily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritualadjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which aman learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share itsmultifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm. 

[Sidenote: It has the spirit of life. ]

Protestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness andself-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitivethan reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they couldspeak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestantfashion. "He that formed us, " they would say, "lives and energiseswithin us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we arefaithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in ourhearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him, we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly forever. " This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves twocorollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may becalled symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one's ownimpulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure toreward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets andpractices--of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; ofidolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather thanrelative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally oftradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardisethe soul's experimental development as, in profound isolation, shewrestles with reality and with her own inspiration. 

[Sidenote: and of courage. ]

In thus meeting the world the soul without experience shows a finecourage proportionate to its own vigour. We may well imagine that lionsand porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their sidethan ever visits the breast of antelope or jelly-fish. This assurance, when put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong andhigh-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination tohold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances. It isa part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in somelaborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the merehabit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The pointis to accomplish something, no matter particularly what; so thatProtestants show on this ground some respect even for an artist when hehas once achieved success. A certain experience of ill fortune is only astimulus to this fidelity. So great is the antecedent trust in the worldthat the world, as it appears at first blush, may be confidently defied. 

[Sidenote: but the voice of inexperience. ]

Hence, in spite of a theoretic optimism, disapproval and proscriptionplay a large part in Protestant sentiment. The zeal for righteousness, the practical expectation that all shall be well, cannot toleraterecognised evils. Evils must be abolished or at least hidden; they mustnot offend the face of day and give the lie to universal sanctimony. This austerity and repression, though they involve occasional hypocrisy, lead also to substantial moral reconstruction. Protestantism, springingfrom a pure heart, purifies convention and is a tonic to any society inwhich it prominently exists. It has the secret of that honest simplicitywhich belongs to unspoiled youth, that keen integrity native to theungalled spirit as yet unconscious of any duplicity in itself or of anyinward reason why it should fail. The only evils it recognises seem somany challenges to action, so many conditions for some gloriousunthought-of victory. Such a religion is indeed profoundly ignorant, itis the religion of inexperience, yet it has, at its core, the veryspirit of life. Its error is only to consider the will omnipotent andsacred and not to distinguish the field of inevitable failure from thatof possible success. Success, however, would never be possible withoutthat fund of energy and that latent resolve and determination whichbring also faith in success. Animal optimism is a great renovator anddisinfectant in the world. 

[Sidenote: Its emancipation from Christianity. ]

It was this youthful religion--profound, barbaric, poetical--that theTeutonic races insinuated into Christianity and substituted for thatlast sigh of two expiring worlds. In the end, with the completecrumbling away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egotismappeared openly on the surface in the shape of German speculativephilosophy. This form, which Protestantism assumed at a moment of hightension and reckless self-sufficiency, it will doubtless shed in turnand take on new expressions; but that declaration of independence on thepart of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit fromChristianity and the end of that series of transformations in which ittook the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials. It now bids fairto apply itself instead to social life and natural science and toattempt to feed its Protean hunger directly from these more homelysources. 

CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH

[Sidenote: Myth should dissolve with the advance of science. ]

That magic and mythology have no experimental sanction is clear so soonas experience begins to be gathered together with any care. As magicattempts to do work by incantations, so myth tries to attain knowledgeby playing with lies. The attempt is in the first instance inevitableand even innocent, for it takes time to discriminate valid fromvalueless fancies in a mind in which they spring up together, with nointrinsic mark to distinguish them. The idle notion attracts attentionno less than the one destined to prove significant; often it pleasesmore. Only watchful eyes and that rare thing, conscience applied tomemory, can pluck working notions from the gay and lascivious vegetationof the mind, or learn to prefer Cinderella to her impudent sisters. If amyth has some modicum of applicability or significance it takes root allthe more firmly side by side with knowledge. There are many subjects ofwhich man is naturally so ignorant that only mythical notions can seemto do them justice; such, for instance, are the minds of other men. Myth remains for this reason a constituent part even of the mostrational consciousness, and what can at present be profitably attemptedis not so much to abolish myth as to become aware of its mythicalcharacter. 

The mark of a myth is that it does not interpret a phenomenon in termscapable of being subsumed under the same category with that phenomenonitself, but fills it out instead with images that could never appearside by side with it or complete it on its own plane of existence. Thusif meditating on the moon I conceive her other side or the aspect shewould wear if I were travelling on her surface, or the position shewould assume in relation to the earth if viewed from some other planet, or the structure she would disclose could she be cut in halves, mythinking, however fanciful, would be on the scientific plane and notmythical, for it would forecast possible perceptions, complementary tothose I am trying to enlarge. If, on the other hand, I say the moon isthe sun's sister, that she carries a silver bow, that she is a virginand once looked lovingly on the sleeping Endymion, only the fool neverknew it--my lucubration is mythical; for I do not pretend that thisembroidery on the aspects which the moon actually wears in my feelingand in the interstices of my thoughts could ever be translated intoperceptions making one system with the present image. By going closer tothat disc I should not see the silver bow, nor by retreating in timeshould I come to the moment when the sun and moon were actually born ofLatona. The elements are incongruous and do not form one existence buttwo, the first sensible, the other only to be enacted dramatically, andhaving at best to the first the relation of an experience to its symbol. These fancies are not fore-tastes of possible perceptions, but are freeinterpretations or translations of the perceptions I have actually had. 

Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touchesthe ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly intothe air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances itsucks from the soil. It is therefore a fruit of experience, an ornament, a proof of animal vitality; but it is no _vehicle_ for experience; itcannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, onthe other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising likemyths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to furtherperceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from oneobject perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible. A scientific hypothesis is one which represents something continuouswith the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium. Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over whichpractical thought may travel from act to act, from perception toperception. 

[Sidenote: But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses. ]

To separate fable from knowledge nothing is therefore requisite exceptclose scrutiny and the principle of parsimony. Were mythology merely apoetic substitute for natural science the advance of science wouldsufficiently dispose of it. What remained over would, like the myths inPlato, be at least better than total silence on a subject that interestsus and makes us think, although we have no means of testing our thoughtsin its regard. But the chief source of perplexity and confusion inmythology is its confusion with moral truth. The myth which originallywas but a symbol substituted for empirical descriptions becomes in thesequel an idol substituted for ideal values. This complication, fromwhich half the troubles of philosophy arise, deserves our carefulattention. 

European history has now come twice upon the dissolution of mythologies, first among the Stoics and then among the Protestants. The circumstancesin the two cases were very unlike; so were the mythical systems thatwere discarded; and yet the issue was in both instances similar. Greekand Christian mythology have alike ended in pantheism. So soon as theconstructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingeniousfictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up themythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting onone side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and onthe other what dramatic imagination had added. For a cool anddisinterested observer the task, where evidence and records were notwanting, would be simple enough. But the critic in this case would notusually be cool or disinterested. His religion was concerned; he had noother object to hang his faith and happiness upon than just thistraditional hybrid which his own enlightenment was now dissolving. Towhich part should he turn for support? In which quarter should hecontinue to place the object of his worship?

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonic revision. ]

From the age of the Sophists to the final disappearance of paganismnearly a thousand years elapsed. A thousand years from the infliction ofa mortal wound to the moment of extinction is a long agony. Religions donot disappear when they are discredited; it is requisite that theyshould be replaced. For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed, they were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the monkscame to relieve them. During this prolonged decrepitude paganism livedon inertia, by accretions from the Orient, and by philosophicreinterpretations. Of these reinterpretations the first was thatattempted by Plato, and afterward carried out by the neo-Platonists andChristians into the notion of a supernatural spiritual hierarchy;above, a dialectical deity, the hypostasis of intellect and itsontological phases; below, a host of angels and demons, hypostases offaculties, moral influences, and evil promptings. In other words, in thediremption of myths which yielded here a natural phenomenon to beexplained and there a moral value to be embodied, Platonism attacheddivinity exclusively to the moral element. The ideas, which wereessentially moral functions, were many and eternal; their physicalembodiments were adventitious to them and constituted a lapse, amisfortune to be wiped out by an eventual reunion of the alienatednature with its own ideal. Religion in such a system necessarily meantredemption. In this movement paganism turned toward the future, towardsupernatural and revealed religion, and away from its own naturalisticprinciple. Revelation, as Plato himself had said, was needed to guide amind which distrusted phenomena and recoiled from earthly pursuits. 

[Sidenote: It made mythical entities of abstractions. ]

This religion had the strength of despair, but all else in it wasweakness. Apart from a revelation which, until Christianity appeared, remained nebulous and arbitrary, there could be no means of maintainingthe existence of those hypostasised moral entities. The effort toseparate them from the natural functions which they evidently expressedcould not succeed while any critical acumen or independence subsisted inthe believer. Platonism, to become a religion, had to appeal tosuperstition. Unity, for instance (which, according to Plato himself, isa category applicable to everything concomitantly with the complementarycategory of multiplicity, for everything, he says, is evidently both oneand many)--unity could not become the One, an independent and supremedeity, unless the meaning and function of unity were altogetherforgotten and a foolish idolatry, agape at words, were substituted forunderstanding. Some one had to come with an air of authority and reporthis visions of the One before such an entity could be added to thecatalogue of actual existences. The reality of all neo-Platonichypostasis was thus dependent on revelation and on forgetting themeaning once conveyed by the terms so mysteriously transfigured intometaphysical beings. 

[Sidenote: Hypostasis ruins ideals. ]

This divorce of neo-Platonic ideas from the functions they originallyrepresented in human life and discourse was found in the end to defeatthe very interest that had prompted it--enthusiasm for the ideal. Enthusiasm for the ideal had led Plato to treat all beauties asstepping-stones toward a perfect beauty in which all their charms mightbe present together, eternally and without alloy. Enthusiasm for theideal had persuaded him that mortal life was only an impeded effort tofall back into eternity. These inspired but strictly unthinkablesuggestions fell from his lips in his zeal to express how much theburden and import of experience exceeded its sensuous vehicle inpermanence and value. A thousand triangles revealed one pregnantproportion of lines and areas; a thousand beds and bridles served oneperpetual purpose in human life, and found in fulfilling it theiressence and standard of excellence; a thousand fascinations taught thesame lesson and coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty andnobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sensefor the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcendthem; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values, an idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum ofsuch enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendencewithout its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be anidealisation, an interpretation of reality reaching prophetically to itsgoals. It became a super-numerary second physics, a world to which anexistence was attributed which could be hardly conceived and wascertainly supported by no evidence, while that significance which itreally possessed in reference to natural processes was ignored, or evendenied. An idealism which had consisted in understanding anddiscriminating values now became a superstition incapable of discerningexistences. It added a prodigious fictitious setting to the cosmos inwhich man had to operate; it obscured his real interests and possiblehappiness by seeking to transport him into that unreal environment, withits fantastic and disproportionate economy; and, worst of all, itrobbed the ideal of its ideality by tearing it up from its roots innatural will and in experienced earthly benefits. For an ideal is notideal if it is the ideal of nothing. In that case it is only a ghostlyexistence, with no more moral significance or authority in relation tothe observer than has any happy creature which may happen to existsomewhere in the unknown reaches of the universe. 

[Sidenote: The Stoic revision. ]

Meantime, a second reinterpretation of mythology was attempted by theStoics. Instead of moving forward, like Plato, toward thesupernaturalism that was for so many ages to dominate the world, theStoics, with greater loyalty to pagan principles, reverted to thenatural forces that had been the chief basis for the traditionaldeities. The progress of philosophy had given the Stoics a notion of thecosmos such as the early Aryan could not have possessed when he recordedand took to heart his scattered observations in the form of divineinfluences, as many and various as the observations themselves. To theStoics the world was evidently one dynamic system. The power thatanimated it was therefore one God. Accordingly, after explaining awaythe popular myths by turning them somewhat ruthlessly into moralapologues, they proceeded to identify Zeus with the order of nature. This identification was supported by many traditional tendencies andphilosophic hints. The resulting concept, though still mythical, wasperhaps as rationalistic as the state of science at the time couldallow. Zeus had been from the beginning a natural force, at once sereneand formidable, the thunderer no less than the spirit of the blue. Hewas the ruler of gods and men; he was, under limitations, a sort ofgeneral providence. Anaxagoras, too, in proclaiming the cosmic functionof reason, had prepared the way for the Stoics in another direction. This "reason, " which in Socrates and Plato was already a deity, meant anorder, an order making for the good. It was the name for a principlemuch like that which Aristotle called Nature, an indwelling propheticinstinct by which things strive after their perfection and happiness. Now Aristotle observed this instinct, as behoved a disciple of Socrates, in its specific cases, in which the good secured could be discriminatedand visibly attained. There were many souls, each with its providentfunction and immutable guiding ideal, one for each man and animal, onefor each heavenly sphere, and one, the prime mover, for the highestsphere of all. But the Stoics, not trained in the same humane andcritical school, had felt the unity, of things more dramatically andvaguely in the realm of physics. Like Xenophanes of old, they gazed atthe broad sky and exclaimed, "The All is One. " Uniting these variousinfluences, they found it easy to frame a conception of Zeus, or theworld, or the universal justice and law, so as to combine in it adynamic unity with a provident reason. A world conceived to be materialand fatally determined was endowed with foresight of its own changes, perfect internal harmony, and absolute moral dignity. Thus mythology, with the Stoics, ended in pantheism. 

[Sidenote: The ideal surrendered before the physical. ]

By reducing their gods to a single divine influence, and identifyingthis in turn with natural forces, the Stoics had, in one sense, savedmythology. For no one would be inclined to deny existence or power tothe cosmos, to the body the soul of which was Zeus. Pantheism, takentheoretically, is only naturalism poetically expressed. It therefore wasa most legitimate and congenial interpretation of paganism for arationalistic age. On the other hand, mythology had not been a merepoetic physics; it had formulated the object of religion; it hadembodied for mankind its highest ideals in worshipful forms. It was whenthis religious function was transferred to the god of pantheism that theparadox and impossibility of the reform became evident. Nature neitheris nor can be man's ideal. The substitution of nature for thetraditional and ideal object of religion involves giving nature moralauthority over man; it involves that element of Stoicism which is thesynonym of inhumanity. Life and death, good and ill fortune, happinessand misery, since they flow equally from the universal order, shall bedeclared, in spite of reason, to be equally good. True virtue shall bereduced to conformity. He who has no ideal but that nature shouldpossess her actual constitution will be wise and superior to allflattery and calamity; he will be equal in dignity to Zeus. He who hasany less conformable and more determinate interests will be a fool and aworm. 

The wise man will, meantime, perform all the offices of nature; he willlend his body and his mind to her predestined labours. For pantheisticmorals, though post-rational, are not ascetic. In dislodging the naturalideal from the mind, they put in its place not its supernaturalexaggeration but a curtailment of it inspired by despair. The passionsare not renounced on the ground that they impede salvation or somevisionary ecstasy; they are merely chilled by the sense that theirdefeat, when actual, is also desirable. As all the gods have beenreduced to one substance or law, so all human treasures are reduced toone privilege--that of fortitude. You can always consent, and by aforced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above allvicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature reallybreeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, youwill be too stolid to perceive or too proud to share. 

Thus the hereditary taint of mythology, the poison of lies, survived inthe two forms of philosophic paganism which it concerns us to study. InPlato's school, myth helped to hypostasise the ideas and, by divorcingthem from their natural basis, to deprive them of their significance andmoral function, and render the worship of them superstitious. In theStoa the surviving mythological element turned nature, when her unityand order had been perceived, into an idol; so that the worship of herblasted all humane and plastic ideals and set men upon a vain andfanatical self-denial. Both philosophies were post-rational, as befitteda decadent age and as their rival and heir, Christianity, was also. 

[Sidenote: Parallel movements in Christianity. ]

Christianity had already within itself a similar duality; being adoctrine of redemption, like neo-Platonism, it tended to deny thenatural values of this life; but, being a doctrine of creation andprovidential government, comparable in a way to the Stoic, it had anineradicable inward tendency toward pantheism, and toward a consequentacceptance of both the goods and evils of this world as sanctioned andrequired by providence. 

[Sidenote: Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic. ]

The horror which pantheism has always inspired in the Church is likethat which materialism inspires in sentimental idealists; they attack itcontinually, not so much because anybody else defends it as because theyfeel it to be implied unmistakably in half their own tenets. Thenon-Platonic half of Christian theology, the Mosaic half, is bound tobecome pantheism in the hands of a philosopher. The Jews were notpantheists themselves, because they never speculated on the relationwhich omnipotence stood in to natural forces and human acts. Theyconceived Jehovah's omnipotence dramatically, as they conceivedeverything. He might pounce upon anything and anybody; he might subvertor play with the laws of nature; he might laugh at men's devices, andturn them to his own ends; his craft and energy could not but succeed inevery instance; but that was not to say that men and nature had no willof their own, and did not proceed naturally on their respective wayswhen Jehovah happened to be busy elsewhere. So soon, however, as thisdramatic sort of omnipotence was made systematic by dialectic, so soonas the doctrines of creation, omniscience, and providential governmentwere taken absolutely, pantheism was clearly involved. The consequencesto moral philosophy were truly appalling, for then the sins God punishedso signally were due to his own contrivance. The fervours of his saints, the fate of his chosen people and holy temples, became nothing but apuppet-show in his ironical self-consciousness. 

[Sidenote: Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals. ]

The strangest part of this system, or what would seem so if itsantecedents were not known, is that it is only half-conscious of itsphysical temper, and in calling itself an idealism (because it makesperception and will the substance of their objects), thinks itself anexpression of human aspirations. This illusion has deep historicalroots. It is the last stage of a mythical philosophy which has beenearnestly criticising its metaphors, on the assumption that they werenot metaphorical; whereby it has stripped them of all significance andreduced them at last to the bare principle of inversion. Nothing is anylonger idealised, yet all is still called an idealism. A myth is aninverted image of things, wherein their moral effects are turned intotheir dramatic antecedents--as when the wind's rudeness is turned intohis anger. When the natural basis of moral life is not understood, mythis the only way of expressing it theoretically, as eyes too weak to seethe sun face to face may, as Plato says, for a time study its imagemirrored in pools, and, as we may add, inverted there. So the good, which in itself is spiritual only, is transposed into a natural power. At first this amounts to an amiable misrepresentation of natural things;the gods inhabit Mount Olympus and the Elysian Fields are not far westof Cadiz. With the advance of geography the mythical facts recede, andin a cosmography like Hegel's, for instance, they have disappearedaltogether; but there remain the mythical values once ascribed to thoseideal objects but now transferred and fettered to the sad realities thathave appeared in their place. The titles of honour once bestowed on afabled world are thus applied to the real world by right of inheritance. 

[Sidenote: Truly divine action limited to what makes for the good. ]

Nothing could be clearer than the grounds on which pious men in thebeginning recognise divine agencies. We see, they say, the hand of Godin our lives. He has saved us from dangers, he has comforted us insorrow. He has blessed us with the treasures of life, of intelligence, of affection. He has set around us a beautiful world, and one still morebeautiful within us. Pondering all these blessings, we are convincedthat he is mighty in the world and will know how to make all things goodto those who trust in him. In other words, pious men discern God in theexcellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be, God would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed withevil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, thepreciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world, are proof of God's power; so is the stilling of tempests and theforgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, whichoptimistic theology has to attribute just as much to God's purposes, arenot attributed to him at all by pious feeling, but rather to hisenemies. In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God's omnipotence, his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and everyChristian prayer. If the most pious of nations is engaged in war, andsuffers a great accidental disaster, such as it might expect to be safefrom, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ forthose that perished. God's office, in both cases, is to save only. Noone seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_--that is, watch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs--noteven in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there. 

[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle. ]

The criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely andunequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respectbetter moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. God is the ideal, andwhat manifests the ideal manifests God. Are you confident of thepermanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in God, you live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure ofrationality in the world, and of God's power over it, is the extent ofhuman satisfactions. In hell, good people would disbelieve in God, andit is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. Theexistence of any evil--and if evil is felt it exists, for experience isits locus--is a proof that some accident has intruded into God's works. If that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality, is to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it containsanything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is notrational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidentalperversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow anelement of resistance to the rational order must be introducedsomewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnishedby reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test;for if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationalityin the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, wemust frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It willno longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, thereal is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order tomaintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea ofreason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is actionaddressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To piousfeeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or passive, ofindependent origination, is the explanation of all defects; andeverything which is not helpful to men's purposes must be assigned totheir own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation ofthat paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will, but repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physicallyconsidered--as theology must consider the matter--both acts and bothvolitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; butpractical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence itfollows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well isGod's doing, and what is done ill is not. 

[Sidenote: The standard of value is human. ]

Thus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmicrationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarilya function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as theworld is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the willsit generates--the excellence of each creature, the value of its life, and the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism couldbe moral because, although it asserted in a sense the morality of theuniverse, it asserted this only by virtue of a belief that the universesupported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness ofthat power which made for righteousness was in danger of passing overinto idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yetthese relapses into Nature-worship are the more rare in that the Jewswere not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job withhis worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only bya scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of God as tomake him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spiteof the mystic and stoical piety of its author, passed very justly foratheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by whichalone God was made manifest to the Hebrews. 

If Job's reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we havesince passed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism, through a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse theprinciple that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for whatshould not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols bywhich the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job shouldrecover a thousand she-asses may seem to us a poor sop for his longanguish of mind and body, and we may hardly agree with him in findinghis new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had ledto no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody, that fidelity would have been folly. There is a noble folly whichconsists in pushing a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as torender it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a caseof such noble folly if we were not somehow assured of its ultimatefruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruitsof virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, thesilence of the passions, the possession of truth, and the love of Godand of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness, incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even thisattenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanishnot merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the wholeChristian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without somewindow open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldlinesswithout being less irrational and vain. 

[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in God. ]

Revelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highestgood which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis ofhuman interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticismof peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations fromthe natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianityconceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction ofhuman nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means. If an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was becausethe decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a greatdespair in all noble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or ahand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blindand maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, theyshould remain for ever in hell-fire. Supernatural, then, as the idealmight seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet acceptedonly because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination, could revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from theheart's corruption and weariness into a new existence. 

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

The human spirit has not passed in historical times through a morecritical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved inaccepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?Was it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Anyabsolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come todestroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or threecenturies unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere, not least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was areconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only beindirect, understanding mythical, happiness surreptitious; but all threesubsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessarydisguises. 

[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion. ]

The young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, thoughclassic virtue and beauty and a great classic state subsisted, the forcethat had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was itnecessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternalapathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under thecircumstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity wasfounded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and thekingdom of heaven--a phrase admitting many interpretations. From theJewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could shift its sense tomean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mysticalspirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, hadmade a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between lifein time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism, Christianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticismand action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. Iteven enshrined the two attitudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewishdoctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of adivine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking toperceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it wasthe Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught apure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however, would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble andweakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but itwould not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. Itpreferred an inconsistency, which it hardly perceived, to a completesurrender of its instincts. It settled down to the conviction that Godcreated the world _and_ redeemed it; that the soul is naturally good_and_ needs salvation. 

[Sidenote: Superficial solution. ]

This contradiction can be explained exoterically by saying that time andchanged circumstances separate the two situations: having made the worldperfect, God redeems it after it has become corrupt; and whereas allthings are naturally good, they may by accident lose their excellence, and need to have it restored. There is, however, an esoteric side to thematter. A soul that may be redeemed, a will that may look forward to asituation in which its action will not be vain or sinful, is one that intruth has never sinned; it has merely been thwarted. Its ambition isrational, and what its heart desires is essentially good and ideal. Sothat the whole classic attitude, the faith in action, art, andintellect, is preserved under this protecting cuticle of dogma; nothingwas needed but a little courage, and circumstances somewhat morefavourable, for the natural man to assert himself again. A peoplebelieving in the resurrection of the flesh in heaven will not be averseto a reawakening of the mind on earth. 

[Sidenote: But from what shall we be redeemed?]

Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines maychange rôles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way, exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity issin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemptionmight mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational lifemight be led under right conditions. Instead of being like Buddha, theredeemer might be like Prometheus. In that case, however, the creatorwould become like Zeus--a tyrant will responsible for our conditionsrather than expressive of our ideal. The doctrine of creation wouldbecome pantheism and that of redemption, formerly ascetic, wouldrepresent struggling humanity. 

[Sidenote: Typical attitude of St. Augustine. ]

The seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studiednowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and completerepresentative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whomthe Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy wasonly one phase of Augustine's genius; with him it was an instrument ofzeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out ofrhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precariousand episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technicalelaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over eitherland; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy ashis exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrewfervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it mustbe confessed) coarseness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined, enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative, remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done morethan any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever moretruly filled with its spirit. 

[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism. ]

Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position hehad to pass in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficulttriumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained theconception of intelligible objects was won only after long disciplineand much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed tohim at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must beperceptible, for to Saint Augustine's mind also, at this early andsensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might neverhave worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vividfancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied, had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. God must somehow beconceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theologicalpassion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensibleobjects alone were real, God must be somewhere discoverable in space; hemust either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe, or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest. 

These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and, what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious andidealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine's mindobeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, andmore, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural thingson which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him thatreality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong ratherto the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object ofsense or experience can be the root and principle of experience andsense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of amoving show. God could now be apprehended and believed in preciselybecause he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he couldnot be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. Theultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things;principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibilityoffered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which wepass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did notattract Augustine's attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was asubordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by"_certissima ratione vel experientia_, " and he even wished science to beallowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mysticand allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoidthe puerilities into which any literal interpretation--of the creationin six days, for instance--would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thusnot be scandalised by mythical dogmas "concerning things which theymight have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation. "

Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; thatregion could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because hisattention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had solaboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplativereason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essencesbehind the variations of experience, essences which at first receivenames, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquirevalues, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, andfinally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the firstcauses and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration. 

[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity. ]

This purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Likeevery phase of Saint Augustine's speculation, it came, as we have said, to buttress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of hisdepth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition didmore to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than thesedogmas could do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonicideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value, their Socratic significance. They had become ontological entities, whereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life. This hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates itsmeaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had alreadybeen carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine, while helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, wasable as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the humanblood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned allhuman interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at allcondemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adoptthose mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. InSaint Augustine's mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonicfigments became the Christian God, the Christian Church, and theChristian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance thanthat which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionaryphilosophy from the soil of Greek culture. 

[Sidenote: God the good. ]

Saint Augustine's way of conceiving God is an excellent illustration ofthe power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of givinglife and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from afabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. God, tohim, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. Allideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divineessence. "The rational soul understands God, for it understands whatexists always unchanged. " ... "God is happiness; and in him and fromhim and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. God isthe good and the beautiful. " He was never tired of telling us that Godis not true but the truth _(i. E. _, the ideal object of thought in anysphere), not good but the good _(i. E. _, the ideal object of will in allits rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflectingon his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and theeternal, he conceived God, inadequately, of course, yet essentially, because God signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfectionswhich the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of thisdivine essence, accordingly, every interesting thing was amanifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of itssuperabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible passion of Saint Augustinetoward his God; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayerinto which he was continually relapsing, a passion and a sweetness whichno one will understand to whom God is primarily a natural power and onlyaccidentally a moral ideal. 

[Sidenote: Primary and secondary religion. ]

Herein lies the chief difference between those in whom religion isspontaneous and primary--a very few--those in whom it is imitative andsecondary. To the former, divine things are inward values, projected bychance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature, while to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objectivefactors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come, perhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of theinner life on account of the supposed physical influence which thosesuper-human entities have over human fortunes. In a word, theology, forthose whose religion is secondary, is simply a false physics, a doctrineabout eventual experience not founded on the experience of the past. Such a false physics, however, is soon discredited by events; it doesnot require much experience or much shrewdness to discover thatsupernatural beings and laws are without the empirical efficacy whichwas attributed to them. True physics and true history must always tend, in enlightened minds, to supplant those misinterpreted religioustraditions. Therefore, those whose reflection or sentiment does notfurnish them with a key to the moral symbolism and poetic validityunderlying theological ideas, if they apply their intelligence to thesubject at all, and care to be sincere, will very soon come to regardreligion as a delusion. Where religion is primary, however, all thatworldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it isirrelevant to an artist's pleasure to be warned that the beauty heexpresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to amathematician's reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and hissupposed philosophy an abracadabra. To the religious man religion isinwardly justified. God has no need of natural or logical witnesses, butspeaks himself within the heart, being indeed that ineffable attractionwhich dwells in whatever is good and beautiful, and that persuasivevisitation of the soul by the eternal and incorruptible by which shefeels herself purified, rescued from mortality, and given an inheritancein the truth. This is precisely what Saint Augustine knew and felt withremarkable clearness and persistence, and what he expressed unmistakablyby saying that every intellectual perception is knowledge of God or hasGod's nature for its object. 

Proofs of the existence of God are therefore not needed, since hisexistence is in one sense obvious and in another of no religiousinterest. It is obvious in the sense that the ideal is a term of moralexperience, and that truth, goodness, and beauty are inevitablyenvisaged by any one whose life has in some measure a rational quality. It is of no religious interest in the sense that perhaps some physicalor dynamic absolute might be scientifically discoverable in the darkentrails of nature or of mind. The great difference between religion andmetaphysics is that religion looks for God at the top of life andmetaphysics at the bottom; a fact which explains why metaphysics hassuch difficulty in finding God, while religion has never lost him. 

This brings us to the grand characteristic and contradiction of SaintAugustine's philosophy, a characteristic which can be best studied, perhaps, in him, although it has been inherited by all Christiantheology and was already present in Stoic and Platonic speculation, when the latter had lost its ethical moorings. This is the idea that thesame God who is the ideal of human aspiration is also the creator of theuniverse and its only primary substance. 

[Sidenote: Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato. ]

If Plato, when he wrote that fine and profound passage in the sixth bookof the Republic, where he says that the good is the cause of allintelligence in the mind and of all intelligibility in the object, andindeed the principle of all essence and existence--if Plato could haveforeseen what his oracular hyperbole was to breed in the world, we maywell believe that he would have expunged it from his pages with the sameseverity with which he banished the poets from his State. In the lips ofSocrates, and at that juncture in the argument of the Republic, thosesentences have a legitimate meaning. The good is the principle ofbenefit, and the philosophers who are to rule the state will not bealienated by their contemplations from practical wisdom, seeing that theidea of the good--_i. E. _, of the advantageous, profitable, andbeneficial--is the highest concept of the whole dialectic, that inreference to which all other ideas have place and significance. If weventured to extend the interpretation of the passage, retaining itsspirit, into fields where we have more knowledge than Plato could have, we might say that the principle of the good generates essence andexistence, in the sense that all natural organs have functions andutilities by which they establish themselves in the world, and that thesystem of these useful functions is the true essence or idea of anyliving thing. But the Socratic origin and sense of such a passage asthis, and of others (in the Timæus, for instance) allied to it, was soonlost in the headlong idolatry which took possession of the neo-Platonicschool; and it was through this medium that Saint Augustine received hisPlatonic inspiration. The good no longer meant, as it did to Plato, theprinciple of benefit everywhere, but it meant the good Being; and this, for a Christian, could naturally be none other than God; so that theidea that the good was the creator of all essence and existence nowassumed a marvellously Mosaic significance. Here was one of those bitsof primeval revelation which, it was explained, had survived in theheathen world. The hypostasis of moral conceptions, then, and of theidea of the good in particular, led up from the Platonic side to thedoctrine of creation. 

[Sidenote: Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job. ]

The history of the conception among the Jews was entirely different, theelement of goodness in the creator being there adventitious and theelement of power original. Jehovah for Job was a universal force, justified primarily by his omnipotence; but this physical authoritywould in the end, he hoped, be partly rationalised and made to clashless scandalously with the authority of justice. Among the Greeks, aswas to be expected, the idea of justice was more independent andentire; but once named and enshrined, that divinity, too, tended toabsoluteness, and could be confused with the physical basis ofexistence. In the Stoic philosophy the latter actually gained the upperhand, and the problem of Job reappeared on the horizon. It did not riseinto painful prominence, however, until Christian times, when absolutemoral perfection and absolute physical efficacy were predicated of Godwith equal emphasis, if not among the people who never have conceivedGod as either perfectly good or entirely omnipotent, at least among thetheologians. If not all felt the contradiction with equal acuteness, thereason doubtless was that a large part of their thought was perfunctoryand merely apologetic: they did not quite mean what they said when theyspoke of perfect goodness; and we shall see how Saint Augustine himself, when reduced to extremities, surrendered his loyalty to the moral idealrather than reconsider his traditional premisses. 

[Sidenote: The Manicheans. ]

How tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we cansee by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans. The Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one beinggoodness and of the other badness. This system was logically weak, because these absolutes were in the first place two, which is onecontradiction, and in the second place relative, which is another. Butin spite of the pitfalls into which the Manicheans were betrayed bytheir pursuit of metaphysical absolutes, they were supported by a moralintuition of great truth and importance. They saw that an essentiallygood principle could not have essential evil for its effect. These moralterms are, we may ourselves feel sure, relative to existence and toactual impulse, and it may accordingly be always misleading to make themthe essence of metaphysical realities: good and bad may be notexistences but qualities which existences have only in relation todemands in themselves or in one another. Yet if we once launch, as manymetaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities andrelations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictoryqualities into opposed entities, and not to render our metaphysicalworld unmeaning as well as fictitious by peopling it with concepts inwhich the most important categories of life are submerged andinvalidated. Evil may be no more a metaphysical existence than good is;both are undoubtedly mere terms for vital utilities and impediments; butif we are to indulge in mythology at all, it is better that ourmythology should do symbolic justice to experience and should representby contrasted figures the ineradicable practical difference between thebetter and the worse, the beautiful and the ugly, the trustworthy andthe fallacious. To discriminate between these things in practice iswisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between themin theory. 

The Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to onepower and what is bad to another. The fable is transparent enough, andwe, who have only just learned to smile at a personal devil, may affectto wonder that any one should ever have taken it literally. But in anage when the assertive imagination was unchecked by any critical sense, such a device at least avoided the scandal of attributing all the evilsand sins of this world to a principle essentially inviolate and pure. Byavoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as toevery one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and tohis practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many tooverlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as itsfigments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences. 

[Sidenote: All things good by nature. ]

The horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculenceof nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softenedby experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us thecomplexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending ourimaginative sympathy to forms of existence and passion at firstrepulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may havetheir natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine wasultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of thoseGreek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evilwas but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore theconception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulanceor exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in itsteeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into ametaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itselfcongruous with the true and the good, since its constitution isintelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not forthe limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict oflife, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace andconcord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in therealm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of theGospel, that their angels see the face of God. Their ideals are no lesscases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideallocked in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity torecognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evilis always relative and subordinate to some constituted nature in itselfa standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation ofeventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordinglyaccidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actionsto natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground forthe condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give riseto it by their imperfect realisation. 

The Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophicalinterpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect towhat was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good;in their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created byGod. For God was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods weresubordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out ofmorals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in theinverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that thehighest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure asa first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operationis what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrinewhich would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moralideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight. If the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pass to an ordinary pantheism, while if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in anaturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is afunction of things and neither their substance nor their cause. 

[Sidenote: The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall. ]

To accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, wasnot very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be setdown to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters offact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and whenthe creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility becamemerely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortalphilosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation waswholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: thedisparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity was afterward toregard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of thedeity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. AndSaint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adorationof God the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacyin the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good mightdispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in singlecombat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and thenatural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious andits origin more intimately bound up with the general constitution of theworld. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflictis only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If weassume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things atfirst proceeded out of the potency of the good--their matter and form, their distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to theattraction of the ultimately best--it is clear that some calamity musthave immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled, the strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and themortal conflict instituted which not only condemns all existent thingsultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfullyendure, to be truly and adequately themselves. 

Original sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythicalground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. Thisfact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediateintroduction of original sin into the history of the world could a manto whom God was still a moral term believe at all in the natural andfundamental efficacy of God in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall madeit possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation. Both belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values oflife were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once themetaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poeticcosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency ofsin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of itsideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rationallife, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesisfor experience and nature as they actually are. God would thus become anatural agent, like the fire of Heraclitus, in which human piety couldtake an interest only by force of traditional inertia andunintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual preventedmen from awaking to the disappearance of the god. The essence of deity, as Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to humanaspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. God, therefore, as theManicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could bethe author of good only; or, to express the same thing in lessfigurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things thatcould contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore, be carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, toanother mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine'stheology was named sin. 

[Sidenote: Original sin. ]

Everything in the world which obscured the image of the creator orrebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which preventedin things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sinwas responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, fordeath, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible--sotruly _original_ was it--for what was painful and wrong even in theanimal kingdom, and sin--such was the paradoxical apex of this invertedseries of causes--sin was responsible for sin itself. The insolubleproblems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced inits every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until weremember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown tophilosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification offables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented ascauses of natural existence. The former are internal products of life, the latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reachthe contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this dayhave followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been thecause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle ofevil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictoryonly after the mythical identification of the God which meant the idealof life with the God which meant the forces of nature. 

[Sidenote: Forced abandonment of the ideal. ]

It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, towork over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction insomewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good andevil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but thatsystem which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system, and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and theupward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only byrenouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by nolonger regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as apartial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturallyinvolves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal termin man's own existence. The latter is the solution adopted bymetaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hardpressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, isjust, although not just as man is, _nor as man should be_. In otherwords, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sensein which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, infact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order tobe able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of thisworld. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, butontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the loveof God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience, as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication, as it was with Spinoza. 

The sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are nothard to trace in Augustine's own doctrine and feeling. He became achampion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition. The eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this wemust admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that thereshould be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling atthe quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences whichfor their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read withoutpain--sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for thecrimes of the universe. "Why should God not create beings that heforeknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fateshe could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and whatfree gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?" "Thinking it morelordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not toallow evil to exist at all. " Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil thatgood may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations andis made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contortedas these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not supposethat they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotionalidealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity isfortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christianapologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while thedialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; andSaint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail thesins and to combat the heresies which his God was stealthily nursing, sothat in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be morebeautifully manifested. 

[Sidenote: The problem among the protestants. ]

It was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervidCatholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. Theyemphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this verypredestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himselfto accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; andconcentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers'controversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitatethe inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts ofemotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on sometext or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnestreligious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every daymore pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehearse theold platitudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy oranother; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals asmore than allegories, historic or mythical illustrations of generalspiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, andafter them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had forChristianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuineinspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personalapprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theologyrediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christianphilosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a purecosmic speculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different ageto men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged. The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finiteexpression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, theincarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity;and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, thematter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with itsmeans of application, once the central point in Christianity, was lesspliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeedcultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into theOne; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperamentcould hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense mustdiscountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, intheory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, aswith the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vitalsocial forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part ofneo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation hadaccordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul maygladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly canbe mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest insuccess and its fidelity to instinct. 

[Sidenote: Pantheism accepted. ]

An absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will isStoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonicabsolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernaturaldestiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent inexistence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate beforecosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity, for salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which theyregard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like theStoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspiredand altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place andfunction in it was unholy and perverse. This world-worship, despisingheartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact, whatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Werethe people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction theircorruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to its own abandonment, forit would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which itsconvenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety, even if their object be material and their worship idolatrous, exalt themind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplationa theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself willhave purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade youafresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can. Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for thereit instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists arefor the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and onlyinterested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency ofthe society in which they live. Their pantheism under thesecircumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them intopractical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists forall its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprovenaturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals wherenaturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the mostuncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finitesoul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and thatnature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine thatthey have no value whatever save by the services they may render to eachspirit in its specific and genuine ambitions. 

[Sidenote: Plainer scorn for the ideal. ]

Indeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens toexist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoraltendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminariesinto the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority, their favourite passions and to sing the picturesqueness of ablood-stained world. "Practical" men follow, deprecating any reflectionwhich may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosenactivities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid, brutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn toinvoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves thetrouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secretindifference to the world's happiness. The follies thus sanctionedtheoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, woulddoubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had theyabsorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deepinstincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affectthem in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clearand honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in somemeasure understood and appreciated it. 

[Sidenote: The price of mythology is superstition. ]

Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversivepowers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man'sstamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying andsacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and thenworships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encountersthe same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merelypoetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpretthe natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sortof life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if itidealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the materialreality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover theactual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship itwould be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature, those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In thelatter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in adramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet, who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. Bythis idealisation the affinity which things often have to man'sinterests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total andreal mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in Æsop'sfables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and whilenature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting thesoul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, nother independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she reallyis, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology andher unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarianpassions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify naturalphilosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions andin its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines. A myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and passion, teaches man to look for models and goals of action in that externalworld where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials. 

CHAPTER X

PIETY

[Sidenote: The core of religion not theoretical. ]

Hebraism is a striking example of a religion tending to discardmythology and magic. It was a Hebraising apostle who said that truereligion and undefiled was to visit the fatherless and the widow, and doother works of mercy. Although a complete religion can hardly remainwithout theoretic and ritual expression, we must remember that after allreligion has other aspects less conspicuous, perhaps, than itsmythology, but often more worthy of respect. If religion be, as we haveassumed, an imaginative symbol for the Life of Reason, it should containnot only symbolic ideas and rites, but also symbolic sentiments andduties. And so it everywhere does in a notable fashion. Piety andspirituality are phases of religion no less important than mythology, orthan those metaphysical spectres with which mythology terminates. It istherefore time we should quite explicitly turn from religious ideas toreligious emotions, from imaginative history and science to imaginativemorals. 

Piety, in its nobler and Roman sense, may be said to mean man'sreverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of hislife by that attachment. A soul is but the last bubble of a longfermentation in the world. If we wish to live associated with permanentracial interests we must plant ourselves on a broad historic and humanfoundation, we must absorb and interpret the past which has made us, sothat we may hand down its heritage reinforced, if possible, and in noway undermined or denaturalised. This consciousness that the humanspirit is derived and responsible, that all its functions are heritagesand trusts, involves a sentiment of gratitude and duty which we may callpiety. 

[Sidenote: Loyalty to the sources of our being. ]

The true objects of piety are, of course, those on which life and itsinterests really depend: parents first, then family, ancestors, andcountry; finally, humanity at large and the whole natural cosmos. Buthad a lay sentiment toward these forces been fostered by clear knowledgeof their nature and relation to ourselves, the dutifulness or cosmicemotion thereby aroused would have remained purely moral and historical. As science would not in the end admit any myth which was not avowedpoetry, so it would not admit any piety which was not plain reason andduty. But man, in his perplexities and pressing needs, has plunged, oncefor all, into imaginative courses through which it is our business tofollow him, to see if he may not eventually reach his goal even bythose by-paths and dark circumlocutions. 

[Sidenote: The pious Æneas. ]

What makes piety an integral part of traditional religions is the factthat moral realities are represented in the popular mind by poeticsymbols. The awe inspired by principles so abstract and consequences soremote and general is arrested at their conventional name. We have allread in boyhood, perhaps with derision, about the pious Æneas. His pietymay have seemed to us nothing but a feminine sensibility, a faculty ofshedding tears on slight provocation. But in truth Æneas's piety, asVirgil or any Roman would have conceived it, lay less in his feelingsthan in his function and vocation. He was bearing the Palladium of hiscountry to a new land, to found another Troy, so that the blood andtraditions of his ancestors might not perish. His emotions were only theappropriate expression of his priestly office. The hero might have beenstern and stolid enough on his own martial ground, but since he bore theold Anchises from the ruins of Ilium he had assumed a sacred mission. Henceforth a sacerdotal unction and lyric pathos belonged rightfully tohis person. If those embers, so religiously guarded, should by chancehave been extinguished, there could never have been a Vestal fire norany Rome. So that all that Virgil and his readers, if they had anypiety, revered in the world had been hazarded in those legendaryadventures. It was not Æneas's own life or private ambition that was atstake to justify his emotion. His tenderness, like Virgil's own, wasennobled and made heroic by its magnificent and impersonal object. Itwas truly an epic destiny that inspired both poet and hero. 

[Sidenote: An ideal background required. ]

If we look closer, however, we shall see that mythical and magicelements were requisite to lend this loftiness to the argument. HadÆneas not been Venus's son, had no prophetic instinct animated him, hadno Juno been planning the rise of Carthage, how could the futuredestinies of this expedition have been imported into it, to lift itabove some piratical or desperate venture? Colonists passing in our dayto America or Australia might conceivably carry with them the seeds ofempires as considerable as Rome's. But they would go out thinking oftheir private livelihood and convenience, breaking or loosening whateverpious bonds might unite them to the past, and quite irresponsibly layingthe foundations for an unknown future. A poet, to raise them to theheight of their unwitting function, would have to endow them with secondsight and a corresponding breadth of soul and purpose. He would need, ina word, heroic figures and supernatural machinery. 

Now, what supernatural machinery and heroic figures do for an epic poetpiety does for a race. It endows it, through mythical and magic symbols, with something like a vision or representation of its past and future. Religion is normally the most traditional and national of things. Itembodies and localises the racial heritage. Commandments of the law, feasts and fasts, temples and the tombs associated with them, are somany foci of communal life, so many points for the dissemination ofcustom. The Sabbath, which a critical age might justify on hygienicgrounds, is inconceivable without a religious sanction. The craving forrest and emotion expressed itself spontaneously in a practice which, asit established itself, had to be sanctioned by fables till the recurrentholiday, with all its humane and chastening influences, came to beestablished on supernatural authority. It was now piety to observe itand to commemorate in it the sacred duties and traditions of the race. In this function, of course, lay its true justification, but themythical one had to be assigned, since the diffused prosaic advantagesof such a practice would never avail to impose it on irrational wills. Indeed, to revert to our illustration, had Æneas foreseen in detail thewhole history of Rome, would not his faith in his divine mission havebeen considerably dashed? The reality, precious and inestimable as onthe whole it was to humanity, might well have shocked him by itscruelties, shames, and disasters. He would have wished to found only aperfect nation and a city eternal indeed. A want of rationality andmeasure in the human will, that has not learned to prize smallbetterments and finite but real goods, compels it to deceive itselfabout the rewards of life in order to secure them. That celestialmission, those heavenly apparitions, those incalculable treasurescarried through many a storm, abused ÆEneas's mind in order to nerve himto his real duty. Yet his illusion was merely intellectual. The missionundertaken was truly worth carrying out. Piety thus came to bear thefruits of philanthropy in an age when the love of man was inconceivable. A dull and visionary intellect could hit on no other way of justifying agood instinct. 

[Sidenote: Piety accepts natural conditions and present tasks. ]

[Sidenote: The leadership of instinct is normal. ]

Philosophers who harbour illusions about the status of intellect innature may feel that this leadership of instinct in moral life is a sortof indignity, and that to dwell on it so insistently is to prolongsatire without wit. But the leadership of instinct, the consciousexpression of mechanism, is not merely a necessity in the Life ofReason, it is a safeguard. Piety, in spite of its allegories, contains amuch greater wisdom than a half-enlightened and pert intellect canattain. Natural beings have natural obligations, and the value of thingsfor them is qualified by distance and by accidental materialconnections. Intellect would tend to gauge things impersonally by theirintrinsic values, since intellect is itself a sort of disembodied anduniversal function; it would tend to disregard material conditions andthat irrational substratum of reason without which reason would have noorgans and no points of application. Piety, on the contrary, esteemsthings apart from their intrinsic worth, on account of their relation tothe agent's person and fortune. Yet such esteem is perfectly rational, partiality in man's affections and allegiance being justified by thepartial nature and local status of his life. Piety is the spirit'sacknowledgment of its incarnation. So, in filial and parental affection, which is piety in an elementary form, there is a moulding of will andemotion, a check to irresponsible initiative, in obedience to the factsof animal reproduction. Every living creature has an intrinsic and idealworth; he is the centre of actual and yet more of potential interests. But this moral value, which even the remotest observer must recognise inboth parent and child, is not the ground of their specific affection foreach other, which no other mortal is called to feel their regard. Thisaffection is based on the incidental and irrational fact that the onehas this particular man for a father, and the other that particular manfor a son. Yet, considering the animal basis of human life, anattachment resting on that circumstance is a necessary and rationalattachment. 

This physical bond should not, indeed, disturb the intellect in itsproper function or warp its judgments; you should not, under guise oftenderness, become foolish and attribute to your father or child greaterstature or cleverness or goodness than he actually possesses. To do sois a natural foible but no part of piety or true loyalty. It is onething to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a justimagination. Indeed, piety is never so beautiful and touching, never sothoroughly humane and invincible, as when it is joined to an impartialintellect, conscious of the relativity involved in existence and able toelude, through imaginative sympathy, the limits set to personal life bycircumstance and private duty. As a man dies nobly when, awaiting hisown extinction, he is interested to the last in what will continue to bethe interests and joys of others, so he is most profoundly pious wholoves unreservedly a country, friends, and associations which he knowsvery well to be not the most beautiful on earth, and who, being whollycontent in his personal capacity with his natural conditions, does notneed to begrudge other things whatever speculative admiration they maytruly deserve. The ideal in this polyglot world, where reason canreceive only local and temporal expression, is to understand alllanguages and to speak but one, so as to unite, in a manly fashion, comprehension with propriety. 

Piety is in a sense pathetic because it involves subordination tophysical accident and acceptance of finitude. But it is also noble andeminently fruitful because, in subsuming a life under the general lawsof relativity, it meets fate with simple sincerity and labours inaccordance with the conditions imposed. Since man, though capable ofabstraction and impartiality, is rooted like a vegetable to one pointin space and time, and exists by limitation, piety belongs to theequilibrium of his being. It resides, so to speak, at his centre ofgravity, at the heart and magnetic focus of his complex endowment. Itexercises there the eminently sane function of calling thought home. Itsaves speculative and emotional life from hurtful extravagance bykeeping it traditional and social. Conventional absurdities have atleast this advantage, that they may be taken conventionally and may cometo be, in practice, mere symbols for their uses. Piety is more closelylinked with custom than with thought. It exercises an irrationalsuasion, moralises by contagion, and brings an emotional peace. 

[Sidenote: Embodiment essential to spirit. ]

Patriotism is another form of piety in which its natural basis andrational function may be clearly seen. It is right to prefer our ownessential to country to all others, because we are children and citizensbefore we can be travellers or philosophers. Specific character is anecessary point of origin for universal relations: a pure nothing canhave no radiation or scope. It is no accident for the soul to beembodied; her very essence is to express and bring to fruition thebody's functions and resources. Its instincts make her ideals and itsrelations her world. A native country is a sort of second body, anotherenveloping organism to give the will definition. A specific inheritancestrengthens the soul. Cosmopolitanism has doubtless its place, because aman may well cultivate in himself, and represent in his nation, affinities to other peoples, and such assimilation to them as iscompatible with personal integrity and clearness of purpose. Plasticityto things foreign need not be inconsistent with happiness and utility athome. But happiness and utility are possible nowhere to a man whorepresents nothing and who looks out on the world without a plot of hisown to stand on, either on earth or in heaven. He wanders from place toplace, a voluntary exile, always querulous, always uneasy, always alone. His very criticisms express no ideal. His experience is withoutsweetness, without cumulative fruits, and his children, if he has them, are without morality. For reason and happiness are like otherflowers--they wither when plucked. 

[Sidenote: Piety to the gods takes form from current ideals. ]

The object most commonly associated with piety is the gods. Popularphilosophy, inverting the natural order of ideas, thinks piety to thegods the source of morality. But piety, when genuine, is rather anincidental expression of morality. Its sources are perfectly natural. Avolitional life that reaches the level of reflection is necessarilymoral in proportion to the concreteness and harmony of its instincts. The fruits which such harmonious instincts, expressed in consciousness, may eventually bear, fruits which would be the aim of virtue, are notreadily imaginable, and the description of them has long ago beenintrusted to poets and mythologists. Thus the love of God, for example, is said to be the root of Christian charity, but is in reality only itssymbol. For no man not having a superabundant need and faculty of lovingreal things could have given a meaning to the phrase, "love of God, " orbeen moved by it to any action. History shows in unequivocal fashionthat the God loved shifts his character with the shift in hisworshippers' real affections. What the psalmist loves is the beauty ofGod's house and the place where his glory dwelleth. A priestly quietudeand pride, a grateful, meditative leisure after the storms of seditionand war, some retired unity of mind after the contradictions of theworld--this is what the love of God might signify for the levites. SaintJohn tells us that he who says he loves God and loves not his neighbouris a liar. Here the love of God is an anti-worldly estimation of thingsand persons, a heart set on that kingdom of heaven in which the humbleand the meek should be exalted. Again, for modern Catholicism the phrasehas changed its meaning remarkably and signifies in effect love forChrist's person, because piety has taken a sentimental turn and centredon maintaining imaginary personal relations with the Saviour. How shouldwe conceive that a single supernatural influence was actuallyresponsible for moral effects themselves so various, and producing, inspite of a consecutive tradition, such various notions concerning theirobject and supposed source?

[Sidenote: The religion of humanity. ]

Mankind at large is also, to some minds, an object of piety. But thisreligion of humanity is rather a desideratum than a fact: humanity doesnot actually appear to anybody in a religious light. The _nihil hominehomini utittus_ remains a signal truth, but the collective influence ofmen and their average nature are far too mixed and ambiguous to fill thesoul with veneration. Piety to mankind must be three-fourths pity. Thereare indeed specific human virtues, but they are those necessary toexistence, like patience and courage. Supported on these indispensablehabits, mankind always carries an indefinite load of misery and vice. Life spreads rankly in every wrong and impracticable direction as wellas in profitable paths, and the slow and groping struggle with its ownignorance, inertia, and folly, leaves it covered in every age of historywith filth and blood. It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man'swretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility. There is a _fond_ of unhappiness in every bosom, but the depths areseldom probed; and there is no doubt that sometimes frivolity andsometimes sturdy habit helps to keep attention on the surface and tocover up the inner void. Certain moralists, without meaning to besatirical, often say that the sovereign cure for unhappiness is work. Unhappily, the work they recommend is better fitted to dull pain than toremove its cause. It occupies the faculties without rationalising thelife. Before mankind could inspire even moderate satisfaction, not tospeak of worship, its whole economy would have to be reformed, itsreproduction regulated, its thoughts cleared up, its affectionsequalised and refined. 

To worship mankind as it is would be to deprive it of what alone makesit akin to the divine--its aspiration. For this human dust lives; thismisery and crime are dark in contrast to an imagined excellence; theyare lighted up by a prospect of good. Man is not adorable, but headores, and the object of his adoration may be discovered within him andelicited from his own soul. In this sense the religion of humanity isthe only religion, all others being sparks and abstracts of the same. The indwelling ideal lends all the gods their divinity. No power, eitherphysical or psychical, has the least moral prerogative nor any justplace in religion at all unless it supports and advances the idealnative to the worshipper's soul. Without moral society between thevotary and his god religion is pure idolatry; and even idolatry would beimpossible but for the suspicion that somehow the brute force exorcisedin prayer might help or mar some human undertaking. 

[Sidenote: Cosmic piety. ]

There is, finally, a philosophic piety which has the universe for itsobject. This feeling, common to ancient and modern Stoics, has anobvious justification in man's dependence upon the natural world and inits service to many sides of the mind. Such justification of cosmicpiety is rather obscured than supported by the euphemisms andambiguities in which these philosophers usually indulge in their attemptto preserve the customary religious unction. For the more they personifythe universe and give it the name of God the more they turn it into adevil. The universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful andimmense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes italike impressive. If we dramatise its life and conceive its spirit, weare filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is thatspirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animalsand plants, the cosmos has its own way of doing things, not whollyrational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great isthis organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, gloriousexperiment. Why should we not look on the universe with piety? Is it notour substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie frometernity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys. Wemay address it without superstitious terrors; it is not wicked. Itfollows its own habits abstractedly; it can be trusted to be true to itsword. Society is not impossible between it and us, and since it is thesource of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we notcling to it and praise it, seeing that it vegetates so grandly and sosadly, and that it is not for us to blame it for what, doubtless, itnever knew that it did? Where there is such infinite and laboriouspotency there is room for every hope. If we should abstain from judginga father's errors or a mother's foibles, why should we pronouncesentence on the ignorant crimes of the universe, which have passed intoour own blood? The universe is the true Adam, the creation the truefall; and as we have never blamed our mythical first parent very much, in spite of the disproportionate consequences of his sin, because wefelt that he was but human and that we, in his place, might have sinnedtoo, so we may easily forgive our real ancestor, whose connatural sin weare from moment to moment committing, since it is only the necessaryrashness of venturing to be without fore-knowing the price or the fruitsof existence. 

CHAPTER XI

SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS

[Sidenote: To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal. ]

In honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective. It collects, as it were, food for morality, and fortifies it with natural andhistoric nutriment. But a digestive and formative principle must existto assimilate this nutriment; a direction and an ideal have to beimposed on these gathered forces. So that religion has a second and ahigher side, which looks to the end toward which we move as piety looksto the conditions of progress and to the sources from which we draw ourenergies. This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality. Spirituality is nobler than piety, because what would fulfil our beingand make it worth having is what alone lends value to that being'ssource. Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than thesubstance and cause of all things. The gift of existence would beworthless unless existence was good and supported at least a possiblehappiness. A man is spiritual when he lives in the presence of theideal, and whether he eat or drink does so for the sake of a true andultimate good. He is spiritual when he envisages his goal so franklythat his whole material life becomes a transparent and transitivevehicle, an instrument which scarcely arrests attention but allows thespirit to use it economically and with perfect detachment and freedom. 

There is no need that this ideal should be pompously or mysticallydescribed. A simple life is its own reward, and continually realises itsfunction. Though a spiritual man may perfectly well go through intricateprocesses of thought and attend to very complex affairs, his single eye, fixed on a rational purpose, will simplify morally the natural chaos itlooks upon and will remain free. This spiritual mastery is, of course, no slashing and forced synthesis of things into a system of philosophywhich, even if it were thinkable, would leave the conceived logicalmachine without ideality and without responsiveness to actual interests;it is rather an inward aim and fixity in affection that knows what totake and what to leave in a world over which it diffuses something ofits own peace. It threads its way through the landscape with so littletemptation to distraction that it can salute every irrelevant thing, asSaint Francis did the sun and moon, with courtesy and a certainaffectionate detachment. 

[Sidenote: Spirituality natural. ]

Spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field! For itssecret has the same simplicity as their vegetative art; onlyspirituality has succeeded in adding consciousness without confusinginstinct. This success, unfortunately so rare in man's life as to seemparadoxical, is its whole achievement. Spirituality ought to have been amatter of course, since conscious existence has inherent value and thereis no intrinsic ground why it should smother that value in alienambitions and servitudes. But spirituality, though so natural andobvious a thing, is subject, like the lilies' beauty, to corruption. Iknow not what army of microbes evidently invaded from the beginning thesoul's physical basis and devoured its tissues, so that sophisticationand bad dreams entirely obscured her limpidity. 

None the less, spirituality, or life in the ideal, must be regarded asthe fundamental and native type of all life; what deviates from it isdisease and incipient dissolution, and is itself what might plausiblydemand explanation and evoke surprise. The spiritual man should be quiteat home in a world made to be used; the firmament is spread over himlike a tent for habitation, and sublunary furniture is even moreobviously to be taken as a convenience. He cannot, indeed, removemountains, but neither does he wish to do so. He comes to endow themountains with a function, and takes them at that, as a painter mighttake his brushes and canvas. Their beauty, their metals, theirpasturage, their defence--this is what he observes in them andcelebrates in his addresses to them. The spiritual man, though notashamed to be a beggar, is cognisant of what wealth can do and of whatit cannot. His unworldliness is true knowledge of the world, not somuch a gaping and busy acquaintance as a quiet comprehension andestimation which, while it cannot come without intercourse, can verywell lay intercourse aside. 

[Sidenote: Primitive consciousness may be spiritual. ]

If the essence of life be spiritual, early examples of life would seemto be rather the opposite. But man's view of primitive consciousness ishumanly biassed and relies too much on partial analogies. We conceive ananimal's physical life in the gross, and must then regard the momentaryfeelings that accompany it as very poor expressions either of its extentor conditions. These feelings are, indeed, so many ephemeral lives, containing no comprehensive view of the animal's fortunes. Theyaccordingly fail to realise our notion of a spiritual human life whichwould have to be rational and to form some representation of man's totalenvironment and interests. But it hardly follows that animal feelingsare not spiritual in their nature and, on their narrow basis, perfectlyideal. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the mostabsolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. Very likely, if wecould revert to an innocent and absorbed view of our early sensations, we should find that each was a little spiritual universe like Dante's, with its internal hell, purgatory, and heaven. Cut off, as thoseexperiences were, from all vistas and from sympathy with things remote, they would contain a closed circle of interests, a flying glimpse ofeternity. So an infant living in his mystical limbo, without trailingin a literal sense any clouds of glory from elsewhere, might well repeaton a diminutive scale the beatific vision, insomuch as the only functionof which he was conscious at all might be perfectly fulfilled by him andfelt in its ideal import. Sucking and blinking are ridiculous processes, perhaps, but they may bring a thrill and satisfaction no less ideal thando the lark's inexhaustible palpitations. Narrow scope and lowrepresentative value are not defects in a consciousness having a narrowphysical basis and comparatively simple conditions. 

[Sidenote: Spirit crossed by instrumentalities. ]

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. Hisinstincts, in becoming many, became confused, and in growing permanent, grew feeble and subject to arrest and deviation. Nature, we may say, threw the brute form back into her cauldron, to smelt its substanceagain before pouring it into a rational mould. The docility whichinstinct, in its feebleness, acquired in the new creature was to bereason's opportunity, but before the larger harmony could be establisheda sorry chaos was bound to reign in the mind. Every peeping impulsewould drop its dark hint and hide its head in confusion, while somepedantic and unjust law would be passed in its absence and without itsvote. Secondary activities, which should always be representative, wouldestablish themselves without being really such. Means would be pursuedas if they were ends, and ends, under the illusion that they wereforces, would be expected to further some activity, itself withoutjustification. So pedantry might be substituted for wisdom, tyranny forgovernment, superstition for morals, rhetoric for art. 

This sophistication is what renders the pursuit of reason so perplexingand prolonged a problem. Half-formed adjustments in the brain and in thebody politic are represented in consciousness by what are calledpassions, prejudices, motives, animosities. None of these feltebullitions in the least understands its own causes, effects, orrelations, but is hatched, so to speak, on the wing and flutters alongin the direction of its momentary preference until it lapses, it knowsnot why, or is crossed and overwhelmed by some contrary power. Thus thevital elements, which in their comparative isolation in the loweranimals might have yielded simple little dramas, each with its obviousideal, its achievement, and its quietus, when mixed in the barbaroushuman will make a boisterous medley. For they are linked enough togetherto feel a strain, but not knit enough to form a harmony. In this way theunity of apperception seems to light up at first nothing but disunion. The first dawn of that rational principle which involves immortalitybreaks upon a discovery of death. The consequence is that ideality seemsto man something supernatural and almost impossible. He finds himself athis awakening so confused that he puts chaos at the origin of the world. But only order can beget a world or evoke a sensation. Chaos issomething secondary, composed of conflicting organisations interferingwith one another. It is compounded like a common noise out of jumbledvibrations, each of which has its period and would in itself be musical. The problem is to arrange these sounds, naturally so tuneful, intoconcerted music. So long as total discord endures human life remainsspasmodic and irresolute; it can find no ideal and admit no totalrepresentation of nature. Only when the disordered impulses andperceptions settle down into a trained instinct, a steady, vitalresponse and adequate preparation for the world, do clear ideas andsuccessful purposes arise in the mind. The Life of Reason, with all thearts, then begins its career. 

The forces at play in this drama are, first, the primary impulses andfunctions represented by elementary values; second, the thin network ofsignals and responses by which those functions are woven into a totalorgan, represented by discursive thought and all secondary mentalfigments, and, third, the equilibrium and total power of that neworganism in action represented by the ideal. Spirituality, which mighthave resided in the elementary values, sensuous or passionate, beforethe relational process supervened, can now exist only in the ultimateactivity to which these processes are instrumental. Obstacles tospirituality in human life may accordingly take the form of an arresteither at the elementary values--an entanglement in sense andpassion--or at the instrumental processes--an entanglement in what inreligious parlance is called "the world. "

[Sidenote: One foe of the spirit is worldliness. ]

Worldly minds bristle with conventional morality (though in private theymay nurse a vice or two to appease wayward nature), and they arerational in everything except first principles. They consider thevoluptuary a weak fool, disgraced and disreputable; and if they noticethe spiritual man at all--for he is easily ignored--they regard him as auseless and visionary fellow. Civilisation has to work algebraicallywith symbols for known and unknown quantities which only in the endresume their concrete values, so that the journeymen and vulgarmiddlemen of the world know only conventional goods. They are lost ininstrumentalities and are themselves only instruments in the Life ofReason. Wealth, station, fame, success of some notorious and outwardsort, make their standard of happiness. Their chosen virtues areindustry, good sense, probity, conventional piety, and whatever else hasacknowledged utility and seemliness. 

[Sidenote: The case for and against pleasure. ]

In its strictures on pleasure and reverie this Philistia is perfectlyright. Sensuous living (and I do not mean debauchery alone, but thepalpitations of any poet without art or any mystic without discipline)is not only inconsequential and shallow, but dangerous to honour and tosincere happiness. When life remains lost in sense or reverts to itentirely, humanity itself is atrophied. And humanity is tormented andspoilt when, as more often happens, a man disbelieving in reason and outof humour with his world, abandons his soul to loose whimseys andpassions that play a quarrelsome game there, like so many ill-bredchildren. Nevertheless, compared with the worldling's mental mechanismand rhetoric, the sensualist's soul is a well of wisdom. He livesnaturally on an animal level and attains a kind of good. He has free andconcrete pursuits, though they be momentary, and he has sinceresatisfactions. He is less often corrupt than primitive, and even whencorrupt he finds some justification for his captious existence. Heharvests pleasures as he goes which intrinsically, as we have seen, mayhave the depth and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles. His experience, for that reason, though disastrous is interesting andhas some human pathos; it is easier to make a saint out of a libertinethan out of a prig. True, the libertine is pursued, like the animals, byunforeseen tortures, decay, and abandonment, and he is vowed to a totaldeath; but in these respects the worldly man has hardly an advantage. The Babels he piles up may indeed survive his person, but they arethemselves vain and without issue, while his brief life has beenmeantime spent in slavery and his mind cramped with cant and foolishambitions. The voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing onnettles and living by chance; the worldling is like a beast of burden, now ill-used and over-worked, now fatted, stalled, and richlycaparisoned. Æsop might well have described their relative happiness ina fable about the wild ass and the mule. 

[Sidenote: Upshot of worldly wisdom. ]

Thus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and the worldling oftenan honest man, they both lack reason so entirely that reflection revoltsequally against the life of both. Vanity, vanity, is their commonepitaph. Now, at the soul's christening and initiation into the Life ofReason, the first vow must always be to "renounce the pomps and vanitiesof this wicked world. " A person to whom this means nothing is one towhom, in the end, nothing has meaning. He has not conceived a highestgood, no ultimate goal is within his horizon, and it has never occurredto him to ask what he is living for. With all his pompous soberness, theworldly man is fundamentally frivolous; with all his maxims and cantestimations he is radically inane. He conforms to religion withoutsuspecting what religion means, not being in the least open to such aninquiry. He judges art like a parrot, without having ever stopped toevoke an image. He preaches about service and duty without anyrecognition of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His morallife is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term is left out thatmight have given sense to the whole, one vast ellipsis in which customseems to bridge the chasm left between ideas. He denies the values ofsense because they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity; thevalues of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie beyond hisscope. He adheres to conventional maxims and material quantitativestandards; his production is therefore, as far as he himself isconcerned, an essential waste and his activity an essential tedium. Ifat least, like the sensualist, he enjoyed the process and expressed hisfancy in his life, there would be something gained; and this sort ofgain, though over-looked in the worldling's maxims, all of which have acategorical tone, is really what often lends his life some propriety andspirit. Business and war and any customary task may come to form, so tospeak, an organ whose natural function will be just that operation, andthe most abstract and secondary activity, like that of adding figures orreading advertisements, may in this way become the one function properto some soul. There are Nibelungen dwelling by choice underground andhappy pedants in the upper air. 

Facts are not wanting for these pillars of society to take solace in, ifthey wish to defend their philosophy. The time will come, astronomerssay, when life will be extinct upon this weary planet. All the delightsof sense and imagination will be over. It is these that will have turnedout to be vain. But the masses of matter which the worldlings havetransformed with their machinery, and carried from one place to another, will remain to bear witness of them. The collocation of atoms willnever be what it would have been if their feet had less continuallybeaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness of knowing that, when nothing that the spirit values endures, the earth may stillsometimes, because of them, cast a slightly different shadow across themoon's craters. 

[Sidenote: Two supposed escapes from vanity:]

There is no more critical moment in the life of a man and a nation thanthat in which they are first conscience-stricken and convicted ofvanity. Failure, exhaustion, confusion of aims, or whatever else it bethat causes a revulsion, brings them before a serious dilemma. Has thevanity of life hitherto been essential or incidental? Are we to look fora new ambition, free from all the illusions of natural impulse, or arewe rather to renounce all will indiscriminately and fall back uponconformity and consummate indifference? As this question is answered inone way or the other, two different types of unworldly religion arise. 

[Sidenote: fanaticism. ]

The first, which heralds a new and unimpeachable special hope, a highestduty finally recognised and driving out all lesser motives andsatisfactions from the soul, refers vanity to perversity, to error, to asort of original misunderstanding of our own nature which has led us, inpursuing our worldly interests, to pursue in truth our own destruction. The vanity of life, according to this belief, has been accidental. Thetaint of existence is not innate vanity but casual sin; what has misledus is not the will in general but only the false and ignorant directionof a will not recognising its only possible satisfaction. What religionin this case opposes to the world is a special law, a special hope, alife intense, ambitious, and aggressive, but excluding much which to aningenuous will might seem excellent and tempting. Worldliness, in aword, is here met by fanaticism. 

[Sidenote: and mysticism. ]

The second type of unworldly religion does not propose to overwhelm theold Adam by singleminded devotion to one selected interest, nor does itrefer vanity to an accidental error. On the contrary, it conceives thatany special interest, any claim made by a finite and mortal creatureupon an infinite world, is bound to be defeated. It is not special acts, it conceives, which are sinful, but action and will themselves that areintrinsically foolish. The cure lies in rescinding the passionateinterests that torment us, not in substituting for them anotherartificial passion more imperious and merciless than the naturalpassions it comes to devour. This form of religion accordingly meetsworldliness with mysticism. Holiness is not placed in conformity to aprescriptive law, in pursuit of a slightly regenerated bliss, nor inadvancing a special institution and doctrine. Holiness for the mysticconsists rather in universal mildness and insight; in freedom from allpassion, bias, and illusion; in a disembodied wisdom which accepts theworld, dominates its labyrinths, and is able to guide others throughit, without pursuing, for its own part, any hope or desire. 

[Sidenote: Both are irrational. ]

If these two expedients of the conscience convicted of vanity were to besubjected to a critical judgment, they would both be convicted of vanitythemselves. The case of fanaticism is not doubtful, for the choice itmakes of a special law or institution or posthumous hope is purelyarbitrary, and only to be justified by the satisfaction it affords tothose very desires which it boasts to supplant. An oracular morality orrevealed religion can hope to support its singular claims only byshowing its general conformity to natural reason and its perfectbeneficence in the world. Where such justification is wanting the systemfanatically embraced is simply an epidemic mania, a social disease forthe philosopher to study and, if possible, to cure. Every strong passiontends to dislodge the others, so that fanaticism may often involve acertain austerity, impetuosity, and intensity of life. This vigour, however, is seldom lasting; fanaticism dries its own roots and becomes, when traditionally established, a convention as arbitrary as any fashionand the nest for a new brood of mean and sinister habits. The Phariseeis a new worldling, only his little world is narrowed to a temple, atribe, and a clerical tradition. 

Mysticism, as its meditative nature comports, is never so pernicious, nor can it be brought so easily round to worldliness again. That itsbeneficent element is purely natural and inconsistent with a denial ofwill, we shall have occasion elsewhere to observe. Suffice it here topoint out, that even if a moral nihilism could be carried through andall definite interests abandoned, the vanity of life would not bethereby corrected, but merely exposed. When our steps had been retracedto the very threshold of being, nothing better worth doing would havebeen discovered on the way. That to suffer illusion is a bad thing mightordinarily be taken for an axiom, because ordinarily we assume that trueknowledge and rational volition are possible; but if this assumption isdenied, the value of retracting illusions is itself impeached. Whenvanity is represented as universal and salvation as purely negative, every one is left free to declare that it is vain to renounce vanity andsinful to seek salvation. 

This result, fantastic though it may at first sight appear, is one whichmysticism actually comes to under certain circumstances. Absolutepessimism and absolute optimism are opposite sentiments attached to adoctrine identically the same. In either case no improvement ispossible, and the authority of human ideals is denied. To escape, tostanch natural wounds, to redeem society and the private soul, are thenmistaken and pitiable ambitions, adding to their vanity a certain touchof impiety. One who really believes that the world's work is allprovidentially directed and that whatever happens, no matter howcalamitous or shocking, happens by divine right, has a quietisticexcuse for license; to check energy by reason, and seek to limit andchoose its path, seems to him a puny rebellion against omnipotence, which works through madness and crime in man no less than throughcataclysms in outer nature. Every particular desire is vain and bound, perhaps, to be defeated; but the mystic, when caught in the expansivemood, accepts this defeat itself as needful. Thus a refusal todiscriminate rationally or to accept human interests as the standard ofright may culminate in a convulsive surrender to passion, just as, whencaught in the contractile phase, the same mysticism may lead touniversal abstention. 

[Sidenote: Is there a third course?]

Must unworldliness be either fanatical or mystical? That is a questionof supreme importance to the moral philosopher. On the answer to ithangs the rationality of a spiritual life; nay, the existence ofspirituality itself among the types of human activity. For the fanaticand mystic are only spiritual in appearance because they separatethemselves from the prevalent interests of the world, the one by aspecial persistent aggression, the other by a general passivity andunearthly calm. The fanatic is, notwithstanding, nothing but a worldlingtoo narrow and violent to understand the world, while the mystic is asensualist too rapt and voluptuous to rationalise his sensations. Bothrepresent arrested forms of common-sense, partial developments of aperfectly usual sensibility. There is no divine inspiration in havingonly one passion left, nor in dreamfully accepting or renouncing all thepassions together. Spirituality, if identified with such types, mightjustly be called childish. There is an innocent and incredulouschildishness, with its useless eyes wide open, just as there is amalevolent and peevish childishness, eaten up with some mischievouswhim. The man of experience and affairs can very quickly form an opinionon such phenomena. He has no reason to expect superior wisdom in thosequarters. On the contrary, his own customary political and humanestandpoint gives him the only authoritative measure of their merits andpossible uses. "These sectaries and dreamers, " he will say to himself, "cannot understand one another nor the role they themselves play insociety. It is for us to make the best of them we can, taking suchprudent measures as are possible to enlist the forces they represent inworks of common utility. "

[Sidenote: Yes; for experience has intrinsic inalienable values. ]

The philosopher's task, in these premisses, is to discover an escapefrom worldliness which shall offer a rational advance over it, such asfanaticism and mysticism cannot afford. Does the Life of Reason differfrom that of convention? Is there a spirituality really wiser thancommon-sense? That there is appears in many directions. Worldliness isarrest and absorption in the instrumentalities of life; butinstrumentalities cannot exist without ultimate purposes, and itsuffices to lift the eyes to those purposes and to question the willsincerely about its essential preferences, to institute a catalogue ofrational goods, by pursuing any of which we escape worldliness. Senseitself is one of these goods. The sensualist at least is not worldly, and though his nature be atrophied in all its higher part, there is notlacking, as we have seen, a certain internal and abstract spiritualityin his experience. He is a sort of sprightly and incidental mystic, treating his varied succession of little worlds as the mystic does hismonotonous universe. Sense, moreover, is capable of many refinements, bywhich physical existence becomes its own reward. In the disciplined playof fancy which the fine arts afford, the mind's free action justifiesitself and becomes intrinsically delightful. Science not only exercisesin itself the intellectual powers, but assimilates nature to the mind, so that all things may nourish it. In love and friendship the liberallife extends also to the heart. All these interests, which justifythemselves by their intrinsic fruits, make so many rational episodes andpatches in conventional life; but it must be confessed in all candourthat these are but oases in the desert, and that as the springs of lifeare irrational, so its most vehement and prevalent interests remainirrational to the end. When the pleasures of sense and art, of knowledgeand sympathy, are stretched to the utmost, what part will they cover andjustify of our passions, our industry, our governments, our religion?

It was a signal error in those rationalists who attributed their idealretrospectively to nature that they grotesquely imagined that peoplewere hungry so that they might enjoy eating, or curious in order todelight in discovering the truth, or in love the better to live inconscious harmony. Such a view forgets that all the forces of life workoriginally and fundamentally _a tergo_, that experience and reason arenot the ground of preference but its result. In order to live men willwork disproportionately and eat all manner of filth without pleasure;curiosity as often as not leads to illusion, and argument serves tofoster hatred of the truth; finally, love is notoriously a greatfountain of bitterness and frequently a prelude to crime and death. Whenwe have skimmed from life its incidental successes, when we haveharvested the moments in which existence justifies itself, its profounddepths remain below in their obscure commotion, depths that breed indeeda rational efflorescence, but which are far from exhausted in producingit, and continually threaten, on the contrary, to engulf it. 

[Sidenote: For these the religious imagination must supply an idealstandard. ]

The spiritual man needs, therefore, something more than a cultivatedsympathy with the brighter scintillation of things. He needs to referthat scintillation to some essential light, so that in reviewing themotley aspects of experience he may not be reduced to cullingsuperciliously the flowers that please him, but may view in them allonly images and varied symbols of some eternal good. Spirituality hasnever flourished apart from religion, except momentarily, perhaps, insome master-mind, whose original intuitions at once became a religion tohis followers. For it is religion that knows how to interpret the casualrationalities in the world and isolate their principle, setting thisprinciple up in the face of nature as nature's standard and model. Thisideal synthesis of all that is good, this consciousness that over earthfloats its congenial heaven, this vision of perfection which gildsbeauty and sanctifies grief, has taken form, for the most part, in suchgrossly material images, in a mythology so opaque and pseudo-physical, that its ideal and moral essence has been sadly obscured; nevertheless, every religion worthy of the name has put into its gods some element ofreal goodness, something by which they become representative of thosescattered excellences and self-justifying bits of experience in whichthe Life of Reason consists. 

That happy constitution which human life has at its best moments--that, says Aristotle, the divine life has continually. The philosopher thusexpressed with absolute clearness the principle which the poets had beenclumsily trying to embody from the beginning. Burdened as traditionalfaiths might be with cosmological and fanciful matter, they stillpresented in a conspicuous and permanent image that which made all goodthings good, the ideal and standard of all excellence. By the help ofsuch symbols the spiritual man could steer and steady his judgment; hecould say, according to the form religion had taken in his country, thatthe truly good was what God commanded, or what made man akin to thedivine, or what led the soul to heaven. Such expressions, though takenmore or less literally by a metaphysical intellect, did not whollyforfeit their practical and moral meaning. God, for a long time, wasunderstood to command what in fact was truly important, the divine waslong the truly noble and beautiful, heaven hardly ever ceased to respondto impersonal and ideal aspirations. Under those figures, therefore, theideals of life could confront life with clearness and authority. Thespiritual man, fixing his eyes on them, could live in the presence ofultimate purposes and ideal issues. Before each immediate task, eachincidental pleasure, each casual success, he could retain his sweetnessand constancy, accepting what good these moments brought and laying iton the altar of what they ought to bring. 

CHAPTER XII

CHARITY

[Sidenote: Possible tyranny of reason. ]

Those whom a genuine spirituality has freed from the foolish enchantmentof words and conventions and brought back to a natural ideal, have stillanother illusion to vanquish, one into which the very concentration anddeepening of their life might lead them. This illusion is that they andtheir chosen interests alone are important or have a legitimate place inthe moral world. Having discovered what is really good for themselves, they assume that the like is good for everybody. Having made a tolerablesynthesis and purification of their own natures, they require everyother nature to be composed of the same elements similarly combined. What they have vanquished in themselves they disregard in others; andthe consequence sometimes is that an impossibly simplified andinconsiderate regimen is proposed to mankind, altogetherunrepresentative of their total interests. Spiritual men, in a word, mayfall into the aristocrat's fallacy; they may forget the infinite animaland vulgar life which remains quite disjointed, impulsive, andshort-winded, but which nevertheless palpitates with joys and sorrows, and makes after all the bulk of moral values in this democratic world. 

[Sidenote: Everything has its rights. ]

After adopting an ideal it is necessary, therefore, without abandoningit, to recognise its relativity. The right path is in such a matterrather difficult to keep to. On the one hand lies fanatical insistenceon an ideal once arrived at, no matter how many instincts and interests(the basis of all ideals) are thereby outraged in others and ultimatelyalso in one's self. On the other hand lies mystical disintegration, which leads men to feel so keenly the rights of everything in particularand of the All in general, that they retain no hearty allegiance to anyhuman interest. Between these two abysses winds the narrow path ofcharity and valour. The ultimate ideal is absolutely authoritative, because if any ground were found to relax allegiance to it in any degreeor for any consideration, that ground would itself be the ideal, foundto be more nearly absolute and ultimate than the one, hastily so called, which it corrected. The ultimate ideal, in order to maintain itsfinality and preclude the possibility of an appeal which should dislodgeit from its place of authority, must have taken all interests intoconsideration; it must be universally representative. Now, to take aninterest into consideration and represent it means to intend, as far aspossible, to secure the particular good which that particular interestlooks to, and never, whatever measures may be adopted, to cease to lookback on the elementary impulse as upon something which ought, ifpossible, to have been satisfied, and which we should still go back andsatisfy now, if circumstances and the claims of rival interestspermitted. 

Justice and charity are identical. To deny the initial right of anyimpulse is not morality but fanaticism. However determined may be theprohibition which reason opposes to some wild instinct, that prohibitionis never reckless; it is never inconsiderate of the very impulse whichit suppresses. It suppresses that impulse unwillingly, pitifully, understress of compulsion and _force majeure_; for reason, in representingthis impulse in the context of life and in relation to every otherimpulse which, in its operation, it would affect mechanically, rejectsand condemns it; but it condemns it not by antecedent hate but bysupervening wisdom. The texture of the natural world, the conflict ofinterests in the soul and in society, all of which cannot be satisfiedtogether, is accordingly the ground for moral restrictions andcompromises. Whatever the up-shot of the struggle may be, whatever theverdict pronounced by reason, the parties to the suit must in justiceall be heard, and heard sympathetically. 

[Sidenote: Primary and secondary morality. ]

Herein lies the great difference between first-hand and second-handmorality. The retailers of moral truth, the town-criers that goshouting in the streets some sentence passed long ago in reason's courtagainst some inadmissible desire, know nothing of justice or mercy orreason--three principles essentially identical. They thunder conclusionswithout remembering the premisses, and expose their precepts, daily, ofcourse, grown more thin and unrepresentative, to the aversion andneglect of all who genuinely love what is good. The masters of life, onthe contrary, the first framers and discoverers of moral ideals, arepersons who disregard those worn conventions and their professionalinterpreters: they are persons who have a fresh sense for the universalneed and cry of human souls, and reconstruct the world of duty to makeit fit better with the world of desire and of possible happiness. Primary morality, inspired by love of something naturally good, isaccordingly charitable and ready to forgive; while secondary morality, founded on prejudice, is fanatical and ruthless. 

[Sidenote: Uncharitable pagan justice is not just. ]

As virtue carries with it a pleasure which perfects it and without whichvirtue would evidently be spurious and merely compulsory, so justicecarries with it a charity which is its highest expression, without whichjustice remains only an organised wrong. Of justice without charity wehave a classic illustration in Plato's Republic and in general in thepagan world. An end is assumed, in this case an end which involvesradical injustice toward every interest not included in it; and then anorganism is developed or conceived that shall subserve that end, andpolitical justice is defined as the harmonious adjustment of powers andfunctions within that organism. Reason and art suffice to discover theright methods for reaching the chosen end, and the polity thusestablished, with all its severities and sacrifices of personal will, isrationally grounded. The chosen end, however, is arbitrary, and, infact, perverse; for to maintain a conventional city with stableinstitutions and perpetual military efficiency would not secure humanhappiness; nor (to pass to the individual virtue symbolised by such astate) would the corresponding discipline of personal habits, in theservice of vested interests and bodily life, truly unfold thepotentialities of the human spirit. 

Plato himself, in passing, acknowledges that his political ideal issecondary and not ideal at all, since only luxury, corruption, andphysical accidents make a military state necessary; but his absorptionin current Greek questions made him neglect the initial question of all, namely, how a non-military and non-competitive state might beestablished, or rather how the remedial functions of the state might beforestalled by natural justice and rendered unnecessary. The violencewhich such a fallen ideal, with its iniquitous virtues, does to humanityappeared only too clearly in the sequel, when Platonism took refuge inthe supernatural. The whole pagan world was convicted of injustice andthe cities for whose glory the greatest heroes had lived and died wereabandoned with horror. Only in a catacomb or a hermitage did there seemto be any room for the soul. This revulsion, perverse in its own way, expressed rightly enough the perversity of that unjust justice, thoseworldly and arbitrary virtues, and that sad happiness which had enslavedthe world. 

[Sidenote: The doom of ancient republics. ]

Plato could never have answered the question whether his Republic had aright to exist and to brush aside all other commonwealths; he couldnever have justified the ways of man to the rest of creation nor (whatis more pertinent) to man's more plastic and tenderer imagination. Theinitial impulses on which his Republic is founded, which make war, defensive and aggressive, the first business of the state, are notirresistible impulses, they do not correspond to ultimate ends. Physicallife cannot justify itself; it cannot be made the purpose of thoserational faculties which it generates; these, on the contrary, are itsown end. The purpose of war must be peace; the purpose of competition amore general prosperity; the purpose of personal life idealachievements. A polity which should not tend to abolish private lusts, competition, and war would be an irrational polity. The organisationwhich the ancients insisted on within each state, the sacrifices theyimposed on each class in the community for the general welfare, have tobe repeated in that greater commonwealth of which cities and nations arecitizens; for their own existence and prosperity depends on conciliatinginwardly all that may affect them and turning foreign forces, whencontact with them is inevitable, into friends. Duty and co-operationmust extend as far as do physical bonds, the function of reason being tobring life into harmony with its conditions, so as to render itself-perpetuating and free. This end can never be attained while thescope of moral fellowship is narrower than that of physical interplay. Ancient civilisation, brilliant in proportion to its inner integration, was brief in proportion to its outer injustice. By defying the externalforces on which also a commonwealth depends, those commonwealths came topremature extinction. 

[Sidenote: Rational charity. ]

There is accordingly a justice deeper and milder than that of paganstates, a universal justice called charity, a kind of all-penetratingcourtesy, by which the limits of personal or corporate interests aretransgressed in imagination. Value is attributed to rival forms of life;something of the intensity and narrowness inherent in the private willis surrendered to admiration and solicitude for what is most alien andhostile to one's self. When this imaginative expansion ends inneutralising the will altogether, we have mysticism; but when it servesmerely to co-ordinate felt interests with other actual interestsconceived sympathetically, and to make them converge, we have justiceand charity. Charity is nothing but a radical and imaginative justice. So the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to manyimaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased, the sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to eithercomplete unless every other creature also is redeemed and forgiven. 

[Sidenote: Its limits. ]

Such universal solicitude is rational, however, only when the beings towhich it extends are in practical efficient relations with the life thatwould co-operate with theirs. In other words, charity extends only tophysical and discoverable creatures, whose destiny is interwovendynamically with our own. Absolute and irresponsible fancy can be thebasis of no duty. If not to take other real forces and interests intoaccount made classic states unstable and unjust, to take intoconsideration purely imaginary forces yields a polity founded onsuperstition, one unjust to those who live under it. A compromise madewith non-existent or irrelevant interests is a wrong to the realinterests on which that sacrifice is imposed gratuitously. Allsacrifices exacted by mere religion have accordingly been inhuman; atbest they have unintentionally made some amends by affording abstractdiscipline or artistic forms of expression. The sacrifice must befruitful in the end and bring happiness to somebody: otherwise itcannot long remain tender or beautiful. 

[Sidenote: Its mythical supports. ]

Charity is seldom found uncoloured by fables which illustrate it andlend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally. Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ's suffering for every sinner, are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like mytheverywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate, although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression. The same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That naturalsensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and manyinequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidentalcircumstances determine its phases and attachments in life. Christiancharity, for instance, has two chief parts: first, it hastens to relievethe body; then, forgetting physical economy altogether, it proceeds toredeem the soul. The bodily works of mercy which Christians perform withso much tact and devotion are not such as philanthropy alone wouldinspire; they are more and less than that. They are more, because theyare done with a certain disproportionate and absolute solicitude, quiteapart from ultimate benefit or a thought of the best distribution ofenergies; they are also less, because they stop at healing, and cannotpass beyond the remedial and incidental phase without ceasing to beChristian. The poor, says Christian charity, we have always with us;every man must be a sinner--else what obligation should he have torepent?--and, in fine, this world is essentially the kingdom of Satan. Charity comes only to relieve the most urgent bodily needs, and then towean the heart altogether from mortal interests. Thus Christianitycovers the world with hospitals and orphanages; but its only positivelabours go on in churches and convents, nor will it found schools, ifleft to itself, to teach anything except religion. These offices may beperformed with more or less success, with more or less appeal to themiraculous; but, with whatever mixture of magic and policy, Christiancharity has never aimed at anything but healing the body and saving thesoul. 

[Sidenote: There is intelligence in charity. ]

Christ himself, we may well feel, did not affect publicans and sinners, ignorant people and children, in order to save them in the regimentaland prescriptive fashion adopted by the Church. He commanded those heforgave to sin no more and those he healed to go, as custom would haveit, to the priest. He understood the bright good that each sinner wasfollowing when he stumbled into the pit. For this insight he was loved. To be rebuked in that sympathetic spirit was to be comforted; to bepunished by such a hand was to be made whole. The Magdalene was forgivenbecause she had loved much; an absolution which rehabilitates theprimary longing that had driven her on, a longing not insulted butcomprehended in such an absolution, and purified by that comprehension. It is a charitable salvation which enables the newly revealed deity tobe absolutely loved. Charity has this art of making men abandon theirerrors without asking them to forget their ideals. 

[Sidenote: Buddhist and Christian forms of it. ]

In Buddhism the same charity wears a more speculative form. All beingsare to be redeemed from the illusion which is the fountain of theirtroubles. None is to be compelled to assume irrationally an alien set ofduties or other functions than his own. Spirit is not to be incarceratedperpetually in grotesque and accidental monsters, but to be freed fromall fatality and compulsion. The goal is not some more flatteringincarnation, but escape from incarnation altogether. Ignorance is to beenlightened, passion calmed, mistaken destiny revoked; only what theinmost being desiderates, only what can really quiet the longingsembodied in any particular will, is to occupy the redeemed mind. Here, though creative reason is wholly wanting, charity is truly understood;for it avails little to make of kindness a vicarious selfishness and touse neighbourly offices to plunge our neighbour deeper into hisfavourite follies. Such servile sympathy would make men one another'saccomplices rather than friends. It would treat them with a weakpromiscuous favour, not with true mercy and justice. In charity therecan be nothing to repent of, as there so often is in natural love and inpartisan propaganda. Christians have sometimes interpreted charity aszeal to bring men into their particular fold; or, at other times, whenenthusiasm for doctrine and institutes has cooled, they have interpretedcharity to be mere blind co-operation, no matter in what. 

The Buddhists seem to have shown a finer sense in their ministry, knowing how to combine universal sympathy with perfect spirituality. There was no brow-beating in their call to conversion, no new tyrannyimposed of sanctioned by their promised deliverance. If they could notrise to a positive conception of natural life, this inability but marksthe well-known limitations of Oriental fancy, which has never been ableto distinguish steadily that imagination which rests on and expressesmaterial life from that which, in its import, breaks loose from thegiven conditions of life altogether, and is therefore monstrous anddreamful. But at least Buddhism knew how to sound the heart and pierceto the genuine principles of happiness and misery. If it did not ventureto interpret reason positively, it at least forbore to usurp its inwardand autonomous authority, and did not set up, in the name of salvation, some new partiality, some new principle of distress and illusion. Indestroying worldliness this religion avoided imposture. The clearing itmade in the soul was soon overgrown again by the inexorable Indianjungle; but had a virile intellect been at hand, it would have been freeto raise something solid and rational in the space so happily sweptclean of all accumulated rubbish. 

[Sidenote: Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural. ]

Against avarice, lust, and rancour, against cruel and vain nationalambitions, tenderer and more recollected minds have always sought someasylum: but they have the seldom possessed enough knowledge of natureand of human life to distinguish clearly the genuine and innocent goodswhich they longed for, and their protest against "the world" has toooften taken on a mystical and irrational accent. Charity, for instance, in its profounder deliverances, has become a protest against theillusion of personality; whereby existence and action seem to be whollycondemned after their principle has been identified with selfishness. Anartificial puzzle is thus created, the same concept, selfishness or anirrational partiality and injustice in the will, being applied to twoprinciples of action, the one wrong and the other necessary. Every manis necessarily the seat of his own desires, which, if truly fulfilled, would bring him satisfaction; but the objects in which that satisfactionmay be found, and the forces that must co-operate to secure it, lie farafield, and his life will remain cramped and self-destructive so long ashe does not envisage its whole basis and co-operate with all hispotential allies. 

The rationality which would then be attained is so immensely exaltedabove the microscopic vision and punctiform sensibility of those whothink themselves practical, that speculative natures seem to beproclaiming another set of interests, another and quite miraculous life, when they attempt to thaw out and vivify the vulgar mechanism; and thesense of estrangement and contradiction often comes over the spirituallyminded themselves, making them confess sadly that the kingdom of heavenis not of this world. As common morality itself falls easily intomythical expressions and speaks of a fight between conscience andnature, reason and the passions, as if these were independent in theirorigin or could be divided in their operation, so spiritual life evenmore readily opposes the ideal to the real, the revealed and heavenlytruth to the extant reality, as if the one could be anything but anexpression and fulfilment of the other. Being equal convinced thatspiritual life is authoritative and possible, and that it is opposed toall that earthly experience has as yet supplied, the prophet almostinevitably speaks of another world above the clouds and anotherexistence beyond the grave; he thus seeks to clothe in concrete andimaginable form the ideal to which natural existence seems to him whollyrebellious. Spiritual life comes to mean life abstracted from politics, from art, from sense, even in the end from morality. Natural motivesand natural virtues are contrasted with those which are henceforthcalled supernatural, and all the grounds and sanctions of right livingare transferred to another life. A doctrine of immortality thus becomesthe favourite expression of religion. By its variations and greater orless transparency and ideality we can measure the degree of spiritualinsight which has been reached at any moment. 

CHAPTER XIII

THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE

[Sidenote: The length of life a subject for natural science. ]

At no point are the two ingredients of religion, superstition and moraltruth, more often confused than in the doctrine of immortality, yet innone are they more clearly distinguishable. Ideal immortality is aprinciple revealed to insight; it is seen by observing the eternalquality of ideas and validities, and the affinity to them native toreason or the cognitive energy of mind. A future life, on the contrary, is a matter for faith or presumption; it is a prophetic hypothesisregarding occult existences. This latter question is scientific andempirical, and should be treated as such. A man is, forensicallyspeaking, the same man after the nightly break in his consciousness. After many changes in his body and after long oblivion, parcels of hisyouth may be revived and may come to figure again among the factors inhis action. Similarly, if evidence to that effect were available, wemight establish the resurrection of a given soul in new bodies or itsactivity in remote places and times. Evidence of this sort has in factalways been offered copiously by rumour and superstition. The operationof departed spirits, like that of the gods, has been recognised in manya dream, or message, or opportune succour. The Dioscuri and Saint Jamesthe Apostle have appeared--preferably on white horses--in sundrybattles. Spirits duly invoked have repeated forgotten gossip andrevealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried. More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensibleor useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsionthat crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left themstill hanging to life by one attenuated fibre. 

[Sidenote: "Psychical" phenomena. ]

The mass of this evidence, ancient and modern, traditional andstatistical, is beneath consideration; the palpitating mood in which itis gathered and received, even when ostensibly scientific, is such thatgullibility and fiction play a very large part in the report; for it isnot to be assumed that a man, because he speaks in the first person andaddresses a learned society, has lost the primordial faculty of lying. When due allowance has been made, however, for legend and fraud, thereremains a certain residuum of clairvoyance and telepathy, and anoccasional abnormal obedience of matter to mind which might pass formagic. There are unmistakable indications that in these regions we touchlower and more rudimentary faculties. There seems to be, as is quitenatural, a sub-human sensibility in man, wherein ideas are connectedtogether by bonds so irrational and tenacious that they seem miraculousto a mind already trained in practical and relevant thinking. Thissub-human sense, far from representing important truths more clearlythan ordinary apprehension can, reduces consciousness again to a tangleof trivial impressions, shots of uncertain range, as if a skin had notyet formed over the body. It emerges in tense and disorganised moments. Its reports are the more trifling the more startingly literal theirveracity. It seems to represent a stratum of life beneath moral orintellectual functions, and beneath all personality. When proof has beenfound that a ghost has actually been seen, proof is required that thephantom has been rightly recognised and named; and this imputed identityis never demonstrable and in most cases impossible. So in the magiccures which from time immemorial have been recorded at shrines of allreligions, and which have been attributed to wonder-workers of everysect: the one thing certain about them is that they prove neither thetruth of whatever myth is capriciously associated with them, nor thegoodness or voluntary power of the miracle-worker himself. Healer andmedium are alike vehicles for some elemental energy they cannot control, and which as often as not misses fire; at best they feel a power goingout of them which they themselves undergo, and which radiates from themlike electricity, to work, as chance will have it, good or evil in theworld. The whole operation lies, in so far as it really takes place atall, on the lowest levels of unintelligence, in a region closely alliedto madness in consciousness and to sporadic organic impulses in thephysical sphere. 

[Sidenote: Hypertrophies of sense. ]

Among the blind, the retina having lost its function, the rest of theskin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness to distance andlight, so that the sightless have a clearer premonition of objects aboutthem than seeing people could have in the dark. So when reason and theordinary processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universalsensibility seems to return to the soul; influences at other times notappreciable make then a sensible impression, and automatic reactions maybe run through in response to a stimulus normally quite insufficient. Now the complexity of nature is prodigious; everything that happensleaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an eye, bychance attentive and duly prepared, can manage to read, recovering for amoment the image of an extinct life. Symbols, illegible to reason, canthus sometimes read themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestigesmay be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or which, like aperfume, impregnated and got lodgment within it. Slight echoes maysuddenly reconstitute themselves in the mind's silence; and ahalf-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost andirrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past, exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and infidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to materialinfluences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they areobviously not discoverable without some derangement and hypertrophy ofthe senses. 

[Sidenote: These possibilities affect physical existence only. ]

That such subtler influences should exist is entirely consonant withreason and experience; but only a hankering tenderness for superstition, a failure to appreciate the function both of religion and of science, can lead to reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influencesprovoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. In utterseriousness and with immense solemnity whole races have given themselvesup to exploiting these shabby mysteries; and while a new survey of thefacts, in the light of natural science and psychology, is certainly notsuperfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a more detailedand conscientious description of natural processes. The thought ofemploying such investigations to save at the last moment religiousdoctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscenesupernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it werediscovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be actually heardby putting one's ear long enough to a tomb, and if (_per impossibile_)those echoes could be legitimately attributed to another mind, and tothe very mind, indeed, whose former body was interred there, amelancholy chapter would indeed be added to man's earthly fortunes, since it would appear that even after death he retained, under certainconditions, a fatal attachment to his dead body and to the othermaterial instruments of his earthly life. Obviously such a discoverywould teach us more about dying than about immortality; the truthsdisclosed, since they would be disclosed by experiment and observation, would be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing about what a trulydisembodied life might be, if one were attainable; for a disembodiedlife could by no possibility betray itself in spectres, rumblings, andspasms. Actual thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stonetables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral authority of theten commandments or to the existence of a truly supreme being. No lessirrelevant to a supramundane immortality is the length of time duringwhich human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth after theirbodies are quiet. In other words, spectral survivals would at mostenlarge our conception of the soul's physical basis, spreading out thearea of its manifestations; they could not possibly, seeing thesurvivals are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul. 

[Sidenote: Moral grounds for the doctrine. The necessary assumption of afuture. ]

Such a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere ofempirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moralor metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Lifeand the will to live are at bottom identical. Experience itself istransitive and can hardly arise apart from a forward effort andprophetic apprehension by which adjustments are made to a futureunmistakably foreseen. This premonition, by which action seeks tojustify and explain itself to reflection, may be analysed into a groupof memories and sensations of movement, generating ideal expectationswhich might easily be disappointed; but scepticism about the future canhardly be maintained in the heat of action. A postulate acted on is anact of genuine and dogmatic faith. I not only postulate a morrow when Iprepare for it, but ingenuously and heartily believe that the morrowwill come. This faith does not amount to certitude; I may confess, ifchallenged, that before to-morrow I and the world and time itself mightconceivably come to an end together; but that idle possibility, so longas it does not slacken action, will not disturb belief. Every moment oflife accordingly trusts that life will continue; and this propheticinterpretation of action, so long as action lasts, amounts to continualfaith in futurity. 

[Sidenote: An assumption no evidence. ]

A sophist might easily transform this psychological necessity into adazzling proof of immortality. To believe anything, he might say, is tobe active; but action involves faith in a future and in the fruits ofaction; and as no living moment can be without this confidence, beliefin extinction would be self-contradictory and at no moment a possiblebelief. The question, however, is not whether every given moment has orhas not a specious future before it to which it looks forward, butwhether the realisation of such foresight, a realisation which duringwaking life is roughly usual, is incapable of failing. Now expectation, never without its requisite antecedents and natural necessity, oftenlacks fulfilment, and never finds its fulfilment entire; so that thenecessity of a postulate gives no warrant for its verification. Expectation and action are constantly suspended together; and whathappens whenever thought loses itself or stumbles, what happens wheneverin its shifts it forgets its former objects, might well happen atcrucial times to that train of intentions which we call a particularlife or the life of humanity. The prophecy involved in action is notinsignificant, but it is notoriously fallible and depends for itsfulfilment on external conditions. The question accordingly really iswhether a man expecting to live for ever or one expecting to die in histime has the more representative and trustworthy notion of the future. The question, so stated, cannot be solved by an appeal to evidence, which is necessarily all on one side, but only by criticising the valueof evidence as against instinct and hope, and by ascertaining therelative status which assumption and observation have in experience. 

The transcendental compulsion under which action labours of envisaging afuture, and the animal instinct that clings to life and flees from deathas the most dreadful of evils are the real grounds why immortality seemsinitially natural and good. Confidence in living for ever is anterior tothe discovery that all men are mortal and to the discovery that thethinker is himself a man. These discoveries flatly contradict thatconfidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and alldoctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are moreor less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact ofmortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or lessclumsily reconciled. 

[Sidenote: A solipsistic argument. ]

The most lordly and genuine fashion of asserting immortality would be toproclaim one's self an exception to the animal race and to point outthat the analogy between one's singular self and others is altogetherlame and purely conventional. Any proud barbarian, with a tincture oftranscendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. "Creatures thatperish, " he might say, "are and can be nothing but puppets and paintedshadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; itscorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments. The world, which I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operationand consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The deathprophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight andcourage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me. "

Such solipsistic boasts may not have been heard in historic times fromthe lips of men speaking in their own persons. Language has anirresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideallytransferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it wouldbe ridiculous to hear from another. Now solipsism in another man is acomic thing: and a mind, prompted perhaps by hell and heaven to speaksolipsistically, is stopped by the laughable echo of its own words, whenit remembers its bold sayings. Language, being social, resists a virginegotism and forbids it to express itself publicly, no matter how wellgrounded it may be in transcendental logic and in animal instinct. Social convention is necessarily materialistic, since the beginning ofall moral reasonableness consists in taming the transcendental conceitnative to a living mind, in attaching it to its body, and bringing thewill that thought itself absolute down to the rank of animals and men. Otherwise no man would acknowledge another's rights or even conceive hisexistence. 

[Sidenote: Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods. ]

Primeval solipsism--the philosophy of untamed animal will--hasaccordingly taken to the usual by-paths and expressed itself openly onlyin myth or by a speculative abstraction in which the transcendentalspirit, for which all the solipsistic privileges were still claimed, wasdistinguished from the human individual. The gods, it was said, wereimmortal; and although on earth spirit must submit to the yoke andservice of matter, on whose occasions it must wait, yet there existed inthe ether other creatures more normally and gloriously compounded, sincetheir forms served and expressed their minds, which ruled also over theelements and feared no assault from time. With the advent of thismythology experience and presumption divided their realms; experiencewas allowed to shape men's notions of vulgar reality, but presumption, which could not be silenced, was allowed to suggest a second sphere, thinly and momentarily veiled to mortal sense, in which the premonitionsof will were abundantly realised. 

This expedient had the advantage of endowing the world with creaturesthat really satisfied human aspirations, such as at any moment theymight be. The gods possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity ofmovement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practicalomniscience. When the gods were also expressions for natural forces, this function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed tocorrespond perfectly to what their worshippers would have mostesteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism fromtheology and to represent the gods as entirely admirable. The Greekgods, to be sure, always continued to have genealogies, and the fact ofhaving been born is a bad augury for immortality; but other religions, and finally the Greek philosophers themselves, conceived unbegottengods, in whom the human rebellion against mutability was expressedabsolutely. 

Thus a place was found in nature for the constant and perpetual elementwhich crude experience seems to contain or at least to suggest. Unfortunately the immortal and the human were in this mythology whollydivorced, so that while immortality was vindicated for something in theuniverse it was emphatically denied to man and to his works. Contemplation, to be satisfied with this situation, had to be heroicallyunselfish and resigned; the gods' greatness and glory had to furnishsufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticismhad to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out thatthe divine life in question was either a personification of naturalprocesses and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection, or else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which couldnot really be conceived apart from the natural human life which theyinformed and from which they had been violently abstracted. 

[Sidenote: Or to a divine principle in all beings. ]

Another expedient was accordingly found, especially by mystics andcritical philosophers, for uniting the mortal and immortal in existencewhile still distinguishing them in essence. _Cur Deus Homo_ might besaid to be the theme of all such speculations. Plato had already foundthe eternal in the form which the temporal puts on, or, if the phrase bepreferred, had seen in the temporal and existential nothing but anindividuated case of the ideal. The soul was immortal, unbegotten, impassible; the bodies it successively inhabited and the experience itgathered served merely to bring out its nature with greater or lesscompleteness. To somewhat the same effect the German transcendentalistsidentified and distinguished the private and the universal spirit. Whatlived in each man and in each moment was the Absolute--for nothing elsecould really exist--and the expression which the Absolute there took onwas but a transitional phase of its total self-expression, which, couldit be grasped in its totality, would no longer seem subject tocontradiction and flux. An immortal agent therefore went through aninfinite series of acts, each transitory and relative to the others, butall possessed of inalienable reality and eternal significance. In suchformulations the divorce was avoided between the intellectual and thesensuous factor in experience--a divorce which the myth about immortalgods and mortal men had introduced. On the other hand existentialimmortality was abandoned; only an ideal permanence, only significance, was allowed to any finite being, and the better or future world of whichancient poets had dreamt, Olympus, and every other heaven, wasaltogether abolished. There was an eternal universe where everything wastransitory and a single immortal spirit at no two moments the same. Theworld of idealism realised no particular ideal, and least of all theideal of a natural and personal immunity from death. 

[Sidenote: In neither case is the individual immortal. ]

First, then, a man may refuse to admit that he must die at all; then, abashed at the arrogance of that assertion, he may consider the immortallife of other creatures, like the earth and stars, which seem subject tono extinction, and he may ascribe to these a perpetual consciousness andpersonality. Finally, confessing the fabulous character of thosedeities, he may distinguish an immortal agent or principle withinhimself, identify it with the inner principle of all other beings, andcontrast it with its varying and conditioned expressions. But scarcelyis this abstraction attained when he must perceive its worthlessness, since the natural life, the concrete aims, and the personal career whichimmortality was intended to save from dissolution are wholly alien to anominal entity which endures through all change, however fundamental, and cohabits with every nature, however hostile and odious to humanity. If immortality is to be genuine, what is immortal must be somethingdefinite, and if this immortality is to concern life and not meresignificance or ideal definition, that which endures must be anindividual creature with a fixed nucleus of habits and demands, so thatits persistence may contain progress and achievement. 

Herewith we may dismiss the more direct attempts to conceive and asserta future life. Their failure drives us to a consideration of indirectattempts to establish an unobservable but real immortality throughrevelation and dogma. Such an immortality would follow on transmigrationor resurrection, and would be assigned to a supernatural sphere, asecond empirical world present to the soul after death, where herfortunes would not be really conceivable without a reconstituted bodyand a new material environment. 

[Sidenote: Possible forms of survival. ]

Many a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station. Could these persons drink at the fountain of youth at least once morethey might do themselves fuller justice and cut a better figure at lastin the universe. Most people think they have stuff in them for greaterthings than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a second career isa pleasing antidote for ill-fortune; the poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy thisdemand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on inan environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning myliving may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, noheroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that myepics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiledin me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetualmotion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-ofepics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, ifhereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in thesame world corrected. Were I transformed into a cherub or transportedinto a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense I shouldcontinue to exist. Those results might be interesting in themselves andmight enrich the universe; they would not prolong my life nor retrievemy disasters. 

For this reason a future life is after all best represented by thosefrankly material ideals which most Christians--being Platonists--arewont to despise. It would be genuine happiness for a Jew to rise againin the flesh and live for ever in Ezekiel's New Jerusalem, with itsceremonial glories and civic order. It would be truly agreeable for anyman to sit in well-watered gardens with Mohammed, clad in green silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like glanceof some young girl, all innocence and fire. Amid such scenes a man mightremain himself and might fulfil hopes that he had actually cherished onearth. He might also find his friends again, which in somewhat generousminds is perhaps the thought that chiefly sustains interest in aposthumous existence. But to recognise his friends a man must find themin their bodies, with their familiar habits, voices, and interests; forit is surely an insult to affection to say that he could find them in aneternal formula expressing their idiosyncrasy. When, however, it isclearly seen that another life, to supplement this one, must closelyresemble it, does not the magic of immortality altogether vanish? Issuch a reduplication of earthly society at all credible? And theprospect of awakening again among houses and trees, among children anddotards, among wars and rumours of wars, still fettered to onepersonality and one accidental past, still uncertain of the future, isnot this prospect wearisome and deeply repulsive? Having passed throughthese things once and bequeathed them to posterity, is it not time foreach soul to rest? The universe doubtless contains all sorts ofexperiences, better and worse than the human; but it is idle toattribute to a particular man a life divorced from his circumstances andfrom his body. 

[Sidenote: Arguments from retribution and need of opportunity. ]

Dogmas about such a posthumous experience find some shadowy support invarious illusions and superstitions that surround death, but they aredeveloped into articulate prophecies chiefly by certain moral demands. One of these requires rewards and punishments more emphatic and surethan those which conduct meets with in this world. Another requiresmerely a more favourable and complete opportunity for the soul'sdevelopment. Considerations like these are pertinent to moralphilosophy. It touches the notion of duty whether an exact hedonisticretribution is to be demanded for what is termed merit and guilt: sothat without such supernatural remuneration virtue, perhaps, would bediscredited and deprived of a motive. It likewise touches the idealityand nobleness of life whether human aims can be realised satisfactorilyonly in the agent's singular person, so that the fruits of effort wouldbe forth-with missed if the labourer himself should disappear. 

[Sidenote: Ignoble temper of both. ]

To establish justice in the world and furnish an adequate incentive tovirtue was once thought the chief business of a future life. The Hebraicreligions somewhat overreached themselves on these points: for thegrotesque alternative between hell and heaven in the end only aggravatedthe injustice it was meant to remedy. Life is unjust in that itsubordinates individuals to a general mechanical law, and the deeper andlonger hold fate has on the soul, the greater that injustice. Aperpetual life would be a perpetual subjection to arbitrary power, whilea last judgment would be but a last fatality. That hell may havefrightened a few villains into omitting a crime is perhaps credible;but the embarrassed silence which the churches, in a more sensitive age, prefer to maintain on that wholesome doctrine--once, as they taught, theonly rational basis for virtue--shows how their teaching has to followthe independent progress of morals. Nevertheless, persons are notwanting, apparently free from ecclesiastical constraint, who stillmaintain that the value of life depends on its indefinite prolongation. By an artifice of reflection they substitute vanity for reason, andselfish for ingenuous instincts in man. Being apparently interested innothing but their own careers, they forget that a man may remember howlittle he counts in the world and suffer that rational knowledge toinspire his purposes. Intense morality has always envisaged earthlygoods and evils, and even when a future life has been accepted vaguely, it has never given direction to human will or aims, which at best itcould only proclaim more emphatically. It may indeed be said that no manof any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone ofhis enthusiasms. Such an instinct is carnal, and if immortality is toadd a higher inspiration to life it must not be an immortality ofselfishness. What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunkbelow the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to livefor his children, for his art, or for country!

[Sidenote: False optimistic postulate involved. ]

To turn these moral questions, however, into arguments for a physicalspeculation, like that about human longevity, resurrection, ormetempsychosis, a hybrid principle is required: thus, even if we haveanswered those moral questions in the conventional way and satisfiedourselves that personal immortality is a postulate of ethics, we cannotinfer that immortality therefore exists unless we import into theargument a tremendous optimistic postulate, to the effect that what isrequisite for moral rationality must in every instance be realised inexperience. 

Such an optimistic postulate, however, as the reader must haverepeatedly observed, is made not only despite all experience but inignorance of the conditions under which alone ideals are framed andretain their significance. Every ideal expresses individual and specifictendencies, proper at some moment to some natural creature; every idealtherefore has for its basis a part only of the dynamic world, so thatits fulfilment is problematical and altogether adventitious to itsexistence and authority. To decide whether an ideal can be or will befulfilled we must examine the physical relation between such organicforces as that ideal expresses and the environment in which those forcesoperate; we may then perceive how far a realisation of the given aims ispossible, how far it must fail, and how far the aims in question, by ashift in their natural basis, will lapse and yield to others, possiblymore capable of execution and more stable in the world. The question ofsuccess is a question of physics. To say that an ideal will beinevitably fulfilled simply because it is an ideal is to say somethinggratuitous and foolish. Pretence cannot in the end avail againstexperience. 

[Sidenote: Transition to ideality. ]

Nevertheless, it is important to define ideals even before theirrealisation is known to be possible, because they constitute one of thetwo factors whose interaction and adjustment is moral life, factorswhich are complementary and diverse in function and may be independentlyascertained. The value of existences is wholly borrowed from theirideality, without direct consideration of their fate, while theexistence of ideals is wholly determined by natural forces, withoutdirect relation to their fulfilment. Existence and ideal value cantherefore be initially felt and observed apart, although of course acomplete description would lay bare physical necessity in the idealsentertained and inevitable ideal harmonies among the facts discovered. Human life, lying as it does in the midst of a larger process, willsurely not be without some congruity with the universe. Every creaturelends potential values to a world in which it can satisfy some at leastof its demands and learn, perhaps, to modify the others. Happiness isalways a natural and an essentially possible thing, and a total despair, since it ignores those goods which are attainable, can express only apartial experience. But before considering in what ways a disciplinedsoul might make its peace with reality, we may consider what anundisciplined soul in the first instance desires; and from thisstarting-point we may trace her chastening and education, observing theideal compensations which may console her for lost illusions. 

CHAPTER XIV

IDEAL IMMORTALITY

[Sidenote: Olympian immortality the first ideal. ]

In order to give the will to live frank and direct satisfaction, itwould have been necessary to solve the problem of perpetual motion inthe animal body, as nature has approximately solved it in the solarsystem. Nutrition should have continually repaired all waste, so thatthe cycle of youth and age might have repeated itself yearly in everyindividual, like summer and winter on the earth. Nor are some hints ofsuch an equilibrium altogether wanting. Convalescence, sudden goodfortune, a belated love, and even the April sunshine or morning air, bring about a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is notideally impossible--perpetuity and constant reinforcement in his vitalpowers. Had nature furnished the elixir of life, or could art havediscovered it, the whole face of human society would have been changed. The earth once full, no more children would have been begotten andparental instincts would have been atrophied for want of function. Allmen would have been contemporaries and, having all time before them fortravel and experiment, would have allied themselves eventually with whatwas most congenial to them and would have come to be bound only by freeand friendly ties. They would all have been well known and would haveacted perpetually in their ultimate and true character, like theimmortal gods. One might have loved fixity, like Hestia, and anothermotion, like Hermes; a third might have been untiring in the plasticarts, like Hephæstus, or, like Apollo, in music; while the infiniterealms of mathematics and philosophy would have lain open to spirits ofa quality not represented in Homer's pantheon. 

That man's primary and most satisfying ideal is something of this sortis clear in itself, and attested by mythology; for the great use of thegods is that they interpret the human heart to us, and help us, while weconceive them, to discover our inmost ambition and, while we emulatethem, to pursue it. Christian fancy, because of its ascetic meagrenessand fear of life, has not known how to fill out the picture of heavenand has left it mystical and vague; but whatever paradise it hasventured to imagine has been modelled on the same primary ideal. It hasrepresented a society of eternal beings among which there was nomarriage nor giving in marriage and where each found his congenialmansion and that perfected activity which brings inward peace. 

After this easy fashion were death and birth conquered in the myths, which truly interpreted the will to live according to its primaryintention, but in reality such direct satisfaction was impossible. Atotal defeat, on the other hand, would have extinguished the will itselfand obliterated every human impulse seeking expression. Man's existenceis proof enough that nature was not altogether unpropitious, butoffered, in an unlooked-for direction, some thoroughfare to the soul. Roundabout imperfect methods were discovered by which something at leastof what was craved might be secured. The individual perished, yet notwithout having segregated and detached a certain portion of himselfcapable of developing a second body and mind. The potentialities of thisseminal portion, having been liberated long after the parent body hadbegun to feel the shock of the world, could reach full expression afterthe parent body had begun to decay; and the offspring needed not itselfto succumb before it had launched a third generation. A cyclical life orarrested death, a continual motion by little successive explosions, could thus establish itself and could repeat from generation togeneration a process not unlike nutrition; only that, while in nutritionthe individual form remains and the inner substance is renewedinsensibly, in reproduction the form is renewed openly and the innersubstance is insensibly continuous. 

[Sidenote: Its indirect attainment by reproduction. ]

Reproduction seems, from the will's point of view, a marvellousexpedient involving a curious mixture of failure and success. Theindividual, who alone is the seat and principle of will, is therebysacrificed, so that reproduction is no response to his original hopesand aspirations; yet in a double way he is enticed and persuaded to bealmost satisfied: first, in that so like a counterfeit of himselfactually survives, a creature to which all his ideal interests may betransmitted; and secondly, because a new and as it were a rival aim isnow insinuated into his spirit. For the impulse toward reproduction hasnow become no less powerful, even if less constant, than the impulsetoward nutrition; in other words, the will to live finds itself in theuncongenial yet inevitable company of the will to have an heir. Reproduction thus partly entertains the desire to be immortal by givingit a vicarious fulfilment, and partly cancels it by adding an impulseand joy which, when you think of it, accepts mortality. For love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, andprompts a man to give his life for his friends. In thus losing his lifegladly he in a sense finds it anew, since it has now become a part ofhis function and ideal to yield his place to others and to liveafterwards only in them. While the primitive and animal side of him maycontinue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought ofextinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build anew ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the futurehe looks to should be enjoyed by others. When we consider such a naturaltransformation and discipline of the will, when we catch even a slightglimpse of nature's resources and mysteries, how thin and verbal thosebelated hopes must seem which would elude death and abolish sacrifice!Such puerile dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, butignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console us for notbeing so radiantly divine as we may at first have thought ourselves. Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to becomeunselfish and noble. 

A first shift in aspiration, a capacity for radical altruism, thussupervenes upon the lust to live and accompanies parental and socialinterests. The new ideal, however, can never entirely obliterate the oldand primary one, because the initial functions which the old Adamexclusively represented remain imbedded in the new life, and are itsphysical basis. If the nutritive soul ceased to operate, thereproductive soul could never arise; to be altruistic we must first be, and spiritual interests can never abolish or cancel the materialexistence on which they are grafted. The consequence is that death, evenwhen circumvented by reproduction and relieved by surviving impersonalinterests, remains an essential evil. It may be accepted as inevitable, and the goods its intrusion leaves standing may be heartily appreciatedand pursued; but something pathetic and incomplete will always attach toa life that looks to its own termination. 

The effort of physical existence is not to accomplish anything definitebut merely to persist for ever. The will has its first law of motion, corresponding to that of matter; its initial tendency is to continue tooperate in the given direction and in the given manner. Inertia is, inthis sense, the essence of vitality. To be driven from that perpetualcourse is somehow to be checked, and an external and hostile force isrequired to change a habit or an instinct as much as to deflect a star. Indeed, nutrition itself, hunting, feeding, and digestion, are forcedactivities, and the basis of passions not altogether congenial norideal. Hunger is an incipient faintness and agony, and an animal thatneeds to hunt, gnaw, and digest is no immortal, free, or essentiallyvictorious creature. His will is already driven into by-paths andexpedients; his primitive beatific vision has to be interrupted byremedial action to restore it for a while, since otherwise it wouldobviously degenerate rapidly through all stages of distress until itstotal extinction. 

[Sidenote: Moral acceptance of this compromise. ]

The tasks thus imposed upon the protoplasmic will raise it, we may say, to a higher level; to hunt is better sport, and more enlightening, thanto lie imbibing sunshine and air; and to eat is, we may well think, amore positive and specific pleasure than merely to be. Such judgments, however, show a human bias. They arise from incapacity to throw offacquired organs. Those necessities which have led to the forms of lifewhich we happen to exemplify, and in terms of which our virtues arenecessarily expressed, seem to us, in retrospect, happy necessities, since without them our conventional goods would not have come to appealto us. These conventional goods, however, are only compromises withevil, and the will would never have taken to pursuing them if it had notbeen dislodged and beaten back from its primary aims. Even food is, forthis reason, no absolute blessing; it is only the first and mostnecessary of comforts, of restorations, of truces and reprieves in thatbattle with death in which an ultimate defeat is too plainly inevitable;for the pitcher that goes often to the well is at last broken, and acreature that is forced to resist his inward collapse by adventitiousaids will some day find that these aids have failed him, and that inwarddissolution has become, for some mechanical reason, quite irresistible. It is therefore not only the lazy or mystical will that chafes at theneed of material supports and deprecates anxieties about the morrow; themost conventional and passionate mind, when it attains any refinement, confesses the essential servitude involved in such preoccupations byconcealing or ignoring them as much as may be. We study to eat as if wewere not ravenous, to win as if we were willing to lose, and to treatpersonal wants in general as merely compulsory and uninterestingmatters. Why dwell, we say to ourselves, on our stammerings andfailures? The intent is all, and the bungling circumlocutions we may bedriven to should be courteously ignored, like a stammerer's troubles, when once our meaning has been conveyed. 

Even animal passions are, in this way, after-thoughts and expedients, and although in a brutal age they seem to make up the whole of life, later it appears that they would be gladly enough outgrown, did thematerial situation permit it. Intellectual life returns, in its freedom, to the attitude proper to primitive will, except that through the newmachinery underlying reason a more stable equilibrium has beenestablished with external forces, and the freedom originally absolutehas become relative to certain underlying adjustments, adjustments whichmay be ignored but cannot be abandoned with impunity. Original action, as seen in the vegetable, is purely spontaneous. On the animal levelinstrumental action is added and chiefly attended to, so that thecreature, without knowing what it lives for, finds attractive tasks anda sort of glory in the chase, in love, and in labour. In the Life ofReason this instrumental activity is retained, for it is a necessarybasis for human prosperity and power, but the value of life is againsought in the supervening free activity which that adjustment tophysical forces, or dominion over them, has made possible on a largerscale. Every free activity would gladly persist for ever; and if any befound that involves and aims at its own arrest or transformation, thatactivity is thereby proved to be instrumental and servile, imposed fromwithout and not ideal. 

[Sidenote: Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible. ]

Not only is man's original effort aimed at living for ever in his ownperson, but, even if he could renounce that desire, the dream of beingrepresented perpetually by posterity is no less doomed. Reproduction, like nutrition, is a device not ultimately successful. If extinctiondoes not defeat it, evolution will. Doubtless the fertility of whateversubstance may have produced us will not be exhausted in this singleeffort; a potentiality that has once proved efficacious and beenactualised in life, though it should sleep, will in time revive again. In some form and after no matter what intervals, nature may be expectedalways to possess consciousness. But beyond this planet and apart fromthe human race, experience is too little imaginable to be interesting. No definite plan or ideal of ours can find its realisation except inourselves. Accordingly, a vicarious physical immortality always remainsan unsatisfactory issue; what is thus to be preserved is but acounterfeit of our being, and even that counterfeit is confronted byomens of a total extinction more or less remote. A note of failure andmelancholy must always dominate in the struggle against natural death. 

[Sidenote: Intellectual victory over change. ]

This defeat is not really problematical, or to be eluded by revivingill-digested hopes resting entirely on ignorance, an ignorance whichthese hopes will wish to make eternal. We need not wait for our totaldeath to experience dying; we need not borrow from observation ofothers' demise a prophecy of our own extinction. Every momentcelebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and thepossession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, isthe most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. Inendowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterlyunimaginable to the unflective creation, the truth of mortality. Everything moves in the midst of death, because it indeed _moves_; butit falls into the pit unawares and by its own action unmakes anddisestablishes itself, until a wonderful visionary faculty is added, sothat a ghost remains of what has perished to reveal that lapse and atthe same time in a certain sense to neutralise it. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetratedwe shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in away, above mortality. That was a heroic and divine oracle which, ininforming us of our decay, made us partners of the gods' eternity, andby giving us knowledge poured into us, to that extent, the serenity andbalm of truth. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dyingand to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory thatopens to us an ideal immortality, unacceptable and meaningless to theold Adam, but genuine in its own way and undeniably true. It is animmortality in representation--a representation which envisages thingsin their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves inreality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called todisguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it isexperience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memorydoes not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor doesit itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stableand more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence, only an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and byits significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on thedeparted and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from thispart of experience, and incapable of returning to life, theynevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actualas experience is to-day, and still help to make up, in company with allpast, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world. 

[Sidenote: The glory of it. ]

As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as anopportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total, serviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting theknowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. Thesacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though thecompensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparentlyoverwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurablesorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactionsessentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in movingforward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as may be theinterests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless, there is the greater reason for cultivating other sources ofsatisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is avital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm andforce of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal, envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is tothat extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, fromhimself, and from his personal destiny. This detachment will not makehim infinitely long-lived, nor absolutely happy, but it may render himintelligent and just, and may open to him all intellectual pleasures andall human sympathies. 

There is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found bycircumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients incircumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is afirst stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition andpossession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions isrecovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whoseconstitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic momentcontains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, athought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of coursefleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporaland life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and anopposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never tobe recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at somesensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made roomand pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god, as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, someself-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment couldtransmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, thepresence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension, which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; itquickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, thetruth of those moments and their inalienable values. 

[Sidenote: Reason makes man's divinity. ]

To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity andin divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable, but the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, oftwo instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual andimperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal andresident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the twoinstants, remain existentially different; were they not two they couldnot come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to beholdone object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Beingindependent in existence, they can be united by the identity of theirburden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were thisideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of unitinganything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds wouldopen between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purelyideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and rendertheir union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thoughtthere may be rivalry and impact--the two thinkers may compete andclash--but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and doesnot love the truth stripped of its accidental associations andprovincial accent. Doctors disagree in so far as they are not trulydoctors, but, as Plato would say, seek, like sophists and wage-earners, to circumvent and defeat one another. The conflict is physical and canextend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted byindividual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to theintellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. Theintellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine andsingle; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles ofperspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevantworlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, calledtruth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus formental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operationswhich converge upon it. 

This unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, notphysical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers areinnumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowmentand habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion orideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a methodand grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significantin proportion to the constancy in meaning which words and locutionspreserve in a speaker's mind at various times, or in the minds ofvarious persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language isnever wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There isalways mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet inpeaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree oftranslucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there isan appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity ofintent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science reststogether with every rational formation. 

[Sidenote: and his immortality. ]

The same function is the seat of human immortality. Reason lifts alarger or smaller element in each man to the plane of ideality accordingas reason more or less thoroughly leavens and permeates the lump. No manis wholly immortal, as no philosophy is wholly true and no languagewholly intelligible; but only in so far as intelligible is a language alanguage rather than a noise, only in so far as true is a philosophymore than a vent for cerebral humours, and only in so far as a man isrational and immortal is he a man and not a sensorium. 

It is hard to convince people that they have such a gift asintelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive itsideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; ifthey perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim intoits ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and inventultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as ifthose celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any lessmaterial than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any lessinstrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if naturehas added intelligence to animal life it is because they belongtogether. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality. If eternitycould exist otherwise than as a vision in time, eternity would have nomeaning for men in the world, while the world, men, and time would haveno vocation or status in eternity. The travail of existence would bewithout excuse, without issue or consummation, while the conceptions oftruth and of perfection would be without application to experience, puredreams about things preternatural and unreal, vacantly conceived, andillogically supposed to have something to do with living issues. Buttruth and perfection, for the very reason that they are not problematicexistences but inherent ideals, cannot be banished from discourse. Experience may lose any of its data; it cannot lose, while it endures, the terms with which it operates in becoming experience. Now, truth isrelevant to every opinion which looks to truth for its standard, andperfection is envisaged in every cry for relief, in every effort atbetterment. Opinions, volitions, and passionate refusals fill humanlife. So that when the existence of truth is denied, truth is given theonly status which it ever required--it is conceived. 

[Sidenote: It is the locus of all truths. ]

Nor can any better defense be found for the denial that nature and herlife have a status in eternity. This statement may not be understood, but if grasped at all it will not be questioned. By having a status ineternity is not meant being parts of an eternal existence, petrified orcongealed into something real but motionless. What is meant is only thatwhatever exists in time, when bathed in the light of reflection, acquires an indelible character and discloses irreversible relations;every fact, in being recognised, takes its place in the universe ofdiscourse, in that ideal sphere of truth which is the common andunchanging standard for all assertions. Language, science, art, religion, and all ambitious dreams are compacted of ideas. Life is asmuch a mosaic of notions as the firmament is of stars; and these idealand transpersonal objects, bridging time, fixing standards, establishingvalues, constituting the natural rewards of all living, are the veryfurniture of eternity, the goals and playthings of that reason which isan instinct in the heart as vital and spontaneous as any other. Orrather, perhaps, reason is a supervening instinct by which all otherinstincts are interpreted, just as the _sensus communis_ ortranscendental unity of psychology is a faculty by which all perceptionsare brought face to face and compared. So that immortality is not aprivilege reserved for a part only of experience, but rather a relationpervading every part in varying measure. We may, in leaving the subject, mark the degrees and phases of this idealisation. 

[Sidenote: Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence. ]

Animal sensation is related to eternity only by the truth that it hastaken place. The fact, fleeting as it is, is registered in ideal historyand no inventory of the world's riches, no true confession of itscrimes, would ever be complete that ignored that incident. Thisindefeasible character in experience makes a first sort of idealimmortality, one on which those rational philosophers like to dwell whohave not speculation enough to feel quite certain of any other. It was aconsolation to the Epicurean to remember that, however brief anduncertain might be his tenure of delight, the past was safe and thepresent sure. "He lives happy, " says Horace, "and master over himself, who can say daily, I have lived. To-morrow let Jove cover the sky withblack clouds or flood it with sunshine; he shall not thereby rendervain what lies behind, he shall not delete and make never to haveexisted what once the hour has brought in its flight. " Suchself-concentration and hugging of the facts has no power to improvethem; it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and rathertends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions a mind that haslost faith in reason and that deliberately ignores the difference inscope and dignity which exists among various pursuits. Yet thereflection is staunch and in its way heroic; it meets a vague and feebleaspiration, that looks to the infinite, with a just rebuke; it points toreal satisfactions, experienced successes, and asks us to be contentwith the fulfilment of our own wills. If you have seen the world, if youhave played your game and won it, what more would you ask for? If youhave tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied; if theexperience has been bitter, you should be glad that it comes to an end. 

Of course, as we have seen, there is a primary demand in man which deathand mutation contradict flatly, so that no summons to cease can ever beobeyed with complete willingness. Even the suicide trembles and theascetic feels the stings of the flesh. It is the part of philosophy, however, to pass over those natural repugnances and overlay them with asmuch countervailing rationality as can find lodgment in a particularmind. The Epicurean, having abandoned politics and religion and beingafraid of any far-reaching ambition, applied philosophy honestly enoughto what remained. Simple and healthy pleasures are the reward of simpleand healthy pursuits; to chafe against them because they are limited isto import a foreign and disruptive element into the case; a healthyhunger has its limit, and its satisfaction reaches a natural term. Philosophy, far from alienating us from those values, should teach us tosee their perfection and to maintain them in our ideal. In other words, the happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe atlarge, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhapsthe only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity. 

[Sidenote: Logical immortality, through objects of thought. ]

Moving events, while remaining enshrined in this fashion in theirpermanent setting, may contain other and less external relations to theimmutable. They may represent it. If the pleasures of sense are notcancelled when they cease, but continue to satisfy reason in that theyonce satisfied natural desires, much more will the pleasures ofreflection retain their worth, when we consider that what they aspiredto and reached was no momentary physical equilibrium but a permanenttruth. As Archimedes, measuring the hypothenuse, was lost to events, being engaged in an event of much greater transcendence, so art andscience interrupt the sense for change by engrossing attention in itsissues and its laws. Old age often turns pious to look away from ruinsto some world where youth endures and where what ought to have been isnot overtaken by decay before it has quite come to maturity. Lost insuch abstract contemplations, the mind is weaned from mortal concerns. It forgets for a few moments a world in which it has so little more todo and so much, perhaps, still to suffer. As a sensation of pure lightwould not be distinguishable from light itself, so a contemplation ofthings not implicating time in their structure becomes, so far as itsown deliverance goes, a timeless existence. Unconsciousness of temporalconditions and of the very flight of time makes the thinker sink for amoment into identity with timeless objects. And so immortality, in asecond ideal sense, touches the mind. 

[Sidenote: Ethical immortality, through types of excellence. ]

The transitive phases of consciousness, however, have themselves areference to eternal things. They yield a generous enthusiasm and loveof good which is richer in consolation than either Epicureanself-concentration or mathematical ecstasy. Events are more interestingthan the terms we abstract from them, and the forward movement of thewill is something more intimately real than is the catalogue of our pastexperiences. Now the forward movement of the will is an avenue to theeternal. What would you have? What is the goal of your endeavour? Itmust be some success, the establishment of some order, the expression ofsome experience. These points once reached, we are not left merely withthe satisfaction of abstract success or the consciousness of idealimmortality. Being natural goals, these ideals are related to naturalfunctions. Their attainment does not exhaust but merely liberates, inthis instance, the function concerned, and so marks the perpetual pointof reference common to that function in all its fluctuations. Everyattainment of perfection in an art--as for instance in government--makesa return to perfection easier for posterity, since there remains anenlightening example, together with faculties predisposed by disciplineto recover their ancient virtue. The better a man evokes and realisesthe ideal the more he leads the life that all others, in proportion totheir worth, will seek to live after him, and the more he helps them tolive in that nobler fashion. His presence in the society of immortalsthus becomes, so to speak, more pervasive. He not only vanquishes time, by his own rationality, living now in the eternal, but he continuallylives again in all rational beings. 

Since the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal struggles, hewho lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in artenjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while helived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the sameabsorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best inhim, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he couldrationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without anysubterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die;for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes hisbeing. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and ofuniversal mutation, he will have identified himself with what isspiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and soconceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal. 

CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

[Sidenote: The failure of magic. ]

The preceding analysis of religion, although it is illustrated mainly byChristianity, may enable us in a general way to distinguish the rationalgoal of all religious life. In no sphere is the contrast clearer betweenwisdom and folly; in none, perhaps, has there been so much of both. Itwas a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic;and the desperate appeal which human weakness has made to prayer, tocastigations, to miscellaneous fantastic acts, in the hope of therebybending nature to greater sympathy with human necessities, is a patheticspectacle; all the more pathetic in that here the very importunity ofevil, which distracted the mind and allowed it no choice ordeliberation, prevented very often those practical measures which, iflighted upon, would have instantly relieved the situation. Religion whenit has tried to do man's work for him has not only cheated hope, butconsumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success. 

[Sidenote: and of mythology. ]

[Sidenote: Their imaginative value. ]

No less useless and retarding has been the effort to give religion thefunction of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causesfor natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human valueswhich they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted andconfused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery ofnatural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on beingexploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificialdespair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involvedwonderful creations which have a poetic value of their own, to offsettheir uselessness in some measure and the obstruction they haveoccasioned. In imagining human agents behind every appearance fancy hasgiven appearances some kinship to human life; it has made nature a massof hieroglyphics and enlarged to that extent the means of humanexpression. While objects and events were capriciously moralised, themind's own plasticity has been developed by its great exercise inself-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, thedispenser of silent benefits and the contriver of deep-seated universalharmonies, has actually stimulated man's moral nature: he has grownlarger by thinking himself so large. 

Through the dense cloud of false thought and bad habit in which religionthus wrapped the world, some rays broke through from the beginning; formythology and magic expressed life and sought to express its conditions. Human needs and human ideals went forth in these forms to solicit and toconquer the world; and since these imaginative methods, for their veryineptitude, rode somewhat lightly over particular issues and envisagedrather distant goods, it was possible through them to give aspirationand reflection greater scope than the meaner exigencies of life wouldhave permitted. Where custom ruled morals and a narrow empiricismbounded the field of knowledge, it was partly a blessing thatimagination should be given an illegitimate sway. Withoutmisunderstanding, there might have been no understanding at all; withoutconfidence in supernatural support, the heart might never have utteredits own oracles. So that in close association with superstition andfable we find piety and spirituality entering the world. 

[Sidenote: Piety and spirituality justified. ]

Rational religion has these two phases: piety, or loyalty to necessaryconditions, and spirituality, or devotion to ideal ends. These simplesanctities make the core of all the others. Piety drinks at the deep, elemental sources of power and order: it studies nature, honours thepast, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses thestrength thus acquired, remodelling all it receives, and looking to thefuture and the ideal. True religion is entirely human and political, aswas that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks. Supernaturalmachinery is either symbolic of natural conditions and moral aims orelse is worthless. 

[Sidenote: Mysticism a primordial state of feeling. ]

There is one other phase or possible overtone of religion about which aword might be added in conclusion. What is called mysticism is a certaingenial loosening of convention, whether rational or mythical; the mysticsmiles at science and plays with theology, undermining both by force ofhis insight and inward assurance. He is all faith, all love, all vision, but he is each of these things _in vacuo_, and in the absence of anyobject. 

Mysticism can exist, in varied degrees, at any stage of rationaldevelopment. Its presence is therefore no indication of the worth orworthlessness of its possessor. This circumstance tends to obscure itsnature, which would otherwise be obvious enough. Seeing the greatestsaints and philosophers grow mystical in their highest flights, aninnocent observer might imagine that mysticism was an ultimate attitude, which only his own incapacity kept him from understanding. But exactlythe opposite is the case. Mysticism is the most primitive of feelingsand only visits formed minds in moments of intellectual arrest anddissolution. It can exist in a child, very likely in an animal; indeed, to parody a phrase of Hegel's, the only pure mystics are the brutes. When articulation fails in the face of experience; when instinct guideswithout kindling any prophetic idea to which action may be inwardlyreferred; when life and hope and joy flow through the soul from anunknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Suchan experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordialenergies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just asat the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yetmay have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earthand sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at theend, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulateexperience may be lifted up and carried down-stream bodily by theelementary flood rising from beneath. 

[Sidenote: It may recur at any stage of culture. ]

Every religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject toincidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone and bethe body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may sayso, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium andinterrupted growth; but in these pauses, when the depths rise to thesurface and obliterate what scratches culture may have made there, therhythm of life may be more powerfully felt, and the very disappearanceof intellect may be taken for a revelation. Both in a social and apsychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes andvolcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt forthose fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they areutterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. If they leavesomething standing it is only by involuntary accident, and if theyprepare the soil for anything, it is commonly only for wild-flowers andweeds. Revelations are seldom beneficent, therefore, unless there ismore evil in the world to destroy than good to preserve; and mysticism, under the same circumstances, may also liberate and relieve the spirit. 

[Sidenote: Form gives substance its life and value. ]

The feelings which in mysticism rise to the surface and speak in theirown name are simply the ancient, overgrown feelings of vitality, dependence, inclusion; they are the background of consciousness comingforward and blotting out the scene. What mysticism destroys is, in asense, its only legitimate expression. The Life of Reason, in so far asit is life, contains the mystic's primordial assurances, and hisrudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered whatthose assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted tosupport action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction andconnexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a many-coloured andnatural happiness. 

*** End of Volume Three ***

REASON IN ART

Volume Four of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

This Dover edition, first published in 1982, is an unabridgedrepublication of volume four of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases ofHuman Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y. , in 1905. 

CONTENTS

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose. --Art is plasticinstinct conscious of its aims. --It is automatic. --So are the ideas itexpresses. --We are said to control whatever obeys us. --Utility is aresult. --The useful naturally stable. --Intelligence is docility. --Art isreason propagating itself. --Beauty an incident in rational art, inseparable from the others. Pages 3-17

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

Utility is ultimately ideal. --Work wasted and chances missed. --Idealsmust be interpreted, not prescribed. --The aim of industry is to livewell. --Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature. --Servile arts maygrow spontaneous or their products may be renounced. --Art starts fromtwo potentialities: its material and its problem. --Each must be definiteand congruous with the other. --A sophism exposed. --Industry preparesmatter for the liberal arts. --Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

Art is spontaneous action made stable by success. --It combines utilityand automatism. --Automatism fundamental and irresponsible. --It is tamedby contact with the world. --The dance. --Functions of gesture. --Automaticmusic. Pages 34-43

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

Music is a world apart. --It justifies itself. --It is vital andtransient. --Its physical affinities. --Physiology of music. --Limits ofmusical sensibility. --The value of music is relative to them. --Wondersof musical structure. --Its inherent emotions. --In growing specific theyremain unearthly. --They merge with common emotions, and express such asfind no object in nature. --Music lends elementary feelings anintellectual communicable form. --All essences are in themselves good, even the passions. --Each impulse calls for a possible congenialworld. --Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings. --Music may doso. --Instability the soul of matter. --- Peace the triumph ofspirit. --Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

Sounds well fitted to be symbols. --Language has a structure independentof things. --Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things thatchange. --Language the dialectical garment of facts. --Words are wisemen's counters. --Nominalism right in psychology and realism inlogic. --Literature moves between the extremes of music anddenotation. --Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may haveaffinity. --Syntax positively representative. --Yet it vitiates what itrepresents. --Difficulty in subduing a living medium. --Languageforeshortens experience. --It is a perpetual mythology. --It may be apt orinapt, with equal richness. --Absolute language a possible but foolishart Pages 68-86

CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

Force of primary expressions. --Its exclusiveness andnarrowness. --Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm. --Inspirationirresponsible. --Plato's discriminating view. --Explosive and pregnantexpression. --Natural history of inspiration. --Expressions to beunderstood must be recreated, and so changed. --Expressions may be recastperversely, humourously, or sublimely. --The nature of prose. --It is moreadvanced and responsible than poetry. --Maturity brings love ofpractical truth. --Pure prose would tend to efface itself. --Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical. --Poetry has its place in themedium. --It is the best medium possible. --Might it not convey what it isbest to know?--A rational poetry would exclude much now thoughtpoetical. --All apperception modifies its object. --Reason has its ownbias and method. --Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge inultimate emotions. --An illustration. --Volume can be found in scopebetter than in suggestion Pages 87-115

CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world. --Sucheffects fruitful. --Magic authority of man's first creations. --Art bringsrelief from idolatry. --Inertia in technique. --Inertia inappreciation. --Adventitious effects appreciated first. --Approach tobeauty through useful structure. --Failure of adapted styles. --Not allstructure beautiful, nor all beauty structural. --Structures designed fordisplay. --Appeal made by decoration. --Its natural rights. --Its alliancewith structure in Greek architecture. --Relations of the two in Gothicart. --The result here romantic. --The mediæval artist. --Representationintroduced. --Transition to illustration. Pages 116-143

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

Psychology of imitation. --Sustained sensation involvesreproduction. --Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a newmaterial. --Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge. --How theartist is inspired and irresponsible. --Need of knowing and loving thesubject rendered. --Public interests determine the subject of art, andthe subject the medium. --Reproduction by acting ephemeral. --demands ofsculpture. --It is essentially obsolete. --When men see groups andbackgrounds they are natural painters. --Evolution of painting. --Sensuousand dramatic adequacy approached. --Essence of landscape-painting. --Itsthreatened dissolution. --Reversion to pure decorative design. --Sensuousvalues are primordial and so indispensable Pages 144-165

CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

Art is subject to moral censorship. --Its initial or specific excellenceis not enough. --All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initialworth. --But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent. --It isliberal, and typical of perfect activity. --The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society. --Plato's strictures: he exaggeratesthe effect of myths. --His deeper moral objections. --Theirlightness. --Importance of æsthetic alternatives. --The importance ofæsthetic goods varies with temperaments. --The æsthetic temperamentrequires tutelage. --Aesthetic values everywhere interfused. --They areprimordial. --To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them. --Theyflow naturally from perfect function. --Even inhibited functions, whenthey fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties. --He who loves beautymust chasten it Pages 166-190

CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened. --Taste gains inauthority as it is more and more widely based. --Different æstheticendowments may be compared in quantity or force. --Authority of vitalover verbal judgments. --Tastes differ also in purity orconsistency. --They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width ofappeal. --Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or byreporting the ultimate. --Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i. E. _, harmonious with all other interests. --A mere "work of art" abaseless artifice. --Human uses give to works of art their highestexpression and charm. --The sad values of appearance. --They need to bemade prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused withbeauty Pages 191-215

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would besuffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections. --Pros and consof detached indulgences. --The happy imagination is one initially in linewith things, and brought always closer to them by experience. --Reason isthe principle of both art and happiness. --Only a rational society canhave sure and perfect arts. --Why art is now empty andunstable. --Anomalous character of the irrational artist. --True artmeasures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

[Sidenote: Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose. ]

Man exists amid a universal ferment of being, and not only needsplasticity in his habits and pursuits but finds plasticity also in thesurrounding world. Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now byaccepting modification and now by imposing it. Since the organ for allactivity is a body in mechanical relation to other material objects, objects which the creature's instincts often compel him to appropriateor transform, changes in his habits and pursuits leave their mark onwhatever he touches. His habitat must needs bear many a trace of hispresence, from which intelligent observers might infer something abouthis life and action. These vestiges of action are for the most partimprinted unconsciously and aimlessly on the world. They are inthemselves generally useless, like footprints; and yet almost any signof man's passage might, under certain conditions, interest a man. Afootprint could fill Robinson Crusoe with emotion, the devastationwrought by an army's march might prove many things to a historian, andeven the disorder in which a room is casually left may express veryvividly the owner's ways and character. 

Sometimes, however, man's traces are traces of useful action which hasso changed natural objects as to make them congenial to his mind. Instead of a footprint we might find an arrow; instead of a disorderedroom, a well-planted orchard--things which would not only have betrayedthe agent's habits, but would have served and expressed his intent. Suchpropitious forms given by man to matter are no less instrumental in theLife of Reason than are propitious forms assumed by man's own habit orfancy. Any operation which thus humanises and rationalises objects iscalled art. 

[Sidenote: Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aim. ]

All art has an instinctive source and a material embodiment. If thebirds in building nests felt the utility of what they do, they would bepractising an art; and for the instinct to be called rational it wouldeven suffice that their traditional purpose and method should becomeconscious occasionally. Thus weaving is an art, although the weaver maynot be at every moment conscious of its purpose, but may be carriedalong, like any other workman, by the routine of his art; and languageis a rational product, not because it always has a use or meaning, butbecause it is sometimes felt to have one. Arts are no less automaticthan instincts, and usually, as Aristotle observed, less thoroughlypurposive; for instincts, being transmitted by inheritance and imbeddedin congenital structure, have to be economically and deeply organised. If they go far wrong they constitute a burden impossible to throw offand impossible to bear. The man harassed by inordinate instinctsperishes through want, vice, disease, or madness. Arts, on the contrary, being transmitted only by imitation and teaching, hover more lightlyover life. If ill-adjusted they make less havoc and cause less drain. The more superficial they are and the more detached from practicalhabits, the more extravagant and meaningless they can dare to become; sothat the higher products of life are the most often gratuitous. Noinstinct or institution was ever so absurd as is a large part of humanpoetry and philosophy, while the margin of ineptitude is much broader inreligious myth than in religious ethics. 

[Sidenote: It is automatic. ]

Arts are instincts bred and reared in the open, creative habits acquiredin the light of reason. Consciousness accompanies their formation; acertain uneasiness or desire and a more or less definite conception ofwhat is wanted often precedes their full organisation. That the needshould be felt before the means for satisfying it have been found hasled the unreflecting to imagine that in art the need produces thediscovery and the idea the work. Causes at best are lightly assigned bymortals, and this particular superstition is no worse than any other. The data--the plan and its execution--as conjoined empirically in thefew interesting cases which show successful achievement, are made into alaw, in oblivion of the fact that in more numerous cases suchconjunction fails wholly or in part, and that even in the successfulcases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, tosecure the result. In a matter where custom is so ingrained andsupported by a constant apperceptive illusion, there is little hope ofmaking thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. Wemust observe, however, that only by virtue of a false perspective doideas seems to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother ofinvention. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the geniusor vital premonition and groping which achieve art, simultaneouslyachieve the ideas which that art embodies; or, rather, ideas arethemselves products of an inner movement which has an automaticextension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas. Mere cravinghas no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the worldmay contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allayits unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; thenthe blind craving, as it turns into an incipient pleasure, firstrecognises its object. The pure will's impotence is absolute, and itwould writhe for ever and consume itself in darkness if perception gaveit no light and experience no premonition. 

[Sidenote: So are the ideas it expresses. ]

Now, a man cannot draw bodily from external perception the ideas he issupposed to create or invent; and as his will or uneasiness, before hecreates the satisfying ideas, is by hypothesis without them, it followsthat creation or invention is automatic. The ideas come of themselves, being new and unthought-of figments, similar, no doubt, to oldperceptions and compacted of familiar materials, but reproduced in anovel fashion and dropping in their sudden form from the blue. Howeverinstantly they may be welcomed, they were not already known and nevercould have been summoned. In the stock example, for instance, of gropingfor a forgotten name, we know the context in which that name should lie;we feel the environment of our local void; but what finally pops intothat place, reinstated there by the surrounding tensions, is itselfunforeseen, for it was just this that was forgotten. Could we haveinvoked the name we should not have needed to do so, having it alreadyat our disposal. It is in fact a palpable impossibility that any ideashould call itself into being, or that any act or any preference shouldbe its own ground. The responsibility assumed for these things is not adetermination to conceive them before they are conceived (which is acontradiction in terms) but an embrace and appropriation of them oncethey have appeared. It is thus that ebullitions in parts of our naturebecome touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seemhardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into themain current of our being. All invention is tentative, all artexperimental, and to be sought, like salvation, with fear and trembling. There is a painful pregnancy in genius, a long incubation and waitingfor the spirit, a thousand rejections and futile birth-pangs, before thewonderful child appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved andinexplicably perfect. Even this unaccountable success comes only in rareand fortunate instances. What is ordinarily produced is so base ahybrid, so lame and ridiculous a changeling, that we reconcile ourselveswith difficulty to our offspring and blush to be represented by ourfated works. 

[Sidenote: We are said to control whatever obeys us. ]

The propensity to attribute happy events to our own agency, little as weunderstand what we mean by it, and to attribute only untoward results toexternal forces, has its ground in the primitive nexus of experience. What we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative processes, bringing a round of familiar impulses and ideas; this stream has ageneral direction, a conscious vital inertia, in harmony with which itmoves. Many of the developments within it are dialectical; that is, theygo forward by inner necessity, like an egg hatching within its shell, warmed but undisturbed by an environment of which they are whollyoblivious; and this sort of growth, when there is adequate consciousnessof it, is felt to be both absolutely obvious and absolutely free. Theemotion that accompanies it is pleasurable, but is too active and proudto call itself a pleasure; it has rather the quality of assurance andright. This part of life, however, is only its courageous core; about itplay all sorts of incidental processes, allying themselves to it in moreor less congruous movement. Whatever peripheral events fall in with thecentral impulse are accordingly lost in its energy and felt to be not somuch peripheral and accidental as inwardly grounded, being, like thestages of a prosperous dialectic, spontaneously demanded and instantlyjustified when they come. 

The sphere of the self's power is accordingly, for primitiveconsciousness, simply the sphere of what happens well; it is the entireunoffending and obedient part of the world. A man who has good luck atdice prides himself upon it, and believes that to have it is his destinyand desert. If his luck were absolutely constant, he would say he hadthe _power_ to throw high; and as the event would, by hypothesis, sustain his boast, there would be no practical error in that assumption. A will that never found anything to thwart it would think itselfomnipotent; and as the psychological essence of omniscience is not tosuspect there is anything which you do not know, so the psychologicalessence of omnipotence is not to suspect that anything can happen whichyou do not desire. Such claims would undoubtedly be made if experiencelent them the least colour; but would even the most comfortable andinnocent assurances of this sort cease to be precarious? Might not anymoment of eternity bring the unimagined contradiction, and shake thedreaming god?

[Sidenote: Utility is a result. ]

Utility, like significance, is an eventual harmony in the arts and by nomeans their ground. All useful things have been discovered as theLilliputians discovered roast pig; and the casual feat has furthermoreto be supported by a situation favourable to maintaining the art. Themost useful act will never be repeated unless its secret remainsembodied in structure. Practice and endeavour will not help an artist toremain long at his best; and many a performance is applauded whichcannot be imitated. To create the requisite structure two preformedstructures are needed: one in the agent, to give him skill andperseverance, and another in the material, to give it the rightplasticity. Human progress would long ago have reached its goal if everyman who recognised a good could at once appropriate it, and possesswisdom for ever by virtue of one moment's insight. Insight, unfortunately, is in itself perfectly useless and inconsequential; itcan neither have produced its own occasion nor now insure its ownrecurrence. Nevertheless, being proof positive that whatever basis itneeds is actual, insight is also an indication that the extantstructure, if circumstances maintain it, may continue to operate withthe same moral results, maintaining the vision which it has oncesupported. 

[Sidenote: The useful naturally stable. ]

When men find that by chance they have started a useful change in theworld, they congratulate themselves upon it and call their persistencein that practice a free activity. And the activity is indeed rational, since it subserves an end. The happy organisation which enables us tocontinue in that rational course is the very organisation which enabledus to initiate it. If this new process was formed under externalinfluences, the same influences, when they operate again, willreconstitute the process each time more easily; while if it was formedquite spontaneously, its own inertia will maintain it quietly in thebrain and bring it to the surface whenever circumstances permit. This iswhat is called learning by experience. Such lessons are far fromindelible and are not always at command. Yet what has once been done maybe repeated; repetition reinforces itself and becomes habit; and a clearmemory of the benefit once attained by fortunate action, representing asit does the trace left by that action in the system, and its harmonywith the man's usual impulses (for the action is felt to be_beneficial_), constitutes a strong presumption that the act will berepeated automatically on occasion; _i. E. _, that it has really beenlearned. Consciousness, which willingly attends to results only, willjudge either the memory or the benefit, or both confusedly, to be theground of this readiness to act; and only if some hitch occurs in themachinery, so that rational behaviour fails to takes place, will asurprised appeal be made to material accidents, or to a guiltyforgetfulness or indocility in the soul. 

[Sidenote: Intelligence is docility. ]

The idiot cannot learn from experience at all, because a new process, inhis liquid brain, does not modify structure; while the fool uses what hehas learned only inaptly and in frivolous fragments, because hisstretches of linked experience are short and their connections insecure. But when the cerebral plasm is fresh and well disposed and when thepaths are clear, attention is consecutive and learning easy; a multitudeof details can be gathered into a single cycle of memory or of potentialregard. Under such circumstances action is the unimpeded expression ofhealthy instinct in an environment squarely faced. Conduct from thefirst then issues in progress, and, by reinforcing its own organisationat each rehearsal, makes progress continual. For there will subsist notonly a readiness to act and a great precision in action, but if anysignificant circumstance has varied in the conditions or in theinterests at stake, this change will make itself felt; it will check theprocess and prevent precipitate action. Deliberation or well-foundedscruple has the same source as facility--a plastic and quickorganisation. To be sensitive to difficulties and dangers goes withbeing sensitive to opportunities. 

[Sidenote: Art is reason propagating itself. ]

Of all reason's embodiments art is therefore the most splendid andcomplete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may bearticulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived, would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and wentwith no actual remodelling of the outer world, to render man's dwellingmore appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible. Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. Whatmakes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces innature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for theLife of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditionsof existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to thebrain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself withoutrecovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instrumentsfor human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things intosympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values maycontinually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain willlast and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses anidea will serve to recall it in future. 

Not only does the work of art thus perpetuate its own function andproduce a better experience, but the process of art also perpetuatesitself, because it is teachable. Every animal learns something byliving; but if his offspring inherit only what he possessed at birth, they have to learn life's lessons over again from the beginning, with atbest some vague help given by their parents' example. But when thefruits of experience exist in the common environment, when newinstruments, unknown to nature, are offered to each individual for hisbetter equipment, although he must still learn for himself how to live, he may learn in a humaner school, where artificial occasions areconstantly open to him for expanding his powers. It is no longer merelyhidden inner processes that he must reproduce to attain hispredecessors' wisdom; he may acquire much of it more expeditiously byimitating their outward habit--an imitation which, furthermore, theyhave some means of exacting from him. Wherever there is art there is apossibility of training. A father who calls his idle sons from thejungle to help him hold the plough, not only inures them to labour butcompels them to observe the earth upturned and refreshed, and to watchthe germination there; their wandering thought, their incipientrebellions, will be met by the hope of harvest; and it will not beimpossible for them, when their father is dead, to follow the plough oftheir own initiative and for their own children's sake. So great is thesustained advance in rationality made possible by art which, beingembodied in matter, is teachable and transmissible by training; for inart the values secured are recognised the more easily for having beenfirst enjoyed when other people furnished the means to them; while themaintenance of these values is facilitated by an external traditionimposing itself contagiously or by force on each new generation. 

[Sidenote: Beauty an incident in rational art. ]

Art is action which transcending the body makes the world a morecongenial stimulus to the soul. All art is therefore useful andpractical, and the notable æsthetic value which some works of artpossess, for reasons flowing for the most part out of their moralsignificance, is itself one of the satisfactions which art offers tohuman nature as a whole. Between sensation and abstract discourse lies aregion of deployed sensibility or synthetic representation, a regionwhere more is seen at arm's length than in any one moment could be feltat close quarters, and yet where the remote parts of experience, whichdiscourse reaches only through symbols, are recovered and recomposed insomething like their native colours and experienced relations. Thisregion, called imagination, has pleasures more airy and luminous thanthose of sense, more massive and rapturous than those of intelligence. The values inherent in imagination, in instant intuition, in senseendowed with form, are called æsthetic values; they are found mainly innature and living beings, but often also in man's artificial works, inimages evoked by language, and in the realm of sound. 

[Sidenote: Inseparable from the others. ]

Productions in which an æsthetic value is or is supposed to beprominent take the name of fine art; but the work of fine art so definedis almost always an abstraction from the actual object, which has manynon-æsthetic functions and values. To separate the æsthetic element, abstract and dependent as it often is, is an artifice which is moremisleading than helpful; for neither in the history of art nor in arational estimate of its value can the æsthetic function of things bedivorced from the practical and moral. What had to be done was, byimaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken or made, was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully. Or, to take the matterup on its psychological side, the ceaseless experimentation and fermentof ideas, in breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimeson figments that gave it delightful pause; these beauties were the firstknowledges and these arrests the first hints of real and useful things. The rose's grace could more easily be plucked from its petals than thebeauty of art from its subject, occasion, and use. An æstheticfragrance, indeed, all things may have, if in soliciting man's senses orreason they can awaken his imagination as well; but this middle zone isso mixed and nebulous, and its limits are so vague, that it cannot wellbe treated in theory otherwise than as it exists in fact--as a phase ofman's sympathy with the world he moves in. If art is that element in theLife of Reason which consists in modifying its environment the betterto attain its end, art may be expected to subserve all parts of thehuman ideal, to increase man's comfort, knowledge, and delight. And asnature, in her measure, is wont to satisfy these interests together, soart, in seeking to increase that satisfaction, will work simultaneouslyin every ideal direction. Nor will any of these directions be on thewhole good, or tempt a well-trained will, if it leads to estrangementfrom all other interests. The æsthetic good will be accordingly hatchedin the same nest with the others, and incapable of flying far in adifferent air. 

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

[Sidenote: Utility is ultimately ideal. ]

If there were anything wholly instrumental or merely useful itsrationality, such as it was, would be perfectly obvious. Such a thingwould be exhaustively defined by its result and conditioned exclusivelyby its expediency. Yet the value of most human arts, mechanical as theymay appear, has a somewhat doubtful and mixed character. Navalarchitecture, for instance, serves a clear immediate purpose. Yet tocross the sea is not an ultimate good, and the ambition or curiositythat first led man, being a land-animal, to that now vulgar adventure, has sometimes found moralists to condemn it. A vessel's true excellenceis more deeply conditioned than the ship-wright may imagine when heprides himself on having made something that will float and go. The bestbattle-ship, or racing yacht, or freight steamer, might turn out to be aworse thing for its specific excellence, if the action it facilitatedproved on the whole maleficent, and if war or racing or trade could berightly condemned by a philosopher. The rationality of ship-building hasseveral sets of conditions: the patron's demands must be firstfulfilled; then the patron's specifications have to be judged by thepurpose he in turn has in mind; this purpose itself has to be justifiedby his ideal in life, and finally his ideal by its adequacy to his totalor ultimate nature. Error on any of these planes makes the ultimateproduct irrational; and if a finer instinct, even in the midst ofabsorbing subsidiary action, warns a man that he is working against hishighest good, his art will lose its savour and its most skilful productswill grow hateful, even to his immediate apprehension, infected as theywill be by the canker of folly. 

[Sidenote: Work wasted and chances missed. ]

Art thus has its casuistry no less than morals, and philosophers in thefuture, if man should at last have ceased to battle with ghosts, mightbe called upon to review material civilisation from its beginnings, testing each complication by its known ultimate fruits and reaching inthis way a purified and organic ideal of human industry, an ideal whicheducation and political action might help to embody. If nakedness or asingle garment were shown to be wholesomer and more agreeable thancomplicated clothes, weavers and tailors might be notably diminished innumber. If, in another quarter, popular fancy should sicken at last ofits traditional round of games and fictions, it might discover infiniteentertainment in the play of reality and truth, and infinite noveltiesto be created by fruitful labour; so that many a pleasure might be foundwhich is now clogged by mere apathy and unintelligence. Human genius, like a foolish Endymion, lies fast asleep amid its opportunities, wasting itself in dreams and disinheriting itself by negligence. 

[Sidenote: Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed. ]

Descriptive economy, however, will have to make great progress beforethe concrete ethics of art can be properly composed. History, conceivedhitherto as a barbarous romance, does not furnish sufficient data bywhich the happiness of life under various conditions may be soberlyestimated. Politics has receded into the region of blind impulse andfactional interests, and would need to be reconstituted before it couldapproach again that scientific problem which Socrates and his greatdisciples would have wished it to solve. Meantime it may not bepremature to say something about another factor in practical philosophy, namely, the ultimate interests by which industrial arts and theirproducts have to be estimated. Even before we know the exact effects ofan institution we can fix to some extent the purposes which, in order tobe beneficent, it will have to subserve, although in truth suchantecedent fixing of aims cannot go far, seeing that every operationreacts on the organ that executes it, thereby modifying the idealinvolved. Doubtless the most industrial people would still wish to behappy and might accordingly lay down certain principles which itsindustry should never transgress, as for instance that production shouldat any price leave room for liberty, leisure, beauty, and a spirit ofgeneral co-operation and goodwill. But a people once having becomeindustrial will hardly be happy if sent back to Arcadia; it will haveformed busy habits which it cannot relax without tedium; it will havedeveloped a restlessness and avidity which will crave matter, like anyother kind of hunger. Every experiment in living qualifies the initialpossibilities of life, and the moralist would reckon without his host ifhe did not allow for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct, adjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally, perhaps, unwelcome. It is too late for the highest good to prescribe flying forquadrupeds or peace for the sea waves. 

What antecedent interest does mechanical art subserve? What is theinitial and commanding ideal of life by which all industrialdevelopments are to be proved rational or condemned as vain? If we lookto the most sordid and instrumental of industries we see that theirpurpose is to produce a foreordained result with the minimum of effort. They serve, in a word, to cheapen commodities. But the value of such anachievement is clearly not final; it hangs on two underlying ideals, onedemanding abundance in the things produced and the other diminution inthe toil required to produce them. At least the latter interest may inturn be analysed further, for to diminish toil is itself no absolutegood; it is a good only when such diminution in one sphere liberatesenergies which may be employed in other fields, so that the total humanaccomplishment may be greater. Doubtless useful labour has its naturallimits, for if overdone any activity may impair the power of enjoyingboth its fruits and its operation. Yet in so far as labour can becomespontaneous and in itself delightful it is a positive benefit; and toits intrinsic value must be added all those possessions or usefuldispositions which it may secure. Thus one ideal--to diminishlabour--falls back into the other--to diffuse occasions for enjoyment. The aim is not to curtail occupation but rather to render occupationliberal by supplying it with more appropriate objects. 

[Sidenote: The aim of industry is to live well. ]

It is then liberal life, fostered by industry and commerce or involvedin them, that alone can justify these instrumental pursuits. Thosephilosophers whose ethics is nothing but sentimental physics like topoint out that happiness arises out of work and that compulsoryactivities, dutifully performed, underlie freedom. Of course matter orforce underlies everything; but rationality does not accrue to spiritbecause mechanism supports it; it accrues to mechanism in so far asspirit is thereby called into existence; so that while values deriveexistence only from their causes, causes derive value only from theirresults. Functions cannot be exercised until their organs exist and arein operation, so that what is primary in the order of genesis is alwayslast and most dependent in the order of worth. The primary substance ofthings is their mere material; their first cause is their lowestinstrument. Matter has only the values of the forms which it assumes, and while each stratification may create some intrinsic ideal andachieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion totheir rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills. Where reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for anyoperation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied byideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success inattaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom. Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, thoughnot so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores. Happiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for thathappiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the wholesky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meannessof soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everythingthat was relevant to our welfare should be envisaged in our thoughts andpurposes. To be absorbed by the incidental is the animal's portion; tobe confined to the instrumental is the slave's. For though within suchactivity there may be a rational movement, the activity ends in a fogand in mere physical drifting. Happiness has to be begged of fortune orfound in mystical indifference: it is not yet subtended by rational art. 

[Sidenote: Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature. ]

The Aristotelian theory of slavery, in making servile action whollysubservient, sins indeed against persons, but not against arts. It sinsagainst persons because there is inconsiderate haste in asserting thatwhole classes of men are capable of no activities, except the physical, which justify themselves inherently. The lower animals also havephysical interests and natural emotions. A man, if he deserves the name, must be credited with some rational capacity: prospect and retrospect, hope and the ideal portraiture of things, must to some extent employhim. Freedom to cultivate these interests is then his inherent right. Asthe lion vindicates his prerogative to ferocity and dignity, so everyrational creature vindicates his prerogative to spiritual freedom. But atoo summary classification of individuals covers, in Aristotle, a justdiscrimination among the arts. In so far as a man's occupation is merelyinstrumental and justified only externally, he is obviously a slave andhis art at best an evil necessity. For the operation is by hypothesisnot its own end; and if the product, needful for some ulterior purpose, had been found ready made in nature, the other and self-justifyingactivities could have gone on unimpeded, without the arrest ordislocation which is involved in first establishing the needfulconditions for right action. If air had to be manufactured, as dwellingsmust be, or breathing to be learned like speech, mankind would startwith an even greater handicap and would never have come within sight ofsuch goals as it can now pursue. Thus all instrumental and remedialarts, however indispensable, are pure burdens; and progress consists inabridging them as much as is possible without contracting the basis formoral life. 

[Sidenote: Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may berenounced. ]

This needful abridgment can take place in two directions. The art maybecome instinctive, unconscious of the utility that backs it andconscious only of the solicitation that leads it on. In that measurehuman nature is adapted to its conditions; lessons long dictated byexperience are actually learned and become hereditary habits. Soinclination to hunt and fondness for nursing children have passed intoinstincts in the human race; and what if it were a forced art would beservile, by becoming spontaneous has risen to be an ingredient in ideallife; for sport and maternity are human ideals. In an opposite directionservile arts may be abridged by a lapse of the demand which requiredthem. The servile art of vine-dressers, for instance, would meet such afate if the course of history, instead of tending to make the vintage anideal episode and to create worshippers of Bacchus and Priapus, tendedrather to bring about a distaste for wine and made the whole industrysuperfluous. This solution is certainly less happy than the other, insomuch as it suppresses a function instead of taking it up intoorganic life; yet life to be organic has to be exclusive and finite; ithas to work out specific tendencies in a specific environment; andtherefore to surrender a particular impeded impulse may involve a cleargain, if only a compensating unimpeded good thereby comes to lightelsewhere. If wine disappeared, with all its humane and symbolicconsecrations, that loss might bring an ultimate gain, could some lesstreacherous friend of frankness and merriment be thereby brought intothe world. 

In practice servile art is usually mitigated by combining these twomethods; the demand subserved, being but ill supported, learns torestrain itself and be less importunate; while at the same time habitrenders the labour which was once unwilling largely automatic, and evenoverlays it with ideal associations. Human nature is happily elastic;there is hardly a need that may not be muffled or suspended, and hardlyan employment that may not be relieved by the automatic interest withwhich it comes to be pursued. To this automatic interest otherpalliatives are often added, sometimes religion, sometimes mere dulnessand resignation; but in these cases the evil imposed is merelycounterbalanced or forgotten, it is not remedied. Reflective andspiritual races minimise labour by renunciation, for they find it easierto give up its fruits than to justify its exactions. Among energetic andself-willed men, on the contrary, the demand for material progressremains predominant, and philosophy dwells by preference on thepossibility that a violent and continual subjection in the present mightissue in a glorious future dominion. This possible result was hardlyrealised by the Jews, nor long maintained by the Greeks and Romans, andit remains to be seen whether modern industrialism can achieve it. Infact, we may suspect that success only comes when a nation's externaltask happens to coincide with its natural genius, so that a minimum ofits labour is servile and a maximum of its play is beneficial. It is insuch cases that we find colossal achievements and apparentlyinexhaustible energies. Prosperity is indeed the basis of every idealattainment, so that prematurely to recoil from hardship, or to behabitually conscious of hardship at all, amounts to renouncingbeforehand all earthly goods and all chance of spiritual greatness. Yeta chance is no certainty. When glory requires Titanic labours it oftenfinds itself in the end buried under a pyramid rather than raised upon apedestal. Energies which are not from the beginning self-justifying andflooded with light seldom lead to ideal greatness. 

[Sidenote: Art starts from two potentialities: its material and itsproblem. ]

The action to which industry should minister is accordingly liberal orspontaneous action; and this one condition of rationality in from twothe arts. But a second condition is implicit in the first: freedom meansfreedom in some operation, ideality means the ideality of somethingembodied and material. Activity, achievement, a passage from prospectto realisation, is evidently essential to life. If all ends were alreadyreached, and no art were requisite, life could not exist at all, muchless a Life of Reason. No politics, no morals, no thought would bepossible, for all these move towards some ideal and envisage a goal towhich they presently pass. The transition is the activity, without whichachievement would lose its zest and indeed its meaning; for a situationcould never be achieved which had been given from all eternity. Theideal is a concomitant emanation from the natural and has no otherpossible status. Those human possessions which are perennial and ofinalienable value are in a manner potential possessions only. Knowledge, art, love are always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutelysynonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, arepeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath andnutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only aperiodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustainedindefinitely, but only if it admits a certain internal oscillation. 

A creature like man, whose mode of being is a life or experience and nota congealed ideality, such as eternal truth might show, must accordinglyfind something to do; he must operate in an environment in whicheverything is not already what he is presently to make it. In the actualworld this first condition of life is only too amply fulfilled; the realdifficulty in man's estate, the true danger to his vitality, lies notin want of work but in so colossal a disproportion between demand andopportunity that the ideal is stunned out of existence and perishes forwant of hope. The Life of Reason is continually beaten back upon itsanimal sources, and nations are submerged in deluge after deluge ofbarbarism. Impressed as we may well be by this ancient experience, weshould not overlook the complementary truth which under more favourablecircumstances would be as plain as the other: namely, that our deepestinterest is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition, assimilation, government, and creation had been made impossible for usby their foregone realisation, so that every operation was forestalledby the given fact. The distinction between the ideal and the real is onewhich the human ideal itself insists should be preserved. It is anessential expression of life, and its disappearance would be tantamountto death, making an end to voluntary transition and idealrepresentation. All objects envisaged either in vulgar action or in theairiest cognition must be at first ideal and distinct from the givenfacts, otherwise action would have lost its function at the same momentthat thought lost its significance. All life would have collapsed into apurposeless datum. 

The ideal requires, then, that opportunities should be offered forrealising it through action, and that transition should be possible toit from a given state of things. One form of such transition is art, where the ideal is a possible and more excellent form to be given tosome external substance or medium. Art needs to find a materialrelatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initialformlessness in matter is essential to art's existence. Were there nostone not yet sculptured and built into walls, no sentiment not yetperfectly uttered in poetry, no distance or oblivion yet to be abolishedby motion or inferential thought, activity of all sorts would have lostits occasion. Matter, or actuality in what is only potentially ideal, istherefore a necessary condition for realising an ideal at all. 

[Sidenote: Each must be definite and congruous with the other. ]

This potentiality, however, in so far as the ideal requires it, is aquite definite disposition. Absolute chaos would defeat life as surelyas would absolute ideality. Activity, in presupposing materialconditions, presupposes them to be favourable, so that a movementtowards the ideal may actually take place. Matter, which from the pointof view of a given ideal is merely its potentiality, is in itself thepotentiality of every other ideal as well; it is accordingly responsibleto no ideal in particular and proves in some measure refractory to all. It makes itself felt, either as an opportune material or as anaccidental hindrance, only when it already possesses definite form andaffinities; given in a certain quantity, quality, and order, matterfeeds the specific life which, if given otherwise, it would impede orsmother altogether. 

[Sidenote: A sophism exposed]

Art, in calling for materials, calls for materials plastic to itsinfluence and definitely predisposed to its ends. Unsuitableness in thedata far from grounding action renders it abortive, and no expedientcould be more sophistical than that into which theodicy, in itsdesperate straits, has sometimes been driven, of trying to justify asconditions for ideal achievement the very conditions which make idealachievement impossible. The given state from which transition is to takeplace to the ideal must support that transition; so that the desirablewant of ideality which plastic matter should possess is merely relativeand strictly determined. Art and reason find in nature the backgroundthey require; but nature, to be wholly justified by its ideal functions, would have to subserve them perfectly. It would have to offer to reasonand art a sufficient and favourable basis; it would have to feed sensewith the right stimuli at the right intervals, so that art and reasonmight continually flourish and be always moving to some new success. Apoet needs emotions and perceptions to translate into language, sincethese are his subject-matter and his inspiration; but starvation, physical or moral, will not help him to sing. One thing is to meet withthe conditions inherently necessary for a given action; another thing isto meet with obstacles fatal to the same. A propitious formlessness inmatter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitiousformlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matterhas already assumed. 

[Sidenote: Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts. ]

Out of this appears, with sufficient clearness, the rational functionwhich the arts possess. They give, as nature does, a form to matter, butthey give it a more propitious form. Such success in art is possibleonly when the materials and organs at hand are in a large measurealready well disposed; for it can as little exist with a dull organ aswith no organ at all, while there are winds in which every sail must befurled. Art depends upon profiting by a bonanza and learning to sail ina good breeze, strong enough for speed and conscious power but placableenough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action canbe attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on theone hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art hasaccordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untowardmatter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the otherliberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses andendowed with a direct spiritual function. A premonition or rehearsal ofthese two stages may be seen in nature, where nutrition and reproductionfit the body for its ideal functions, whereupon sensation andcerebration make it a direct organ of mind. Industry merely gives naturethat form which, if more thoroughly humane, she might have originallypossessed for our benefit; liberal arts bring to spiritual fruition thematter which either nature or industry has prepared and renderedpropitious. This spiritual fruition consists in the activity of turningan apt material into an expressive and delightful form, thus filling theworld with objects which by symbolising ideal energies tend to revivethem under a favouring influence and therefore to strengthen and refinethem. 

[Sidenote: Each partakes of the other]

It remains merely to note that all industry contains an element of fineart and all fine art an element of industry; since every proximate end, in being attained, satisfies the mind and manifests the intent thatpursued it; while every operation upon a material, even one so volatileas sound, finds that material somewhat refractory. Before the productcan attain its ideal function many obstacles to its transparency andfitness have to be removed. A certain amount of technical andinstrumental labour is thus involved in every work of genius, and acertain genius in every technical success. 

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

[Sidenote: Art is spontaneous action made stable by success. ]

Action which is purely spontaneous is merely tentative. Any experienceof success or utility which might have preceded, if it availed to makeaction sure, would avail to make it also intentional and conscious ofits ulterior results. Now the actual issue which an action is destinedto have, since it is something future and problematical, can exert noinfluence on its own antecedents; but if any picture of what the issueis likely to be accompanies the heat and momentum of action, thatpicture being, of all antecedents in the operation, the one most easilyremembered and described, may be picked out as essential, and dignifiedwith the name of motive or cause. This will not happen to everyprophetic idea; we may live in fear and trembling as easily as with anarrogant consciousness of power. The difference flows from the greateror lesser affinity that happens to exist between expectation andinstinct. Action remains always, in its initial phase, spontaneous andautomatic; it retains an inwardly grounded and perfectly blind tendencyof its own; but this tendency may agree or clash with the motorimpulses subtending whatever ideas may at the same time people thefancy. If the blind and the ideal impulses agree, spontaneous action isvoluntary and its result intentional; if they clash, the ideas remainspeculative and idle, random, ineffectual wishes; while the result, notbeing referable to any idea, is put down to fate. The sense of power, accordingly, shows either that events have largely satisfied desire, sothat natural tendency goes hand in hand with the suggestions ofexperience, or else that experience has not been allowed to count at alland that the future is being painted _a priori_. In the latter case thesense of power is illusory. Action will then never really issue in theway intended, and even thought will only seem to make progress byconstantly forgetting its original direction. 

Though life, however, is initially experimental and always remainsexperimental at bottom, yet experiment fortifies certain tendencies andcancels others, so that a gradual sediment of habit and wisdom is formedin the stream of time. Action then ceases to be merely tentative andspontaneous, and becomes art. Foresight begins to accompany practiceand, as we say, to guide it. Purpose thus supervenes on useful impulse, and conscious expression on self-sustaining automatism. Art lies betweentwo extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which wouldnever foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them afterthey had been created, since at the next moment the imaginative currentwould as likely as not have faced about and might be making in theopposite direction; and on the other side is pure utility, which woulddeprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive ofanything in man save his necessities. War, for instance, is an art when, having set itself an ideal end, it devises means of attaining it; butthis ideal end has for its chief basis some failure in politics andmorals. War marks a weakness and disease in human society, and its besttriumphs are glorious evils--cruel and treacherous remedies, big withnew germs of disease. War is accordingly a servile art and notessentially liberal; whatever inherent values its exercise may havewould better be realised in another medium. Yet out of the pomp andcircumstance of war fine arts may arise--music, armoury, heraldry, andeloquence. So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsicvalue and becomes expressive. On the other hand, spontaneous actionleads to art when it acquires a rational function. Thus utterance, whichis primarily automatic, becomes the art of speech when it serves to markcrises in experience, making them more memorable and influential throughtheir artificial expression; but expression is never art while itremains expressive to no purpose. 

[Sidenote: It combines utility and automatism. ]

A good way of understanding the fine arts would be to study how theygrow, now out of utility, now out of automatism. We should thus seemore clearly how they approach their goal, which can be nothing but thecomplete superposition of these two characters. If all practice were artand all art perfect, no action would remain compulsory and not justifiedinherently, while no creative impulse would any longer be wasteful or, like the impulse to thrum, symptomatic merely and irrelevant toprogress. It is by contributing to the Life of Reason and merging intoits substance that art, like religion or science, first becomes worthyof praise. Each element comes from a different quarter, bringing itsspecific excellence and needing its peculiar purification andenlightenment, by co-ordination with all the others; and this process ofenlightenment and purification is what we call development in eachdepartment. The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit eitherof utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and morerational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneitybeneficent. 

[Sidenote: Automatism fundamental and irresponsible. ]

The spontaneous arts are older than the useful, since man must live andact before he can devise instruments for living and acting better. Boththe power to construct machines and the end which, to be useful, theywould have to serve, need to be given in initial impulse. There isaccordingly a vast amount of irresponsible play and loose experiment inart, as in consciousness, before these gropings acquire a settled habitand function, and rationality begins. The farther back we go intobarbarism the more we find life and mind busied with luxuries; andthough these indulgences may repel a cultivated taste and seem in theend cruel and monotonous, their status is really nearer to that ofreligion and spontaneous art than to that of useful art or of science. Ceremony, for instance, is compulsory in society and sometimes trulyoppressive, yet its root lies in self-expression and in a certainascendency of play which drags all life along into conventional channelsoriginally dug out in irresponsible bursts of action. This occursinevitably and according to physical analogies. Bodily organs growautomatically and become necessary moulds of life. We must either find ause for them or bear as best we may the idle burden they impose. Of suchburdens the barbarian carries the greatest possible sum; and while hepaints the heavens with his grotesque mythologies, he encumbers earthwith inventions and prescriptions almost as gratuitous. The fiendishdances and shouts, the cruel initiations, mutilations, and sacrifices inwhich savages indulge, are not planned by them deliberately norjustified in reflection. Men find themselves falling into thesepractices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct. In its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quiteas it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually sotorpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises aneedless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration. Without mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces underwhich man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection tohis own false steps and childish errors. 

[Sidenote: It is tamed by contact with the world. ]

This mental vegetation, this fitful nervous groping, is nevertheless asign of life, out of which art emerges by discipline and by a gradualapplication to real issues. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dreamof the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotised byreality. Even barbaric genius may find points of application in theworld. These points will be more numerous the more open the eyes havebeen, the more docile and intelligent the mind is that gathers andrenders back its impressions in a synthetic and ideal form. Intuitionwill then represent, at least symbolically, an actual situation. Grimaceand gesture and ceremony will be modified by a sense of their effect;they will become artful and will transform their automaticexpressiveness into ideal expression. They will become significant ofwhat it is intended to communicate and important to know; they will haveceased to be irresponsible exercises and vents for passing feeling, bywhich feeling is dissipated, as in tears, without being embodied andintellectualised, as in a work of art. 

[Sidenote: The dance. ]

[Sidenote: Functions of gesture. ]

The dance is an early practice that passes after this fashion into anart. A prancing stallion may transfigure his movements more beautifullythan man is capable of doing; for the springs and limits of effect arethroughout mechanical, and man, in more than one respect, would have tobecome a centaur before he could rival the horse's prowess. Humaninstinct is very imperfect in this direction, and grows less happy themore artificial society becomes; most dances, even the savage ones, aresomewhat ridiculous. A rudimentary instinct none the less remains, whichnot only involves a faculty of heightened and rhythmic motion, but alsoassures a direct appreciation of such motion when seen in others. Theconscious agility, _fougue_, and precision which fill the performerbecome contagious and delight the spectator as well. There are indeeddances so ugly that, like those of contemporary society, they cannot beenjoyed unless they are shared; they yield pleasures of exercise only, or at best of movement in unison. But when man was nearer to the animaland his body and soul were in happier conjunction, when society, too, was more compulsive over the individual, he could lend himself morewillingly and gracefully to being a figure in the general pageant of theworld. The dance could then detach itself from its early associationwith war and courtship and ally itself rather to religion and art. Frombeing a spontaneous vent for excitement, or a blind means of producingit, the dance became a form of discipline and conscious socialcontrol--a cathartic for the soul; and this by a quite intelligibletransition. Gesture, of which the dance is merely a pervasive use, is anincipient action. It is conduct in the groping stage, before it has liton its purpose, as can be seen unmistakably in all the gesticulation oflove and defiance. In this way the dance is attached to life initiallyby its physiological origin. Being an incipient act, it naturally leadsto its own completion and may arouse in others the beginnings of anappropriate response. Gesture is only less catching and less eloquentthan action itself. But gesture, while it has this power of suggestingaction and stimulating the response which would be appropriate if theaction took place, may be arrested in the process of execution, since itis incipient only; it will then have revealed an intention and betrayeda state of mind. Thus it will have found a function which action itselfcan seldom fulfil. When an act is done, indications of what it was to beare superfluous; but indications of possible acts are in the highestdegree useful and interesting. In this way gesture assumes the rôle oflanguage and becomes a means of rational expression. It remainssuggestive and imitable enough to convey an idea, but not enough toprecipitate a full reaction; it feeds that sphere of merely potentialaction which we call thought; it becomes a vehicle for intuition. 

Under these circumstances, to tread the measures of a sacred dance, tomarch with an army, to bear one's share in any universal act, fills theheart with a voluminous silent emotion. The massive suggestion, thepressure of the ambient will, is out of all proportion to the presentcall for action. Infinite resources and definite premonitions are thusstored up in the soul; and merely to have moved solemnly together is thebest possible preparation for living afterwards, even if apart, in theconsciousness of a general monition and authority. 

[Sidenote: Automatic music. ]

Parallel to this is the genesis and destiny of music, an art originallyclosely intertwined with the dance. The same explosive forces thatagitate the limbs loosen the voice; hand, foot, and throat mark theirwild rhythm together. Birds probably enjoy the pulsation of theirsinging rather than its sound. Even human music is performed long beforeit is listened to, and is at first no more an art than sighing. Theoriginal emotions connected with it are felt by participation in theperformance--a participation which can become ideal only because, atbottom, it is always actual. The need of exercise and self-expression, the force of contagion and unison, bears the soul along before anartistic appreciation of music arises; and we may still observe amongcivilised races how music asserts itself without any æsthetic intent, aswhen the pious sing hymns in common, or the sentimental, at sea, cannotrefrain from whining their whole homely repertory in the moonlight. Hereas elsewhere, instinct and habit are phases of the same innerdisposition. What has once occurred automatically on a given occasionwill be repeated in much the same form when a similar occasion recurs. Thus impulse, reinforced by its own remembered expression, passes intoconvention. Savages have a music singularly monotonous, automatic, andimpersonal; they cannot resist the indulgence, though they probably havelittle pleasure in it. The same thing happens with customary sounds aswith other prescribed ceremonies; to omit them would be shocking andwell-nigh impossible, yet to repeat them serves no end further than toavoid a sense of strangeness or inhibition. These automatisms, however, in working themselves out, are not without certain retroactive effects:they leave the system exhausted or relieved, and they have meantimeplayed more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we makeautomatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation mayeven modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side. The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, inproportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automaticperformer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection andcriticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to beconsecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare hisimprovisation with its subject and function, and thus he develops whatis called style and taste. 

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

[Sidenote: Music is a world apart. ]

Sound readily acquires ideal values. It has power in itself to engrossattention and at the same time may be easily diversified, so as tobecome a symbol for other things. Its direct empire is to be comparedwith that of stimulants and opiates, yet it presents to the mind, asthese do not, a perception that corresponds, part by part, with theexternal stimulus. To hear is almost to understand. The process weundergo in mathematical or dialectical thinking is called understanding, because a natural sequence is there adequately translated into idealterms. Logical connections seem to be internally justified, while onlythe fact that we perceive them here and now, with more or less facility, is attributed to brute causes. Sound approaches this sort of ideality;it presents to sense something like the efficacious structure of theobject. It is almost mathematical; but like mathematics it is adequateonly by being abstract; and while it discloses point by point one strainin existence, it leaves many other strains, which in fact are interwovenwith it, wholly out of account. Music is accordingly, like mathematics, very nearly a world by itself; it contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. Yet thissecond existence, this life in music, is no mere ghost of the other; ithas its own excitements, its quivering alternatives, its surprisingturns; the abstract energy of it takes on so much body, that inprogression or declension it seems quite as impassioned as any animaltriumph or any moral drama. 

[Sidenote: It justifies itself. ]

That a pattering of sounds on the ear should have such moment is a factcalculated to give pause to those philosophers who attempt to explainconsciousness by its utility, or who wish to make physical and moralprocesses march side by side from all eternity. Music is essentiallyuseless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lendsutility to its conditions. That the way in which idle sounds runtogether should matter so much is a mystery of the same order as thespirit's concern to keep a particular body alive, or to propagate itslife. Such an interest is, from an absolute point of view, whollygratuitous; and so long as the natural basis and expressive function ofspirit are not perceived, this mystery is baffling. In truth the orderof values inverts that of causes; and experience, in which all valueslie, is an ideal resultant, itself ineffectual, of the potencies it canconceive. Delight in music is liberal; it makes useful the organs andprocesses that subserve it. These agencies, when they support aconscious interest in their operation, give that operation its firstglimmering justification, and admit it to the rational sphere. Just sowhen organic bodies generate a will bent on their preservation, they adda value and a moral function to their equilibrium. In vain should we askfor what purpose existences arise, or become important; that purpose, tobe such, must already have been important to some existence; and theonly question that can be asked or answered is what recognisedimportance, what ideal values, actual existences involve. 

[Sidenote: It is vital and transient. ]

We happen to breathe, and on that account are interested in breathing;and it is no greater marvel that, happening to be subject to intricatemusical sensations, we should be in earnest about these too. The humanear discriminates sounds with ease; what it hears is so diversified thatits elements can be massed without being confused, or can form asequence having a character of its own, to be appreciated andremembered. The eye too has a field in which clear distinctions andrelations appear, and for that reason is an organ favourable tointelligence; but what gives music its superior emotional power is itsrhythmic advance. Time is a medium which appeals more than space toemotion. Since life is itself a flux, and thought an operation, there isnaturally something immediate and breathless about whatever flows andexpands. The visible world offers itself to our regard with a certainlazy indifference. "Peruse me, " it seems to say, "if you will. I amhere; and even if you pass me by now and later find it to your advantageto resurvey me, I may still be here. " The world of sound speaks a moreurgent language. It insinuates itself into our very substance, and it isnot so much the music that moves us as we that move with it. Its rhythmsseize upon our bodily life, to accelerate or to deepen it; and we musteither become inattentive altogether or remain enslaved. 

[Sidenote: Its physical affinities. ]

This imperious function in music has lent it functions which are farfrom æsthetic. Song can be used to keep in unison many men's efforts, aswhen sailors sing as they heave; it can make persuasive and obvioussentiments which, if not set to music, might seem absurd, as often inlove songs and in psalmody. It may indeed serve to prepare the mind forany impression whatever, and render the same more intense when it comes. Music was long used before it was loved or people took pains to refineit. It would have seemed as strange in primitive times to turn utteranceinto a fine art as now to make æsthetic paces out of mourning orchild-birth. Primitive music is indeed a wail and a parturition; magicaland suggestive as it may be, for long ages it never bethinks itself tobe beautiful. It is content to furnish a contagious melancholyemployment to souls without a language and with little interest in thereal world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing together more orless at random, are too much carried away by their performance toconceive its effect; they cry far too loud and too unceasingly tolisten. A contagious tradition carries them along and controls them, ina way, as they improvise; the assembly is hardly an audience; all areperformers, and the crowd is only a stimulus that keeps every onedancing and howling in emulation. This unconsidered flow of early artremains present, more or less, to the end. Instead of vague custom wehave schools, and instead of swaying multitudes academic example; butmany a discord and mannerism survive simply because the musician is sosuggestible, or so lost in the tumult of production, as never toreconsider what he does, or to perceive its wastefulness. 

Nevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted sounds, althoughbarbaric practice and theory are slow to recognise it. Each tone has itsquality, like jewels of different water; every cadence has its vitalexpression, no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture orin a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and thoughthis perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort andexcitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top. Participation in music may become perfunctory or dull for the greatmajority, as when hymns are sung in church; a mere suggestion of actionwill doubtless continue to colour the impression received, for atendency to act is involved in perception; but this suggestion will beonly an over-tone or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performerswill be singled out from the crowd; those whom the public likes to hearwill be asked to continue alone; and soon a certain suasion will beexerted over them by the approval or censure of others, so thatconsciously or unconsciously they will train themselves to please. 

[Sidenote: Physiology of music. ]

The musical quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for itsbasis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep orloudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure andthin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different inprinciple, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, andthe harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with itsimmense appeal, to the cumulative effect already secured by renderingmany notes together. The heightened effect which a note gets by figuringin a phrase, or a phrase in a longer passage, comes of course from thetensions established and surviving in the sensorium--a case, differentlyshaded, of chords and overtones. The difference is only that the moreemphatic parts of the melody survive clearly to the end, while thedetail, which if perceived might now clash, is largely lost, and out ofthe preceding parts perhaps nothing but a certain swing and potency ispresent at the close. The mind has been raked and set vibrating in anunusual fashion, so that the _finale_ comes like a fulfilment after muchpremonition and desire, whereas the same event, unprepared for, mighthardly have been observed. The whole technique of music is but animmense elaboration of this principle. It deploys a sensuous harmony bya sort of dialectic, suspending and resolving it, so that the partsbecome distinct and their relation vital. 

[Sidenote: Limits of musical sensibility. ]

Such elaboration often exceeds the synthetic power of all but the besttrained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty variesprodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a givenconscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor isthere any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changedcircumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphonymight be felt at once, if the musician's power of sustained orcumulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes andtheir interval in one sensation (actual experience being alwaystransitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), so a trained mind mightsurvey a whole composition. This is not to say that time would betranscended in such an experience; the apperception would still haveduration and the object would still have successive features, forevidently music not arranged in time would not be music, while allsensations with a recognisable character occupy more than an instant inpassing. But the passing sensation, throughout its lapse, presents someexperience; and this experience, taken at any point, may present atemporal sequence with any number of members, according to the syntheticand analytic power exerted by the given mind. What is tedious andformless to the inattentive may seem a perfect whole to one who, as theysay, takes it all in; and similarly what is a frightful deafeningdiscord to a sense incapable of discrimination, for one who can hear theparts may break into a celestial chorus. A musical education isnecessary for musical judgment. What most people relish is hardly music;it is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills. 

[Sidenote: The value of music is relative to them. ]

The degree to which music should be elaborated depends on the capacitypossessed by those it addresses. There are limits to every man'ssynthetic powers, and to stretch those powers to their limit isexhausting. Excitement then becomes a debauch; it leaves the soul lesscapable of habitual harmony. Especially is such extreme tensiondisastrous when, as in music, nothing remains to be the fruit of thatmighty victory; the most pregnant revelation sinks to an illusion and isdiscredited when it cannot maintain its inspiration in the world'spresence. Everything has its own value and sets up its price; but othersmust judge if that price is fair, and sociability is the condition ofall rational excellence. There is therefore a limit to right complexityin music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by itsplace in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, isaltogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturallyplace it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular musicneeds to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to thefew. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all musicis a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love isvoluptuousness or fashion, and not music itself. 

[Sidenote: Wonders of musical structure. ]

Beneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectualessence. Out of simple chords and melodies, which at first catch onlythe ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal alsoto the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it maybe compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesquethat has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense toform, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannotdo violence to it by its complex artifices--these are types of pureliving, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life withorder, precision with spontaneity; the flux in them has becomerhythmical and its freedom has passed into a rational choice, since ithas come in sight of the eternal form it would embody. The musician, like an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than theyfrom material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth;every step opens up new vistas, every decision--how unlike those made inreal life!--multiplies opportunities, and widens the horizon before him, without preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at anypoint, to trace the other possible paths leading thence through variousmagic landscapes. Pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction isbalanced by its entire spontaneity, and, while it has no externalsignificance, it bears no internal curse. It is something to which a fewspirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberalcommonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour, the fruits ofwhich many may enjoy. Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, whereorder is free, refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. Byanalogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in otherregions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, asthe Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical. 

[Sidenote: Its inherent emotions. ]

It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, allabout nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a politicalanimal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moralaffinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth andmarried with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it iswedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotionswhich music and life arouse in common. For sound, in sweeping throughthe body and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress, provokes no less interest than does any other physical event orpremonition. Music can produce emotion as directly as can fighting orlove. If in the latter instances the body's whole life may be injeopardy, this fact is no explanation of our concern; for many a dangeris not felt and there is no magic in the body's future condition, thatit should now affect the soul. What touches the soul is the body'scondition at the moment; and this is altered no less truly by a musicalimpression than by some protective or reproductive act. If emotionsaccompany the latter, they might as well accompany the former; and infact they do. Nor is music the only idle cerebral commotion that enlistsattention and presents issues no less momentous for being quiteimaginary; dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life soabsorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts, as can deliriumin sickness, or delusion in what passes for health. 

[Sidenote: In growing specific they remain unearthly. ]

There is perhaps no emotion incident to human life that music cannotrender in its abstract medium by suggesting the pang of it; though ofcourse music cannot describe the complex situation which lends earthlypassions their specific colour. It is by fusion with many suggestedemotions that sentiment grows definite; this fusion can hardly comeabout without ideas intervening, and certainly it could never besustained or expressed without them. Occasions define feelings; we canconvey a delicate emotion only by delicately describing the situationwhich brings it on. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do thisfor common life, and the passions, as music renders them, are alwaysgeneral. But music has its own substitute for conceptual distinctness. It makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise thanassociation with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form. We may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions, music creates a new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than isvulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory whichhas already become somewhat classical and worn, but music has no end ofnew situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodiesto all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destinybeats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling;we cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor canwe wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But inmusic there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling usback to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothingdelightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its owninstinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, wemust call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression. Each phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no humansituation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they arealtogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native tothe passing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul. 

[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find noobject in nature. ]

There is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feelingfor the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singularprivilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulateand express those depths of human nature which can speak no languagecurrent in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of itremains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part of our passionsfrom this pathological plight, and gives them some other function thanmerely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutuallyrepresentative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experienceis pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is alsorational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have ameaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animalsoul as a dream might fuse them, however incongruous the situation theydepict might be in waking life; they are significant only if thismoment's product can meet and conspire with some other thought speakingof what elsewhere exists, and uttering an intuition that from time totime may be actually recovered. The art of distributing interest amongthe occasions and vistas of life so as to lend them a constant worth, and at the same time to give feeling an ideal object, is at bottom thesole business of education; but the undertaking is long, and muchfeeling remains unemployed and unaccounted for. This objectless emotionchokes the heart with its dull importunity; now it impedes right action, now it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from primaryfunctions which, though their operation is half known, have only base orpitiful associations in human life; so that they trouble us with deepand subtle cravings, the unclaimed _Hinterland_ of life. When music, either by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both atonce, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling, itaccordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb speak, and plucksfrom the animal heart potentialities of expression which might renderit, perhaps, even more than human. 

[Sidenote: Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicableform. ]

By its emotional range music is appropriate to all intense occasions: wedance, pray, and mourn to music, and the more inadequate words orexternal acts are to the situation, the more grateful music is. As theonly bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of place onlywhere emotion itself is absent. If it breaks in upon us in the midst ofstudy or business it becomes an interruption or alternative to ouractivity, rather than an expression of it; we must either remaininattentive or pass altogether into the realm of sound (which may beunemotional enough) and become musicians for the nonce. Music brings itssympathetic ministry only to emotional moments; there it merges withcommon existence, and is a welcome substitute for descriptive ideas, since it co-operates with us and helps to deliver us from dumbsubjection to influences which we should not know how to meet otherwise. There is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, togetherwith a certain poverty of form; the power felt is out of proportion tothe interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain, at oncestrained and idle. At such a moment music is a blessed resource. Withoutattempting to remove a mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it acongruous filling. Thus the mood is justified by an illustration orexpression which seems to offer some objective and ideal ground for itsexistence; and the mood is at the same time relieved by absorption inthat impersonal object. So entertained, the feeling settles. The passionto which at first we succumbed is now tamed and appropriated. We havedigested the foreign substance in giving it a rational form: itsenergies are merged in that strength by which we freely operate. 

In this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest emotions. Matter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacitieswhich a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into thisnew channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forthclose to the ground, far below the point where the other boughsseparate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in commonwith its parent. Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstractsphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at whichhuman understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which otherbranches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Thoseelementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his specialmethods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blindintensity. 

[Sidenote: All essences are in themselves good, even the passions. ]

There is consequently in music a sort of Christian piety, in that itcomes not to call the just but sinners to repentance, and understandsthe spiritual possibilities in outcasts from the respectable world. Ifwe look at things absolutely enough, and from their own point of view, there can be no doubt that each has its own ideal and does not questionits own justification. Lust and frenzy, revery or despair, fatal as theymay be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are notperverse in themselves: each searches for its own affinities, and has akind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach ordraw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as somany forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a differentlife. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal fluxmakes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes isthe ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That suchstrains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot berequired of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by allthat enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find aworld to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to havecreated that in which it found itself expressed. But such satisfactionhas been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at leastpostponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since theequilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcertedharmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its ownperfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peepinto being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world. Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware ofbeing potential gods. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenialparadise? Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitiousappellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there isa piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that areperverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decidesto treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a pietytowards things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter thatare wanting for their perfect realisation?

[Sidenote: Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world. ]

Philosophers talk of self-contradiction, but there is evidently no suchthing, if we take for the self what is really vital, each propulsive, definite strain of being, each nucleus for estimation and for pleasureand pain. Bach impulse may be contradicted, but not by itself; it mayfind itself opposed, in a theatre which it has entered it knows not how, by violent personages that it has never wished to encounter. Theenvironment it calls for is congenial with it: and by that environmentit could never be thwarted or condemned. The lumbering course of eventsmay indeed involve it in rum, and a mind with permanent interests todefend may at once rule out everything inconsistent with possibleharmonies; but such rational judgments come from outside and represent acompromise struck with material forces. Moral judgments and conflictsare possible only in the mind that represents many interestssynthetically: in nature, where primary impulses collide, all conflictis physical and all will innocent. Imagine some ingredient of humanityloosed from its oppressive environment in human economy: it would atonce vegetate and flower into some ideal form, such as we seeexuberantly displayed in nature. If we can only suspend for a moment thecongested traffic in the brain, these initial movements will begin totraverse it playfully and show their paces, and we shall live in one ofthose plausible worlds which the actual world has made impossible. 

[Sidenote: Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings. ]

Man possesses, for example, a native capacity for joy. There aremoments, in friendship or in solitude, when joy is realised; but theoccasions are often trivial and could never justify in reflection thefeelings that then happen to bubble up. Nor can pure joy be longsustained: cross-currents of lassitude or anxiety, distractingincidents, irrelevant associations, trouble its course and make itlanguish, turning it before long into dulness or melancholy. Languagecannot express a joy that shall be full and pure; for to keep the puritynothing would have to be named which carried the least suggestion ofsadness with it, and, in the world that human language refers to, such acondition would exclude every situation possible. "O joy, O joy, " wouldbe the whole ditty: hence some dialecticians, whose experience islargely verbal, think whatever is pure necessarily thin. 

[Sidenote: Music may do so. ]

That feeling should be so quickly polluted is, however, a superficialand earthly accident. Spirit is clogged by what it flows through, but atits springs it is both limpid and abundant. There is matter enough injoy for many a universe, though the actual world has not a single formquite fit to embody it, and its too rapid syllables are excluded fromthe current hexameter. Music, on the contrary, has a more flexiblemeasure; its prosody admits every word. Its rhythms can explicate everyemotion, through all degrees of complexity and volume, without oncedisavowing it. Thus unused matter, which is not less fertile than thatwhich nature has absorbed, comes to fill out an infinity of ideal forms. The joy condemned by practical exigencies to scintillate for a momentuncommunicated, and then, as it were, to be buried alive, may now findan abstract art to embody it and bring it before the public, formed intoa rich and constant object called a musical composition. So art succeedsin vindicating the forgotten regions of spirit: a new spontaneouscreation shows how little authority or finality the given creation has. 

[Sidenote: Instability the soul of matter. ]

What is true of joy is no less true of sorrow, which, though it arisesfrom failure in some natural ideal, carries with it a sentimental idealof its own. Even confusion can find in music an expression and acatharsis. That death or change should grieve does not follow from thematerial nature of these phenomena. To change or to disappear might beas normal a tendency as to move; and it actually happens, when nothingideal has been attained, that _not to be thus_ is the whole law ofbeing. There is then a nameless satisfaction in passing on; which is thevirtual ideal of pain and mere willing. Death and change acquire atragic character when they invade a mind which is not ready for them inall its parts, so that those elements in it which are still vigorous, and would maintain somewhat longer their ideal identity, suffer violenceat the hands of the others, already mastered by decay and willing to beself-destructive. Thus a man whose physiological complexion involvesmore poignant emotion than his ideas can absorb--one who issentimental--will yearn for new objects that may explain, embody, andfocus his dumb feelings; and these objects, if art can produce them, will relieve and glorify those feelings in the act of expressing them. Catharsis is nothing more. 

[Sidenote: Peace the triumph of spirit. ]

There would be no pleasure in expressing pain, if pain were notdominated through its expression. To know how just a cause we have forgrieving is already a consolation, for it is already a shift fromfeeling to understanding. By such consideration of a passion, theintellectual powers turn it into subject-matter to operate upon. Allutterance is a feat, all apprehension a discovery; and this intellectualvictory, sounding in the midst of emotional struggles, hushes some partof their brute importunity. It is at once sublime and beneficent, like agod stilling a tempest. Melancholy can in this way be the food of art;and it is no paradox that such a material may be beautiful when a fitform is imposed upon it, since a fit form turns anything into anagreeable object; its beauty runs as deep as its fitness, and stopswhere its adaptation to human nature begins to fail. Whatever caninterest may prompt to expression, as it may have satisfied curiosity;and the mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate atruth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests. As meditation on death and onlife make equally for wisdom, so the expression of sorrow and joy makeequally for beauty. Meditation and expression are themselves congenialactivities with an intrinsic value which is not lessened if what theydeal with could have been abolished to advantage. If once it exists, wemay understand and interpret it; and this reaction will serve a doublepurpose. At first, in its very act, it will suffuse and mollify theunwelcome experience by another, digesting it, which is welcome; andlater, by the broader adjustment which it will bring into the mind, itwill help us to elude or confront the evils thus laid clearly before us. 

Catharsis has no such effect as a sophistical optimism wishes toattribute to it; it does not show us that evil is good, or that calamityand crime are things to be grateful for: so forced an apology for evilhas nothing to do with tragedy or wisdom; it belongs to apologetics andan artificial theodicy. Catharsis is rather the consciousness of howevil evils are, and how besetting; and how possible goods lie betweenand involve serious renunciations. To understand, to accept, and to usethe situation in which a mortal may find himself is the function of artand reason. Such mastery is desirable in itself and for its fruits; itdoes not make itself responsible for the chaos of goods and evils thatit supervenes upon. Whatever writhes in matter, art strives to give formto; and however unfavourable the field may be for its activity, it doeswhat it can there, since no other field exists in which it may labour. 

[Sidenote: Refinement is true strength. ]

Sad music pleases the melancholy because it is sad and other men becauseit is music. When a composer attempts to reproduce complex conflicts inhis score he will please complex or disordered spirits for expressingtheir troubles, but other men only for the order and harmony he may havebrought out of that chaos. The chaos in itself will offend, and it is nopart of rational art to produce it. As well might a physician poison inorder to give an antidote, or maim in order to amputate. The subjectmatter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of artis to make life better. The depth to which an artist may find currentexperience to be sunk in discord and confusion is not his specialconcern; his concern is, in some measure, to lift experience out. Themore barbarous his age, the more drastic and violent must be hisoperation. He will have to shout in a storm. His strength must needs, insuch a case, be very largely physical and his methods sensational. In agentler age he may grow nobler, and blood and thunder will no longerseem impressive. Only the weak are obliged to be violent; the strong, having all means at command, need not resort to the worst. Refined artis not wanting in power if the public is refined also. And asrefinement comes only by experience, by comparison, by subordinatingmeans to ends and rejecting what hinders, it follows that a refined mindwill really possess the greater volume, as well as the subtlerdiscrimination. Its ecstasy without grimace, and its submission withouttears, will hold heaven and earth better together--and hold them betterapart--than could a mad imagination. 

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

[Sidenote: Sounds well fitted to be symbols. ]

Music rationalises sound, but a more momentous rationalising of sound isseen in language. Language is one of the most useful of things, yet thegreater part of it still remains (what it must all have been in thebeginning) useless and without ulterior significance. The musical sideof language is its primary and elementary side. Man is endowed withvocal organs so plastic as to emit a great variety of delicately variedsounds; and by good fortune his ear has a parallel sensibility, so thatmuch vocal expression can be registered and confronted by auditoryfeeling. It has been said that man's pre-eminence in nature is due tohis possessing hands; his modest participation in the ideal world maysimilarly be due to his possessing tongue and ear. For when he findsshouting and vague moaning after a while fatiguing, he can draw a newpleasure from uttering all sorts of labial, dental, and gutteral sounds. Their rhythms and oppositions can entertain him, and he can begin to usehis lingual gamut to designate the whole range of his perceptions andpassions. 

Here we touch upon one of the great crises in creation. As nutrition atfirst established itself in the face of waste, and reproduction in theface of death, so representation was able, by help of vocal symbols, toconfront that dispersion inherent in experience, which is something initself ephemeral. Merely to associate one thing with another bringslittle gain; and merely to have added a vocal designation to fleetingthings--a designation which of course would have been taken for a partof their essence--would in itself have encumbered phenomena withoutrendering them in any way more docile to the will. But the encumbrancein this instance proved to be a wonderful preservative and means ofcomparison. It actually gave each moving thing its niche and cenotaph inthe eternal. For the universe of vocal sounds was a field, like that ofcolour or number, in which the elements showed relations and transitionseasy to dominate. It was a key-board over which attention could run backand forth, eliciting many implicit harmonies. Henceforth when varioussounds had been idly associated with various things, and identified withthem, the things could, by virtue of their names, be carried overmentally into the linguistic system; they could be manipulated thereideally, and vicariously preserved in representation. Needless to saythat the things themselves remained unchanged all the while in theirefficacy and mechanical succession, just as they remain unchanged inthose respects when they pass for the mathematical observer into theirmeasure or symbol; but as this reduction to mathematical form makes themcalculable, so their earlier reduction to words rendered them comparableand memorable, first enabling them to figure in discourse at all. 

[Sidenote: Language has a structure independent of things. ]

Language had originally no obligation to subserve an end which we maysometimes measure it by now, and depute to be its proper function, namely, to stand for things and adapt itself perfectly to theirstructure. In language as in every other existence idealism precedesrealism, since it must be a part of nature living its own life before itcan become a symbol for the rest and bend to external control. The vocaland musical medium is, and must always remain, alien, to the spatial. What makes terms correspond and refer to one another is a relationeternally disparate from the relation of propinquity or derivationbetween existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event oremotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net ofvocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch afly, without destroying or changing it. The object's quality passed tothe word at the same time that the word's relations enveloped theobject; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound, previously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once establisheditself between the drift proper to the verbal medium and that proper tothe designated things; a conflict which the whole history of languageand thought has embodied and which continues to this day. 

[Sidenote: Words remaining identical, serve to identify things thatchange. ]

Suppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previouslyvisited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old trainof reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirstand the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fanciedliquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted. His active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In hisfairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simplyannihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, andthis ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and livefor a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by timeand it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassertitself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem tobring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of thattemporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the goodinvisible, would soon be gone and forgotten. 

If we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and hadfrom the first called his haunt _the river_, he would have repeated itsname on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed torecognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, uponfinding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a _change_; forit would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. Anidentical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomenaand serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities inthose phenomena to pass for accidents; and the useful proposition couldat once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free andsometimes frozen. 

[Sidenote: Language the dialectical garment of facts. ]

This proposition is true, yet it contains much that is calculated tooffend a scrupulous dialectician. Its language and categories are notpurely logical, but largely physical and representative. The notion thatwhat changes nevertheless endures is a remarkable hybrid. It arises whenrigid ideal terms are imposed on evanescent existence. Feelings, takenalone, would show no identities; they would be lost in changing, or bewoven into the infinite feeling of change. Notions, taken alone, wouldallow no lapse, but would merely lead attention about from point topoint over an eternal system of relations. Power to understand theworld, logical or scientific mastery of existence, arises only by theforced and conventional marriage of these two essences, when the actualflux is ideally suspended and an ideal harness is loosely flung uponthings. For this purpose words are an admirable instrument. They havedialectical relations based on an ideal import, or tendency todefinition, which makes their essence their signification; yet they canbe freely bandied about and applied for a moment to the ambiguous thingsthat pass through existence. 

[Sidenote: Words are wise men's counters. ]

Had men been dumb, an exchange and circulation of images need not havebeen wanting, and associations might have arisen between ideals in themind and corresponding reactive habits in the body. What words add isnot power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectualexchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative valuesmay well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a commondenominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its ownin order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, bywhich a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of thatthing's context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined torecall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold bynature is a worthless standard of value in other things. Words are amaterial accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, butone which happens to subserve easily a universal function. Some otherelement in objects might conceivably have served for a commondenominator between them; but words, just by virtue of theiradventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily comparedand manipulated in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted forthis office. They are not vague, as any common quality abstracted fromthings would necessarily become; and though vagueness is a quality onlytoo compatible with perception, so that vague ideas can exist withoutend, this vagueness is not what makes them universal in their functions. It is one thing to perceive an ill-determined form and quite another toattribute to it a precise general predicate. Words, distinct in theirown category and perfectly recognisable, can accordingly perform verywell the function of embodying a universal; for they can be identifiedin turn with many particulars and yet remain throughout particularthemselves. 

[Sidenote: Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic]

The psychology of nominalism is undoubtedly right where it insists thatevery image is particular and every term, in its existential aspect, a_flatum vocis_; but nominalists should have recognised that images mayhave any degree of vagueness and generality when measured by aconceptual standard. A figure having obviously three sides and threecorners may very well be present to the mind when it is impossible tosay whether it is an equilateral or a rectangular triangle. Functionalor logical universality lies in another sphere altogether, being amatter of intent and not of existence. When we say that "universalsalone exist in the mind" we mean by "mind" something unknown toBerkeley; not a bundle of psychoses nor an angelic substance, but quickintelligence, the faculty of discourse. Predication is an act, understanding a spiritual and transitive operation: its existentialbasis may well be counted in psychologically and reduced to a stream ofimmediate presences; but its meaning can be caught only by anothermeaning, as life only can exemplify life. Vague or general images are aslittle universal as sounds are; but a sound better than a flickeringabstraction can serve the intellect in its operation of comparison andsynthesis. Words are therefore the body of discourse, of which the soulis understanding. 

[Sidenote: Literature moves between the extremes of music anddenotation. ]

The categories of discourse are in part merely representative, in partmerely grammatical, and in part attributable to both spheres. Euphonyand phonetic laws are principles governing language without anyreference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of music. At theother extreme lies that ultimate form of prose which we see inmathematical reasoning or in a telegraphic style, where absolutelynothing is rhetorical and speech is denuded of every feature notindispensable to its symbolic rôle. Between these two extremes lies thebroad field of poetry, or rather of imaginative or playful expression, where the verbal medium is a medium indeed, having a certaintransparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the sametime elaborates the fact in expressing it, and endows it with affinitiesalien to its proper nature. A pun is a grotesque example of suchdiremption, where ambiguities belonging only to speech are used tosuggest impossible substitutions in ideas. Less frankly, languagehabitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its realcontext and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the worldof logic and reflection. Concretions in existence are subsumed, whennamed, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands uponexperience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a materialfor fiction and eloquence. Man's intellectual progress has a poeticphase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, inwhich he sifts and tests what he has imagined. 

[Sidenote: Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may haveaffinity. ]

In what measure do inflection and syntax represent anything in thesubject-matter of discourse? In what measure are they an independentplay of expression, a quasi-musical, quasi-mathematical veil interposedbetween reflection and existence? One who knows only languages of asingle family can give but a biassed answer to this question. There aredoubtless many approaches to correct symbolism in language, whichgrammar may have followed up at different times in strangely differentways. That the medium in every art has a character of its own, acharacter limiting its representative value, may perhaps be safelyasserted, and this intrinsic character in the medium antedates andpermeates all representation. Phonetic possibilities and phonetic habitsbelong, in language, to this indispensable vehicle; what the throat andlips can emit easily and distinguishably, and what sequences can appealto the ear and be retained, depend alike on physiological conditions;and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be forsignification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimesremain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm whollyextrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the mediumand in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miraclegrows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium'smovement and that of the subject-matter. 

Both language and ideas involve processes in the brain. The twoprocesses may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only andforget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant's tusk;yet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a singleorganism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic orantipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruitybetween subject and vehicle which is otherwise such a mystery inexpression. If to think of Athena and to look on ivory are congruousphysiological processes, if they sustain or heighten each other, then torepresent Athena in ivory will be a happy expedient, in which the verynature of the medium will already be helping us forward. Scent and formgo better together, for instance, in the violet or the rose than in thehyacinth or the poppy: and being better compacted for human perceptionthey seem more expressive and can be linked more unequivocally withother sources of feeling. So a given vocal sound may have more or lessanalogy to the thing it is used to signify; this analogy may be obvious, as in onomatopoeia, or subtle, as when short, sharp sounds go withdecision, or involved rhythms and vague reverberations with a floatingdream. What seems exquisite to one poet may accordingly seem vapid toanother, when the texture of experience in the two minds differs, sothat a given composition rustles through one man's fancy as a wind mightthrough a wood, but finds no sympathetic response in the other organism, nerved as it may be, perhaps, to precision in thought and action. 

[Sidenote: Syntax positively representative. ]

The structure of language, when it passes beyond the phonetic level, begins at once to lean upon existences and to imitate the structure ofthings. We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, insubservience to distinctions which we make in ideas. The feeling orquality represented by an adjective, the relation indicated by a verb, the substance or concretion of qualities designated by a noun, arediversities growing up in experience, by no means attributable to themere play of sound. The parts of speech are therefore representative. Their inflection is representative too, since tenses mark importantpractical differences in the distribution of the events described, andcases express the respective rôles played by objects in the operation. "I struck him and he will strike me, " renders in linguistic symbols amarked change in the situation; the variation in phrase is notrhetorical. Language here, though borrowed no doubt from ancestralpoetry, has left all revery far behind, and has been submerged in theLife of Reason. 

[Sidenote: Yet it vitiates what it represents. ]

The medium, however, constantly reasserts itself. An example may befound in gender, which, clearly representative in a measure, cuts loosein language from all genuine representation and becomes a feature inabstract linguistic design, a formal characteristic in expression. Contrasted sentiments permeate an animal's dealings with his own sex andwith the other; nouns and adjectives represent this contrast by takingon masculine and feminine forms. The distinction is indeed so importantthat wholly different words--man and woman, bull and cow--stand for thebest-known animals of different sex; while adjectives, where declensionis extinct, as in English, often take on a connotation of gender and areapplied to one sex only--as we say a beautiful woman, but hardly abeautiful man. But gender in language extends much farther than sex, andeven if by some subtle analogy all the masculine and feminine nouns in alanguage could be attached to something suggesting sex in the objectsthey designate, yet it can hardly be maintained that the elaborateconcordance incident upon that distinction is representative of any feltquality in the things. So remote an analogy to sex could not assertitself pervasively. Thus Horace says:

 Quis _multa_ gracilis te puer in _rosa_ perfusis liquidis urget odoribus _grato_, Pyrrha, sub _antro_?

Here we may perceive why the rose was instinctively made feminine, andwe may grant that the bower, though the reason escape us, was somehowproperly masculine; but no one would urge that a _profusion_ of roseswas also intrinsically feminine, or that the _pleasantness_ of a bowerwas ever specifically masculine to sense. The epithets _multa_ and_grato_ take their gender from the nouns, even though the quality theydesignate fails to do so. Their gender is therefore non-representativeand purely formal; it marks an intra-linguistic accommodation. Themedium has developed a syntactical structure apart from any intrinsicsignificance thereby accruing to its elements. Artificial concordance ingender does not express gender: it merely emphasises the grammaticallinks in the phrases and makes greater variety possible in thearrangement of words. 

[Sidenote: Difficulty in subduing a living medium. ]

This example may prepare us to understand a general principle: thatlanguage, while essentially significant viewed in its function, isindefinitely wasteful, being mechanical and tentative in its origin. Itoverloads itself, and being primarily music, and a labyrinth of sounds, it develops an articulation and method of its own, which only in theend, and with much inexactness, reverts to its function of expression. How great the possibilities of effect are in developing a pure medium wecan best appreciate in music; but in language a similar development goeson while it is being applied to representing things. The organ isspontaneous, the function adventitious and superimposed. Rhetoric andutility keep language going, as centrifugal and centripetal forces keepa planet in its course. Euphony, verbal analogy, grammatical fancy, poetic confusion, continually drive language afield, in its owntangential direction; while the business of life, in which language isemployed, and the natural lapse of rhetorical fashions, as continuallydraw it back towards convenience and exactitude. 

[Sidenote: Language foreshortens experience. ]

Between music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion. Until music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tella story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were leftbehind altogether, language would pass into a sort of algebra or vocalshorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicativeand record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and itsintrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, makethe essence of art; they give representation a new and specific valuesuch as the object, before representation, could not have possessed. Consciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence, which it foreshortens and elevates into synthetic ideas. Reason, too, bybringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in singleacts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces intolife the influence of a representative medium, without which life couldnever pass from a process into an art. Language acquires scope in thesame way, by its kindly infidelities; its metaphors and syntax lendexperience perspective. Language vitiates the experience it expresses, but thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another. The two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion indiscourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus aproverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable thanthe event it first described would ever have been if not translated intoan epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for bythat translation the event has become an idea. 

[Sidenote: It is a perpetual mythology. ]

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which ina certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its "ideas" imbeddedin their own medium--they are musical ideas--and cannot impose them onany foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary, seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as muchas possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middlecourse and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would befutile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, makingmusic thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaningnourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or nouse in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digestthat reality to which it confines itself, making it over into idealsubstance and material for the mind. It looks at things with anincorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (whichthey never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by theirimaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what isincidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play inman's adventures. 

Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literaryimpulse itself. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration; he mustwait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in his mind, proving itto be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yetinspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative tosomething other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify thereal world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its nativeagility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what ismomentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; itcannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves aburdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuadethe universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle. Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, man's simian chatterbecomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lendsit a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth. 

[Sidenote: It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness. ]

[Sidenote: Absolute language a possible but foolish art. ]

These relations, in determining the function of language, determine theideal which its structure should approach. Any sort of grammar andrhetoric, the most absurd and inapplicable as well as the mostdescriptive, can be spontaneous; fit organisms are not less natural thanthose that are unfit. Felicitous genius is so called because it meetsexperience half-way. A genius which flies in the opposite direction, though not less fertile internally, is externally inept and is calledmadness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off. Better surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, inthat respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line ofdevelopment that alienates thought from reality. The language of birdsis excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported tohave understood it very likely had merely perceived that it was notmeant to be intelligible; for it is not to understand nature to reduceher childishly to a human scale. Man, who is merged in universal natureat the roots of his being, is not without profound irrational intuitionsby which he can half divine her secret processes; and his heart, in itsown singing and fluttering, might not wholly misinterpret the birds. Buthuman discourse is not worth having if it is mere piping, and helps notat all in mastering things; for man is intelligent, which is another wayof saying that he aspires to envisage in thought what he is dealing within action. Discourse that absolved itself from that observant duty wouldnot be cognitive; and in failing to be cognitive it would fail to redeemthe practical forces it ignored from their brute externality, and tomake them tributary to the Life of Reason. Thus its own dignity andcontinued existence depend on its learning to express momentous facts, facts important for action and happiness; and there is nothing which soquickly discredits itself as empty rhetoric and dialectic, or poetrythat wanders in dim and private worlds. If pure music, even with itsimmense sensuous appeal, is so easily tedious, what a universal yawnmust meet the verbiage which develops nothing but its own irridescence. Absolute versification and absolute dialectic may have their place insociety; they give play to an organ that has its rights like any other, and that, after serving for a while in the economy of life, may wellclaim a holiday in which to disport itself irresponsibly among the fowlsof the air and the lilies of the field. But the exercise is trivial;and if its high priests go through their mummeries with a certainunction, and pretend to be wafted by them into a higher world, thephenomenon is neither new nor remarkable. Language is a wonderful andpliant medium, and why should it not lend itself to imposture? Asystematic abuse of words, as of other things, is never without someinner harmony or propriety that makes it prosper; only the man who looksbeyond and sees the practical results awakes to the villainy of it. Inthe end, however, those who play with words lose their labour, andpregnant as they feel themselves to be with new and wonderful universes, they cannot humanise the one in which they live and rather banishthemselves from it by their persistent egotism and irrelevance. 

CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

[Sidenote: Force of primary expressions. ]

There is both truth and illusion in the saying that primitive poets aresublime. Genesis and the Iliad (works doubtless backed by a longtradition) are indeed sublime. Primitive men, having perhaps developedlanguage before the other arts, used it with singular directness todescribe the chief episodes of life, which was all that life as yetcontained. They had frank passions and saw things from single points ofview. A breath from that early world seems to enlarge our natures, andto restore to language, which we have sophisticated, all itsmagnificence and truth. But there is more, for (as we have seen)language is spontaneous; it constitutes an act before it registers anobservation. It gives vent to emotion before it is adjusted to thingsexternal and reduced, as it were, to its own echo rebounding from arefractory world. The lion's roar, the bellowing of bulls, even thesea's cadence has a great sublimity. Though hardly in itself poetry, ananimal cry, when still audible in human language, renders it also theunanswerable, the ultimate voice of nature. Nothing can so pierce thesoul as the uttermost sigh of the body. There is no utterance sothrilling as that of absolute impulse, if absolute impulse has learnedto speak at all. An intense, inhospitable mind, filled with a singleidea, in which all animal, social, and moral interests are fusedtogether, speaks a language of incomparable force. Thus the Hebrewprophets, in their savage concentration, poured into one torrent allthat their souls possessed or could dream of. What other men are wont topursue in politics, business, religion, or art, they looked for from onewave of national repentance and consecration. Their age, swept by thisideal passion, possessed at the same time a fresh and homely vocabulary;and the result was an eloquence so elemental and combative, soimaginative and so bitterly practical, that the world has never heardits like. Such single-mindedness, with such heroic simplicity in wordsand images, is hardly possible in a late civilisation. Cultivated poetsare not unconsciously sublime. 

[Sidenote: Its exclusiveness and narrowness. ]

The sublimity of early utterances should not be hailed, however, withunmixed admiration. It is a sublimity born of defect or at least ofdisproportion. The will asserts itself magnificently; images, likethunder-clouds, seem to cover half the firmament at once. But such awill is sadly inexperienced; it has hardly tasted or even conceived anypossible or high satisfactions. Its lurid firmament is poor in stars. Tothrow the whole mind upon something is not so great a feat when themind has nothing else to throw itself upon. Every animal when goadedbecomes intense; and it is perhaps merely the apathy in which mortalsare wont to live that keeps them from being habitually sublime in theirsentiments. The sympathy that makes a sheep hasten after its fellows, invague alarm or in vague affection; the fierce premonitions that drive abull to the heifer; the patience with which a hen sits on her eggs; theloyalty which a dog shows to his master--what thoughts may not all theseinstincts involve, which it needs only a medium of communication totranslate into poetry?

Man, though with less wholeness of soul, enacts the same dramas. Hehears voices on all occasions; he incorporates what little he observesof nature into his verbal dreams; and as each new impulse bubbles to thesurface he feels himself on the verge of some inexpressible heaven orhell. He needs but to abandon himself to that seething chaos whichperpetually underlies conventional sanity--a chaos in which memory andprophecy, vision and impersonation, sound and sense, are inextricablyjumbled together--to find himself at once in a magic world, irrecoverable, largely unmeaning, terribly intricate, but, as he willconceive, deep, inward, and absolutely real. He will have reverted, inother words, to crude experience, to primordial illusion. The movementof his animal or vegetative mind will be far from delightful; it will beunintelligent and unintelligible; nothing in particular will berepresented therein; but it will be a movement in the soul and for thesoul, as exciting and compulsive as the soul's volume can make it. Inthis muddy torrent words also may be carried down; and if these wordsare by chance strung together into a cadence, and are afterwards writtendown, they may remain for a memento of that turbid moment. Such words wemay at first hesitate to call poetry, since very likely they arenonsense; but this nonsense will have some quality--some rhyme orrhythm--that makes it memorable (else it would not have survived); andmoreover the words will probably show, in their connotation and order, some sympathy with the dream that cast them up. For the man himself, inwhom such a dream may be partly recurrent, they may consequently have aconsiderable power of suggestion, and they may even have it for others, whenever the rhythm and incantation avail to plunge them also into asimilar trance. 

[Sidenote: Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm. ]

Memorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic power, is thereally primitive and radical form of poetry. Nor is such poetry yetextinct: children still love and compose it and every genuine poet, onone side of his genius, reverts to it from explicit speech. As alllanguage has acquired its meaning, and did not have it in the beginning, so the man who launches a new locution, the poet who creates a symbol, must do so without knowing what significance it may eventually acquire, and conscious at best only of the emotional background from which itemerged. Pure poetry is pure experiment; and it is not strange thatnine-tenths of it should be pure failure. For it matters little whatunutterable things may have originally gone together with a phrase inthe dreamer's mind; if they were not uttered and the phrase cannot callthem back, this verbal relic is none the richer for the high company itmay once have kept. Expressiveness is a most accidental matter. What aline suggests at one reading, it may never suggest again even to thesame person. For this reason, among others, poets are partial to theirown compositions; they truly discover there depths of meaning whichexist for nobody else. Those readers who appropriate a poet and make himtheir own fall into a similar illusion; they attribute to him what theythemselves supply, and whatever he reels out, lost in his own personalrevery, seems to them, like _sortes biblicoe, _ written to fit their owncase. 

[Sidenote: Inspiration irresponsible. ]

Justice has never been done to Plato's remarkable consistency andboldness in declaring that poets are inspired by a divine madness andyet, when they transgress rational bounds, are to be banished from anideal republic, though not without some marks of Platonic regard. Instead of fillets, a modern age might assign them a coterie offlattering dames, and instead of banishment, starvation; but the resultwould be the same in the end. A poet is inspired because what occurs inhis brain is a true experiment in creation. His apprehension plays withwords and their meanings as nature, in any spontaneous variation, playswith her own structure. A mechanical force shifts the kaleidoscope; anew direction is given to growth or a new gist to signification. Thisinspiration, moreover, is mad, being wholly ignorant of its own issue;and though it has a confused fund of experience and verbal habit onwhich to draw, it draws on this fund blindly and quite at random, consciously possessed by nothing but a certain stress and pregnancy andthe pains, as it were, of parturition. Finally the new birth has to beinspected critically by the public censor before it is allowed to live;most probably it is too feeble and defective to prosper in the commonair, or is a monster that violates some primary rule of civic existence, tormenting itself to disturb others. 

[Sidenote: Plato's discriminating view. ]

Plato seems to have exaggerated the havoc which these poetic dragons canwork in the world. They are in fact more often absurd than venomous, andno special legislation is needed to abolish them. They soon die quietlyof universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates among apeople is poetry of a secondary and conventional sort that propagatesestablished ideas in trite metaphors. Popular poets are the parishpriests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long sinceconverted public. Plato's quarrel was not so much with poetic art aswith ancient myth and emotional laxity: he was preaching a crusadeagainst the established church. For naturalistic deities he wished tosubstitute moral symbols; for the joys of sense, austerity andabstraction. To proscribe Homer was a marked way of protesting againstthe frivolous reigning ideals. The case is much as if we should nowproscribe the book of Genesis, on account of its mythical cosmogony, orin order to proclaim the philosophic truth that the good, being anadequate expression to be attained by creation, could not possibly havepreceded it or been its source. We might admit at the same time thatGenesis contains excellent images and that its poetic force isremarkable; so that if serious misunderstanding could be avoided thecensor might be glad to leave it in everybody's hands. Plato in somesuch way recognised that Homer was poetical and referred his works, mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration. Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body ofthings to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world, though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision, congenial to many early impulses and dreams of the mind. 

[Sidenote: Explosive and pregnant expression. ]

Homer, indeed, was no primitive poet; he was a consummate master, theheir to generations of discipline in both life and art. This appears inhis perfect prosody, in his limpid style, in his sense for proportion, his abstentions, and the frank pathos of his portraits and principles, in which there is nothing gross, subjective, or arbitrary. Theinspirations that came to him never carried him into crudeness orabsurdity. Every modern poet, though the world he describes may be morerefined in spots and more elaborate, is less advanced in his art; forart is made rudimentary not by its date but by its irrationality. Yeteven if Homer had been primitive he might well have been inspired, inthe same way as a Bacchic frenzy or a mystic trance; the most blunderingexplosions may be justified antecedently by the plastic force that isvented in them. They may be expressive, in the physical sense of thisambiguous word; for, far as they may be from conveying an idea, they maybetray a tendency and prove that something is stirring in the soul. Expressiveness is often sterile; but it is sometimes fertile and capableof reproducing in representation the experience from which it sprang. Asa tree in the autumn sheds leaves and seeds together, so a ripeningexperience comes indifferently to various manifestations, some barrenand without further function, others fit to carry the parent experienceover into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there. Expressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in thelatter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The firstis idle self-manifestation, the second rational art. 

[Sidenote: Natural history of inspiration. ]

Self-manifestation, so soon as it is noted and accepted as such, seemsto present the same marvel as any ideal success. Such self-manifestationis incessant, many-sided, unavoidable; yet it seems a miracle when itsconditions are looked back upon from the vantage ground of their result. By reading spirit out of a work we turn it into a feat of inspiration. Thus even the crudest and least coherent utterances, when we suspectsome soul to be groping in them, and striving to address us, becomeoracular; a divine afflatus breathes behind their gibberish and theyseem to manifest some deep intent. The miracle of creation orinspiration consists in nothing but this, that an external effect shouldembody an inner intention. The miracle, of course, is apparent only, anddue to an inverted and captious point of view. In truth the tendencythat executed the work was what first made its conception possible; butthis conception, finding the work responsive in some measure to itsinner demand, attributes that response to its own magic prerogative. Hence the least stir and rumble of formative processes, when itgenerates a soul, makes itself somehow that soul's interpreter; and dimas the spirit and its expression may both remain, they are none the lessin profound concord, a concord which wears a miraculous providentialcharacter when it is appreciated without being understood. 

[Sidenote: Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and sochanged. ]

Primitive poetry is the basis of all discourse. If we open any ancientbook we come at once upon an elaborate language, and on diversconventional concepts, of whose origin and history we hear nothing. Wemust read on, until by dint of guessing and by confronting instances wegrow to understand those symbols. The writer was himself heir to alinguistic tradition which he made his own by the same process ofadoption and tentative use by which we, in turn, interpret his phrases:he understood what he heard in terms of his own experience, andattributed to his predecessors (no matter what their incommunicablefeelings may have been) such ideas as their words generated in his ownthinking. In this way expressions continually change their sense; theycan communicate a thought only by diffusing a stimulus, and in passingfrom mouth to mouth they will wholly reverse their connotation, unlesssome external object or some recurring human situation gives them aconstant standard, by which private aberrations may be checked. Thus inthe first phrase of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the heavensand the earth, " the words have a stable meaning only in so far as theyare indicative and bring us back to a stable object. What "heavens" and"earth" stand for can be conveyed by gestures, by merely pointing up anddown; but beyond that sensuous connotation their meaning has entirelychanged since they were here written; and no two minds, even to-day, will respond to these familiar words with exactly the same images. "Beginning" and "created" have a superficial clearness, though theirimplications cannot be defined without precipitating the most intricatemetaphysics, which would end in nothing but a proof that both terms wereambiguous and unthinkable. As to the word "God, " all mutualunderstanding is impossible. It is a floating literary symbol, with avalue which, if we define it scientifically, becomes quite algebraic. Asno experienced object corresponds to it, it is without fixed indicativeforce, and admits any sense which its context in any mind may happen togive it. In the first sentence of Genesis its meaning, we may safelysay, is "a masculine being by whom heaven and earth were created. " Tofill out this implication other instances of the word would have to begathered, in each of which, of course, the word would appear with a newand perhaps incompatible meaning. 

[Sidenote: Expressions may be recast perversely, humorously, orsublimely. ]

Whenever a word appears in a radically new context it has a radicallynew sense: the expression in which it so figures is a poetic figment, afresh literary creation. Such invention is sometimes perverse, sometimeshumorous, sometimes sublime; that is, it may either buffet oldassociations without enlarging them, or give them a plausible butimpossible twist, or enlarge them to cover, with unexpected propriety, amuch wider or more momentous experience. The force of experience in anymoment--if we abstract from represented values--is emotional; so thatfor sublime poetry what is required is to tap some reservoir of feeling. If a phrase opens the flood-gates of emotion, it has made itself mostdeeply significant. Its discursive range and clearness may not beremarkable; its emotional power will quite suffice. For this reasonagain primitive poetry may be sublime: in its inchoate phrases there isaffinity to raw passion and their very blindness may serve to bring thatpassion back. Poetry has body; it represents the volume of experience aswell as its form, and to express volume a primitive poet will relyrather on rhythm, sound, and condensed suggestion than on discursivefulness or scope. 

[Sidenote: The nature of prose. ]

The descent from poetry to prose is in one sense a progress. When usehas worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it anindifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has becomeprosaic; it has also become, by the same process, transparent and purelyinstrumental. In poetry feeling is transferred by contagion; in prose itis communicated by bending the attention upon determinate objects; theone stimulates and the other informs. Under the influence of poetryvarious minds radiate from a somewhat similar core of sensation, fromthe same vital mood, into the most diverse and incommunicable images. Interlocutors speaking prose, on the contrary, pelt and besiege oneanother with a peripheral attack; they come into contact at sundrysuperficial points and thence push their agreement inwards, untilperhaps a practical coincidence is arrived at in their thought. Agreement is produced by controlling each mind externally, through aseries of checks and little appeals to possible sensation; whereas inpoetry the agreement, where it exists, is vague and massive; there is aninitial fusion of minds under hypnotic musical influences, from whicheach listener, as he awakes, passes into his own thoughts andinterpretations. In prose the vehicle for communication is aconventional sign, standing in the last analysis for some demonstrableobject or controllable feeling. By marshalling specific details acertain indirect suasion is exercised on the mind, as nature herself, bycontinual checks and denials, gradually tames the human will. Theelements of prose are always practical, if we run back and reconstructtheir primitive essence, for at bottom every experience is an originaland not a copy, a nucleus for ideation rather than an object to whichideas may refer. It is when these stimulations are shaken together andbecome a system of mutual checks that they begin to take on ideally arhythm borrowed from the order in which they actually recurred. Then aprophetic or representative movement arises in thought. Before thiscomes about, experience remains a constantly renovated dream, as poetryto the end conspires to keep it. For poetry, while truly poetical, neverloses sight of initial feelings and underlying appeals; it isincorrigibly transcendental, and takes every present passion and everyprivate dream in turn for the core of the universe. By creating newsigns, or by recasting and crossing those which have becomeconventional, it keeps communication massive and instinctive, immersedin music, and inexhaustible by clear thought. 

[Sidenote: It is more advanced and responsible than poetry. ]

Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not yet reached thelevel on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity andsignificance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value themas we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be whollyfree and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so greata violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians andphilosophers, still protest against such a distinction. They urge (whatis perfectly true for a rudimentary creature) that facts are mereconceptions and conceptions full-fledged facts; but this interestingembryonic lore they apply, in their intellectual weakness, to retractingor undermining those human categories which, though alone fruitful orapplicable in life, are not congenial to their half-formed imagination. Retreating deeper into the inner chaos, they bring to bear the wholemomentum of an irresponsible dialectic to frustrate the growth ofrepresentative ideas: In this they are genuine, if somewhat belated, poets, experimenting anew with solved problems, and fancying howcreation might have moved upon other lines. The great merit that proseshares with science is that it is responsible. Its conscience is a newand wiser imagination, by which creative thought is rendered cumulativeand progressive; for a man does not build less boldly or solidly if hetakes the precaution of building in baked brick. Prose is in itselfmeagre and bodiless, merely indicating the riches of the world. Itstransparency helps us to look through it to the issue, and the signalsit gives fill the mind with an honest assurance and a prophetic art farnobler than any ecstasy. 

[Sidenote: Maturity brings love of practical truth. ]

As men of action have a better intelligence than poets, if only theiraction is on a broad enough stage, so the prosaic rendering ofexperience has the greater value, if only the experience rendered coversenough human interests. Youth and aspiration indulge in poetry; a matureand masterful mind will often despise it, and prefer to express itselflaconically in prose. It is clearly proper that prosaic habits shouldsupervene in this way on the poetical; for youth, being as yet littlefed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; thehalf-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alonebeautiful and worthy of homage. Time modifies this sentiment in twodirections. It breeds lassitude and indifference towards impracticableideals, originally no less worthy than the practicable. Ideals whichcannot be realised, and are not fed at least by partial realisations, soon grow dormant. Life-blood passes to other veins; the urgent andpalpitating interests of life appear in other quarters. While thingsimpossible thus lose their serious charm, things actual reveal theirnatural order and variety; these not only can entertain the mindabstractly, but they can offer a thousand material rewards inobservation and action. In their presence, a private dream begins tolook rather cheap and hysterical. Not that existence has any dignity orprerogative in the presence of will, but that will itself, beingelastic, grows definite and firm when it is fed by success; and itsformed and expressible ideals then put to shame the others, which haveremained vague for want of practical expression. Mature interests centreon soluble problems and tasks capable of execution; it is at such pointsthat the ideal can be really served. The individual's dream straightensand reassures itself by merging with the dream of humanity. To dwell, asirrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion withoutrepresentative or ulterior value, then seems a waste of time. Fictionbecomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort ofincompetent whimper, a childish fore-shortening of the outspread world. 

[Sidenote: Pure prose would tend to efface itself. ]

On the other hand, prose has a great defect, which is abstractness. Itdrops the volume of experience in finding bodiless algebraic symbols bywhich to express it. The verbal form, instead of transmitting an image, seems to constitute it, in so far as there is an image suggested atall; and the ulterior situation is described only in the sense that achange is induced in the hearer which prepares him to meet thatsituation. Prose seems to be a use of language in the service ofmaterial life. It would tend, in that case, to undermine its own basis;for in proportion as signals for action are quick and efficacious theydiminish their sensuous stimulus and fade from consciousness. Werelanguage such a set of signals it would be something merelyinstrumental, which if made perfect ought to be automatic andunconscious. It would be a buzzing in the ears, not a music native tothe mind. Such a theory of language would treat it as a necessary eviland would look forward hopefully to the extinction of literature, inwhich it would recognise nothing ideal. There is of course no reason todeprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material agency, toexpedite affairs; but an art of speech, if it is to add any ultimatecharm to life, has to supervene upon a mere code of signals. Prose, could it be purely representative, would be ideally superfluous. Aliterary prose accordingly owns a double allegiance, and its life isamphibious. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in alanguage that lends the message an intrinsic value, and makes itdelightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory orpractice. Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called poetrythat had become pervasively representative, and was altogether faithfulto its rational function. 

[Sidenote: Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical. ]

We may therefore with good reason distinguish prosaic form from prosaicsubstance. A novel, a satire, a book of speculative philosophy, may havea most prosaic exterior; every phrase may convey its idea economically;but the substance may nevertheless be poetical, since these ideas may beirrelevant to all ulterior events, and may express nothing but theimaginative energy that called them forth. On the other hand, a poeticvehicle in which there is much ornamental play of language and rhythmmay clothe a dry ideal skeleton. So those tremendous positivists, theHebrew prophets, had the most prosaic notions about the goods and evilsof life. So Lucretius praised, I will not say the atoms merely, but evenfecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racineattributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologistcould not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be madethe mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a bornpoet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; heclothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; thearoma of sentiment rises like a sort of pungent incense between them andus, and no dramatist has ever had so sure a mastery over transports andtears. 

[Sidenote: Poetry has its place in the medium. ]

In the medium a poet is at home; in the world he tries to render, he isa child and a stranger. Poetic notions are false notions; in so far astheir function is representative they are vitiated by containingelements not present in things. Truth is a jewel which should not bepainted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light. The poetic way of idealising reality is dull, bungling, and impure; abetter acquaintance with things renders such flatteries ridiculous. Thatvery effort of thought by which opaque masses of experience were firstdetached from the flux and given a certain individuality, seeks tocontinue to clarify them until they become as transparent as possible. To resist this clarification, to love the chance incrustations thatencumber human ideas, is a piece of timid folly, and poetry in thisrespect is nothing but childish confusion. Poetic apprehension is amakeshift, in so far as its cognitive worth is concerned; it is exactly, in this respect, what myth is to science. Approaching its subject-matterfrom a distance, with incongruous categories, it translates it into somevague and misleading symbol rich in emotions which the object as it iscould never arouse and is sure presently to contradict. What lends thesehybrid ideas their temporary eloquence and charm is their congruity withthe mind that breeds them and with its early habits. Falsification, orrather clouded vision, gives to poetry a more human accent and a readierwelcome than to truth. In other words, it is the medium that assertsitself; the apperceptive powers indulge their private humours, andneglect the office to which they were assigned once for all by theircognitive essence. 

[Sidenote: It is the best medium possible. ]

That the medium should so assert itself, however, is no anomaly, thecognitive function being an ulterior one to which ideas are by no meansobliged to conform. Apperception is itself an activity or art, and likeall others terminates in a product which is a good in itself, apart fromits utilities. If we abstract, then, from the representative functionwhich may perhaps accrue to speech, and regard it merely as an operationabsorbing energy and occasioning delight, we see that poetic language islanguage at its best. Its essential success consists in fusing ideas incharming sounds or in metaphors that shine by their own brilliance. Poetry is an eloquence justified by its spontaneity, as eloquence is apoetry justified by its application. The first draws the whole soul intothe situation, and the second puts the whole situation before the soul. 

[Sidenote: Might it not convey what it is best to know?]

Is there not, we may ask, some ideal form of discourse in whichapperceptive life could be engaged with all its volume and transmutingpower, and in which at the same time no misrepresentation should beinvolved? Transmutation is not erroneous when it is intentional;misrepresentation does not please for being false, but only becausetruth would be more congenial if it resembled such a fiction. Whyshould not discourse, then, have nothing but truth in its import andnothing but beauty in its form? With regard to euphony and grammaticalstructure there is evidently nothing impossible in such an ideal; forthese radical beauties of language are independent of thesubject-matter. They form the body of poetry; but the ideal andemotional atmosphere which is its soul depends on things external tolanguage, which no perfection in the medium could modify. It might seemas if the brilliant substitutions, the magic suggestions essential topoetry, would necessarily vanish in the full light of day. The light ofday is itself beautiful; but would not the loss be terrible if no otherlight were ever suffered to shine?

[Sidenote: A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical. ]

The Life of Reason involves sacrifice. What forces yearn for the ideal, being many and incompatible, have to yield and partly deny themselves inorder to attain any ideal at all. There is something sad in all possibleattainment so long as the rational virtue (which wills such attainment)is not pervasive; and even then there is limitation to put up with, andthe memory of many a defeat. Rational poetry is possible and would beinfinitely more beautiful than the other; but the charm of unreason, ifunreason seem charming, it certainly could not preserve. In what humanfancy demands, as at present constituted, there are irrationalelements. The given world seems insufficient; impossible things have tobe imagined, both to extend its limits and to fill in and vivify itstexture. Homer has a mythology without which experience would haveseemed to him undecipherable; Dante has his allegories and his mockscience; Shakespeare has his romanticism; Goethe his symbolic charactersand artificial machinery. All this lumber seems to have been somehownecessary to their genius; they could not reach expression in morehonest terms. If such indirect expression could be discarded, it wouldnot be missed; but while the mind, for want of a better vocabulary, isreduced to using these symbols, it pours into them a part of its ownlife and makes them beautiful. Their loss is a real blow, while theincapacity that called for them endures; and the soul seems to becrippled by losing its crutches. 

[Sidenote: All apperception modifies its object. ]

There are certain adaptations and abbreviations of reality which thoughtcan never outgrow. Thought is representative; it enriches each soul andeach moment with premonitions of surrounding existences. If discourse isto be significant it must transfer to its territory and reduce to itsscale whatever objects it deals with: in other words, thought has apoint of view and cannot see the world except in perspective. This pointof view is not, for reason, locally or naturally determined; sense aloneis limited in that material fashion, being seated in the body andlooking thence centrifugally upon things in so far as they come intodynamic relations with that body. Intelligence, on the contrary, salliesfrom that physical stronghold and consists precisely in shifting anduniversalising the point of view, neutralising all local, temporal, orpersonal conditions. Yet intelligence, notwithstanding, has its owncentre and point of origin, not explicitly in space or in a naturalbody, but in some specific interest or moral aim. It translates animallife into moral endeavour, and what figured in the first as a localexistence figures in the second as a specific good. Reason accordinglyhas its essential bias, and looks at things as they affect theparticular form of life which reason expresses; and though all realityshould be ultimately swept by the eye of reason, the whole would stillbe surveyed by a particular method, from a particular starting-point, for a particular end; nor would it take much shrewdness to perceive thatthis nucleus for discourse and estimation, this ideal life, correspondsin the moral world to that animal body which gave sensuous experienceits seat and centre; so that rationality is nothing but the idealfunction or aspect of natural life. Reason is universal in its outlookand in its sympathies: it is the faculty of changing places ideally andrepresenting alien points of view; but this very self-transcendencemanifests a certain special method in life, an equilibrium which afar-sighted being is able to establish between itself and itscomprehended conditions. Reason remains to the end essentially humanand, in its momentary actuality, necessarily personal. 

[Sidenote: Reason has its own bias and method. ]

We have here an essential condition of discourse which renders it atbottom poetical. Selection and applicability govern all thinking, andgovern it in the interests of the soul. Reason is itself a specificmedium; so that prose can never attain that perfect transparency andmere utility which we were attributing to it. We should not wish to know"things in themselves, " even if we were able. What it concerns us toknow about them is merely the service or injury they are able to do us, and in what fashion they can affect our lives. To know this would be, inso far, truly to know them; but it would be to know them through our ownfaculties and through their supposed effects; it would be to know themby their appearance. A singular proof of the frivolous way in whichphilosophers often proceed, when they think they are particularlyprofound, is seen in this puzzle, on which they solemnly ask us to fixour thoughts: How is it possible to know reality, if all we can attainin experience is but appearance? The meaning of knowledge, which is anintellectual and living thing, is here forgotten, and the notion ofsensation, or bodily possession, is substituted for it; so what we arereally asked to consider is how, had we no understanding, we should beable to understand what we endure. It is by conceiving what we endure tobe the appearance of something beyond us, that we reach knowledge thatsomething exists beyond us, and that it plays in respect to us adeterminate rôle. There could be no knowledge of reality if whatconveyed that knowledge were not felt to be appearance; nor can a mediumof knowledge better than appearance be by any possibility conceived. Tohave such appearances is what makes realities knowable. Knowledgetranscends sensation by relating it to other sensation, and therebyrising to a supersensuous plane, the plane of principles and causes bywhich sensibles are identified in character and distributed inexistence. These principles and causes are what we call the intelligibleor the real world; and the sensations, when they have been sointerpreted and underpinned, are what we call experience. 

[Sidenote: Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimateemotions. ]

If a poet could clarify the myths he begins with, so as to reachultimate scientific notions of nature and life, he would still bedealing with vivid feeling and with its imaginative expression. Theprosaic landscape before him would still be a work of art, painted onthe human brain by human reason. If he found that landscapeuninteresting, it would be because he was not really interested in life;if he found it dull and unpoetical, he would be manifesting his smallcapacity and childish whims. Tragic, fatal, intractable, he might wellfeel that the truth was; but these qualities have never been absent fromthat half-mythical world through which poets, for want of a rationaleducation, have hitherto wandered. A rational poet's vision would havethe same moral functions which myth was asked to fulfil, and fulfilledso treacherously; it would employ the same ideal faculties which mythexpressed in a confused and hasty fashion. More detail would have beenadded, and more variety in interpretation. To deal with so great anobject, and retain his mastery over it, a poet would doubtless need arobust genius. If he possessed it, and in transmuting all existencefalsified nothing, giving that picture of everything which humanexperience in the end would have drawn, he would achieve an idealresult. In prompting mankind to imagine, he would be helping them tolive. His poetry, without ceasing to be a fiction in its method andideality, would be an ultimate truth in its practical scope. It wouldpresent in graphic images the total efficacy of real things. Such apoetry would be more deeply rooted in human experience than is anycasual fancy, and therefore more appealing to the heart. Such a poetrywould represent more thoroughly than any formula the concrete burden ofexperience; it would become the most trustworthy of companions. Theimages it had worked out would confront human passion more intelligiblythan does the world as at present conceived, with its mechanism halfignored and its ideality half invented; they would represent vividly theuses of nature, and thereby make all natural situations seem so manyincentives to art. 

[Sidenote: An illustration. ]

Rational poetry is not wholly unknown. When Homer mentions an object, how does he render it poetical? First, doubtless, by the euphony of itsname or the sensuous glow of some epithet coupled with it. Sometimes, however, even this ornamental epithet is not merely sensuous; it is verylikely a patronymic, the name of some region or some mythical ancestor. In other words, it is a signal for widening our view and for conceivingthe object, not only vividly and with pause, but in an adequate historicsetting. Macbeth tells us that his dagger was "unmannerly breeched ingore. " Achilles would not have amused himself with such a metaphor, evenif breeches had existed in his day, but would rather have told us whoseblood, on other occasions, had stained the same blade, and perhaps whatfather or mother had grieved for the slaughtered hero, or what bravechildren remained to continue his race. Shakespeare's phrase isingenious and fanciful; it dazzles for a moment, but in the end it seemsviolent and crude. What Homer would have said, on the contrary, beingsimple and true, might have grown, as we dwelt upon it, always morenoble, pathetic, and poetical. Shakespeare, too, beneath his occasionalabsurdities of plot and diction, ennobles his stage with actual history, with life painted to the quick, with genuine human characters, politics, and wisdom; and surely these are not the elements that do least creditto his genius. In every poet, indeed, there is some fidelity to nature, mixed with that irrelevant false fancy with which poetry is sometimesidentified; and the degree in which a poet's imagination dominatesreality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. 

[Sidenote: Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion. ]

Before prosaic objects are descried, the volume and richness needful forpoetry lie in a blurred and undigested chaos; but after the common worldhas emerged and has called on prose to describe it, the same volume andrichness may be recovered; and a new and clarified poetry may arisethrough synthesis. Scope is a better thing than suggestion, and moretruly poetical. It has expressed what suggestion pointed to and felt inthe bulk: it possesses what was yearned for. A real thing, when all itspertinent natural associates are discerned, touches wonder, pathos, andbeauty on every side; the rational poet is one who, without feigninganything unreal, perceives these momentous ties, and presents hissubject loaded with its whole fate, missing no source of worth which isin it, no ideal influence which it may have. Homer remains, perhaps, thegreatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in howmany ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, andan equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel abouthim, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet theideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one couldonly attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describethem ingenuously; idealisation, to select from this reality what ispertinent to ultimate interests and can speak eloquently to the soul. 

CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

[Sidenote: Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world. ]

We have seen how arts founded on exercise and automatic self-expressiondevelop into music, poetry, and prose. By an indirect approach they cometo represent outer conditions, till they are interwoven in a life whichhas in some measure gone out to meet its opportunities and learned toturn them to an ideal use. We have now to see how man's reactive habitspass simultaneously into art in a wholly different region. Spontaneousexpression, such as song, comes when internal growth in an animal systemvents itself, as it were, by the way. At the same time animal economyhas playful manifestations concerned with outer things, such asburrowing or collecting objects. These practices are not lessspontaneous than the others, and no less expressive; but they seem moreexternal because the traces they leave on the environment are moreclearly marked. 

To change an object is the surest and most glorious way of changing aperception. A shift in posture may relieve the body, and in that waysatisfy, but the new attitude is itself unstable. Its pleasantness, like its existence, is transient, and scarcely is a movement executedwhen both its occasion and its charm are forgotten. Self-expression byexercise, in spite of its pronounced automatism, is therefore somethingcomparatively passive and inglorious. A man has hardly _done_ anythingwhen he has laughed or yawned. Even the inspired poet retains somethingof this passivity: his work is not his, but that of a restless, irresponsible spirit passing through him, and hypnotising him for itsown ends. Of the result he has no profit, no glory, and littleunderstanding. So the mystic also positively gloats on his ownnothingness, and puts his whole genuine being in a fanciedinstrumentality and subordination to something else. Far more virile andnoble is the sense of having actually done something, and left at leastthe temporary stamp of one's special will on the world. To chop a stick, to catch a fly, to pile a heap of sand, is a satisfying action; for thesand stays for a while in its novel arrangement, proclaiming to thesurrounding level that we have made it our instrument, while the flywill never stir nor the stick grow together again in all eternity. Ifthe impulse that has thus left its indelible mark on things is constantin our own bosom, the world will have been permanently improved andhumanised by our action. Nature cannot but be more favourable to thoseideas which have once found an efficacious champion. 

[Sidenote: Such effects fruitful. ]

Plastic impulses find in this way an immediate sanction in the sense ofvictory and dominion which they carry with them; it is so evident aproof of power in ourselves to see things and animals bent out of theirhabitual form and obedient instead to our idea. But a far weightiersanction immediately follows. Man depends on things for his experience, yet by automatic action he changes these very things so that it becomespossible that by his action he should promote his welfare. He may, ofcourse, no less readily precipitate his ruin. The animal is more subjectto vicissitudes than the plant, which makes no effort to escape them orto give chase to what it feeds upon. The greater perils of action, however, are in animals covered partly by fertility, partly byadaptability, partly by success. The mere possibility of success, in aworld governed by natural selection, is an earnest of progress. Sometimes, in impressing the environment, a man will improve it: whichis merely to say that a change may sometimes fortify the impulse whichbrought it about. As soon as this retroaction is perceived and the actis done with knowledge of its ensuing benefits, plastic impulse becomesart, and the world begins actually to change in obedience to reason. 

One respect, for instance, in which man depends on things is for theæsthetic quality of his perceptions. If he happens, by a twist of thehand, to turn a flowering branch into a wreath, thereby making it moreinteresting, he will have discovered a decorative art and initiatedhimself auspiciously into the practice of it. Experimentation mayfollow, and whenever the new form given to the object improvesit--_i. E. _, increases its interest for the eye--the experimenter willtriumph and will congratulate himself on his genius. The garland soarranged will be said to express the taste it satisfies; insight andreason will be mythically thought to have guided the work by which theyare sustained in being. It is no small harmony, however, that theyshould be sustained by it. The consonances man introduces into naturewill follow him wherever he goes. It will no longer be necessary thatnature should supply them spontaneously, by a rare adventitious harmonywith his demands. His new habit will habitually rear-range her chancearrangements, and his path will be marked by the beauties he has strewnit with. So long as the same plastic impulse continues operative it willbe accompanied by knowledge and criticism of its happy results. Self-criticism, being a second incipient artistic impulse, contrastingitself with the one which a work embodies, may to some extent modify thenext performance. If life is drawn largely into this deepening channel, physical proficiency and its ideal sanctions will develop more or lessharmoniously into what is called a school of art. 

[Sidenote: Magic authority of man's first creations. ]

The first felt utilities by which plastic instinct is sanctioned are ofcourse not distinctly æsthetic, much less distinctly practical; theyare magical. A stone cut into some human or animal semblance fascinatesthe savage eye much more than would a useful tool or a beautiful idol. The man wonders at his own work, and petrifies the miracle of his artinto miraculous properties in its product. Primitive art is incrediblyconservative; its first creations, having once attracted attention, monopolise it henceforth and nothing else will be trusted to work themiracle. It is a sign of stupidity in general to stick to physicalobjects and given forms apart from their ideal functions, as when achild cries for a broken doll, even if a new and better one is at handto replace it. Inert associations establish themselves, in such a case, with that part of a thing which is irrelevant to its value--its materialsubstance or perhaps its name. Art can make no progress in such asituation. A man remains incorrigibly unhappy and perplexed, cowed, andhelpless, because not intelligent enough to readjust his actions; hisidol must be the self-same hereditary stock, or at least it must havethe old sanctified rigidity and stare. Plastic impulse, as yet sporadic, is overwhelmed by a brute idolatrous awe at mere existence andactuality. What is, what has always been, what chance has associatedwith one person, alone seems acceptable or conceivable. 

[Sidenote: Art brings relief from idolatry. ]

Idolatry is by no means incident to art; art, on the contrary, is arelease from idolatry. A cloud, an animal, a spring, a stone, or thewhole heaven, will serve the pure idolater's purpose to perfection;these things have existence and a certain hypnotic power, so that he maymake them a focus for his dazed contemplation. When the mind takes togeneralities it finds the same fascination in Being or in the Absolute, something it needs no art to discover. The more indeterminate, immediate, and unutterable the idol is, the better it induces panicself-contraction and a reduction of all discourse to the infiniteintensity of zero. When idolaters pass from trying to evoke theAbsolutely Existent to apostrophising the sun or an ithyphallic bullthey have made an immense progress in art and religion, for now theiridols represent some specific and beneficent function in nature, something propitious to ideal life and to its determinate expression. Isaiah is very scornful of idols made with hands, because they have nophysical energy. He forgets that perhaps they represent something, andso have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never haveunless they too become representative and express some ideal. Isaiah'sconception of Jehovah, for instance, is itself a poetic image, the workof man's brain; and the innocent worship of it would not be idolatry, ifthat conception represented something friendly to human happiness and tohuman art. The question merely is whether the sculptor's image or theprophet's stands for the greater interest and is a more adequate symbolfor the good. The noblest art will be the one, whether plastic orliterary or dialectical, which creates figments most trulyrepresentative of what is momentous in human life. Similarly the leastidolatrous religion would be the one which used the most perfect art, and most successfully abstracted the good from the real. 

[Sidenote: Inertia in technique. ]

Conservatism rules also in those manufactures which are tributary toarchitecture and the smaller plastic arts. Utility makes small headwayagainst custom, not only when custom has become religion, but even whenit remains inert and without mythical sanction. To admit or trustanything new is to overcome that inertia which is a general law in thebrain no less than elsewhere, and which may be distinguished inreflection into a technical and a social conservatism. Technicalconservatism appears, for instance, in a man's handwriting, which is soseldom improved, even when admitted, perhaps, to be execrable. Everyartist has his tricks of execution, every school its hereditary, irrational processes. These refractory habits are to blame for the rareand inimitable quality of genius; they impose excellence on one man andrefuse it to a million. A happy physiological structure, by creating amannerism under the special circumstances favourable to expression, maylift a man, perhaps inferior in intelligence, to heights which noinsight can attain with inferior organs. As a voice is necessary forsinging, so a certain quickness of eye and hand is needed for goodexecution in the plastic arts. The same principle goes deeper. Conception and imagination are themselves automatic and run in grooves, so that only certain forms in certain combinations will ever suggestthemselves to a given designer. Every writer's style, too, howevervaried within limits, is single and monotonous compared with the idealpossibilities of expression. Genius at every moment is confined to theidiom it is creating. 

[Sidenote: Inertia in appreciation. ]

Social inertia is due to the same causes working in the community atlarge. The fancy, for instance, of building churches in the shape of across has largely determined Christian architecture. Builders wereprevented by a foregone suggestion in themselves and by their patrons'demands from conceiving any alternative to that convention. Earlypottery, they say, imitates wicker-work, and painted landscape was forages not allowed to exist without figures, although even the old mastersshow plainly enough in their backgrounds that they could love landscapefor its own sake. When one link with humanity has been rendered explicitand familiar, people assume that by no other means can humanity betouched at all; even if at the same time their own heart is expanding tothe highest raptures in a quite different region. The severer Greeksreprobated music without words; Saint Augustine complained of chantsthat rendered the sacred text unintelligible; the Puritans regardedelaborate music as diabolical, little knowing how soon some of theirdescendants would find religion in nothing else. A stupid conventionstill looks on material and mathematical processes as somehowdistressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificiallymechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away;whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as amongnatural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or sosafely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It isnot necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: theaction of an animal's limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove itto any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbalprejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all freshperception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrationaldecencies, make man's chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools'heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there andstart the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has aninfinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing sopersistently avoids the directions in which it might find mostsatisfaction. 

[Sidenote: Adventitious effects appreciated first. ]

Since construction grows rational slowly and by indirect pressure, wemay expect that its most superficial merits will be the firstappreciated. Ultimate beauty in a building would consist, of course, inresponding simultaneously to all the human faculties affected: to theeye, by the building's size, form, and colour; to the imagination, byits fitness and ideal expression. Of all grounds for admiration thosemost readily seized are size, elaboration, splendour of materials, anddifficulties or cost involved. Having built or dug in the conventionalway a man may hang before his door some trophy of battle or the chase, bearing witness to his prowess; just as people now, not thinking ofmaking their rooms beautiful, fill them with photographs of friends orplaces they have known, to suggest and reburnish in their minds theirinteresting personal history, which even they, unstimulated, might tendto forget. That dwelling will seem best adorned which contains mostadventitious objects; bare and ugly will be whatever is not concealed bysomething else. Again, a barbarous architect, without changing hismodel, may build in a more precious material; and his work will beadmired for the evidence it furnishes of wealth and wilfulness. As acommunity grows luxurious and becomes accustomed to such display, it maycome to seem strange and hideous to see a wooden plate or a pewterspoon. A beautiful house will need to be in marble and the sight ofplebeian brick will banish all satisfaction. 

Less irrational, and therefore less vulgar, is the wonder aroused bygreat bulk or difficulty in the work. Exertions, to produce a greatresult, even if it be material, must be allied to perseverance andintelligent direction. Roman bridges and aqueducts, for instance, gaina profound emotional power when we see in their monotonous arches asymbol of the mightiest enterprise in history, and in their decay anevidence of its failure. Curiosity is satisfied, historic imagination isstimulated, tragic reflection is called forth. We cannot refuseadmiration to a work so full of mind, even if no great plastic beautyhappens to distinguish it. It is at any rate beautiful enough, like thesea or the skeleton of a mountain. We may rely on the life it has madepossible to add more positive charms and clothe it with imaginativefunctions. Modern engineering works often have a similar value; theforce and intelligence they express merge in an æsthetic essence, andthe place they hold in a portentous civilisation lends them an almostepic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, hasbecome interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walkthrough the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. Acity, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill, and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least ascurious and delightful as sea-shells or birds' nests. The purpose ofimprovements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purposeof castles was military; but both may incidentally please thecontemplative mind by their huge forms and human associations. 

[Sidenote: Approach to beauty through useful structure. ]

Of the two approaches which barbaric architecture makes to beauty--onethrough ornamentation and the other through mass--the latter is ingeneral the more successful. An engineer fights with nature hand tohand: he is less easily extravagant than a decorator; he can hardly everafford to be absurd. He becomes accordingly more rapidly civilised andhis work acquires, in spite of itself, more rationality and a morepermanent charm. A self-sustaining structure, in art as in life, is theonly possible basis for a vital ideal. When the framework is determined, when it is tested by trial and found to stand and serve, it willgradually ingratiate itself with the observer; affinities it may have inhis memory or apperceptive habits will come to light; they will help himto assimilate the new vision and will define its æsthetic character. Whatever beauty its lines may have will become a permanent possessionand whatever beauties they exclude will be rejected by a faithfulartist, no matter how sorely at first they may tempt him. Not that theseexcluded beauties would not be really beautiful; like fashions, theywould truly please in their day and very likely would contain certainabsolute excellences of form or feeling which an attentive eye couldenjoy at any time. Yet if appended to a structure they have no functionin, these excellences will hardly impose themselves on the next builder. Being adventitious they will remain optional, and since fancy is quick, and exotic beauties are many, there will be no end to the variations, inendless directions, which art will undergo. Caprice will follow capriceand no style will be developed. 

[Sidenote: Failure of adapted styles. ]

A settled style is perhaps in itself no desideratum. A city that shouldbe a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of newinventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certaininterest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round andthere is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of theirglitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apartis usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtlymanners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quitegenuine; adaptations have to be introduced and every adaptation, thebolder it is, runs the greater risk of being extravagant. Nothing ismore pitiable than the attempts people make, who think they have anexquisite sensibility, to live in a house all of one period. Theconnoisseur, like an uncritical philosopher, boasts to have patched hisdwelling perfectly together, but he has forgotten himself, its egregiousinhabitant. Nor is he merely a blot in his own composition; his presencesecretly infects and denaturalises everything in it. Ridiculous himselfin such a setting, he makes it ridiculous too by his æsthetic pose andappreciations; for the objects he has collected or reproduced were onceused and prized in all honesty, when life and inevitable tradition hadbrought them forth, while now they are studied and exhibited, relics ofa dead past and evidences of a dead present. Historic remains andrestorations might well be used as one uses historic knowledge, to servesome living interest and equip the mind for the undertakings of thehour. An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. Ideas that have long been used may be used still, if they remain ideasand have not been congealed into memories. Incorporated into a designthat calls for them, traditional forms cease to be incongruous, as wordsthat still have a felt meaning may be old without being obsolete. Alldepends on men subserving an actual ideal and having so firm and genuinean appreciation of the past as to distinguish at once what is stillserviceable in it from what is already ghostly and dead. 

[Sidenote: Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural. ]

An artist may be kept true to his style either by ignorance of allothers or by love of his own. This fidelity is a condition of progress. When he has learned to appreciate whatever is æsthetically appreciablein his problem, he can go on to refine his construction, to ennoble, andfinally to decorate it. As fish, flesh, and fowl have specific forms, each more or less beautiful and adorned, so every necessary structurehas its specific character and its essential associations. Taking hiscue from these, an artist may experiment freely; he may emphasise thestructure in the classic manner and turn its lines into ornament, addingonly what may help to complete and unite its suggestions. Thispuritanism in design is rightly commended, but its opposite may beadmirable too. We may admit that nudity is the right garment for thegods, but it would hardly serve the interests of beauty to legislatethat all mortals should always go naked. The veil that conceals naturalimperfections may have a perfection of its own. Maxims in art arepernicious; beauty is here the only commandment. And beauty is a freenatural gift. When it has appeared, we may perceive that its influenceis rational, since it both expresses and fosters a harmony ofimpressions and impulses in the soul; but to take any mechanismwhatever, and merely because it is actual or necessary to insist that itis worth exhibiting, and that by divine decree it shall be pronouncedbeautiful, is to be quite at sea in moral philosophy. 

Beauty is adventitious, occasional, incidental, in human products noless than in nature. Works of art are automatic figments which naturefashions through man. It is impossible they should be wholly beautiful, as it is impossible that they should offer no foothold or seed-plot forbeauty at all. Beauty is everywhere potential and in a way pervasivebecause existence itself presupposes a modicum of harmony, first withinthe thing and then between the thing and its environment. Of thisenvironment the observer's senses are in this case an important part. Man can with difficulty maintain senses quite out of key with thestimuli furnished by the outer world. They would then be uselessburdens to his organism. On the other side, even artificial structuresmust be somehow geometrical or proportional, because only suchstructures hold physically together. Objects that are to be esteemed byman must further possess or acquire some function in his economy;otherwise they would not be noticed nor be so defined as to berecognisable. Out of these physical necessities beauty may grow; but anadjustment must first take place between the material stimulus and thesense it affects. Beauty is something spiritual and, being such, itrests not on the material constitution of each existence taken apart, but on their conspiring ideally together, so that each furthers theother's endeavour. Structure by itself is no more beautiful thanexistence by itself is good. They are only potentialities or conditionsof excellence. 

[Sidenote: Structures designed for display. ]

An architect, when his main structure is uninteresting, may haverecourse to a subsidiary construction. The façade, or a part of it, orthe interior may still have a natural form that lends itself toelaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore oreven conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirelybeautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be givenconcerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false frontin itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that itovertops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quiteanother material. What we admire is not so much a façade as a triumphalgateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world, wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home. This was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public, to whose taste this flattering embassy was addressed. However our moralsense may judge the matter, it is clear that two separate monumentsoccupied the architect in such cases, if indeed inside and outside wereactually designed by the same hand. Structure may appear in eachindependently and may be frankly enough expressed. The most beautifulfaçades, even if independent of their building, are buildingsthemselves, and since their construction is decorative there is thegreater likelihood that their decoration should be structural. 

In relation to the house, however, the façade in such an extreme casewould be an abstract ornament; and so, though the ornament be structuralwithin its own lines, we have reverted to the style of building whereconstruction is one thing and decoration another. Applied ornament hasan indefinite range and there would be little profit in reasoning aboutit. Philosophy can do little more at this point than expose thefallacies into which dogmatic criticism is apt to fall. Everything istrue decoration which truly adorns, and everything adorns which enrichesthe impression and pleasantly entertains the eye. There is a decorativeimpulse as well as a sense for decoration. As I sit idle my stick makesmeaningless marks upon the sand; or (what is nearer to the usual originof ornament) I make a design out of somebody's initials, or symbolisefantastically something lying in my thoughts. We place also one thingupon another, the better to see and to think of two things at once. 

[Sidenote: Appeal made by decoration. ]

To love decoration is to enjoy synthesis: in other words, it is to havehungry senses and unused powers of attention. This hunger, when itcannot well be fed by recollecting things past, relishes a profusion ofthings simultaneous. Nothing is so much respected by unintelligentpeople as elaboration and complexity. They are simply dazed and overawedat seeing at once so much more than they can master. To overwhelm thesenses is, for them, the only way of filling the mind. It takescultivation to appreciate in art, as in philosophy, the consummate valueof what is simple and finite, because it has found its pure function andultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately andsilently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to allultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. Whatastonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousandsuggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitelyglutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put tothe inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbariancraves the assault of a myriad sensations together, and feels repleteand comfortable when a sort of infinite is poured into him without idealmediation. As ideal mediation is another name for intelligence, so it isthe condition of elegance. Intelligence and elegance naturally existtogether, since they both spring from a subtle sense for absent andeventual processes. They are sustained by experience, by nicety inforetaste and selection. Before ideality, however, is developed, volumeand variety must be given bodily or they cannot be given at all. At thatearlier stage a furious ornamentation is the chief vehicle for beauty. 

[Sidenote: Its natural rights. ]

That the ornate may be very beautiful, that in fact what is to becompletely beautiful needs to be somehow rich, is a fact of experiencewhich further justifies the above analysis. For sensation is the matterof ideas; all representation is such only in its function; in itsexistence it remains mere feeling. Decoration, by stimulating thesenses, not only brings a primary satisfaction with it, independent ofany that may supervene, but it furnishes an element of effect which nohigher beauty can ever render unwelcome or inappropriate, since anyhigher beauty, in moving the mind, must give it a certain sensuous andemotional colouring. Decoration is accordingly an independent art, to bepractised for its own sake, in obedience to elementary plasticinstincts. It is fundamental in design, for everything structural orsignificant produces in the first instance some sensuous impression andfigures as a spot or pattern in the field of vision. The fortunatearchitect is he who has, for structural skeleton in his work, a form initself decorative and beautiful, who can carry it out in a beautifulmaterial, and who finally is suffered to add so much decoration as theeye may take in with pleasure, without losing the expression andlucidity of the whole. 

It is impossible, however, to imagine beforehand what these elementsshould be or how to combine them. The problem must exist before itssolution can be found. The forms of good taste and beauty which a mancan think of or esteem are limited by the scope of his previousexperience. It would be impossible to foresee or desire a beauty whichhad not somehow grown up of itself and been recognised receptively. Asatisfaction cannot be conceived ideally when neither its organ nor itsoccasion has as yet arisen. That ideal conception, to exist, would haveto bring both into play. The fine arts are butter to man's daily bread;there is no conceiving or creating them except as they spring out ofsocial exigencies. Their types are imposed by utility: theirornamentation betrays the tradition that happens to envelop anddiversify them; their expression and dignity are borrowed from thecompany they keep in the world. 

[Sidenote: Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture. ]

The Greek temple, for instance, if we imagine it in its glory, with allits colour and furniture, was a type of human art at its best, wheredecoration, without in the least restricting itself, took naturally anexquisitely subordinate and pervasive form: each detail had its ownsplendour and refinement, yet kept its place in the whole. Structure anddecoration were alike traditional and imposed by ulterior practical orreligious purposes; yet, by good fortune and by grace of thatrationality which unified Greek life, they fell together easily into aharmony such as imagination could never have devised had it been invitedto decree pleasure-domes for non-existent beings. Had the Greek godsbeen hideous, their images and fable could not so readily havebeautified the place where they were honoured; and had the structuraltheme and uses of the temple been more complicated, they would not havelent themselves so well to decoration without being submerged beneathit. 

[Sidenote: Relations of the two in Gothic art. ]

In some ways the ideal Gothic church attained a similar perfection, because there too the structure remained lucid and predominant, while itwas enriched by many necessary appointments--altars, stalls, screens, chantries--which, while really the _raison d'être_ of the whole edifice, æsthetically regarded, served for its ornaments. It may be doubted, however, whether Gothic construction was well grounded enough in utilityto be a sound and permanent basis for beauty; and the extremeinstability of Gothic style, the feverish, inconstancy of architectsstraining after effects never, apparently, satisfactory when achieved, shows that something was wrong and artificial in the situation. Thestructure, in becoming an ornament, ceased to be anything else and couldbe discarded by any one whose fancy preferred a different image. 

For this reason a building like the cathedral of Amiens, where astructural system is put through consistently, is far from representingmediæval art in its full and ideal essence; it is rather an incidentalachievement, a sport in which an adventitious interest is, for a moment, emphasised overwhelmingly. Intelligence here comes to the fore, and asort of mathematical virtuosity: but it was not mathematical virtuositynor even intelligence to which, in Christian art, the leading rôleproperly belonged. What structural elucidation did for churcharchitecture was much like what scholastic elucidation did for churchdogma: it insinuated a logic into the traditional edifice which was farfrom representing its soul or its genuine value. The dialecticintroduced might be admirable in itself, in its lay and abstruserationality; but it could not be applied to the poetic material in handwithout rendering it absurd and sterile. The given problem wasscientifically carried out, but the given problem was itself fantastic. To vault at such heights and to prop that vault with external buttresseswas a gratuitous undertaking. The result was indeed interesting, theingenuity and method exhibited were masterly in their way; yet theresult was not proportionate in beauty to the effort required; it wasafter all a technical and a vain triumph. 

[Sidenote: The result here romantic. ]

The true magic of that very architecture lay not in its intelligiblestructure but in the bewildering incidental effects which that structurepermitted. The part in such churches is better than the symmetricalwhole; often incompleteness and accretions alone give grace orexpression, to the monument. A cross vista where all is wonder, a sidechapel where all is peace, strike the key-note here; not thatpunctilious and wooden repetition of props and arches, as a builder'smodel might boast to exhibit them. Perhaps the most beautiful Gothicinteriors are those without aisles, if what we are considering is theirproportion and majesty; elsewhere the structure, if perceived at all, istoo artificial and strange to be perceived intuitively and to have theglow of a genuine beauty. There is an over-ingenious mechanism, redeemedby its colour and the thousand intervening objects, when these have notbeen swept away. Glazed and painted as Gothic churches were meant to be, they were no doubt exceedingly gorgeous. When we admire their structuralscheme we are perhaps nursing an illusion like that which sentimentalclassicists once cherished when they talked about the purity of whitemarble statues and the ideality of their blank and sightless eyes. Whatwe treat as a supreme quality may have been a mere means to mediævalbuilders, and a mechanical expedient: their simple hearts were set onmaking their churches, for God's glory and their own, as large, as high, and as rich as possible. After all, an uninterrupted tradition attachedthem to Byzantium; and it was the sudden passion for stained glass andthe goldsmith's love of intricate fineness--which the Saracens also hadshown--that carried them in a century from Romanesque to flamboyant. Thestructure was but the inevitable underpinning for the desired display. If these sanctuaries, in their spoliation and ruin, now show us theiradmirable bones, we should thank nature for that rational skeleton, imposed by material conditions on an art which in its life-time wasgoaded on only by a pious and local emulation, and wished at all coststo be sumptuous and astonishing. 

[Sidenote: The mediæval artist. ]

It was rather in another direction that groping mediæval art reached itsmost congenial triumphs. That was an age, so to speak, of epidemicprivacy; social contagion was irresistible, yet it served only to makeeach man's life no less hard, narrow, and visionary than that of everyone else. Like bees in a hive, each soul worked in its separate cell bythe same impulse as every other. Each was absorbed in saving itselfonly, but according to a universal prescription. This isolation inunanimity appears in those patient and childlike artists who copied eachhis leaf or flower, or imagined each his curious angels and devils, taking what was told of them so much to heart that his rendering becamedeeply individual. The lamp of sacrifice--or perhaps rather ofignorance--burned in every workshop; much labour was wasted inforgetfulness of the function which the work was to perform, yet acertain pathos and expression was infused into the detail, on which allinvention and pride had to be lavished. Carvings and statues atimpossible elevations, minute symbols hidden in corners, the choice forarchitectural ornament of animal and vegetable forms, copied asattentively and quaintly as possible--all this shows how abstractedlythe artist surrendered himself to the given task. He dedicated hisgenius like the widow's mite, and left the universal composition toProvidence. 

Nor was this humility, on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial. The Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. Afresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Neverwas spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloisteredgarden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from along trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a workwas to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure andthe function lay here, in this private revelation, in this playfuldialogue between a bit of nature and a passing mood. When a Greekworkman cut a volute or a moulding, he was not asked to be a poet; hewas merely a scribe, writing out what some master had composed beforehim. The spirit of his art, if that was called forth consciously atall, could be nothing short of intelligence. Those lines and none other, he would say to himself, are requisite and sufficient: to do less wouldbe unskilful, to do more would be perverse. But the mediæval craftsmanwas irresponsible in his earnestness. The whole did not concern him, forthe whole was providential and therefore, to the artist, irrelevant. Hewas only responsible inwardly, to his casual inspiration, to hisindividual model, and his allotted block of stone. With these he carriedon, as it were, an ingenuous dialectic, asking them questions by a blowof the hammer, and gathering their oracular answers experimentally fromthe result. Art, like salvation, proceeded by a series of littlemiracles; it was a blind work, half stubborn patience, half unmeritedgrace. If the product was destined to fill a niche in the celestialedifice, that was God's business and might be left to him: whatconcerned the sculptor was to-day's labour and joy, with the shrewdwisdom they might bring after them. 

[Sidenote: Representation introduced. ]

Gothic ornament was accordingly more than ornament; it was sculpture. Tothe architect sculpture and painting are only means of variegating asurface; light and shade, depth and elaboration, are thereby secured andaid him in distributing his masses. For this reason geometrical orhighly conventionalised ornament is all the architect requires. If hisdecorators furnish more, if they insist on copying natural forms orillustrating history, that is their own affair. Their humanity willdoubtless give them, as representative artists, a new claim on humanregard, and the building they enrich in their pictorial fashion willgain a new charm, just as it would gain by historic associations or bythe smell of incense clinging to its walls. When the arts superposetheir effects the total impression belongs to none of them inparticular; it is imaginative merely or in the broadest sense poetical. So the monumental function of Greek sculpture, and the interpretationsit gave to national myths, made every temple a storehouse of poeticmemories. In the same way every great cathedral became a piousstory-book. Construction, by admitting applied decoration, offers asplendid basis and background for representative art. It is in theirdecorative function that construction and representation meet; they areable to conspire in one ideal effect by virtue of the common appealwhich they unwittingly make to the senses. If construction were notdecorative it could never ally itself imaginatively to decoration; anddecoration in turn would never be willingly representative if the formswhich illustration requires were not decorative in themselves. 

[Sidenote: Transition to illustration. ]

Illustration has nevertheless an intellectual function by which itdiverges altogether from decoration and even, in the narrowest senseof the word, from art: for the essence of illustration lies neitherin use nor in beauty. The illustrator's impulse is to reproduceand describe given objects. He wishes in the first place to forceobservers--overlooking all logical scruples--to call his work by thename of its subject matter; and then he wishes to inform them further, through his representation, and to teach them to apprehend the realobject as, in its natural existence, it might never have beenapprehended. His first task is to translate the object faithfully intohis special medium; his second task, somewhat more ambitious, is so topenetrate into the object during that process of translation that thistranslation may become at the same time analytic and imaginative, inthat it signalises the object's structure and emphasises its idealsuggestions. In such reproduction both hand and mind are called upon toconstruct and build up a new apparition; but here construction hasceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in order to becomerepresentative. The æsthetic element in art has begun to recede beforethe intellectual; and sensuous effects, while of course retained andstill studied, seem to be impressed into the service of ideas. 

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

[Sidenote: Psychology of imitation. ]

Imitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seenthat it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellowmind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interestingof plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but itsprevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state ofhuman biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In amotor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about toexecute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea, apparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received someimpulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what isseen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these twophenomena, separable logically and divided in Cartesian psychology by anartificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for naturalhistory, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist forconsciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involvesmotion nor constitutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulteriorevents which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies itat the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. Ifthe image involved no bodily attitude and prophesied no action it wouldrefer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Evenif it _meant_ to refer to something ulterior it would, under thosecircumstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connectedit with any object which could support or verify its asseverations. Itmight _feel_ significant, like a dream, but its significance would bevain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of eventsthat logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all. This needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebodeis not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas inthemselves assert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to thesoil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. Forthe idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which theulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; sothat the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materiallyto the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally. 

[Sidenote: Sustained sensation involves reproduction. ]

In some such fashion we may come to conceive how imitative art is simplythe perfection and fulfilment of sensation. The act of apperception inwhich a sensation is reflected upon and understood is already aninternal reproduction. The object is retraced and gone over in themind, not without quite perceptible movements in the limbs, which sway, as it were, in sympathy with the object's habit. Presumably thisincipient imitation of the object is the physical basis for apperceptionitself; the stimulus, whatever devious courses it may pursue, reconstitutes itself into an impulse to render the object again, as weacquire the accent which we often hear. This imitation sometimes has thehappiest results, in that the animal fights with one that fights, andruns after one that runs away from him. All this happens initially, aswe may still observe in ourselves, quite without thought of eventualprofit; although if chase leads to contact, and contact stimulateshunger or lust, movements important for preservation will quicklyfollow. Such eventual utilities, however, like all utilities, aresupported by a prodigious gratuitous vitality, and long before apractical or scientific use of sensation is attained its artistic forceis in full operation. If art be play, it is only because all life isplay in the beginning. Rational adjustments to truth and to benefitsupervene only occasionally and at a higher level. 

[Sidenote: Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a newmaterial. ]

Imitation cannot, of course, result in a literal repetition of theobject that suggests it. The copy is secondary; it does not iterate themodel by creating a second object on the same plane of reality, butreproduces the form in a new medium and gives it a different function. In these latter circumstances lies the imitative essence of the secondimage: for one leaf does not imitate another nor is each twin theother's copy. Like sensibility, imitation remodels a given being so thatit becomes, in certain formal respects, like another being in itsenvironment. It is a response and an index, by which note is taken of asituation or of its possible developments. When a man involuntarilyimitates other men, he does not become those other persons; he is simplymodified by their presence in a manner that allows him to conceive theirwill and their independent existence, not without growing similar tothem in some measure and framing a genuine representation of them in hissoul. He enacts what he understands, and his understanding consistsprecisely in knowing that he is re-enacting something which has itscollateral existence elsewhere in nature. An element in the percipientrepeats the total movement and tendency of the person perceived. Theimitation, though akin to what it imitates, and reproducing it, lies ina different medium, and accordingly has a specific individuality andspecific effects. Imitation is far more than similarity, nor does itsideal function lie in bringing a flat and unmeaning similarity about. Ithas a representative and intellectual value because in reproducing theforms of things it reproduces them in a fresh substance to a newpurpose. 

If I imitate mankind by following their fashions, I add one to themillion and improve nothing: but if I imitate them under properinhibitions and in the service of my own ends, I really understand them, and, by representing what I do not bodily become, I preserve and enlargemy own being and make it relevant ideally to what it physically dependsupon. Assimilation is a way of drifting through the flux or of lettingit drift through oneself; representation, on the contrary, is aprinciple of progress. To grow by accumulating passions and fancies isat best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra mightbe. But to make the accretions which time brings to your beingrepresentative of what you are not, and do not wish to be, is to grow indignity. It is to be wise and prepared. It is to survey a universewithout ceasing to be a mind. 

[Sidenote: Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge. ]

A product of imitative sensibility is accordingly on a higher plane thanthe original existences it introduces to one another--the ignorantindividual and the unknown world. Imitation in softening the body intophysical adjustment stimulates the mind to ideal representation. This isthe case even when the stimulus is a contagious influence or habit, though the response may then be slavish and the representation vague. Sheep jumping a wall after their leader doubtless feel that they are notalone; and though their action may have no purpose it probably has afelt sanction and reward. Men also think they invoke an authority whenthey appeal to the _quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus_, and aconscious unanimity is a human if not a rational joy. When, however, thestimulus to imitation is not so pervasive and touches chiefly a singlesense, when what it arouses is a movement of the hand or eye retracingthe object, then the response becomes very definitely cognitive. Itconstitutes an observation of fact, an acquaintance with a thing'sstructure amounting to technical knowledge; for such a survey leavesbehind it a power to reconstitute the process it involved. It leaves anefficacious idea. In an idle moment, when the information thus acquiredneed not be put to instant use, the new-born faculty may work itself outspontaneously. The sound heard is repeated, the thing observed issketched, the event conceived is acted out in pantomime. Then imitationrounds itself out; an uninhibited sensation has become an instinct tokeep that sensation alive, and plastic representation has begun. 

[Sidenote: How the artist is inspired and irresponsible. ]

The secret of representative genius is simple enough. All hangs onintense, exhaustive, rehearsed sensation. To paint is a way of lettingvision work; nor should the amateur imagine that while he lackstechnical knowledge he can have in his possession all the ideal burdenof an art. His reaction will be personal and adventitious, and he willmiss the artist's real inspiration and ignore his genuine successes. Youmay instruct a poet about literature, but his allegiance is to emotion. You may offer the sculptor your comparative observations on style andtaste; he may or may not care to listen, but what he knows and loves isthe human body. Critics are in this way always one stage behind orbeyond the artist; their operation is reflective and his is direct. Intransferring to his special medium what he has before him his whole mindis lost in the object; as the marksman, to shoot straight, looks at themark. How successful the result is, or how appealing to human nature, hejudges afterwards, as an outsider might, and usually judges ill; sincethere is no life less apt to yield a broad understanding for humanaffairs or even for the residue of art itself, than the life of a maninspired, a man absorbed, as the genuine artist is, in his own travail. But into this travail, into this digestion and reproduction of the thingseen, a critic can hardly enter. Having himself the ulterior office ofjudge, he must not hope to rival nature's children in their sportivenessand intuition. 

In an age of moral confusion, these circumstances may lead to a strangeshifting of rôles. The critic, feeling that something in the artist hasescaped him, may labour to put himself in the artist's place. If hesucceeded, the result would only be to make him a biographer; he wouldbe describing in words the very intuitions which the artist had renderedin some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is notcriticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for. Its function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder, to deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this mostæsthetic element in a work's operation does not borrow its value fromthe possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions. If he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; buthis work's value would still consist entirely in its power to propagatesuch good effects, whether they were already present in him or not. Allcriticism is therefore moral, since it deals with benefits and theirrelative weight. Psychological penetration and reconstructed biographymay be excellent sport; if they do not reach historic truth they may atleast exercise dramatic talent. Criticism, on the other hand, is aserious and public function; it shows the race assimilating theindividual, dividing the immortal from the mortal part of a soul. 

[Sidenote: Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered. ]

Representation naturally repeats those objects which are mostinteresting in themselves. Even the medium, when a choice is possible, is usually determined by the sort of objects to be reproduced. Instruments lose their virtue with their use and a medium ofrepresentation, together with its manipulation, is nothing but avehicle. It is fit if it makes possible a good rendition. Allaccordingly hangs on what life has made interesting to the senses, onwhat presents itself persuasively to the artist for imitation; andliving arts exist only while well-known, much-loved things imperativelydemand to be copied, so that their reproduction has some honestnon-æsthetic interest for mankind. Although subject matter is often saidto be indifferent to art, and an artist, when his art is secondary, maythink of his technique only, nothing is really so poor and melancholy asart that is interested in itself and not in its subject. If any remnantof inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from asurviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literaturethat calls itself purely æsthetic is in truth prurient; without thishalf-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would havehad nothing to marshall or to sustain them. 

[Sidenote: Public interests determine the subject of art, and thesubject the medium. ]

A good way to understand schools and styles and to appreciate theirrespective functions and successes is to consider first what region ofnature preoccupied the age in which they arose. Perception can cut theworld up into many patterns, which it isolates and dignifies with thename of things. It must distinguish before it can reproduce and theobjects which attention distinguishes are of many strange sorts. Thusthe single man, the hero, in his acts of prowess or in his readiness, may be the unit and standard in discourse. It will then be his imagethat will preoccupy the arts. For such a task the most adequate art isevidently sculpture, for sculpture is the most complete of imitations. In no other art can apprehension render itself so exhaustively and withsuch recuperative force. Sculpture retains form and colour, with allthat both can suggest, and it retains them in their integrity, leavingthe observer free to resurvey them from any point of view and drink intheir quality exhaustively. 

[Sidenote: Reproduction by acting ephemera. ]

The movement and speech which are wanting, the stage may be called uponto supply; but it cannot supply them without a terrible sacrifice, forit cannot give permanence to it expression. Acting is for this reason aninferior art, not perhaps in difficulty and certainly not in effect, butinferior in dignity, since the effort of art is to keep what isinteresting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal, and this idealis half frustrated if the representation is itself fleeting and therendering has no firmer subsistence than the inspiration that gave itbirth. By making himself, almost in his entirety, the medium of his art, the actor is morally diminished, and as little of him remains in hiswork, when this is good, as of his work in history. He lends himselfwithout interest, and after being Brutus at one moment and Falstaff atanother, he is not more truly himself. He is abolished by his creations, which nevertheless cannot survive him. 

[Sidenote: High demands of sculpture. ]

Being so adequate a rendering of its object, sculpture demands a perfectmastery over it and is correspondingly difficult. It requires taste andtraining above every other art; for not only must the material form bereproduced, but its motor suggestions and moral expression must berendered; things which in the model itself are at best transitory, andwhich may never be found there if a heroic or ideal theme is proposed. The sculptor is obliged to have caught on the wing attitudes momentarilyachieved or vaguely imagined; yet these must grow firm and harmoniousunder his hand. Nor is this enough; for sculpture is more dependent thanother arts on its model. If the statue is to be ideal, _i. E. _, if it isto express the possible motions and vital character of its subject, themodel must itself be refined. Training must have cut in the flesh thoselines which are to make the language and eloquence of the marble. Trivial and vulgar forms, such as modern sculpture abounds in, reflectan undisciplined race of men, one in which neither soul nor body hasdone anything well, because the two have done nothing together. Theframe has remained gross or awkward, while the face has taken on a tenseexpression, betraying loose and undignified habits of mind. To carvesuch a creature is to perpetuate a caricature. The modern sculptor isstopped short at the first conception of a figure; if he gives it itscostume, it is grotesque; if he strips it, it is unmeaning and pitiful. 

[Sidenote: It is essentially obsolete. ]

Greece was in all these respects a soil singularly favourable tosculpture. The success there achieved was so conspicuous that twothousand years of essential superfluity have not availed to extirpatethe art. Plastic impulse is indeed immortal, and many a hand, evenwithout classic example, would have fallen to modelling. In the middleages, while monumental sculpture was still rudely reminiscent, ornamental carving arose spontaneously. Yet at every step theexperimental sculptor would run up against disaster. What could be seenin the streets, while it offered plenty of subjects, offered none thatcould stimulate his talent. His patrons asked only for illustration andapplied ornament; his models offered only the smirk and sad humour of astunted life. Here and there his statues might attain a certainsweetness and grace, such as painting might perfectly well haverendered; but on the whole sculpture remained decorative and infantile. 

The Renaissance brought back technical freedom and a certaininspiration, unhappily a retrospective and exotic one. The art cutpraiseworthy capers in the face of the public, but nobody could teachthe public itself to dance. If several great temperaments, under theauspices of fashion, could then call up a magic world in which bodiesstill spoke a heroic language, that was a passing dream. Society couldnot feed such an artificial passion, nor the schools transmit anarbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in socialconditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nudecontinued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetoricalstatues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroicsculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly andconfesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails torescue an art from laboured insignificance when it has no steadyingfunction in the moral world, and must waver between caprice andconvention. Where something modest and genuine peeped out was inportraiture, and also at times in that devotional sculpture in woodwhich still responded to a native interest and consequently kept itssincerity and colour. Pious images may be feeble in the extreme, butthey have not the weakness of being merely æsthetic. The purveyor ofchurch wares has a stated theme; he is employed for a purpose; and if hehas enough technical resource his work may become truly beautiful: whichis not to say that he will succeed if his conceptions are withoutdignity or his style without discretion. There are good _Materdolorosas_; there is no good _Sacred Heart_. 

[Sidenote: When men see groups and backgrounds they are naturalpainters. ]

It may happen, however, that people are not interested in subjects thatdemand or allow reproduction in bulk. The isolated figure or simplegroup may seem cold apart from its natural setting. In rendering anaction you may need to render its scene, if it is the circumstance thatgives it value rather than the hero. You may also wish to trace out theaction through a series of episodes with many figures. In the lattercase you might have recourse to a bas-relief, which, although durable, is usually a thankless work; there is little in it that might not beconveyed in a drawing with distinctness. As some artists, like MichaelAngelo, have carried the sculptor's spirit into painting, many more, when painting is the prevalent and natural art, have produced carvedpictures. It may be said that any work is essentially a picture which isconceived from a single quarter and meant to be looked at only in onelight. Objects in such a case need not be so truly apperceived andappropriated as they would have to be in true sculpture. One aspectsuffices: the subject presented is not so much constructed as dreamt. 

[Sidenote: Evolution of painting. ]

The whole history of painting may be strung on this single thread--theeffort to reconstitute impressions, first the dramatic impression andthen the sensuous. A summary and symbolic representation of things isall that at first is demanded; the point is to describe somethingpictorially and recall people's names and actions. It is characteristicof archaic painting to be quite discursive and symbolic; each figure istreated separately and stuck side by side with the others upon a goldenground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist;only those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual namesor chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really moresensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision insuspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, andis employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorativesplendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may lateracquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; Titians, Murillos, or Turners are _colourists in representation_, and their canvases wouldnot be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing humanor mystical or atmospheric. A stained-glass window or a wall of tilescan outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration, accordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may fromtime to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols withwhich it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what theirobject contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a groupwill be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separatefigures may still be, their attitudes and relations will reconstitutethe dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language;it will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symboliccrucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is;a plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a realcrucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium andmake dramatic truth sensuous truth also. 

[Sidenote: Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached. ]

To work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its passionateassociations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we callemotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant andprior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting wehave not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of thesensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaicpainting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the proseof design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour andtechnical feeling--that expression of candour and satisfaction which maypervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness anddislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting mustproceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impressionis almost restored, but so restored that it contains all thearticulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting asTintoretto's or Paolo Veronese's records impressions as a cultivatedsense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies thesensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligentexpression of all those mechanisms, those situations and passions, withwhich the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots, meant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience, meant to outshine the reality. 

In order to reconstitute the image we may take an abstractrepresentation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and itsscope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, headds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observantrendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects theirtexture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From arepresentation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figuresby furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, theartist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of awhole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to losetheir separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or treesin a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by theirinterplay, and shining by a light which is mutually reflected. 

[Sidenote: Essence of landscape-painting. ]

When this transformation is complete the painting is essentially alandscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may evendepict an interior, like Velasquez's Meninas. But the observer, even inthe presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by themedium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens tohold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature putsbefore him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffusedmaterial substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits ofsubstance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally andby virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. Ifthis physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and moralityinvolved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus aprofound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours itsobjects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this activeself-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, thesentiment of the landscape. 

Perception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they arereadily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first acertain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture, so that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still bedistinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in themgoes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individualover. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objectsthreaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, andprofound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces, that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There ceaseto be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences innature. 

[Sidenote: Its threatened dissolution. ]

An artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a caseunits and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. Aman, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, maywell feel his mind's articulate grammar losing its authority, but thatgrammar must evidently be reasserted if from the immediate he everwishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists forthe mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have notso far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animalwithin us to absolve us from human distinctions. 

Moreover, it is not quite true that the immediate has no real diversity. It evidently suggests the ideal terms into which we divide it, and itsustains our apprehension itself, with all the diversities this maycreate. To what I call right and left, light and darkness, a realopposition must correspond in any reality which is at all relevant to myexperience; so that I should fail to integrate my impression, and toabsorb the only reality that concerns me, if I obliterated those pointsof reference which originally made the world figured and visible. Spaceremains absolutely dark, for all the infinite light which we may declareto be radiating through it, until this light is concentrated in one bodyor reflected from another; and a landscape cannot be so much as vaporousunless mists are distinguishable in it, and through them some knownobject which they obscure. In a word, landscape is always, in spite ofitself, a collection of particular representations. It is a mass ofhieroglyphics, each the graphic symbol for some definite human sensationor reaction; only these symbols have been extraordinarily enriched andare fused in representation, so that, like instruments in an orchestra, they are merged in the voluminous sensation they constitute together, asensation in which, for attentive perception, they never cease to exist. 

[Sidenote: Reversion to pure decorative design. ]

Impatience of such control as reality must always exercise overrepresentation may drive painting back to a simpler function. When adesigner, following his own automatic impulse, conventionalises a form, he makes a legitimate exchange, substituting fidelity to hisapperceptive instincts for fidelity to his external impressions. When alandscape-painter, revolting against a tedious discursive style, studiesonly masses of colour and abstract systems of lines, he retainssomething in itself beautiful, although no longer representative, perhaps, of anything in nature. A pure impression cannot beillegitimate; it cannot be false until it pretends to representsomething, and then it will have ceased to be a simple feeling, sincesomething in it will refer to an ulterior existence, to which it oughtto conform. This ulterior existence (since intelligence is lifeunderstanding its own conditions) can be nothing in the end but whatproduced that impression. Sensuous life, however, has its value withinitself; its pleasures are not significant. Representative art isaccordingly in a sense secondary; beauty and expression begin fartherback. They are present whenever the outer stimulus agreeably strikes anorgan and thereby arouses a sustained image, in which the consciousnessof both stimulation and reaction is embodied. An abstract design inoutline and colour will amply fulfil these conditions, if sensuous andmotor harmonies are preserved in it, and if a sufficient sweep and depthof reaction is secured. Stained-glass, tapestry, panelling, and in ameasure all objects, by their mere presence and distribution, have adecorative function. When sculpture and painting cease to berepresentative they pass into the same category. Decoration in turnmerges in construction; and so all art, like the whole Life of Reason, is joined together at its roots, and branches out from the vitalprocesses of sensation and reaction. Diversity arises centrifugally, according to the provinces explored and the degree of mutual checkingand control to which the various extensions are subjected. 

[Sidenote: Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable. ]

Organisation, both internal and adaptive, marks the dignity andauthority which each art may have attained; but this advantage, important as is must seem to a philosopher or a legislator, is not whatthe artist chiefly considers. His privilege is to remain capricious inhis response to the full-blown universe of science and passion, and tobe still sensuous in his highest imaginings. He cares for structure onlywhen it is naturally decorative. He thinks gates were invented for thesake of triumphal arches, and forests for the sake of poets and deer. Representation, with all it may represent, means to him simply what itsays to his emotions. In all this the artist, though in one sensefoolish, in another way is singularly sane; for, after all, everythingmust pass through the senses, and life, whatever its complexity, remainsalways primarily a feeling. 

To render this feeling delightful, to train the senses to their highestpotency and harmony in operation, is to begin life well. Were thefoundations defective and subject to internal strain there could belittle soundness in the superstructure. Æsthetic activity is far frombeing a late or adventitious ornament in human economy; it is anelementary factor, the perfection of an indispensable vehicle. Wheneverscience or morals have done violence to sense they have decreed theirown dissolution. To sense a rebellious appeal will presently beaddressed, and the appeal will go against rash and empty dogmas. A keenæsthetic sensibility and a flourishing art mark the puberty of reason. Fertility comes later, after a marriage with the practical world. But asensuous ripening is needed first, such as myth and ornament betray intheir exuberance. A man who has no feeling for feeling and no felicityin expression will hardly know what he is about in his furtherundertakings. He will have missed his first lesson in livingspontaneously and well. Not knowing himself, he will be all hearsay andpedantry. He may fall into the superstition of supposing that what giveslife value can be something external to life. Science and morals arethemselves arts that express natural impulses and find experimentalrewards. This fact, in betraying their analogy to æsthetic activity, enables them also to vindicate their excellence. 

CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

[Sidenote: Art is subject to moral censorship. ]

It is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry art. Either itsinfluence seems to them too slight to excite alarm, or their systems aretoo lax to subject anything to censure which has the least glamour orideality about it. Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflictbetween science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a harmonybetween morals and art. Moral harmonies, however, are not given; theyhave to be made. The curse of superstition is that it justifies andprotracts their absence by proclaiming their invisible presence. Ofcourse a rational religion could not conflict with a rational science;and similarly an art that was wholly admirable would necessarily playinto the hands of progress. But as the real difficulty in the formercase lies in saying what religion and what science would be trulyrational, so here the problem is how far extant art is a benefit tomankind, and how far, perhaps, a vice or a burden. 

[Sidenote: Its initial or specific excellence is not enough. ]

That art is _prima facie_ and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It isa spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the functionof ethics is precisely to revise _prima facie_ judgments of this kindand to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far asthey can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire, wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples topour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which æsthetic values areallowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a point of greattheoretic importance, not only for art but for general philosophy. Ifart is excluded altogether or given only a trivial rôle, perhaps as anecessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging humanarts is ascetic or post-rational. It pretends to guide life from aboveand from without; it has discredited human nature and mortal interests, and has thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a partialexpression of that humanity which it strives to transcend. If, on thecontrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if thepoetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own completejustification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational or, rather, non-existent; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus belong tothis school. 

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians andæsthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. Intoxication is asad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drownyourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhatfooled by yesterday's joys and somewhat lost in to-day's vacancy. Theman who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying toelude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexedat conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his ownincompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, heproclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revengingitself is to excommunicate the world. 

It is in the world, however, that art must find its level. It mustvindicate its function in the human commonwealth. What direct acceptablecontribution does it make to the highest good? What sacrifices, if any, does it impose? What indirect influence does it exert on otheractivities? Our answer to these questions will be our apology for art, our proof that art belongs to the Life of Reason. 

[Sidenote: All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth. ]

When moralists deprecate passion and contrast it with reason, they doso, if they are themselves rational, only because passion is so often"guilty, " because it works havoc so often in the surrounding world andleaves, among other ruins, "a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed. " Werethere no danger of such after-effects within and without the sufferer, no passion would be reprehensible. Nature is innocent, and so are allher impulses and moods when taken in isolation; it is only on meetingthat they blush. If it be true that matter is sinful, the logic of thistruth is far from being what the fanatics imagine who commonly propoundit. Matter is sinful only because it is insufficient, or is wastefullydistributed. There is not enough of it to go round among the legion ofhungry ideas. To embody or enact an idea is the only way of making itactual; but its embodiment may mutilate it, if the material or thesituation is not propitious. So an infant may be maimed at birth, whenwhat injures him is not being brought forth, but being brought forth inthe wrong manner. Matter has a double function in respect to existence;essentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it incidentally. Mensadly misbegotten, or those who are thwarted at every step by the times'penury, may fall to thinking of matter only by its defect, ignoring thematerial ground of their own aspirations. All flesh will seem to themweak, except that forgotten piece of it which makes their own spiritualstrength. Every impulse, however, had initially the same authority asthis censorious one, by which the others are now judged and condemned. 

[Sidenote: But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent. ]

If a practice can point to its innocence, if it can absolve itself fromconcern for a world with which it does not interfere, it has justifieditself to those who love it, though it may not yet have recommendeditself to those who do not. Now art, more than any other considerablepursuit, more even than speculation, is abstract and inconsequential. Born of suspended attention, it ends in itself. It encourages sensuousabstraction, and nothing concerns it less than to influence the world. Nor does it really do so in a notable degree. Social changes do notreach artistic expression until after their momentum is acquired andtheir other collateral effects are fully predetermined. Scarcely is aschool of art established, giving expression to prevailing sentiment, when this sentiment changes and makes that style seem empty andridiculous. The expression has little or no power to maintain themovement it registers, as a waterfall has little or no power to bringmore water down. Currents may indeed cut deep channels, but they cannotfeed their own springs--at least not until the whole revolution ofnature is taken into account. 

In the individual, also, art registers passions without stimulatingthem; on the contrary, in stopping to depict them it steals away theirlife; and whatever interest and delight it transfers to their expressionit subtracts from their vital energy. This appears unmistakably inerotic and in religious art. Though the artist's avowed purpose here beto arouse a practical impulse, he fails in so far as he is an artist intruth; for he then will seek to move the given passions only throughbeauty, but beauty is a rival object of passion in itself. Lasciviousand pious works, when beauty has touched them, cease to give out what iswilful and disquieting in their subject and become altogetherintellectual and sublime. There is a high breathlessness about beautythat cancels lust and superstition. The artist, in taking the latter forhis theme, renders them innocent and interesting, because he looks atthem from above, composes their attitudes and surroundings harmoniously, and makes them food for the mind. Accordingly it is only in a refinedand secondary stage that active passions like to amuse themselves withtheir æsthetic expression. Unmitigated lustiness and raw fanaticism willsnarl at pictures. Representations begin to interest when crude passionsrecede, and feel the need of conciliating liberal interests and addingsome intellectual charm to their dumb attractions. Thus art, while byits subject it may betray the preoccupations among which it springs up, embodies a new and quite innocent interest. 

[Sidenote: It is liberal. ]

This interest is more than innocent, it is liberal. Not being concernedwith material reality so much as with the ideal, it knows neitherulterior motives nor quantitative limits; the more beauty there is themore there can be, and the higher one artist's imagination soars thebetter the whole flock flies. In æsthetic activity we have accordinglyone side of rational life; sensuous experience is dominated there asmechanical or social realities ought to be dominated in science andpolitics. Such dominion comes of having faculties suited to theirconditions and consequently finding an inherent satisfaction in theiroperation. The justification of life must be ultimately intrinsic; andwherever such self-justifying experience is attained, the ideal has beenin so far embodied. To have realised it in a measure helps us to realiseit further; for there is a cumulative fecundity in those goods whichcome not by increase of force or matter, but by a better organisationand form. 

[Sidenote: and typical of perfect activity. ]

Art has met, on the whole, with more success than science or morals. Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experienceas yet can offer; and the most lauded geniuses have been poets, as ifpeople felt that those seers, rather than men of action or thought, hadlived ideally and known what was worth knowing. That such should be thecase, if the fact be admitted, would indeed prove the rudimentary stateof human civilisation. The truly comprehensive life should be thestatesman's, for whom perception and theory might be expressed andrewarded in action. The ideal dignity of art is therefore merelysymbolic and vicarious. As some people study character in novels, andtravel by reading tales of adventure, because real life is not yet sointeresting to them as fiction, or because they find it cheaper to maketheir experiments in their dreams, so art in general is a rehearsal ofrational living, and recasts in idea a world which we have no presentmeans of recasting in reality. Yet this rehearsal reveals the glories ofa possible performance better than do the miserable experiments untilnow executed on the reality. 

When we consider the present distracted state of government andreligion, there is much relief in turning from them to almost any art, where what is good is altogether and finally good, and what is bad is atleast not treacherous. When we consider further the senseless rivalries, the vanities, the ignominy that reign in the "practical" world, howdoubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is anexcellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambitionis consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it! It isindeed so in art; for we must not import into its blameless labours thebickerings and jealousies of criticism. Critics quarrel with othercritics, and that is a part of philosophy. With an artist no sane manquarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes. As nature, being full of seeds, rises into all sorts of crystallisations, eachhaving its own ideal and potential life, each a nucleus of order and ahabitation for the absolute self, so art, though in a medium poorer thanpregnant matter, and incapable of intrinsic life, generates a semblanceof all conceivable beings. What nature does with existence, art doeswith appearance; and while the achievement leaves us, unhappily, muchwhere we were before in all our efficacious relations, it entirelyrenews our vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form hasthe same inner justification that all life has in the real world. As noinsect is without its rights and every cripple has his dream ofhappiness, so no artistic fact, no child of imagination, is without itssmall birthright of beauty. In this freer element, competition does notexist and everything is Olympian. Hungry generations do not tread downthe ideal but only its spokesmen or embodiments, that have cast in theirlot with other material things. Art supplies constantly to contemplationwhat nature seldom affords in concrete experience--the union of life andpeace. 

[Sidenote: The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society. ]

[Sidenote: Plato's strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths. ]

The ideal, however, would not come down from the empyrean and beconceived unless somebody's thought were absorbed in the conception. Artactually segregates classes of men and masses of matter to serve itsspecial interests. This involves expense; it impedes some possibleactivities and imposes others. On this ground, from the earliest timesuntil our own, art has been occasionally attacked by moralists, who havefelt that it fostered idolatry or luxury or irresponsible dreams. Ofthese attacks the most interesting is Plato's, because he was an artistby temperament, bred in the very focus of artistic life and discussion, and at the same time a consummate moral philosopher. His ætheticsensibility was indeed so great that it led him, perhaps, into arelative error, in that he overestimated the influence which art canhave on character and affairs. Homer's stories about the gods canhardly have demoralised the youths who recited them. No religion hasever given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without thegrossest immorality. Yet these shocking representations have not had abad effect on believers. The deity was opposed to their own vices; thoseit might itself be credited with offered no contagious example. In spiteof the theologians, we know by instinct that in speaking of the gods weare dealing in myths and symbols. Some aspect of nature or some law oflife, expressed in an attribute of deity, is what we really regard, andto regard such things, however sinister they may be, cannot but chastenand moralise us. The personal character that such a function wouldinvolve, if it were exercised willingly by a responsible being, issomething that never enters our thoughts. No such painful image comes toperplex the plain sense of instinctive, poetic religion. To give moralimportance to myths, as Plato tended to do, is to take them far tooseriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves theyfloat in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood andgrow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or ametaphor. The same æsthetic sterility appears at the other end of thescale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in"Punch and Judy" a shocking proof of British brutality, destined furtherto demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal may pass. That blacktragedy reflects not very pretty manners, but puppets exercise nosuasion over men. 

[Sidenote: His deeper moral objections. ]

To his supersensitive censure of myths Plato added strictures upon musicand the drama: to excite passions idly was to enervate the soul. Onlymartial or religious strains should be heard in the ideal republic. Furthermore, art put before us a mere phantom of the good. Trueexcellence was the function things had in use; the horseman knew thebridle's value and essence better than the artisan did who put ittogether; but a painted bridle would lack even this relation to utility. It would rein in no horse, and was an impertinent sensuous reduplicationof what, even when it had material being, was only an instrument and ameans. 

This reasoning has been little understood, because Platonists so soonlost sight of their master's Socratic habit and moral intent. Theyturned the good into an existence, making it thereby unmeaning. Plato'sdialectic, if we do not thus abolish the force of its terms, isperfectly cogent: representative art has indeed no utility, and, if thegood has been identified with efficiency in a military state, it canhave no justification. Plato's Republic was avowedly a fallen state, achurch militant, coming sadly short of perfection; and the joy whichPlato as much as any one could feel in sensuous art he postponed, as aman in mourning might, until life should be redeemed from baseness. 

[Sidenote: Their rightness. ]

Never have art and beauty received a more glowing eulogy than is impliedin Plato's censure. To him nothing was beautiful that was not beautifulto the core, and he would have thought to insult art--the remodelling ofnature by reason--if he had given it a narrower field than all practice. As an architect who had fondly designed something impossible, or whichmight not please in execution, would at once erase it from the plan andabandon it for the love of perfect beauty and perfect art, so Platowished to erase from pleasing appearance all that, when its operationwas completed, would bring discord into the world. This was done in theultimate interest of art and beauty, which in a cultivated mind areinseparable from the vitally good. It is mere barbarism to feel that athing is æsthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hatefulto perception. Things partially evil or partially ugly may have to bechosen under stress of unfavourable circumstances, lest some worse thingcome; but if a thing were ugly it would _thereby_ not be wholly good, and if it were _altogether_ good it would perforce be beautiful. 

To criticise art on moral grounds is to pay it a high compliment byassuming that it aims to be adequate, and is addressed to acomprehensive mind. The only way in which art could disallow suchcriticism would be to protest its irresponsible infancy, and admit thatit was a more or less amiable blatancy in individuals, and not _art_ atall. Young animals often gambol in a delightful fashion, and men alsomay, though hardly when they intend to do so. Sportive self-expressioncan be prized because human nature contains a certain elasticity andmargin for experiment, in which waste activity is inevitable and may beprecious: for this license may lead, amid a thousand failures, to somereal discovery and advance. Art, like life, should be free, since bothare experimental. But it is one thing to make room for genius and torespect the sudden madness of poets through which, possibly, some godmay speak, and it is quite another not to judge the result by rationalstandards. The earth's bowels are full of all sorts of rumblings; whichof the oracles drawn thence is true can be judged only by the light ofday. If an artist's inspiration has been happy, it has been so becausehis work can sweeten or ennoble the mind and because its total effectwill be beneficent. Art being a part of life, the criticism of art is apart of morals. 

[Sidenote: Importance of æsthetic alternatives. ]

Maladjustments in human society are still so scandalous, they touchmatters so much more pressing than fine art, that maladjustments in thelatter are passed over with a smile, as if art were at any rate anirresponsible miraculous parasite that the legislator had better notmeddle with. The day may come, however, if the state is ever reduced toa tolerable order, when questions of art will be the most urgentquestions of morals, when genius at last will feel responsible, and thetwist given to imagination will seem the most crucial thing in life. Under a thin disguise, the momentous character of imaginative choiceshas already been fully recognised by mankind. Men have passionatelyloved their special religions, languages, and manners, and preferreddeath to a life flowering in any other fashion. In justifying thisattachment forensically, with arguments on the low level of men's namedand consecrated interests, people have indeed said, and perhaps come tobelieve, that their imaginative interests were material interests atbottom, thinking thus to give them more weight and legitimacy; whereasin truth material life itself would be nothing worth, were it not, inits essence and its issue, ideal. 

It was stupidly asserted, however, that if a man omitted the prescribedceremonies or had unauthorised dreams about the gods, he would lose hisbattles in this world and go to hell in the other. He who runs can seethat these expectations are not founded on any evidence, on anyobservation of what actually occurs; they are obviously a _mirage_arising from a direct ideal passion, that tries to justify itself byindirection and by falsehoods, as it has no need to do. We all readfacts in the way most congruous with our intellectual habit, and whenthis habit drives us to effulgent creations, absorbing and expressingthe whole current of our being, it not merely biasses our reading ofthis world but carries us into another world altogether, which we positinstead of the real one, or beside it. 

Grotesque as the blunder may seem by which we thus introduce our poetictropes into the sequence of external events or existences, the blunderis intellectual only; morally, zeal for our special rhetoric may not beirrational. The lovely Phoebus is no fact for astronomy, nor does hestand behind the material sun, in some higher heaven, physicallysuperintending its movements; but Phoebus is a fact in his own region, atoken of man's joyful piety in the presence of the forces that reallycondition his welfare. In the region of symbols, in the world of poetry, Phoebus has his inalienable rights. Forms of poetry are forms of humanlife. Languages express national character and enshrine particular waysof seeing and valuing events. To make substitutions and extensions inexpression is to give the soul, in her inmost substance, a somewhat newconstitution. A method of apperception is a spontaneous variation inmind, perhaps the origin of a new moral species. 

The value apperceptive methods have is of course largely representative, in that they serve more or less aptly to dominate the order of eventsand to guide action; but quite apart from this practical value, expressions possess a character of their own, a sort of vegetative life, as languages possess euphony. Two reports of the same fact may beequally trustworthy, equally useful as information, yet they may embodytwo types of mental rhetoric, and this diversity in genius may be ofmore intrinsic importance than the raw fact it works upon. Thenon-representative side of human perception may thus be the mostmomentous side of it, because it represents, or even constitutes, theman. After all, the chief interest we have in things lies in what we canmake of them or what they can make of us. There is consequently nothingfitted to colour human happiness more pervasively than art does, nor toexpress more deeply the mind's internal habit. In educating theimagination art crowns all moral endeavour, which from the beginning isa species of art, and which becomes a fine art more completely as itworks in a freer medium. 

[Sidenote: The importance of æsthetic goods varies with temperaments. ]

How great a portion of human energies should be spent on art and itsappreciation is a question to be answered variously by various personsand nations. There is no ideal _à priori_; an ideal can but express, ifit is genuine, the balance of impulses and potentialities in a givensoul. A mind at once sensuous and mobile will find its appropriateperfection in studying and reconstructing objects of sense. Itsrationality will appear chiefly on the plane of perception, to renderthe circle of visions which makes up its life as delightful as possible. For such a man art will be the most satisfying, the most significantactivity, and to load him with material riches or speculative truths orprofound social loyalties will be to impede and depress him. Theirrational is what does not justify itself in the end; and the bornartist, repelled by the soberer and bitterer passions of the world, mayjustly call them irrational. They would not justify themselves in hisexperience; they make grievous demands and yield nothing in the endwhich is intelligible to him. His picture of them, if he be a dramatist, will hardly fail to be satirical; fate, frailty, illusion will be hisconstant themes. If his temperament could find political expression, hewould minimise the machinery of life and deprecate any calculatedprudence. He would trust the heart, enjoy nature, and not frown tooangrily on inclination. Such a Bohemia he would regard as an ideal worldin which humanity might flourish congenially. 

[Sidenote: The æsthetic temperament requires tutelage. ]

A puritan moralist, before condemning such an infantile paradise, shouldremember that a commonwealth of butterflies actually exists. It is notany inherent wrongness in such an ideal that makes it unacceptable, butonly the fact that human butterflies are not wholly mercurial and thateven imperfect geniuses are but an extreme type in a society whoseguiding ideal is based upon a broader humanity than the artistrepresents. Men of science or business will accuse the poet of folly, on the very grounds on which he accuses them of the same. Each will seemto the other to be obeying a barren obsession. The statesman orphilosopher who should aspire to adjust their quarrel could do so onlyby force of intelligent sympathy with both sides, and in view of thecommon conditions in which they find themselves. What ought to be doneis that which, when done, will most nearly justify itself to allconcerned. Practical problems of morals are judicial and politicalproblems. Justice can never be pronounced without hearing the partiesand weighing the interests at stake. 

[Sidenote: Æsthetic values everywhere interfused. ]

A circumstance that complicates such a calculation is this: æestheticand other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally;they are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything. Æsthetic sensibility colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance, and modifies every product of human labour. Consequently the love ofbeauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsically, or as aconstituent part of life more or less to be insisted upon; it has tojustify itself also as an influence. A hostile influence is the mostodious of things. The enemy himself, the alien creature, lies in his owncamp, and in a speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place andlearn to think of him charitably; but his spirit in our own souls islike a private tempter, a treasonable voice weakening our allegiance toour own duty. A zealot might allow his neighbours to be damned inpeace, did not a certain heretical odour emitted by them infect thesanctuary and disturb his own dogmatic calm. In the same way practicalpeople might leave the artist alone in his oasis, and even grant him apittance on which to live, as they feed the animals in a zoologicalgarden, did he not intrude into their inmost conclave and vitiate theabstract cogency of their designs. It is not so much art in its ownfield that men of science look askance upon, as the love of glitter andrhetoric and false finality trespassing upon scientific ground; whilemen of affairs may well deprecate a rooted habit of sensuous absorptionand of sudden transit to imaginary worlds, a habit which must work havocin their own sphere. In other words, there is an element of poetryinherent in thought, in conduct, in affection; and we must ask ourselveshow far this ingredient is an obstacle to their proper development. 

[Sidenote: They are primordial. ]

The fabled dove who complained, in flying, of the resistance of the air, was as wise as the philosopher who should lament the presence andinfluence of sense. Sense is the native element and substance ofexperience; all its refinements are still parts of it existentially; andwhatever excellence belongs specifically to sense is a preliminaryexcellence, a value antecedent to any which thought or action canachieve. Science and morals have but representative authority; they areprinciples of ideal synthesis and safe transition; they are bridgesfrom moment to moment of sentience. Their function is indeed universaland their value overwhelming, yet their office remains derivative orsecondary, and what they serve to put in order has previously itsintrinsic worth. An æsthetic bias is native to sense, being indeednothing but its form and potency; and the influence which æsthetichabits exercise on thought and action should not be regarded as anintrusion to be resented, but rather as an original interest to be builtupon and developed. Sensibility contains the distinctions which reasonafterward carries out and applies; it is sensibility that involves andsupports primitive diversities, such as those between good and bad, hereand there, fast and slow, light and darkness. There are complicationsand harmonies inherent in these oppositions, harmonies which æstheticfaculty proceeds to note; and from these we may then construct others, not immediately presentable, which we distinguish by attributing them toreason. Reason may well outflank and transform æsthetic judgments, butcan never undermine them. Its own materials are the perceptions which iffull and perfect are called beauties. Its function is to endow the partsof sentience with a consciousness of the system in which they lie, sothat they may attain a mutual relevance and ideally support one another. But what could relevance or support be worth if the things to bebuttressed were themselves worthless? It is not to organise pain, ugliness, and boredom that reason can be called into the world. 

[Sidenote: To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them. ]

When a practical or scientific man boasts that he has laid asideæsthetic prejudices and is following truth and utility with a singleeye, he can mean, if he is judicious, only that he has not yielded toæsthetic preference after his problem was fixed, nor in an arbitrary andvexatious fashion. He has not consulted taste when it would have been inbad taste to do so. If he meant that he had rendered himself altogetherinsensible to æsthetic values, and that he had proceeded to organiseconduct or thought in complete indifference to the beautiful, he wouldbe simply proclaiming his inhumanity and incompetence. A rightobservance of æsthetic demands does not obstruct utility nor logic; forutility and logic are themselves beautiful, while a sensuous beauty thatran counter to reason could never be, in the end, pleasing to anexquisite sense. Æsthetic vice is not favourable to æsthetic faculty: itis an impediment to the greatest æsthetic satisfactions. And so when byyielding to a blind passion for beauty we derange theory and practice, we cut ourselves off from those beauties which alone could havesatisfied our passion. What we drag in so obstinately will bring but acheap and unstable pleasure, while a double beauty will thereby be lostor obscured--first, the unlooked-for beauty which a genuine and stablesystem of things could not but betray, and secondly the coveted beautyitself, which, being imported here into the wrong context, will berendered meretricious and offensive to good taste. If a jewel worn onthe wrong finger sends a shiver through the flesh, how disgusting mustnot rhetoric be in diplomacy or unction in metaphysics!

[Sidenote: They flow naturally from perfect function. ]

The poetic element inherent in thought, affection, and conduct is priorto their prosaic development and altogether legitimate. Clear, well-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primarycreative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At everystage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered foræsthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythmare at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested byæsthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And longafter these initial forms have disowned their sensuous values, andsuffered a wholly dialectical expansion or analysis, mathematicalobjects again fall under the æsthetic eye, and surprise the senses bytheir emotional power. A mechanical system, such as astronomy in oneregion has already unveiled, is an inexhaustible field for æstheticwonder. Similarly, in another sphere, sensuous affinity leads tofriendship and love, and makes us huddle up to our fellows and feeltheir heart-beats; but when human society has thereupon established alegal and moral edifice, this new spectacle yields new imaginativetransports, tragic, lyric, and religious. Æsthetic values everywhereprecede and accompany rational activity, and life is, in one aspect, always a fine art; not by introducing inaptly æsthetic vetoes oræsthetic flourishes, but by giving to everything a form which, implyinga structure, implies also an ideal and a possible perfection. Thisperfection, being felt, is also a beauty, since any process, though itmay have become intellectual or practical, remains for all that a vitaland sentient operation, with its inherent sensuous values. Whatever isto be representative in import must first be immediate in existence;whatever is transitive in operation must be at the same time actual inbeing. So that an æsthetic sanction sweetens all successful living;animal efficiency cannot be without grace, nor moral achievement withouta sensible glory. 

[Sidenote: Even inhibited functions, when they fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties. ]

These vital harmonies are natural; they are neither perfect norpreordained. We often come upon beauties that need to be sacrificed, aswe come upon events and practical necessities without number that aretruly regrettable. There are a myriad conflicts in practice and inthought, conflicts between rival possibilities, knocking inopportunelyand in vain at the door of existence. Owing to the initialdisorganisation of things, some demands continually prove to beincompatible with others arising no less naturally. Reason in such casesimposes real and irreparable sacrifices, but it brings a stableconsolation if its discipline is accepted. Decay, for instance, is amoral and æsthetic evil; but being a natural necessity it can become thebasis for pathetic and magnificent harmonies, when once imagination isadjusted to it. The hatred of change and death is ineradicable whilelife lasts, since it expresses that self-sustaining organisation in acreature which we call its soul; yet this hatred of change and death isnot so deeply seated in the nature of things as are death and changethemselves, for the flux is deeper than the ideal. Discipline may attuneour higher and more adaptable part to the harsh conditions of being, andthe resulting sentiment, being the only one which can be maintainedsuccessfully, will express the greatest satisfactions which can bereached, though not the greatest that might be conceived or desired. Tobe interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, ahappier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdomdiscovers these possible accommodations, as circumstances impose them;and education ought to prepare men to accept them. 

[Sidenote: He who loves beauty must chasten it. ]

It is for want of education and discipline that a man so often insistspetulantly on his random tastes, instead of cultivating those whichmight find some satisfaction in the world and might produce in him somepertinent culture. Untutored self-assertion may even lead him to denysome fact that should have been patent, and plunge him into needlesscalamity. His Utopias cheat him in the end, if indeed the barbaroustaste he has indulged in clinging to them does not itself lapse beforethe dream is half formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven onlyto find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. Theodicies thatwere to demonstrate an absolute cosmic harmony have turned the universeinto a tyrannous nightmare, from which we are glad to awake again inthis unintentional and somewhat tractable world. Thus the fancies ofeffeminate poets in violating science are false to the highest art, andthe products of sheer confusion, instigated by the love of beauty, turnout to be hideous. A rational severity in respect to art simply weedsthe garden; it expresses a mature æsthetic choice and opens the way tosupreme artistic achievements. To keep beauty in its place is to makeall things beautiful. 

CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

[Sidenote: Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened. ]

Dogmatism in matters of taste has the same status as dogmatism in otherspheres. It is initially justified by sincerity, being a systematicexpression of a man's preferences; but it becomes absurd when its basisin a particular disposition is ignored and it pretends to have anabsolute or metaphysical scope. Reason, with the order which in everyregion it imposes on life, is grounded on an animal nature and has noother function than to serve the same; and it fails to exercise itsoffice quite as much when it oversteps its bounds and forgets whom it isserving as when it neglects some part of its legitimate province andserves its master imperfectly, without considering all his interests. 

Dialectic, logic, and morals lose their authority and become inept ifthey trespass upon the realm of physics and try to disclose existences;while physics is a mere idea in the realm of poetic meditation. So thenotorious diversities which human taste exhibits do not becomeconflicts, and raise no moral problem, until their basis or theirfunction has been forgotten, and each has claimed a right to assertitself exclusively. This claim is altogether absurd, and we might failto understand how so preposterous an attitude could be assumed byanybody did we not remember that every young animal thinks himselfabsolute, and that dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative sideof greed and courage in the brute. The brute cannot surrender hisappetites nor abdicate his primary right to dominate his environment. What experience and reason may teach him is merely how to make hisself-assertion well balanced and successful. In the same way taste isbound to maintain its preferences but free to rationalise them. After aman has compared his feelings with the no less legitimate feelings ofother creatures, he can reassert his own with more complete authority, since now he is aware of their necessary ground in his nature, and oftheir affinities with whatever other interests his nature enables him torecognise in others and to co-ordinate with his own. 

[Sidenote: Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widelybased. ]

A criterion of taste is, therefore, nothing but taste itself in its moredeliberate and circumspect form. Reflection refines particularsentiments by bringing them into sympathy with all rational life. Thereis consequently the greatest possible difference in authority betweentaste and taste, and while delight in drums and eagle's feathers isperfectly genuine and has no cause to blush for itself, it cannot becompared in scope or representative value with delight in a symphony oran epic. The very instinct that is satisfied by beauty prefers onebeauty to another; and we have only to question and purge our æstheticfeelings in order to obtain our criterion of taste. This criterion willbe natural, personal, autonomous; a circumstance that will give itauthority over our own judgment--which is all moral science is concernedabout--and will extend its authority over other minds also, in so far astheir constitution is similar to ours. In that measure what is a genuineinstance of reason in us, others will recognise for a genuine expressionof reason in themselves also. 

[Sidenote: Different æsthetic endowments may be compared in quantity orforce. ]

Æsthetic feeling, in different people, may make up a different fractionof life and vary greatly in volume. The more nearly insensible a man isthe more incompetent he becomes to proclaim the values which sensibilitymight have. To beauty men are habitually insensible, even while they areawake and rationally active. Tomes of æsthetic criticism hang on a fewmoments of real delight and intuition. It is in rare and scatteredinstants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced forhabitual comfort to remembering her past favours. An æsthetic glow maypervade experience, but that circumstance is seldom remarked; it figuresonly as an influence working subterraneously on thoughts and judgmentswhich in themselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only whenthe æsthetic ingredient becomes predominant do we exclaim, Howbeautiful! Ordinarily the pleasures which formal perception gives remainan undistinguished part of our comfort or curiosity. 

[Sidenote: Authority of vital over verbal judgments]

Taste is formed in those moments when æsthetic emotion is massive anddistinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments then put intowords, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constituteprejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all otherbeauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequentmay amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youthin these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their earlyimpressions more systematically and find confirmations of them invarious quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use newcategories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our firstmasters, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeplystirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we thendiscovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of æstheticlife may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquentappreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a giftedfriend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature;and then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously inferiorin volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take hisjudgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar ofall our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations, especially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes themauthoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hangall our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days andshape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive. 

A race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a seasonof love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has apre-eminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgmentsto duller peoples. We may accordingly listen with reverence to a Greekjudgment on that subject, expecting that what might seem to us wrongabout it is the expression of knowledge and passion beyond our range; itwill suffice that we learn to live in the world of beauty, instead ofmerely studying its relics, for us to understand, for instance, thatimitation is a fundamental principle in art, and that any rationaljudgment on the beautiful must be a moral and political judgment, enveloping chance æsthetic feelings and determining their value. Whatmost German philosophers, on the contrary, have written about art andbeauty has a minimal importance: it treats artificial problems in agrammatical spirit, seldom giving any proof of experience orimagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry isbetter than lay opinion; it may reveal, of course, some petty jealousyor some partial incapacity, because a special gift often carries with itcomplementary defects in apprehension; yet what is positive in suchjudgments is founded on knowledge and avoids the romancing into whichlitterateurs and sentimentalists will gladly wander. The specific valuesof art are technical values, more permanent and definite than theadventitious analogies on which a stray observer usually bases hisviews. Only a technical education can raise judgments on musicalcompositions above impertinent auto-biography. The Japanese know thebeauty of flowers, and tailors and dressmakers have the best sense forthe fashions. We ask them for suggestions, and if we do not always taketheir advice, it is not because the fine effects they love are notgenuine, but because they may not be effects which we care to produce. 

[Sidenote: Tastes differ also in purity or consistency. ]

This touches a second consideration, besides the volume and vivacity offeeling, which enters into good taste. What is voluminous may beinwardly confused or outwardly confusing. Excitement, though on thewhole and for the moment agreeable, may verge on pain and may be, whenit subsides a little, a cause of bitterness. A thing's attractions maybe partly at war with its ideal function. In such a case what, in ourhaste, we call a beauty becomes hateful on a second view, and accordingto the key of our dissatisfaction we pronounce that effect meretricious, harsh, or affected. These discords appear when elaborate things areattempted without enough art and refinement; they are essentially in badtaste. Rudimentary effects, on the contrary, are pure, and though we maythink them trivial when we are expecting something richer, their defectis never intrinsic; they do not plunge us, as impure excitements do, into a corrupt artificial conflict. So wild-flowers, plain chant, or ascarlet uniform are beautiful enough; their simplicity is a positivemerit, while their crudity is only relative. There is a touch ofsophistication and disease in not being able to fall back on such thingsand enjoy them thoroughly, as if a man could no longer relish a glass ofwater. Your true epicure will study not to lose so genuine a pleasure. Better forego some artificial stimulus, though that, too, has its charm, than become insensible to natural joys. Indeed, ability to revert toelementary beauties is a test that judgment remains sound. 

Vulgarity is quite another matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirtyhand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric withoutcogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things weshould have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind ofdishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may be excellent inisolation, so that an untrained or torpid mind will be at a loss tounderstand the critic's displeasure. Oftentimes barbaric art almostsucceeds, by dint of splendour, in banishing the sense of confusion andabsurdity; for everything, even reason, must bow to force. Yet theimpression remains chaotic, and we must be either partly inattentive orpartly distressed. Nothing could show better than this alternative howmechanical barbaric art is. Driven by blind impulse or tradition, theartist has worked in the dark. He has dismissed his work without havingquite understood it or really justified it to his own mind. It is ratherhis excretion than his product. Astonished, very likely, at his ownfertility, he has thought himself divinely inspired, little knowing thatclear reason is the highest and truest of inspirations. Other men, observing his obscure work, have then honoured him for profundity; andso mere bulk or stress or complexity have produced a mystical wonder bywhich generation after generation may be enthralled. Barbaric art ishalf necromantic; its ascendancy rests in a certain measure onbewilderment and fraud. 

To purge away these impurities nothing is needed but quickenedintelligence, a keener spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate, expression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to thevarious solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he willthereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, lethim pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefyhim; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejectingand forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction hemust disengage it from the contrary intent, and so he must either purifyhis object or leave it a mass of confused promptings. Promptingsessentially demand to be carried out, and when once an idea has becomearticulate it is not enriched but destroyed if it is still identifiedwith its contrary. Any complete expression of a barbarous theme will, therefore, disengage its incompatible elements and turn it into a numberof rational beauties. 

[Sidenote: They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal. ]

When good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgidmedley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live insociety. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, buteach finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of otherbeings, on whose co-operation it depends. Good taste, besides beinginwardly clear, has to be outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours anddissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an immortalembodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free fromcontradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situationpropitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal varywhich is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can beultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. Itsubsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of allfurther earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed theinalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever thatform is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, andthat eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. Acriterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes toeducate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, itmust represent the interests over which it would preside. 

There are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties whichnothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many oncesuggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone andevaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world isthe destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution, death in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has itsbereavements of this kind. A complete mastery of existence achieved atone moment gives no warrant that it will be sustained or achieved againat the next. The achievement may have been perfect; nature will not onthat account stop to admire it. She will move on, and the meaning whichwas read so triumphantly in her momentary attitude will not fit her newposture. Like Polonius's cloud, she will always suggest some new ideal, because she has none of her own. 

In lieu of an ideal, however, nature has a constitution, and this, whichis a necessary ground for ideals, is what it concerns the ideal toreckon with. A poet, spokesman of his full soul at a given juncture, cannot consider eventualities or think of anything but the message he issent to deliver, whether the world can then hear it or not. God, he mayfeel sure, understands him, and in the eternal the beauty he sees andloves immortally justifies his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, critics mustview his momentary ebullition from another side. They do not come tojustify the poet in his own eyes; he amply relieves them, of such afunction. They come only to inquire how significant the poet'sexpressions are for humanity at large or for whatever public headdresses. They come to register the social or representative value ofthe poet's soul. His inspiration may have been an odd cerebral rumbling, a perfectly irrecoverable and wasted intuition; the exquisite quality itdoubtless had to his own sense is now not to the purpose. A work of artis a public possession; it is addressed to the world. By taking on amaterial embodiment, a spirit solicits attention and claims some kinshipwith the prevalent gods. Has it, critics should ask, the affinitiesneeded for such intercourse? Is it humane, is it rational, is itrepresentative? To its inherent incommunicable charms it must add akind of courtesy. If it wants other approval than its own, it cannotafford to regard no other aspiration. 

This scope, this representative faculty or wide appeal, is necessary togood taste. All authority is representative; force and inner consistencyare gifts on which I may well congratulate another, but they give him noright to speak for me. Either æsthetic experience would have remained achaos--which it is not altogether--or it must have tended to conciliatecertain general human demands and ultimately all those interests whichits operation in any way affects. The more conspicuous and permanent awork of art is, the more is such an adjustment needed. A poet orphilosopher may be erratic and assure us that he is inspired; if wecannot well gainsay it, we are at least not obliged to read his works. An architect or a sculptor, however, or a public performer of any sort, that thrusts before us a spectacle justified only in his innerconsciousness, makes himself a nuisance. A social standard of taste mustassert itself here, or else no efficacious and cumulative art can existat all. Good taste in such matters cannot abstract from tradition, utility, and the temper of the world. It must make itself an interpreterof humanity and think esoteric dreams less beautiful than what thepublic eye might conceivably admire. 

[Sidenote: Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar. ]

There are various affinities by which art may acquire a representativeor classic quality. It may do so by giving form to objects whicheverybody knows, by rendering experiences that are universal andprimary. The human figure, elementary passions, common types and crisesof fate--these are facts which pass too constantly through apperceptionnot to have a normal æthetic value. The artist who can catch that effectin its fulness and simplicity accordingly does immortal work. This sortof art immediately becomes popular; it passes into language andconvention so that its æsthetic charm is apparently worn down. The oldimages after a while hardly stimulate unless they be presented in someparadoxical way; but in that case attention will be diverted to theaccidental extravagance, and the chief classic effect will be missed. Itis the honourable fate or euthanasia of artistic successes that theypass from the field of professional art altogether and become a portionof human faculty. Every man learns to be to that extent an artist;approved figures and maxims pass current like the words and idioms of amother-tongue, themselves once brilliant inventions. The lustre of suchsuccesses is not really dimmed, however, when it becomes a part of man'sdaily light; a retrogression from that habitual style or habitualinsight would at once prove, by the shock it caused, how precious thoseingrained apperceptions continued to be. 

[Sidenote: or by reporting the ultimate. ]

Universality may also be achieved, in a more heroic fashion, by art thatexpresses ultimate truths, cosmic laws, great human ideals. Virgil andDante are classic poets in this sense, and a similar quality belongs toGreek sculpture and architecture. They may not cause enthusiasm ineverybody; but in the end experience and reflection renew their charm;and their greatness, like that of high mountains, grows more obviouswith distance. Such eminence is the reward of having accepted disciplineand made the mind a clear anagram of much experience. There is a greatdifference between the depth of expression so gained and richness orrealism in details. A supreme work presupposes minute study, sympathywith varied passions, many experiments in expression; but thesepreliminary things are submerged in it and are not displayed side byside with it, like the foot-notes to a learned work, so that theignorant may know they have existed. 

Some persons, themselves inattentive, imagine, for instance, that Greeksculpture is abstract, that it has left out all the detail and characterwhich they cannot find on the surface, as they might in a modern work. In truth it contains those features, as it were, in solution and in theresultant which, when reduced to harmony, they would produce. Itembodies a finished humanity which only varied exercises could haveattained, for as the body is the existent ground for all possibleactions, in which as actions they exist only potentially, so a perfectbody, such as a sculptor might conceive, which ought to be ready for allexcellent activities, cannot present them all in act but only thereadiness for them. The features that might express them severally mustbe absorbed and mastered, hidden like a sword in its scabbard, andreduced to a general dignity or grace. Though such immersed eloquence beat first overlooked and seldom explicitly acknowledged, homage isnevertheless rendered to it in the most unmistakable ways. When lazyartists, backed by no great technical or moral discipline, think they, too, can produce masterpieces by summary treatment, their failure showshow pregnant and supreme a thing simplicity is. Every man, in proportionto his experience and moral distinction, returns to the simple butinexhaustible work of finished minds, and finds more and more of his ownsoul responsive to it. 

Human nature, for all its margin of variability, has a substantial corewhich is invariable, as the human body has a structure which it cannotlose without perishing altogether; for as creatures grow more complex agreater number of their organs become vital and indispensable. Advancedforms will rather die than surrender a tittle of their character; a factwhich is the physical basis for loyalty and martyrdom. Any deepinterpretation of oneself, or indeed of anything, has for that reason alargely representative truth. Other men, if they look closely, will makethe same discovery for themselves. Hence distinction and profundity, inspite of their rarity, are wont to be largely recognised. The best menin all ages keep classic traditions alive. These men have on their sidethe weight of superior intelligence, and, though they are few, theymight even claim the weight of numbers, since the few of all ages, addedtogether, may be more than the many who in any one age follow atemporary fashion. Classic work is nevertheless always national, or atleast characteristic of its period, as the classic poetry of each peopleis that in which its language appears most pure and free. To translateit is impossible; but it is easy to find that the human nature soinimitably expressed in each masterpiece is the same that, underdifferent circumstance, dictates a different performance. The deviationsbetween races and men are not yet so great as is the ignorance of self, the blindness to the native ideal, which prevails in most of them. Hencea great man of a remote epoch is more intelligible than a common man ofour own time. 

[Sidenote: Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i. E. _, harmonious with all other interests. ]

Both elementary and ultimate judgments, then, contribute to a standardof taste; yet human life lies between these limits, and an art which isto be truly adjusted to life should speak also for the intermediateexperience. Good taste is indeed nothing but a name for thoseappreciations which the swelling incidents of life recall andreinforce. Good taste is that taste which is a good possession, a friendto the whole man. It must not alienate him from anything except to allyhim to something greater and more fertile in satisfactions. It will notsuffer him to dote on things, however seductive, which rob him of somenobler companionship. To have a foretaste of such a loss, and to rejectinstinctively whatever will cause it, is the very essence of refinement. Good taste comes, therefore, from experience, in the best sense of thatword; it comes from having united in one's memory and character thefruit of many diverse undertakings. Mere taste is apt to be bad taste, since it regards nothing but a chance feeling. Every man who pursues anart may be presumed to have some sensibility; the question is whether hehas breeding, too, and whether what he stops at is not, in the end, vulgar and offensive. Chance feeling needs to fortify itself withreasons and to find its level in the great world. When it has addedfitness to its sincerity, beneficence to its passion, it will haveacquired a right to live. Violence and self-justification will not passmuster in a moral society, for vipers possess both, and mustnevertheless be stamped out. Citizenship is conferred only on creatureswith human and co-operative instincts. A civilised imagination has tounderstand and to serve the world. 

The great obstacle which art finds in attempting to be rational is itsfunctional isolation. Sense and each of the passions suffers from asimilar independence. The disarray of human instincts lets everyspontaneous motion run too far; life oscillates between constraint andunreason. Morality too often puts up with being a constraint and evenimagines such a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, asoften hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and forgets thatit is itself a rational principle of creation and order. Morality isthus reduced to a necessary evil and art to a vain good, all for want ofharmony among human impulses. If the passions arose in season, ifperception fed only on those things which action should be adjusted to, turning them, while action proceeded, into the substance of ideas--thenall conduct would be voluntary and enlightened, all speculation would bepractical, all perceptions beautiful, and all operations arts. The Lifeof Reason would then be universal. 

To approach this ideal, so far as art is concerned, would involvediffusing its processes and no longer confining them to a set of deadand unproductive objects called works of art. 

[Sidenote: A mere "work of art" a baseless artifice. ]

Why art, the most vital and generative of activities, should produce aset of abstract images, monuments to lost intuitions, is a curiousmystery. Nature gives her products life, and they are at least equal totheir sources in dignity. Why should mind, the actualisation of nature'spowers, produce something so inferior to itself, reverting in itsexpression to material being, so that its witnesses seem so many fossilswith which it strews its path? What we call museums--mausoleums, rather, in which a dead art heaps up its remains--are those the places where theMuses intended to dwell? We do not keep in show-cases the coins currentin the world. A living art does not produce curiosities to be collectedbut spiritual necessaries to be diffused. 

Artificial art, made to be exhibited, is something gratuitous andsophisticated, and the greater part of men's concern about it isaffectation. There is a genuine pleasure in planning a work, inmodelling and painting it; there is a pleasure in showing it to asympathetic friend, who associates himself in this way with the artist'stechnical experiment and with his interpretation of some human episode;and there might be a satisfaction in seeing the work set up in someappropriate space for which it was designed, where its decorativequality might enrich the scene, and the curious passer-by might stop todecipher it. The pleasures proper to an ingenuous artist are spontaneousand human; but his works, once delivered to his patrons, are householdfurniture for the state. Set up to-day, they are outworn and replacedto-morrow, like trees in the parks or officers in the government. Acommunity where art was native and flourishing would have anuninterrupted supply of such ornaments, furnished by its citizens inthe same modest and cheerful spirit in which they furnish othercommodities. Every craft has its dignity, and the decorative andmonumental crafts certainly have their own; but such art is neithersingular nor pre-eminent, and a statesman or reformer who should raisesomewhat the level of thought or practice in the state would do aninfinitely greater service. 

[Sidenote: Human uses give to works of art their highest expression andcharm. ]

The joys of creating are not confined, moreover, to those who createthings without practical uses. The merely æsthetic, like rhyme andfireworks, is not the only subject that can engage a playful fancy or beplanned with a premonition of beautiful effects. Architecture may beuseful, sculpture commemorative, poetry reflective, even, music, by itsexpression, religious or martial. In a word, practical exigencies, incalling forth the arts, give them moral functions which it is a pleasureto see them fulfil. Works may not be æsthetic in their purpose, and yetthat fact may be a ground for their being doubly delightful in executionand doubly beautiful in effect. A richer plexus of emotions is concernedin producing or contemplating something humanly necessary than somethingidly conceived. What is very rightly called a _sense_ for fitness is avital experience, involving æsthetic satisfactions and æsthetic shocks. The more numerous the rational harmonies are which are present to themind, the more sensible movements will be going on there to giveimmediate delight; for the perception or expectation of an ulterior goodis a present good also. Accordingly nothing can so well call forth orsustain attention as what has a complex structure relating it to manycomplex interests. A work woven out of precious threads has a deeppertinence and glory; the artist who creates it does not need tosurrender his practical and moral sense in order to indulge hisimagination. 

The truth is that mere sensation or mere emotion is an indignity to amature human being. When we eat, we demand a pleasant vista, flowers, orconversation, and failing these we take refuge in a newspaper. Themonks, knowing that men should not feed silently like stalled oxen, appointed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers, obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theologyintelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mindfinds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensualitywithout love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What istrue of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The ArabianNights--futile enough in any case--would be absolutely intolerable ifthey contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convincedepicureanism behind their miracles and their tattle. Any absolute workof art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion hasabout it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with ablank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures. Art, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove adisappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can neversweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mindonly by leaving the other half in abeyance. In the mere artist, too, there is always something that falls short of the gentleman and thatdefeats the man. 

[Sidenote: The sad values of appearance. ]

Surely it is not the artistic impulse in itself that involves such lackof equilibrium. To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter isone of the most masterful of actions. The trouble lies in the barren andsuperficial character of this imposed form: fine art is a play ofappearance. Appearance, for a critical philosophy, is distinguished fromreality by its separation from the context of things, by its immediacyand insignificance. A play of appearance is accordingly some littleclosed circle in experience, some dream in which we lose ourselves byignoring most of our interests, and from which we awake into a world inwhich that lost episode plays no further part and leaves no heirs. Artas mankind has hitherto practised it falls largely under this head andtoo much resembles an opiate or a stimulant. Life and history are notthereby rendered better in their principle, but a mere ideal isextracted out of them and presented for our delectation in some cheapmaterial, like words or marble. The only precious materials are fleshand blood, for these alone can defend and propagate the ideal which hasonce informed them. 

Artistic creation shows at this point a great inferiority to naturalreproduction, since its product is dead. Fine art shapes inert matterand peoples the mind with impotent ghosts. What influence it has--forevery event has consequences--is not pertinent to its inspiration. Theart of the past is powerless even to create similar art in the present, unless similar conditions recur independently. The moments snatched forart have been generally interludes in life and its products parasites innature, the body of them being materially functionless and the soulmerely represented. To exalt fine art into a truly ideal activity weshould have to knit it more closely with other rational functions, sothat to beautify things might render them more useful and to representthem most imaginatively might be to see them in their truth. Somethingof the sort has been actually attained by the noblest arts in theirnoblest phases. A Sophocles or a Leonardo dominates his dreamful vehicleand works upon the real world by its means. These small centres, whereinterfunctional harmony is attained, ought to expand and cover the wholefield. Art, like religion, needs to be absorbed in the Life of Reason. 

[Sidenote: They need to be made prophetic of practical goods. ]

What might help to bring about this consummation would be, on the oneside, more knowledge; on the other, better taste. When a mind is filledwith important and true ideas and sees the actual relations of things, it cannot relish pictures of the world which wantonly misrepresent it. Myth and metaphor remain beautiful so long as they are the most adequateor graphic means available for expressing the facts, but so soon as theycease to be needful and sincere they become false finery. The same thinghappens in the plastic arts. Unless they spring from love of theirsubject, and employ imagination only to penetrate into that subject andinterpret it with a more inward sympathy and truth, they becomeconventional and overgrown with mere ornament. They then seem ridiculousto any man who can truly conceive what they represent. So in puttingantique heroes on the stage we nowadays no longer tolerate a moderncostume, because the externals of ancient life are too well known to us;but in the seventeenth century people demanded in such personagesintelligence and nobleness, since these were virtues which the ancientswere clothed with in their thought. A knowledge that should be at oncefull and appreciative would evidently demand fidelity in both matters. Knowledge, where it exists, undermines satisfaction in what doesviolence to truth, and it renders such representations grotesque. Ifknowledge were general and adequate the fine arts would accordingly bebrought round to expressing reality. 

[Sidenote: which in turn would be suffused with beauty. ]

At the same time, if the rendering of reality is to remain artistic, itmust still study to satisfy the senses; but as this study would nowaccompany every activity, taste would grow vastly more subtle andexacting. Whatever any man said or did or made, he would be alive to itsæsthetic quality, and beauty would be a pervasive ingredient inhappiness. No work would be called, in a special sense, a work of art, for all works would be such intrinsically; and even instinctive mimicryand reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idlenessprompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made theexercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to beno division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-dementedpoets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people makewho have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of humanaction. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art oflife, the only one wholly useful or fine among them. 

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

[Sidenote: Æsthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones. ]

The greatest enemy harmony can have is a premature settlement in whichsome essential force is wholly disregarded. This excluded element willrankle in the flesh; it will bring about no end of disorders until it isfinally recognised and admitted into a truly comprehensive regimen. Themore numerous the interests which a premature settlement combines thegreater inertia will it oppose to reform, and the more self-righteouslywill it condemn the innocent pariah that it leaves outside. 

Art has had to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort. Sometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded itfrom their programme, thereby making their programme unjust andinadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most premature is thatwhich the fine arts are wont to establish. A harmony in appearance only, one that touches the springs of nothing and has no power to propagateitself, is so partial and momentary a good that we may justly call it anillusion. To gloat on rhythms and declamations, to live lost inimaginary passions and histrionic woes, is an unmanly life, cut off frompractical dominion and from rational happiness. A lovely dream is anexcellent thing in itself, but it leaves the world no less a chaos andmakes it by contrast seem even darker than it did. By dwelling in itsmock heaven art may inflict on men the same kind of injury that anyirresponsible passion or luxurious vice might inflict. For this reasonit sometimes passes for a misfortune in a family if a son insists onbeing a poet or an actor. Such gifts suggest too much incompetence andsuch honours too much disrepute. A man does not avoid real evils byhaving visionary pleasures, but besides exposing himself to the realevils quite unprotected, he probably adds fancied evils to them ingenerous measure. He becomes supersensitive, envious, hysterical; theworld, which was perhaps carried away at first by his ecstasies, at thenext moment merely applauds his performance, then criticises itsuperciliously, and very likely ends by forgetting it altogether. 

Thus the fine arts are seldom an original factor in human progress. Ifthey express moral and political greatness, and serve to enhance it, they acquire a certain dignity; but so soon as this expressive functionis abandoned they grow meretricious. The artist becomes an abstractedtrifler, and the public is divided into two camps: the dilettanti, whodote on the artist's affectations, and the rabble, who pay him to growcoarse. Both influences degrade him and he helps to foster both. Anatmosphere of dependence and charlatanry gathers about the artisticattitude and spreads with its influence. Religion, philosophy, andmanners may in turn be infected with this spirit, being reduced to avoluntary hallucination or petty flattery. Romanticism, ritualism, æstheticism, symbolism are names this disease has borne at differenttimes as it appeared in different circles or touched a different object. Needless to say that the arts themselves are the first to suffer. Thatbeauty which should have been an inevitable smile on the face ofsociety, an overflow of genuine happiness and power, has to be imported, stimulated artificially, and applied from without; so that art becomes asickly ornament for an ugly existence. 

[Sidenote: yet prototypes of true perfections. ]

Nevertheless, æsthetic harmony, so incomplete in its basis as to befleeting and deceptive, is most complete in its form. This so partialsynthesis is a synthesis indeed, and just because settlements made infancy are altogether premature, and ignore almost everything in theworld, in type they can be the most perfect settlements. The artist, being a born lover of the good, a natural breeder of perfections, clingsto his insight. If the world calls his accomplishments vain, he can, with better reason, call vain the world's cumbrous instrumentalities, bywhich nothing clearly good is attained. Appearances, he may justly urge, are alone actual. All forces, substances, realities, and principles areinferred and potential only and in the moral scale mere instruments tobring perfect appearances about. To have grasped such an appearance, tohave embodied a form in matter, is to have justified for the first timewhatever may underlie appearance and to have put reality to some use. Itis to have begun to live. As the standard of perfection is internal andis measured by the satisfaction felt in realising it, every artist hastasted, in his activity, what activity essentially is. He has mouldedexistence into the likeness of thought and lost himself in that idealachievement which, so to speak, beckons all things into being. Even if athousand misfortunes await him and a final disappointment, he has beenhappy once. He may be inclined to rest his case there and challengepractical people to justify in the same way the faith that is in them. 

[Sidenote: Pros and cons of detached indulgences. ]

That a moment of the most perfect happiness should prove a source ofunhappiness is no paradox to any one who has observed the world. A hope, a passion, a crime, is a flash of vitality. It is inwardly congruouswith the will that breeds it, yet the happiness it pictures is sopartial that even while it is felt it may be overshadowed by sinisterforebodings. A certain unrest and insecurity may consciously harass it. With time, or by a slight widening in the field of interest, thissubmerged unhappiness may rise to the surface. If, as is probable, it iscaused or increased by the indulgence which preceded, then the onlymoment in which a good was tasted, the only vista that had openedcongenially before the mind, will prove a new and permanent curse. Inthis way love often misleads individuals, ambition cities, and religionwhole races of men. That art, also, should often be an indulgence, ablind that hides reality from ill-balanced minds and ultimatelyincreases their confusion, is by no means incompatible with art's idealessence. On the contrary, such a result is inevitable when ideality iscarried at all far upon a narrow basis. The more genuine and excellentthe vision the greater havoc it makes if, being inadequate, itestablishes itself authoritatively in the soul. Art, in the bettersense, is a condition of happiness for a practical and labouringcreature, since without art he remains a slave; but it is one moresource of unhappiness for him so long as it is not squared with hisnecessary labours and merely interrupts them. It then alienates him fromhis world without being able to carry him effectually into a better one. 

[Sidenote: The happy imagination is one initially in line with things. ]

The artist is in many ways like a child. He seems happy, because hislife is spontaneous, yet he is not competent to secure his own good. Tobe truly happy he must be well bred, reared from the cradle, as it were, under propitious influences, so that he may have learned to love whatconduces to his development. In that rare case his art will expand ashis understanding ripens; he will not need to repent and begin again ona lower key. The ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all timeand all existence for his virtual theme. Fed by the world he can help tomould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him as sciencemight for using the world well and making it more fruitful. He can thenbe happy, not merely in the sense of having now and then an ecstaticmoment, but happy in having light and resource enough within him to copesteadily with real things and to leave upon them the vestige of hismind. 

[Sidenote: and brought always closer to them by experience. ]

One effect of growing experience is to render what is unrealuninteresting. Momentous alternatives in life are so numerous and thepossibilities they open up so varied that imagination finds enoughemployment of a historic and practical sort in trying to seize them. Achild plans Towers of Babel; a mature architect, in planning, would loseall interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. Theconditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, becomeconditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each place, for eachsituation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal. It need not goafield to import something exotic. It need make no sacrifices to whimand to personal memories. It rather breeds out of the given problem anew and singular solution, thereby exercising greater invention thanwould be requisite for framing an arbitrary ideal and imposing it at allcosts on every occasion. 

[Sidenote: Reason is the principle of both art and happiness. ]

In other words, a happy result can be secured in art, as in life, onlyby intelligence. Intelligence consists in having read the heart anddeciphered the promptings latent there, and then in reading the worldand deciphering its law and constitution, to see how and where theheart's ideal may be embodied. Our troubles come from the colossalblunders made by our ancestors (who had worse ancestors of their own) inboth these interpretations, blunders which have come down to us in ourblood and in our institutions. The vices thus transmitted cloud ourintelligence. We fail in practical affairs when we ignore the conditionsof action and we fail in works of imagination when we concoct what isfantastic and without roots in the world. 

The value of art lies in making people happy, first in practising theart and then in possessing its product. This observation might seemneedless, and ought to be so; but if we compare it with what is commonlysaid on these subjects, we must confess that it may often be denied andmore often, perhaps, may not be understood. Happiness is something menought to pursue, although they seldom do so; they are drawn away from itat first by foolish impulses and afterwards by perverse laws. To securehappiness conduct would have to remain spontaneous while it learned notto be criminal; but the fanatical attachment of men, now to a fierceliberty, now to a false regimen, keeps them barbarous and wretched. Arational pursuit of happiness--which is one thing with progress or withthe Life of Reason--would embody that natural piety which leaves to theepisodes of life their inherent values, mourning death, celebratinglove, sanctifying civic traditions, enjoying and correcting nature'sways. To discriminate happiness is therefore the very soul of art, whichexpresses experience without distorting it, as those political ormetaphysical tyrannies distort it which sanctify unhappiness. A freemind, like a creative imagination, rejoices at the harmonies it can findor make between man and nature; and, where it finds none, it solves theconflict so far as it may and then notes and endures it with a shudder. 

A morality organised about the human heart in an ingenuous and sincerefashion would involve every fine art and would render the worldpervasively beautiful--beautiful in its artificial products andbeautiful in its underlying natural terrors. The closer we keep toelementary human needs and to the natural agencies that may satisfythem, the closer we are to beauty. Industry, sport, and science, withthe perennial intercourse and passions of men, swarm with incentives toexpression, because they are everywhere creating new moulds of being andcompelling the eye to observe those forms and to recast them ideally. Art is simply an adequate industry; it arises when industry is carriedout to the satisfaction of all human demands, even of those incidentalsensuous demands which we call æsthetic and which a brutal industry, inits haste, may despise or ignore. 

Arts responsive in this way to all human nature would be beautifulaccording to reason and might remain beautiful long. Poetic beautytouches the world whenever it attains some unfeigned harmony either withsense or with reason; and the more unfeignedly human happiness was madethe test of all institutions and pursuits, the more beautiful they wouldbe, having more numerous points of fusion with the mind, and fusing withit more profoundly. To distinguish and to create beauty would then be noart relegated to a few abstracted spirits, playing with casual fancies;it would be a habit inseparable from practical efficiency. Alloperations, all affairs, would then be viewed in the light of ultimateinterests, and in their deep relation to human good. The arts would thusrecover their Homeric glory; touching human fate as they clearly would, they would borrow something of its grandeur and pathos, and yet theinterest that worked in them would be warm, because it would remainunmistakably animal and sincere. 

[Sidenote: Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts. ]

The principle that all institutions should subserve happiness runsdeeper than any cult for art and lays the foundation on which the lattermight rest safely. If social structure were rational its free expressionwould be so too. Many observers, with no particular philosophy toadduce, feel that the arts among us are somehow impotent, and they lookfor a better inspiration, now to ancient models, now to the rawphenomena of life. A dilettante may, indeed, summon inspiration whencehe will; and a virtuoso will never lack some material to keep him busy;but if what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a greatrevolution would first have to be worked in society. We should have toabandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotismsand schools of art, and to discover instead our genuine needs, the formsof our possible happiness. To call for such self-examination seemsrevolutionary only because we start from a sophisticated system, asystem resting on traditional fashions and superstitions, by which thewill of the living generation is misinterpreted and betrayed. To shakeoff that system would not subvert order but rather institute order forthe first time; it would be an _Instauratio Magna_, a setting thingsagain on their feet. 

We in Christendom are so accustomed to artificial ideals and toartificial institutions, kept up to express them, that we hardlyconceive how anomalous our situation is, sorely as we may suffer fromit. We found academies and museums, as we found missions, to fan a flamethat constantly threatens to die out for lack of natural fuel. Our overtideals are parasites in the body politic, while the ideals native to thebody politic, those involved in our natural structure and situation, are either stifled by that alien incubus, leaving civic life barbarous, or else force their way up, unremarked or not justly honoured as ideals. Industry and science and social amenities, with all the congruouscomforts and appurtenances of contemporary life, march on their way, asif they had nothing to say to the spirit, which remains entangled in acobweb of dead traditions. An idle pottering of the fancy over obsoleteforms--theological, dramatic, or plastic--makes that by-play to thesober business of life which men call their art or their religion; andthe more functionless and gratuitous this by-play is the more those whoindulge in it think they are idealists. They feel they are champions ofwhat is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancyherself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book instead ofplanting their seeds in the garden. 

[Sidenote: Why art is now empty and unstable. ]

It is clear that gratuitous and functionless habits cannot bringhappiness; they do not constitute an activity at once spontaneous andbeneficent, such as noble art is an instance of. Those habits may indeedgive pleasure; they may bring extreme excitement, as madness notablydoes, though it is in the highest degree functionless and gratuitous. Nor is such by-play without consequences, some of which mightconceivably be fortunate. What is functionless is so called for beingworthless from some ideal point of view, and not conducing to theparticular life considered. But nothing real is dissociated from theuniversal flux; everything--madness and all unmeaning cross-currents inbeing--count in the general process and discharge somewhere, not withouteffect, the substance they have drawn for a moment into their littlevortex. So our vain arts and unnecessary religions are not without realeffects and not without a certain internal vitality. When life isprofoundly disorganised it may well happen that only in detachedepisodes, only in moments snatched for dreaming in, can men see the blueor catch a glimpse of something like the ideal. In that case theiresteem for their irrelevant visions may be well grounded, and their thinart and far-fetched religion may really constitute what is best in theirexperience. In a pathetic way these poor enthusiasms may be justified, but only because the very conception of a rational life lies entirelybeyond the horizon. 

[Sidenote: Anomalous character of the irrational artist. ]

It is no marvel, when art is a brief truancy from rational practice, that the artist himself should be a vagrant, and at best, as it were, aninfant prodigy. The wings of genius serve him only for an escapade, enabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mysticalabysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artistor master; he has burst convention only to break it, not to create a newconvention more in harmony with nature. His originality, though it mayastonish for a moment, will in the end be despised and will find nothoroughfare. He will meantime be wretched himself, torn from the rootsof his being by that cruel, unmeaning inspiration; or, if too rapt tosee his own plight, he will be all the more pitied by practical men, whocannot think it a real blessing to be lost in joys that do notstrengthen the character and yield nothing for posterity. 

Art, in its nobler acceptation, is an achievement, not an indulgence. Itprepares the world in some sense to receive the soul, and the soul tomaster the world; it disentangles those threads in each that can bewoven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless, dreamful may almost seem a natural law, but it is none the less ascandal. An artist's business is not really to cut fantastical capers orbe licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keensoul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks, giving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to thesituation, the most delicate adjustment to every faculty it affects. Thewonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of hispenetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortalisolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of theirsecret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurancethan they could have spoken with to themselves. And the joy of his greatsanity, the power of his adequate vision, is not the less intensebecause he can lend it to others and has borrowed it from a faithfulstudy of the world. 

[Sidenote: True art measures and completes happiness. ]

If happiness is the ultimate sanction of art, art in turn is the bestinstrument of happiness. In art more directly than in other activitiesman's self-expression is cumulative and finds an immediate reward; forit alters the material conditions of sentience so that sentience becomesat once more delightful and more significant. In industry man is stillservile, preparing the materials he is to use in action. In actionitself, though he is free, he exerts his influence on a living andtreacherous medium and sees the issue at each moment drift farther andfarther from his intent. In science he is an observer, preparing himselffor action in another way, by studying its results and conditions. Butin art he is at once competent and free; he is creative. He is nottroubled by his materials, because he has assimilated them and may takethem for granted; nor is he concerned with the chance complexion ofaffairs in the actual world, because he is making the world over, notmerely considering how it grew or how it will consent to grow in future. Nothing, accordingly, could be more delightful than genuine art, normore free from remorse and the sting of vanity. Art springs socompletely from the heart of man that it makes everything speak to himin his own language; it reaches, nevertheless, so truly to the heart ofnature that it co-operates with her, becomes a parcel of her creativematerial energy, and builds by her instinctive hand. If the variousformative impulses afoot in the world never opposed stress to stress andmade no havoc with one another, nature might be called an unconsciousartist. In fact, just where such a formative impulse finds support fromthe environment, a consciousness supervenes. If that consciousness isadequate enough to be prophetic, an art arises. Thus the emergence ofarts out of instincts is the token and exact measure of nature's successand of mortal happiness. 

*** End of Volume Four ***

REASON IN SCIENCE

Volume Five of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

This Dover edition, first published in 1982, is an unabridgedrepublication of volume five of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases ofHuman Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y. , in 1905. 

CONTENTS

REASON IN SCIENCE

CHAPTER I

TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE

Science still young. --Its miscarriage in Greece. --Its timid reappearancein modern times. --Distinction between science and myth. --Platonic statusof hypothesis. --Meaning of verification. --Possible validity ofmyths. --Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced. --But science followsthe movement of its subject-matter. --Moral value of science. --Itscontinuity with common knowledge. --Its intellectual essence. --Unity ofscience. --In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin ofwaste. --Sciences converge from different points of origin. --Two chiefkinds of science, physics and dialectic. --Their mutualimplication. --Their coöperation. --No science _a priori_. --Role ofcriticism. Pages 3-38

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

History an artificial memory. --Second sight requires control. --Naturethe theme common to various memories. --Growth of legend. --No historywithout documents. --The aim is truth. --Indirect methods of attainingit. --Historical research a part of physics. --Verification hereindirect. --Futile ideal to survey all facts. --Historical theory. --It isarbitrary. --A moral critique of the past is possible. --How it might bejust. --Transition to historical romance. --Possibility of genuineepics. --Literal truth abandoned. --History exists to be transcended. --Itsgreat rôle. Pages 39-68

CHAPTER III

MECHANISM

Recurrent forms in nature. --Their discovery makes the fluxcalculable. --Looser principles tried first. --Mechanism for the most parthidden. --Yet presumably pervasive. --Inadequacy of consciousness. --Itsarticulation inferior to that of its objects. --Science consequentlyretarded, and speculation rendered necessary. --Dissatisfaction withmechanism partly natural, and partly artificial. --Biassed judgmentsinspired by moral inertia. --Positive emotions proper tomaterialism. --The material world not dead nor ugly, nor especiallycruel. --Mechanism to be judged by its fruits Pages 69-94

CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD

Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence. --Men of science notspeculative. --Confusion in semi-moral subjects. --"Physic of metaphysicbegs defence. "--Evolution by mechanism. --Evolution by idealattraction. --If species are evolved they cannot guideevolution. --Intrusion of optimism. --Evolution according to Hegel. --Theconservative interpretation. --The radical one. --Megalomania. --Chaos inthe theory of mind. --Origin of self-consciousness. --The notion ofspirit. --The notion of sense. --Competition between the two. --The rise ofscepticism Pages 95-125

CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

Mind reading not science. --Experience a reconstruction. --The honest artof education. --Arbitrary readings of the mind. --Human nature appealed torather than described. --Dialectic in psychology. --Spinoza on thepassions. --A principle of estimation cannot govern events. --Scientificpsychology a part of biology. --Confused attempt to detach the psychicelement. --Differentia of the psychic. --Approach to irrelevantsentience. --Perception represents things in their practical relation tothe body. --Mind the existence in which form becomes actual. --Attempt atidealistic physics. --Association not efficient. --- It describescoincidences. --Understanding is based on instinct and expressed indialectic. --Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and willanother. --Double attachment of mind to nature. --Is the subject-matter ofpsychology absolute being?--Sentience is representable only infancy. --The conditions and objects of sentience, which are notsentience, are also real. --Mind knowable and important in so far as itrepresents other things Pages 126-166

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

Dialectic better than physics. --Maladjustments to nature render physicsconspicuous and unpleasant. --Physics should be largely virtual, anddialectic explicit. --Intent is vital and indescribable. --It is analogousto flux in existence. --It expresses natural life. --- It has a materialbasis. --It is necessarily relevant to earth. --The basis of intentbecomes appreciable in language. --Intent starts from a datum, and iscarried by a feeling. --It demands conventional expression. --A fableabout matter and form Pages 167-186

CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

Dialectic elaborates given forms. --Forms are abstracted from existenceby intent. --Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguousintent. --The fact that mathematics applies to existence isempirical. --Its moral value is therefore contingent. --Quantity submitseasily to dialectical treatment--Constancy and progress inintent. --Intent determines the functional essence of objects. --Also thescope of ideals. --Double status of mathematics. --Practical rôle ofdialectic. --Hegel's satire on dialectic. --Dialectic expresses a givenintent. --Its empire is ideal and autonomous Pages 187-209

CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

Empirical alloy in dialectic. --Arrested rationality in morals. --Itsemotional and practical power. --Moral science is an application ofdialectic, not a part of anthropology. --Estimation the soul ofphilosophy. --Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable. --A choiceof proverbs. --Their various representative value. --Conflict of partialmoralities. --The Greek ideal. --Imaginative exuberance and politicaldiscipline. --Sterility of Greek example. --Prerational morality among theJews. --The development of conscience. --Need of Hebraic devotion to Greekaims. --Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programmePages 210-232

CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

Moral passions represent private interests. --Common ideal interests maysupervene. --To this extent there is rational society. --A rationalmorality not attainable, but its principle clear. --It is the logic of anautonomous will. --Socrates' science. --Its opposition to sophistry andmoral anarchy. --Its vitality. --Genuine altruism is naturalself-expression. --Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced toharmony. --Self-love artificial. --The sanction of reason ishappiness. --Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and itsunrecognised scope. --Fallacy in democratic hedonism. --Sympathy aconditional duty. --All life, and hence right life, finite andparticular. Pages 233-261

CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

Socratic ethics retrospective. --Rise of disillusioned moralities. --Theillusion subsisting in them. --Epicurean refuge in pleasure. --Stoicrecourse to conformity. --Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped inarbitrary doctrines. --The latter alone lend it practical force. --Moralambiguity in pantheism. --Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires amythology. --A supernatural world made by the Platonist out ofdialectic. --The Hebraic cry for redemption. --The two factors meet inChristianity. --Consequent electicism. --The negation of naturalism nevercomplete. --Spontaneous values rehabilitated. --A witness out ofIndia. --Dignity of post-rational morality. --Absurdities neverthelessinvolved. --The soul of positivism in all ideals. --Moribund dreams andperennial realities. Pages 262-300

CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

Various modes of revising science. --Science its own bestcritic. --Obstruction by alien traditions. --Needless anxiety for moralinterests. --Science an imaginative and practical art. --Arrière-pensée intranscendentalism. --Its romantic sincerity. --Its constructiveimpotence. --Its dependence on common-sense. --Its futility. --Idealscience is self-justified. --Physical science is presupposed inscepticism. --It recurs in all understanding of perception. --Sciencecontains all trustworthy knowledge. --It suffices for the Life of ReasonPages 301-320

REASON IN SCIENCE

CHAPTER I

TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE

[Sidenote: Science still young. ]

Science is so new a thing and so far from final, it seems to the laymanso hopelessly accurate and extensive, that a moralist may well feel somediffidence in trying to estimate its achievements and promises at theirhuman worth. The morrow may bring some great revolution in science, andis sure to bring many a correction and many a surprise. Religion and arthave had their day; indeed a part of the faith they usually inspire isto believe that they have long ago revealed their secret. A critic maysafely form a judgment concerning them; for even if he dissents from theorthodox opinion and ventures to hope that religion and art may assumein the future forms far nobler and more rational than any they havehitherto worn, still he must confess that art and religion have hadseveral turns at the wheel; they have run their course through invarious ages and climes with results which anybody is free to estimateif he has an open mind and sufficient interest in the subject. Science, on the contrary, which apparently cannot exist where intellectualfreedom is denied, has flourished only twice in recorded times: oncefor some three hundred years in ancient Greece, and again for about thesame period in modern Christendom. Its fruits have scarcely begun toappear; the lands it is discovering have not yet been circumnavigated, and there is no telling what its ultimate influence will be on humanpractice and feeling. 

[Sidenote: Its miscarriage in Greece. ]

The first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual. The Greeks' energy and liberty were too soon spent, and the veryexuberance of their genius made its expression chaotic. Where every mindwas so fresh and every tongue so clever no scientific tradition couldarise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the value ofrival notions and decide between them. Men of science were merephilosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but atthe very beginning. Another circumstance that impeded the growth ofscience was the forensic and rhetorical turn proper to Greekintelligence. This mental habit gave a tremendous advantage inphilosophy to the moralist and poet over the naturalist ormathematician. Hence what survived in Greece after the heyday oftheoretic achievement was chiefly philosophies of life, and these--atthe death of liberty--grew daily more personal and ascetic. Authority inscientific matters clung chiefly to Plato and Aristotle, and this notfor the sake of their incomparable moral philosophy--for in ethics thatdecadent age preferred the Stoics and Epicureans--but just for thoserhetorical expedients which in the Socratic school took the place ofnatural science. Worse influences in this field could hardly beimagined, since Plato's physics ends in myth and apologue, whileAristotle's ends in nomenclature and teleology. 

All that remained of Greek physics, therefore, was the conception ofwhat physics should be--a great achievement due to the earlierthinkers--and certain hints and guesses in that field. The elements ofgeometry had also been formulated, while the Socratic school bequeathedto posterity a well-developed group of moral sciences, rational inprinciple, but destined to be soon overlaid with metaphysical andreligious accretions, so that the dialectical nerve and reasonablenessof them were obliterated, and there survived only miscellaneousconclusions, fragments of wisdom built topsy-turvy into the new mythicaledifice. It is the sad task reserved for historical criticism to detachthose sculptured stones from the rough mass in which they have beenembedded and to rearrange them in their pristine order, thusrediscovering the inner Socratic principle of moral philosophy, which isnothing but self-knowledge--a circumspect, systematic utterance of thespeaker's mind, disclosing his implicit meaning and his ultimatepreferences. 

[Sidenote: Its timid reappearance in modern times. ]

At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmictheories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in soberlaborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries--theearth's roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, thedevelopment and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus, and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was apatient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly andwithout a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormedimaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once thenotion of nature's dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possessionin detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn inorder to maintain the main position. 

Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into asystem, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a generalphysics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the wholeexistent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in theirsystem. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moralworld, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicableaddendum. Similarly Newton's mechanical principles, broad as they were, were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until thenineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated giventheir full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza's system, thoughnaturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had noinfluence on science and for a long time little even on speculation. 

Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, whichshall include all existences--gods no less than men, if gods actuallyexist--is one not yet current, although it is implied in everyscientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporarymovements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men's mindsback to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movementsis the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such anirresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has beenemancipated from authority and has set to work to square men'sconscience with history and experience. This theology has generallypassed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognisesthe universal empire of law and conceives man's life as an incident in aprodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests areproduced and devoured. This "idealism" is in truth a system ofimmaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While itworks with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalistwould care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to exceptwhat the naturalist or historian may already have discovered andexpressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is atranslation of physical evolution into mythical language, whichpresents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now inthat of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, andjust those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are notbrought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillinglyand unawares, by their religious speculations. 

[Sidenote: Distinction between science and myth. ]

The gulf that yawns between such idealistic cosmogonies and a truephysics may serve to make clear the divergence in principle whicheverywhere divides natural science from arbitrary conceptions of things. This divergence is as far as possible from lying in the merit of the twosorts of theory. Their merit, and the genius and observation required toframe them, may well be equal, or an imaginative system may have theadvantage in these respects. It may even be more serviceable for a whileand have greater pragmatic value, so long as knowledge is at bestfragmentary, and no consecutive or total view of things is attempted byeither party. Thus in social life a psychology expressed in terms ofabstract faculties and personified passions may well carry a man fartherthan a physiological psychology would. Or, again, we may say that therewas more experience and love of nature enshrined in ancient mythologythan in ancient physics; the observant poet might then have fared betterin the world than the pert and ignorant materialist. Nor does thedifference between science and myth lie in the fact that the one isessentially less speculative than the other. They are differentlyspeculative, it is true, since myth terminates in unverifiable notionsthat might by chance represent actual existences; while scienceterminates in concepts or laws, themselves not possibly existent, butverified by recurring particular facts, belonging to the same experienceas those from which the theory started. 

[Sidenote: Platonic status of hypothesis. ]

The laws formulated by science--the transitive figments describing therelation between fact and fact--possess only a Platonic sort of reality. They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because theyare more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same timethey are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatiblewith immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is trueof existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf. This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, notdocile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent ontreating everything by a single method. They have asked themselvespersistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form ofthings is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed, each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element aloneis existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all thosepropositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody's_knowledge_ of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is ofcourse but a moment of existence or material being, which whether foundin God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself whichit may succeed in knowing. 

[Sidenote: Meaning of verification. ]

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched whenwe say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity, however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method onlyvicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense. To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occultexistences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discoverthat what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also. There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of akind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivablyexist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes ofrelation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof. Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, couldnot be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world opento sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without beingexistences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurringas those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device, gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value isestablished. It _is_ not, it merely _applies_; and every situation inwhich it is found to apply is a proof of its truth. 

The case would not be different with fables, were their basis andmeaning remembered. But fables, when hypostatised, forget that they, too, were transitive symbols and boast to reveal an undiscoverablereality. A dogmatic myth is in this sorry plight: that the more evidenceit can find to support it the more it abrogates its metaphysicalpretensions, while the more it insists on its absolute truth the lessrelevance it has to experience and the less meaning. To try to supportfabulous dogmas by evidence is tantamount to acknowledging that they aremerely scientific hypotheses, instruments of discourse, and methods ofexpression. But in that case their truth would no longer be supposed tolie in the fact that somewhere beyond the range of human observationthey descended bodily to the plane of flying existence, and wereactually enacted there. They would have ceased to resemble the societyof Olympus, which to prove itself real would need to verify itself, since only the gods and those mortals admitted to their conclave couldknow for a fact that that celestial gathering existed. On the contrary, a speculation that could be supported by evidence would be one thatmight be made good without itself descending to the plane of immediacy, but would be sufficiently verified when diffuse facts fall out as it hadled us to expect. The myth in such a case would have become transparentagain and relevant to experience, which could continually serve tosupport or to correct it. Even if somewhat overloaded and poetical, itwould be in essence a scientific theory. It would no longer terminate initself; it would point forward, leading the thinker that used it toeventual facts of experience, facts which his poetic wisdom would haveprepared him to meet and to use. 

[Sidenote: Possible validity of myths. ]

If I say, for instance, that Punishment, limping in one leg, patientlyfollows every criminal, the myth is obvious and innocent enough. Itreveals nothing, but, what is far better, it means something. I haveexpressed a truth of experience and pointed vaguely to the course whichevents may be expected to take under given circumstances. Theexpression, though mythical in form, is scientific in effect, because ittends to surround a given phenomenon (the crime) with objects on its ownplane--other passions and sensations to follow upon it. What would betruly mythical would be to stop at the figure of speech and maintain, byway of revealed dogma, that a lame goddess of vindictive mind actuallyfollows every wicked man, her sword poised in mid-air. Sinking into thatreverie, and trembling at its painted truth, I should be passing to theundiscoverable and forgetting the hard blows actually awaiting me in theworld. Fable, detaining the mind too long in the mesh of expression, would have become metaphysical dogma. I should have connected the givenfact with imagined facts, which even if by chance real--for such agoddess may, for all we know, actually float in the fourthdimension--are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by anypossibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they arethought to explain. The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses, but ashypotheses they are not gods. 

[Sidenote: Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced. ]

The same distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that science dealsonly with objects of possible experience. But this expression isunfortunate, because everything thinkable, no matter how mythical andsupernatural or how far beyond the range of mortal senses, is an objectof _possible_ experience. Tritons and sea-horses might observe oneanother and might feel themselves live. The thoughts and decrees said tooccupy the divine mind from all eternity would certainly be phenomenathere; they would be experienced things. Were fables really asmetaphysical and visionary as they pretend to be, were they not all thewhile and in essence mere symbols for natural situations, they would benothing but reports about other alleged parts of experience. A realTriton, a real Creator, a real heaven would obviously be objects open toproperly equipped senses and seats of much vivid experience. But aTriton after all has something to do with the Ægean and other earthlywaters; a Creator has something to do with the origin of man and of hishabitat; heaven has something to do with the motives and rewards ofmoral action. This relevance to given experience and its objects is whatcuts those myths off from their blameless and gratuitous rôle ofreporting experiences that might be going on merrily enough somewhereelse in the universe. In calling them myths and denying that what theydescribe falls within the purview of science, we do not assert that, absolutely taken, they could not be objects of a possible experience. What we mean is rather that no matter how long we searched the seawaves, in which it is the essence of our Tritons to disport themselves, we should never find Tritons there; and that if we traced back thehistory of man and nature we should find them always passing by naturalgeneration out of slightly different earlier forms and never appearingsuddenly, at the fiat of a vehement Jehovah swimming about in a chaos;and finally that if we considered critically our motives and our ideals, we should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life andits functions, and not at all on a disembodied and timeless ecstasy. Those myths, then, while they intrinsically refer to facts in the givenworld, describe those facts in incongruous terms. They are symbols, notextensions, for the experience we know. 

[Sidenote: But science follows the movement of its subject-matter. ]

A chief characteristic of science, then, is that in supplementing givenfacts it supplements them by adding other facts belonging to the samesphere, and eventually discoverable by tracing the given object in itsown plane through its continuous transformations. Science expandsspeculatively, by the aid of merely instrumental hypotheses, objectsgiven in perception until they compose a congruous, self-supportingworld, all parts of which might be observed consecutively. What ascientific hypothesis interpolates among the given facts--the atomicstructure of things, for instance--might come in time under the directfire of attention, fixed more scrupulously, longer, or with betterinstruments upon those facts themselves. Otherwise the hypothesis thatassumed that structure would be simply false, just as a hypothesis thatthe interior of the earth is full of molten fire would be false if oninspection nothing were found there but solid rock. Science does notmerely prolong a habit of inference; it verifies and solves theinference by reaching the fact inferred. 

The contrast with myth at this point is very interesting; for in myththe facts are themselves made vehicles, and knowledge is felt toterminate in an independent existence on a higher or deeper level thanany immediate fact; and this circumstance is what makes myth impossibleto verify and, except by laughter, to disprove. If I attributed thestars' shining to the diligence of angels who lighted their lamps atsunset, lest the upper reaches of the world should grow dangerous fortravellers, and if I made my romance elaborate and ingenious enough, Imight possibly find that the stars' appearance and disappearance couldcontinue to be interpreted in that way. My myth might always suggestitself afresh and might be perennially appropriate. But it would neverdescend, with its charming figures, into the company of its evidences. It would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in mymetaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels wouldremain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that themore earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I bedeceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their ownemotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been theirhands--if they had hands--that would have lighted the stars I saw; andthis, after all, was the gist and starting-point of my whole fable andits sole witness in my world. A myth might by chance be a revelation, did what it talks of have an actual existence somewhere else in theuniverse; but it would need to be a revelation in order to be true atall, and would then be true only in an undeserved and spurious fashion. Any representative and provable validity which it might possess wouldassimulate it to science and reduce it to a mere vehicle and instrumentfor human discourse. It would evaporate as soon as the prophecies itmade were fulfilled, and it would claim no being and no worship on itsown account. Science might accordingly be called a myth conscious of itsessential ideality, reduced to its fighting weight and valued only forits significance. 

[Sidenote: Moral value of science. ]

A symptom of the divergence between myth and science may be found in thecontrary emotions which they involve. Since in myth we interpretexperience in order to interpret it, in order to delight ourselves byturning it poetically into the language and prosody of our own life, theemotion we feel when we succeed is artistic; myth has a dramatic charm. Since in science, on the contrary, we employ notional machinery, initself perhaps indifferent enough, in order to arrive at eventual factsand to conceive the aspect which given things would actually wear from adifferent point of view in space or time, the emotion we feel when wesucceed is that of security and intellectual dominion; science has arational value. To see better what we now see, to see by anticipationwhat we should see actually under other conditions, is wonderfully tosatisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientificthinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does. It summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fataldirection upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeedabsorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow, have to be satisfied by dramatic myths. To imagine how things might havebeen would be neither interesting nor possible if we knew fully howthings are. All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would theninhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts fromthe more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross andbasal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seemscomparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opensthrough to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps, we recognise that in science we are surveying all it concerns us toknow, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be. Mereamusement in thought as in sportive action is tedious and illiberal: itmarks a temperament so imperfectly educated that it prefers idle tosignificant play and a flimsy to a solid idea. 

[Sidenote: Its continuity with common knowledge. ]

The fact that science follows the subject-matter in its own movementinvolves a further consequence: science differs from common knowledge inscope only, not in nature. When intelligence arises, when the flux ofthings begins to be mitigated by representation of it and objects are atlast fixed and recognisable, there is science. For even here, in thepresence of a datum something virtual and potential is called up, namely, what the given thing was a moment ago, what it is growing into, or what it is contrasted with in character. As I walk round a tree, Ilearn that the parts still visible, those that have just disappearedand those now coming into view, are continuous and belong to the sametree. 

This declaration, though dialectic might find many a mare's nest in itslanguage, is a safe and obvious enough expression of knowledge. Itinvolves terms, however, which are in the act of becoming potential. What is just past, what is just coming, though sensibly continuous withwhat is present, are partially infected with nonentity. After a whilehuman apprehension can reach them only by inference, and to count uponthem is frankly to rely on theory. The other side of the tree, whichcommon sense affirms to exist unconditionally, will have to berepresented in memory or fancy; and it may never actually be observed byany mortal. Yet, if I continued my round, I should actually observe itand know it by experience; and I should find that it had the same statusas the parts now seen, and was continuous with them. My assertion thatit exists, while certainly theoretical and perhaps false, is accordinglyscientific in type. Science, when it has no more scope than this, isindistinguishable from common sense. The two become distinct only whenthe facts inferred cannot be easily verified or have not yet been mergedwith the notion representing the given object in most men's minds. 

Where science remains consciously theoretical (being as yet contrastedwith ordinary apperception and current thought), it is, ideallyconsidered, a _pis aller_, an expedient to which a mind must haverecourse when it lacks power and scope to hold all experience in handand to view the wide world in its genuine immediacy. As oblivescence isa gradual death, proper to a being not ideally master of the universalflux, but swamped within it, so science is an artificial life, in whichwhat cannot be perceived directly (because personal limitations forbid)may be regarded abstractly, yet efficaciously, in what we think and do. With better faculties the field of possible experience could be betterdominated, and fewer of its parts, being hidden from sight, would needto be mapped out symbolically on that sort of projection which we callscientific inference. The real relations between the parts of naturewould then be given in intuition, from which hypothesis, after all, hasborrowed its schemata. 

[Sidenote: Its intellectual essence. ]

Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universalvision. We should not forget to add, however, that the universal visionin question, if it were to be something better than private sensation orpassive feeling in greater bulk, would have to be intellectual, just asscience is; that is, it would have to be practical and to survey theflux from a given standpoint, in a perspective determined by special andlocal interests. Otherwise the whole world, when known, would merely bere-enacted in its blind immediacy without being understood or subjectedto any purpose. The critics of science, when endowed with anyspeculative power, have always seen that what is hypothetical andabstract in scientific method is somehow servile and provisional;science being a sort of telegraphic wire through which a meagre reportreaches us of things we would fain observe and live through in theirfull reality. This report may suffice for approximately fit action; itdoes not suffice for ideal knowledge of the truth nor for adequatesympathy with the reality. What commonly escapes speculative critics ofscience, however, is that in transcending hypothesis and reachingimmediacy again we should run a great risk of abandoning knowledge andsympathy altogether; for if we _became_ what we now represent soimperfectly, we should evidently no longer represent it at all. Weshould not, at the end of our labours, have at all enriched our ownminds by adequate knowledge of what surrounds us, nor made our willsjust in view of alien but well-considered interests. We should have lostour own essence and substituted for it, not something higher thanindiscriminate being, but only indiscriminate being in its flat, blind, and selfish infinity. The ideality, the representative faculty, wouldhave gone out in our souls, and our perfected humanity would havebrought us back to protoplasm. 

In transcending science, therefore, we must not hope to transcendknowledge, nor in transcending selfishness to abolish finitude. Finitudeis the indispensable condition of unselfishness as well as ofselfishness, and of speculative vision no less than of hypotheticalknowledge. The defect of science is that it is inadequate or abstract, that the account it gives of things is not full and sensuous enough; butits merit is that, like sense, it makes external being present to acreature that is concerned in adjusting itself to its environment, andinforms that creature about things other than itself. Science, ifbrought to perfection, would not lose its representative or idealessence. It would still survey and inform, but it would surveyeverything at once and inform the being it enlightened about all thatcould affect its interests. It would thus remain practical in effect andspeculative in character. In losing its accidental limitations it wouldnot lose its initial bias, its vital function. It would continue to be arational activity, guiding and perfecting a natural being. 

Perfect knowledge of things would be as far as possible from identifyingthe knower with them, seeing that for the most part--even when we callthem human--they have no knowledge of themselves. Science, accordingly, even when imperfect, is a tremendous advance on absorption in sense anda dull immediacy. It begins to enrich the mind and gives it someinkling, at least, of that ideal dominion which each centre ofexperience might have if it had learned to regard all others, and therelation connecting it with them, both in thought and in action. Idealknowledge would be an inward state corresponding to a perfectadjustment of the body to all forces affecting it. If the adjustment wasperfect the inward state would regard every detail in the objectsenvisaged, but it would see those details in a perspective of its own, adding to sympathetic reproduction of them a consciousness of theirrelation to its own existence and perfection. 

[Sidenote: Unity of science. ]

The fact that science expresses the character and relation of objects intheir own terms has a further important consequence, which serves againto distinguish science from metaphorical thinking. If a man tries toillustrate the nature of a thing by assimilating it to something elsewhich he happens to have in mind at the same time, it is obvious that asecond man, whose mind is differently furnished, may assimilate the sameobject to a quite different idea: so myths are centrifugal, and the moreelaborate and delicate they are the more they diverge, likewell-developed languages. The rude beginnings of myth in every age andcountry bear a certain resemblance, because the facts interpreted aresimilar and the minds reading them have not yet developed their specialgrammar of representation. But two highly developed mythicalsystems--two theologies, for instance, like the Greek and theIndian--will grow every day farther and farther apart. Science, on thecontrary, whatever it may start with, runs back into the same circle offacts, because it follows the lead of the subject-matter, and isattentive to its inherent transformations. 

If men's fund of initial perceptions, then, is alike, their science issure to be so; while the embroideries they make upon perception out oftheir own resources will differ as much as do the men themselves. Menasleep, said Heraclitus, live each in his own world, but awake they livein the same world together. To be awake is nothing but to be dreamingunder control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to thecomparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth. Thus if our objects are the same, our science and our waking lives willcoincide; or if there is a natural diversity in our discoveries, becausewe occupy different points in space and time and have a varying range ofexperience, these diversities will nevertheless supplement one another;the discovery that each has made will be a possible discovery for theothers also. So a geographer in China and one in Babylonia may at firstmake wholly unlike maps; but in time both will take note of theHimalayas, and the side each approaches will slope up to the very crestapproached by the other. So science is self-confirming, and its mostdisparate branches are mutually illuminating; while in the realm ofmyth, until it is surveyed scientifically, there can be nothing butmutual repulsion and incapacity to understand. Languages and religionsare necessarily rivals, but sciences are necessarily allies. 

[Sidenote: In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin ofwaste. ]

The unity of science can reach no farther than does coherent experience;and though coherence be a condition of experience in the more pregnantsense of the word--in the sense in which the child or the fool has noexperience--existence is absolutely free to bloom as it likes, and nologic can set limits or prescribe times for its irresponsible presence. A great deal may accordingly exist which cannot be known by science, orbe reached from the outside at all. This fact perhaps explains whyscience has as yet taken so little root in human life: for even withinthe limits of human existence, which are tolerably narrow, there isprobably no little incoherence, no little lapsing into what, from anyother point of view, is inconceivable and undiscoverable. Science, forinstance, can hardly reach the catastrophes and delights, often sovivid, which occur in dreams; for even if a physiological psychologyshould some day be able to find the causes of these phenomena, and so topredict them, it would never enter the dream-world persuasively, in away that the dreamer could appreciate and understand, while he continuedto dream. This is because that dream-world and the waking world presenttwo disjointed landscapes, and the figures they contain belong to quitedifferent genealogies--like the families of Zeus and of Abraham. Scienceis a great disciplinarian, and misses much of the sport which theabsolute is free to indulge in. If there is no inner congruity andcommunion between two fields, science cannot survey them both; at bestin tracing the structure of things presented in one of them, it may comeupon some detail which may offer a basis or lodgment for the entirefabric of the other, which will thus be explained _ab extra_; as thechildren of Abraham might give an explanation for Zeus and his progeny, treating them as a phenomenon in the benighted minds of some of Japhet'schildren. 

This brings the Olympian world within the purview of science, but doesso with a very bad grace. For suppose the Olympian gods reallyexisted--and there is nothing impossible in that supposition--they wouldnot be allowed to have any science of their own; or if they did, itwould threaten the children of Abraham with the same imputed unrealitywith which the latter boast to have extinguished Olympus. In order, then, that two regions of existence should be amenable to a sciencecommon to both and establishing a mutual rational representation betweenthem, it is requisite that the two regions should be congruous intexture and continuous inwardly: the objects present in each must betransformations of the objects present in the other. As this conditionis not always fulfilled, even within a man's personal fortunes, it isimpossible that all he goes through should be mastered by science orshould accrue to him ideally and become part of his funded experience. Much must be lost, left to itself, and resigned to the unprofitableflux that produced it. 

[Sidenote: Sciences converge from different points of origin. ]

A consequence of this incoherence in experience is that science is notabsolutely single but springs up in various places at once, as a certainconsistency or method becomes visible in this or that direction. Theseindependent sciences might, conceivably, never meet at all; each mightwork out an entirely different aspect of things and cross the other, asit were, at a different level. This actually happens, for instance, inmathematics as compared with history or psychology, and in morals ascompared with physics. Nevertheless, the fact that these varioussciences are all human, and that here, for instance, we are able tomention them in one breath and to compare their natures, is proof thattheir spheres touch somehow, even if only peripherally. Since commonknowledge, which knows of them all, is itself an incipient science, wemay be sure that some continuity and some congruity obtains betweentheir provinces. Some aspect of each must coincide with some aspect ofsome other, else nobody who pursued any one science would so much assuspect the existence of the rest. Great as may be the aversion oflearned men to one another, and comprehensive as may be their ignorance, they are not positively compelled to live in solitary confinement, andthe key of their prison cells is at least in their own pocket. 

[Sidenote: Two chief kinds of science, physics and dialectic. ]

Some sciences, like chemistry and biology, or biology and anthropology, are parted only, we presume, by accidental gaps in human knowledge; amore minute and better directed study of these fields would doubtlessdisclose their continuity with the fields adjoining. But there is onegeneral division in science which cuts almost to the roots of humanexperience. Human understanding has used from the beginning a doublemethod of surveying and arresting ideally the irreparable flux of being. One expedient has been to notice and identify similarities of character, recurrent types, in the phenomena that pass before it or in its ownoperations; the other expedient has been to note and combine in onecomplex object characters which occur and reappear together. The latterfeat which is made easy by the fact that when various senses arestimulated at once the inward instinctive reaction--which is felt by aprimitive mind more powerfully than any external image--is one and notconsciously divisible. 

The first expedient imposes on the flux what we call ideas, which areconcretions in discourse, terms employed in thought and language. Thesecond expedient separates the same flux into what we call things, whichare concretions in existence, complexes of qualities subsisting in spaceand time, having definable dynamic relations there and a traceablehistory. Carrying out this primitive diversity in reflection sciencehas moved in two different directions. By refining concretions indiscourse it has attained to mathematics, logic, and the dialecticaldevelopments of ethics; by tracing concretions in existence it hasreached the various natural and historical sciences. Following ancientusage, I shall take the liberty of calling the whole group of scienceswhich elaborates ideas _dialectic_, and the whole group that describesexistences _physics_. 

The contrast between ideal science or dialectic and natural science orphysics is as great as the understanding of a single experience couldwell afford; yet the two kinds of science are far from independent. Theytouch at their basis and they co-operate in their results. Weredialectic made clearer or physics deeper than it commonly is, thesepoints of contact would doubtless be multiplied; but even as they standthey furnish a sufficient illustration of the principle that all sciencedevelops objects in their own category and gives the mind dominion overthe flux of matter by discovering its form. 

[Sidenote: Their mutual implication. ]

That physics and dialectic touch at their basis may be shown by a doubleanalysis. In the first place, it is clear that the science of existence, like all science, is itself discourse, and that before concretions inexistence can be discovered, and groups of coexistent qualities can berecognised, these qualities themselves must be arrested by the mind, noted, and identified in their recurrences. But these terms, bandiedabout in scientific discourse, are so many essences and pure ideas: sothat the inmost texture of natural science is logical, and the wholeforce of any observation made upon the outer world lies in the constancyand mutual relations of the terms it is made in. If down did not meandown and motion motion, Newton could never have taken note of the fallof his apple. Now the constancy and relation of meanings is something_meant_, it is something created by insight and intent and is altogetherdialectical; so that the science of existence is a portion of the art ofdiscourse. 

On the other hand discourse, in its operation, is a part of existence. That truth or logical cogency is not itself an existence can be proveddialectically, [A] and is obvious to any one who sees for a moment whattruth means, especially if he remembers at the same time that allexistence is mutable, which it is the essence of truth not to be. Butthe knowledge or discovery of truth is an event in time, an incident inthe flux of existence, and therefore a matter for natural science tostudy. 

Furthermore, every term which dialectic uses is originally givenembodied; in other words, it is given as an element in the actual flux, it conies by illustration. Though meaning is the object of an idealfunction, and signification is inwardly appreciable only in terms ofsignification, yet the ideal leap is made from a material datum: that inwhich signification is seen is a fact. Or to state the matter somewhatdifferently, truth is not self-generating; if it were it would be afalsehood. 

Its eternity, and the infinitude of propositions it contains, remainpotential and unapproachable until their incidence is found inexistence. Form cannot of itself decide which of all possible formsshall be real; in their ideality, and without reference to theirillustration in things, all consistent propositions would be equallyvalid and equally trivial. Important truth is truth about something, nottruth about truth; and although a single datum might suffice to givefoothold and pertinence to an infinity of truths, as one atom wouldposit all geometry, geometry, if there were no space, would be, if I maysay so, all of the fourth dimension, and arithmetic, if there were nopulses or chasms in being, would be all algebra. Truth depends uponfacts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide whichtruths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal formsof actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert ifthe existent world had no arbitrary constitution. Living dialectic comesto clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of thingsby reflecting upon them, and by making them intended subjects ofdiscourse. 

[Sidenote: Their co-operation. ]

Dialectic and physics, thus united at their basis, meet again in theirresults. In mechanical science, which is the best part of physics, mathematics, which is the best part of dialectic, plays a predominantrôle; it furnishes the whole method of understanding wherever there isany real understanding at all. In psychology and history, too, althoughdialectic is soon choked by the cross-currents of nature, it furnishesthe little perspicuousness which there is. We understand actions andmental developments when the purposes or ideas contained in any stageare carried out logically in the sequel; it is when conduct and growthare rational, that is, when they are dialectical, that we think we havefound the true secret and significance of them. It is the evident idealof physics, in every department, to attain such an insight into causesthat the effects actually given may be thence _deduced_; and deductionis another name for dialectic. To be sure, the dialectic applicable tomaterial processes and to human life is one in which the terms and thecategories needed are still exceedingly numerous and vague: a littlelogic is all that can be read into the cataract of events. But the hopeof science, a hope which is supported by every success it scores, isthat a simpler law than has yet been discovered will be found to connectunits subtler than those yet known; and that in these finer terms theuniversal mechanism may be exhaustively rendered. Mechanism is the idealof physics, because it is the infusion of a maximum of mathematicalnecessity into the flux of real things. It is the aspiration of naturalscience to be as dialectical as possible, and thus, in their ideal, bothbranches of science are brought together. 

That the ideal of dialectic is to apply to existence and thereby tocoincide with physics is in a sense no less true, although dialecticiansmay be little inclined to confess it. The direct purpose of deduction isto elucidate an idea, to develop an import, and nothing can be moreirrelevant in this science than whether the conclusion is verified innature or not. But the direct purpose of dialectic is not its ultimatejustification. Dialectic is a human pursuit and has, at bottom, a moralfunction; otherwise, at bottom, it would have no value. And the moralfunction and ultimate justification of dialectic is to further the Lifeof Reason, in which human thought has the maximum practical validity, and may enjoy in consequence the richest ideal development. If dialectictakes a turn which makes it inapplicable in physics, which makes itworthless for mastering experience, it loses all its dignity: forabstract cogency has no dignity if the subject-matter into which it isintroduced is trivial. In fact, were dialectic a game in which thecounters were not actual data and the conclusions were not possibleprinciples for understanding existence, it would not be a science atall. It would resemble a counterfeit paper currency, without intrinsicvalue and without commercial convenience. Just as a fact withoutimplications is not a part of science, so a method without applicationwould not be. 

The free excursions of dialectic into non-natural regions may be wiselyencouraged when they satisfy an interest which is at bottom healthy andmay, at least indirectly, bring with it excellent fruits. As musiciansare an honour to society, so are dialecticians that have a single heartand an exquisite patience. But somehow the benefit must redound tosociety and to practical knowledge, or these abstracted hermits willseem at first useless and at last mad. The logic of nonsense has asubtle charm only because it can so easily be turned into the logic ofcommon sense. Empty dialectic is, as it were, the ballet of science: itruns most neatly after nothing at all. 

[Sidenote: No science _a priori_. ]

Both physics and dialectic are contained in common knowledge, and whencarried further than men carry them daily life these sciences remainessentially inevitable and essentially fallible. If science deservesrespect, it is not for being oracular but for being useful anddelightful, as seeing is. Understanding is nothing but seeing under andseeing far. There is indeed a great mystery in knowledge, but thismystery is present in the simplest memory or presumption. The scienceshave nothing to supply more fundamental than vulgar thinking or, as itwere, preliminary to it. They are simply elaborations of it; they acceptits pre-suppositions and carry on its ordinary processes. A pretence onthe philosopher's part that he could get behind or below human thinking, that he could underpin, so to speak, his own childhood and the inherentconventions of daily thought, would be pure imposture. A philosophercan of course investigate the history of knowledge, he can analyse itsmethod and point out its assumptions; but he cannot know by otherauthority than that which the vulgar know by, nor can his knowledgebegin with other unheard-of objects or deploy itself in advance over anesoteric field. Every deeper investigation presupposes ordinaryperception and uses some at least of its data. Every possible discovery_extends_ human knowledge. None can base human knowledge anew on adeeper foundation or prefix an ante-experimental episode to experience. We may construct a theory as disintegrating as we please about thedialectical or empirical conditions of the experience given; we maydisclose its logical stratification or physical antecedents; but everyidea and principle used in such a theory must be borrowed from currentknowledge as it happens to lie in the philosopher's mind. 

[Sidenote: Role of criticism. ]

If these speculative adventures do not turn out well, the scientific manis free to turn about and become the critic and satirist of his foiledambitions. He may exhaust scepticism and withdraw into the citadel ofimmediate feeling, yielding bastion after bastion to the assaults ofdoubt. When he is at last perfectly safe from error and reduced tospeechless sensibility, he will perceive, however, that he is alsowashed clean of every practical belief: he would declare himselfuniversally ignorant but for a doubt whether there be really anything toknow. This metaphysical exercise is simply one of those "fallings fromus, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worldsnot realised" which may visit any child. So long as the suspension ofjudgment lasts, knowledge is surely not increased; but when we rememberthat the enemy to whom we have surrendered is but a ghost of our ownevoking, we easily reoccupy the lost ground and fall back into anordinary posture of belief and expectation. This recovered faith has nonew evidences to rest on. We simply stand where we stood before we beganto philosophise, only with a better knowledge of the lines we areholding and perhaps with less inclination to give them up again for nobetter reason than the undoubted fact that, in a speculative sense, itis always possible to renounce them. 

Science, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; itis common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the sameorder as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Itstest is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimesconsists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science ismerely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction moreaccurate of meaning from meaning and purpose from purpose. It generatesin the mind, for each vulgar observation, a whole brood of suggestions, hypotheses, and inferences. The sciences bestow, as is right andfitting, infinite pains upon that experience which in their absencewould drift by unchallenged or misunderstood. They take note, infer, andprophesy. They compare prophecy with event; and altogether theysupply--so intent are they on reality--every imaginable background andextension for the present dream. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: For instance, in Plato's "Parmenides, " where it is shownthat the ideas are not in the mind. We may gather from what is theresaid that the ideas cannot be identified with any embodiment of them, however perfect, since an idea means a nature common to all its possibleembodiments and remains always outside of them. This is what Plato meantby saying that the ideas lay apart from phenomena and were what theywere in and for themselves. They were mere forms and not, as amaterialised Platonism afterward fancied, images in the mind of somepsychological deity. The gods doubtless know the ideas, as Plato tellsus in the same place: these are the common object of their thought andof ours; hence they are not anybody's thinking process, which of coursewould be in flux and phenomenal. Only by being ideal (_i. E. _, by being agoal of intellectual energy and no part of sensuous existence) can aterm be common to various minds and serve to make their deliverancespertinent to one another. 

That truth is no existence might also be proved as follows: Suppose thatnothing existed or (if critics carp at that phrase), that a universe didnot exist. It would then be true that all existences were wanting, yetthis truth itself would endure; therefore truth is not an existence. Anattempt might be made to reverse this argument by saying that since itwould still "be" true that nothing existed, the supposition isself-contradictory, for the truth would "be" or exist in any case. Truthwould thus be turned into an opinion, supposed to subsist eternally inthe ether. The argument, however, is a bad sophism, because it falsifiesthe intent of the terms used. Somebody's opinion is not what is meant bythe truth, since every opinion, however long-lived, may be false. Furthermore, the notion that it might have been true that nothingexisted is a perfectly clear notion. The nature of dialectic is entirelycorrupted when sincerity is lost. No intent can be self-contradictory, since it fixes its own object, but a man may easily contradict himselfby wavering between one intent and another. ]

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

[Sidenote: History an artificial memory. ]

The least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personalrecollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freelycommented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make notthe least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode inhis career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or lamentsthe changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. Hewould become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented andcontrolled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate painsto gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematicinvestigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens thebasis for imaginative reconstruction. It buttresses somewhat the frailbody of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged anindividual's attention. 

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost besaid to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were notwhat science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we mustrely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed toexpand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what hasto be assumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within themind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have buta shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame ofthe past changes continually and grows every day less similar to theoriginal experience which it purports to describe. 

[Sidenote: Second sight requires control. ]

It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise thecurtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. Wemay imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but, though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in somespiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like othertelepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-goneperception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiæand trivial concomitants, might involve no true repetition of anythingthat had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether. The sense of knowing constitutes only a working presumption forexperiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption canclaim no respect from the outsider. 

[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories. ]

While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can becompared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only whenmemory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itselfcorroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity andapproach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide, make a double assurance. While memory, then, is the basis of allhistorical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a fieldwhere it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is thatnatural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational, envisage together. Assertions relating to events in that world cancorroborate or contradict one another--something that would beimpossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphereof its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objectswhich are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correcteach other and help to fix the order of events as they reallyhappened--that is, as they happened independently of what either memorymay chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and directrecovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematicallycredited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event innature, in that common world in space and time to which other memoriesand perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memorybecomes a portion of natural science. Its assertions are such that anynatural science may conceivably support or contradict them. 

[Sidenote: Growth of legend. ]

Nature and its transformations, however, form too serried andcomplicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to theirspontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at firstvaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth andfable being originally localised within the confines of the materialworld and made to pass for a part of early history. The method by whichknowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginativeinfluence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that theimagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythmbecomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm isreproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew. The absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap--a gap which themomentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image. Whatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominantround of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion. 

This consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and forthe most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we areconscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, theexcitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discoverthe hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man ofexperience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certainawe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memoryfor its arts. A bard's mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put alljudgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanctity attributed to thetale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkeringwith it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with whichearly history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with maliceprepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling, between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time thetale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since itis memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only ifsome record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physicalmemorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with themodified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons. It merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocentpoet believes his own lies. 

Legends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramaticforce. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and idealpertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formativeprinciples for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures isa ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so itis in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but onlysuch stability as the circumstances require. Dramatic effect is noteverywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it iswanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full ofirrelevant survivals, contradictions, and scraps of nonsense. Theseliterary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which themechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated. The recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down itsinconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-taleincidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body, reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction orbeauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and piousminstrel carries it with him to the end. 

[Sidenote: No history without documents. ]

For these reasons there can be no serious history until there arearchives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privilegedposition may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of hisown time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archivesand records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian frompaying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the sameconcessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence ofdocuments, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle thatelicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out ofremembered events. In both cases the facts are automaticallyforeshortened and made to cluster, as it were providentially, about achosen interest. The historian's politics, philosophy, or romanticimagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that fallswithin that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, therest is passed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possibleto say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest whichguides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on theevents he relates and especially on their grouping and significance. 

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts andput a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is broughtforward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march ofevents, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals areendowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in theiractions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actualachievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remainburied in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and anhonest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish, as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits ofhis book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a verygreat mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent andsuch a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative ofall reality. 

[Sidenote: The aim is truth. ]

Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that theyavowedly write history with a view to effect, either political orliterary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as thosephilosophers who worship evolution. They sketch every situation withmalice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point, much as fashionable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge thecharacteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense oftime and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is thatwhich he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generichumanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he mightassume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. Thecharacteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheralvariation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartlessshimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body thatsupports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all withinhis apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is whollydevoted to expressing the passions of the dead. His ideal, emanatingfrom his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make hisheroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world. 

Nevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and evenscandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterousmyth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomesunblushing theory. Now theory--when we use the word for a schema ofthings' relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail andfulness--is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. Thefunction of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be torender theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geologicalchanges since the creation we should need no geological theory tosuggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like therule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknownand needs to be inferred from those which are given. The idealhistorian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses, and since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actualjuxtapositions he would need no classifications. The intentions, acts, and antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places, with no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had beenin fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modestposition in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience theidea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things wereperceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flowthrough being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there bein saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relationof cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought isguided by presumption. We say, "If this thing had happened, that otherthing would have followed"--a hypothesis which would lapse and becomeunmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contraryto fact would then have entered discourse. 

[Sidenote: Indirect methods of attaining it. ]

This ideal of direct omniscience is, however, impossible to attain; notmerely accidental frailties, but the very nature of things stands in theway. Experience cannot be suspended or sustained in being, because itsvery nucleus is mobile and in shifting cannot retain its past phasesbodily, but only at best some trace or representation of them. Memoryitself is an expedient by which what is hopelessly lost in its totalitymay at least be partly kept in its beauty or significance; andexperience can be enlarged in no other way than by carrying into themoving present the lesson and transmitted habit of much that is past. History is naturally reduced to similar indirect methods of recoveringwhat has lapsed. The historian's object may be to bring the past againbefore the mind in all its living reality, but in pursuing that objecthe is obliged to appeal to inference, to generalisation, and to dramaticfancy. We may conveniently distinguish in history, as it is perforcewritten by men, three distinct elements, which we may call historicalinvestigation, historical theory, and historical romance. 

[Sidenote: Historical research a part of physics. ]

Historical investigation is the natural science of the past. Thecircumstance that its documents are usually literary may somewhatdisguise the physical character and the physical principles of thisscience; but when a man wishes to discover what really happened at agiven moment, even if the event were somebody's thought; he has to readhis sources, not for what they say, but for what they imply. In otherwords, the witnesses cannot be allowed merely to speak for themselves, after the gossiping fashion familiar in Herodotus; their testimony hasto be interpreted according to the laws of evidence. The past needs tobe reconstructed out of reports, as in geology or archæology it needs tobe reconstructed out of stratifications and ruins. A man's memory or thereport in a newspaper is a fact justifying certain inferences about itsprobable causes according to laws which such phenomena betray in thepresent when they are closely scrutinised. This reconstruction is oftenvery difficult, and sometimes all that can be established in the end ismerely that the tradition before us is certainly false; somewhat as aperplexed geologist might venture on no conclusion except that the stateof the earth's crust was once very different from what it is now. 

[Sidenote: Verification here indirect. ]

A natural science dealing with the past labours under the disadvantageof not being able to appeal to experiment. The facts it terminates uponcannot be recovered, so that they may verify in sense the hypothesisthat had inferred them. The hypothesis can be tested only by currentevents; it is then turned back upon the past, to give assurance of factswhich themselves are hypothetical and remain hanging, as it were, to theloose end of the hypothesis itself. A hypothetical fact is a mostdangerous creature, since it lives on the credit of a theory which inturn would be bankrupt if the fact should fail. Inferred past facts aremore deceptive than facts prophesied, because while the risk of error inthe inference is the same, there is no possibility of discovering thaterror; and the historian, while really as speculative as the prophet, can never be found out. 

Most facts known to man, however, are reached by inference, and theirreality may be wisely assumed so long as the principle by which theyare inferred, when it is applied in the present, finds complete andconstant verification. Presumptions involved in memory and traditiongive the first hypothetical facts we count upon; the relations whichthese first facts betray supply the laws by which facts are to beconcatenated; and these laws may then be used to pass from the firsthypothetical facts to hypothetical facts of a second order, forming abackground and congruous extension to those originally assumed. Thisexpansion of discursive science can go on for ever, unless indeed theprinciples of inference employed in it involve some present existence, such as a skeleton in a given tomb, which direct experience fails toverify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy ofhypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility. 

[Sidenote: Futile ideal to survey all facts. ]

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and characterof events throughout past time in all places. The task is franklysuperhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimaldetail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominatedby the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum _adinfinitum_ would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be calledinfrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such completehistorical science would achieve would merely furnish materials forintelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There aremany things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than toknow--namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind'sfortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux ofimmediate experience in other minds or in one's own past; and just as itis better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gonesensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuouspulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificantin character. 

An attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever livedwould be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian abovethe world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it wouldflatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence, with all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is notcome to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete surveyof events would perforce register all changes that have taken place inmatter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, palæontology, and archæology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learningwould dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished ofboredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which mayenter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, butwhich ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed. 

[Sidenote: Historical theory. ]

The profit of studying history lies in something else than in a deadknowledge of what happens to have happened. A seductive alternativemight be to say that the profit of it lies in _understanding_ what hashappened, in perceiving the principles and laws that govern socialevolution, or the meaning which events have. We are hereby launched upona region of physico-ethical speculation where any man with a genius forquick generalisation can swim at ease. To find the one great cause whyBorne fell, especially if no one has ever thought of it before, or toexpound the true import of the French Revolution, or to formulate inlimpid sentences the essence of Greek culture--what could be moretempting or more purely literary? It would ill become the author of thisbook to decry allegorical expressions, or a cavalierlike fashion ofdismissing whole periods and tendencies with a verbal antithesis. Wemust have exercises in apperception, a work of imagination must be takenimaginatively, and a landscape painter must be suffered to be, at hisown risk, as impressionistic as he will. If Raphael, when he wasdesigning the _School of Athens_, had said to himself that Aristotleshould point down to a fact and Plato up to a meaning, or when designingthe _Disputa_ had conceived that the proudest of intellects, weary ofargument and learning, should throw down his books and turn torevelation for guidance, there would have been much historicalpertinence in those conceptions; yet the figures would have beenallegorical, contracting into a decorative design events that had beendispersed through centuries and emotions that had only cropped up hereand there, with all manner of variations and alloys, when the particularnatural situation had made them inevitable. So the Renaissance might bespoken of as a person and the Reformation as her step-sister, andsomething might be added about the troubles of their home life; butwould it be needful in that case to enter a warning that these unitswere verbal merely, and that the phenomena and the forces really at workhad been multitudinous and infinitesimal?

[Sidenote: It is arbitrary. ]

In fine, historical terms mark merely rhetorical unities, which have nodynamic cohesion, and there are no historical laws which are not atbottom physical, like the laws of habit--those expressions of Newton'sfirst law of motion. An essayist may play with historical apperceptionas long as he will and always find something new to say, discovering theideal nerve and issue of a movement in a different aspect of the facts. The truly proportionate, constant, efficacious relations between thingswill remain material. Physical causes traverse the moral units at whichhistory stops, determining their force and duration, and the order, soirrelevant to intent, in which they succeed one another. Even the singleman's life and character have subterranean sources; how should the outerexpression and influence of that character have sources moresuperficial than its own? Yet we cannot trace mechanical necessity downto the more stable units composing a personal mechanism, and much less, therefore, to those composing a complex social evolution. We accordinglytranslate the necessity, obviously lurking under life's commonplace yetunaccountable shocks, into verbal principles, names for generalimpressive results, that play some rôle in our ideal philosophy. Each ofthese idols of the theatre is visible only on a single stage and to dulypredisposed spectators. The next passion affected will throw adifferently coloured calcium light on the same pageant, and there willbe no end of rival evolutions and incompatible ideal principles crossingone another at every interesting event. 

Such a manipulation of history, when made by persons who underestimatetheir imaginative powers, ends in asserting that events have directedthemselves prophetically upon the interests which they arouse. Apartfrom the magic involved and the mockery of all science, there is adifficulty here which even a dramatic idealist ought to feel. Theinterests affected are themselves many and contrary. If history is to beunderstood teleologically, which of all the possible ends it might bepursuing shall we think really endowed with regressive influence andresponsible for the movement that is going to realise it? Did Columbus, for instance, discover America so that George Washington might exist andthat some day football and the Church of England may prevail throughoutthe world? Or was it (as has been seriously maintained) in order thatthe converted Indians of South America might console Saint Peter for thedefection of the British and Germans? Or was America, as Hegel believed, ideally superfluous, the absolute having become self-conscious enoughalready in Prussia? Or shall we say that the real goal is at an infinitedistance and unimaginable by us, and useless, therefore, forunderstanding anything?

In truth, whatever plausibility the providential view of a givenoccurrence may have is dependent on the curious limitation andselfishness of the observer's estimations. Sheep are providentiallydesigned for men; but why not also for wolves, and men for worms andmicrobes? If the historian is willing to accept such a suggestion, andto become a blind worshipper of success, applauding every issue, howeverlamentable for humanity, and calling it admirable tragedy, he may seemfor a while to save his theory by making it mystical; yet presently thislast illusion will be dissipated when he loses his way in the maze andfinds that all victors perish in their turn and everything, if you lookfar enough, falls back into the inexorable vortex. This is the sort ofobservation that the Indian sages made long ago; it is what renderstheir philosophy, for all its practical impotence, such an irrefragablerecord of experience, such a superior, definitive perception of theflux. Beside it, our progresses of two centuries and our philosophies ofhistory, embracing one-quarter of the earth for three thousand years, seem puerile vistas indeed. Shall all eternity and all existence be forthe sake of what is happening here to-day, and to me? Shall we strivemanfully to the top of this particular wave, on the ground that its foamis the culmination of all things for ever?

There is a sense, of course, in which definite political plans and moralaspirations may well be fulfilled by events. Our ancestors, sharing andanticipating our natures, may have had in many respects our actualinterests in view, as we may have those of posterity. Such idealco-operation extends far, where primary interests are concerned; it israrer and more qualified where a fine and fragile organisation isrequired to support the common spiritual life. Even in these cases, theaim pursued and attained is not the force that operates, since theresult achieved had many other conditions besides the worker's intent, and that intent itself had causes which it knew nothing of. Every"historical force" pompously appealed to breaks up on inspection into acataract of miscellaneous natural processes and minute particularcauses. It breaks into its mechanical constituents and proves to havebeen nothing but an _effet d'ensemble_ produced on a mind whose habitsand categories are essentially rhetorical. 

[Sidenote: A moral critique of the past is possible. ]

This sort of false history or philosophy of history might be purified, like so many other things, by self-knowledge. If the philosopher inreviewing events confessed that he was scrutinising them in order toabstract from them whatever tended to illustrate his own ideals, as hemight look over a crowd to find his friends, the operation would becomea perfectly legitimate one. The events themselves would be left forscientific inference to discover, where credible reports did not testifyto them directly; and the causes of events would be left to some theoryof natural evolution, to be stated, according to the degree of knowledgeattained, in terms more and more exact and mechanical. In the presenceof the past so defined imagination and will, however, would not abdicatetheir rights, and a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate ofevents in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed, might supervene upon positive history. This estimate of evolution mightwell be called a philosophy of history, since it would be a higheroperation performed on the results of natural science, to give a needfulbasis and illustration to the ideal. The present work is an essay inthat direction. 

[Sidenote: How it might be just. ]

The ideal which in such a review would serve as the touchstone forestimation, if it were an enlightened ideal, would recognise its ownnatural basis, and therefore would also recognise that under otherconditions other ideals, no less legitimate, may have arisen and mayhave been made the standard for a different judgment on the world. Historical investigation, were its resources adequate, would reveal tous what these various ideals have been. Every animal has his own, andwhenever individuals or nations have become reflective they have knownhow to give articulate expression to theirs. That all these ideals couldnot have been realised in turn or together is an immense misfortune, theirremediable half-tragedy of life, by which we also suffer. Inestimating the measure of success achieved anywhere a liberal historian, who does not wish to be bluntly irrational, will of course estimate itfrom _all_ these points of view, considering all real interestsaffected, in so far as he can appreciate them. This is what is meant byputting the standard of value, not in some arbitrary personal dogma butin a variegated omnipresent happiness. 

It is by no means requisite, therefore, in disentangling the Life ofReason, to foresee what ultimate form the good might some day take, muchless to make the purposes of the philosopher himself, his time, or hisnation the test of all excellence. This test is the perpetualconcomitant ideal of the life it is applied to. As all could not be wellin the world if my own purposes were defeated, so the general excellenceof things would be heightened if other men's purposes also had beenfulfilled. Each will is a true centre for universal estimation. As eachwill, therefore, comes to expression, real and irreversible values areintroduced into the world, and the historian, in estimating what hasbeen hitherto achieved, needs to make himself the spokesman for all pastaspirations. 

If the Egyptian poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to ouradvantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reasonwas thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erraticexperiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in theirday, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success thatin the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for whatis good in history and measures the past by the scale of reason need beno impertinent dogmatist on that account. Reason would not be reason butpassion if it did not make all passions in all creatures constituents ofits own authority. The judgments it passes on existence are only thejudgments which existence, so far, has passed on itself, and these areindelible and have their proportionate weight though others of manydifferent types may surround or succeed them. 

[Sidenote: Transition to historical romance. ]

To inquire what everybody has thought about the world, and into whatstrange shapes every passionate dream would fain have transformedexistence, might be merely a part of historical investigation. Thesefacts of preference and estimation might be made to stand side by sidewith all other facts in that absolute physical order which the universemust somehow possess. In the reference book of science they would allfind their page and line. But it is not for the sake of making vainknowledge complete that historians are apt to linger over heroicepisodes and commanding characters in the world's annals. It is not evenin the hope of discovering just to what extent and in how manydirections experience has been a tragedy. The mathematical balance offailure and success, even if it could be drawn with accuracy, would notbe a truth of moral importance, since whatever that balance might be forthe world at large, success and benefit here, from the living point ofview, would be equally valid and delightful; and however good or howeverbad the universe may be it is always worth while to make it better. 

What engages the historian in the reconstruction of moral life, such asthe past contained, is that he finds in that life many an illustrationof his own ideals, or even a necessary stimulus in defining what hisideals are. Where his admiration and his sympathy are awakened, he seesnoble aims and great achievements, worthy of being minutely studied andbrought vividly before later generations. Very probably he will be ledby moral affinities with certain phases of the past to attribute tothose phases, in their abstraction and by virtue of their moral dignity, a material efficacy which they did not really have; and his interest inhistory's moral will make him turn history itself into a fable. Thisabuse may be abated, however, by having recourse to impartial historicalinvestigation, that will restore to the hero all his circumstantialimpotence, and to the glorious event all its insignificant causes. Certain men and certain episodes will retain, notwithstanding, theirintrinsic nobility; and the historian, who is often a politician and apoet rather than a man of science, will dwell on those noble things soas to quicken his own sense for greatness and to burnish in his soulideals that may have remained obscure for want of scrutiny or may havebeen tarnished by too much contact with a sordid world. 

[Sidenote: Possibility of genuine epics. ]

History so conceived has the function of epic or dramatic poetry. Themoral life represented may actually have been lived through; but thatcircumstance is incidental merely and what makes the story worth tellingis its pertinence to the political or emotional life of the present. Torevive past moral experience is indeed wellnigh impossible unless theliving will can still covet or dread the same issues; historical romancecannot be truthful or interesting when profound changes have taken placein human nature. The reported acts and sentiments of early peoples losetheir tragic dignity in our eyes when they lose their pertinence to ourown aims. So that a recital of history with an eye to its dramaticvalues is possible only when that history is, so to speak, our own, orwhen we assimilate it to ours by poetic license. 

The various functions of history have been generally carried onsimultaneously and with little consciousness of their profounddiversity. Since historical criticism made its appearance, the romanticinterest in the past, far from abating, has fed eagerly on all thematerial incidents and private gossip of remote times. This sort ofpetty historical drama has reflected contemporary interests, which havecentred so largely in material possessions and personal careers; whileat the same time it has kept pace with the knowledge of minutiæ attainedby archæology. When historical investigation has reached its limits aperiod of ideal reconstruction may very likely set in. Indeed were itpossible to collect in archives exhaustive accounts of everything thathas ever happened, so that the curious man might always be informed onany point of fact that interested him, historical imagination might growfree again in its movements. Not being suspected of wishing to distortfacts which could so easily be pointed to, it might become moreconscious of its own moral function, and it might turn unblushingly towhat was important and inspiring in order to put it with dramatic forcebefore the mind. Such a treatment of history would reinstate that epicand tragic poetry which has become obsolete; it might well be written inverse, and would at any rate be frankly imaginative; it might furnish asort of ritual, with scientific and political sanctions, for publicfeasts. Tragedies and epics are such only in name if they do not dealwith the highest interests and destinies of a people; and they couldhardly deal with such ideals in an authoritative and definite way, unless they found them illustrated in that people's traditions. 

[Sidenote: Literal truth abandoned. ]

Historic romance is a work of art, not of science, and its fidelity topast fact is only an expedient, often an excellent and easy one, forstriking the key-note of present ideals. The insight attained, even whenit is true insight into what some one else felt in some other age, drawsits force and sublimity from current passions, passions potential in theauditor's soul. Mary Queen of Scots, for instance, doubtless repeated, in many a fancied dialogue with Queen Elizabeth, the very words thatSchiller puts into her mouth in the central scene of his play, "_Dennich bin Euer König!_" Yet the dramatic force of that expression, itsaudacious substitution of ideals for facts, depends entirely on thescope which we lend it. Different actors and different readers wouldinterpret it differently. Some might see in it nothing but a sally in awoman's quarrel, reading it with the accent of mere spite andirritation. Then the tragedy, not perhaps without historic truth, wouldbe reduced to a loud comedy. Other interpreters might find in thephrase the whole feudal system, all the chivalry, legality, andfoolishness of the Middle Ages. Then the drama would become moreinteresting, and the poor queen's cry, while that of a mindsophisticated and fanatical, would have great pathos and keenness. Toreach sublimity, however, that moment would have to epitomise idealswhich we deeply respected. We should have to believe in the sanctity ofcanon law and in the divine right of primogeniture. That a woman mayhave been very unhappy or that a state may have been held together bypersonal allegiance does not raise the fate of either to the tragicplane, unless "laws that are not of to-day nor yesterday, " aspirationsnative to the heart, shine through those legendary misfortunes. 

It would matter nothing to the excellence of Schiller's drama which ofthese interpretations might have been made by Mary Stuart herself at anygiven moment; doubtless her attitude toward her rival was coloured ondifferent occasions by varying degrees of political insight and moralfervour. The successful historical poet would be he who caught the mostsignificant attitude which a person in that position could possibly haveassumed, and his Mary Stuart, whether accidentally resembling the realwoman or not, would be essentially a mythical person. So Electra andAntigone and Helen of Troy are tragic figures absolved from historicalaccuracy, although possibly if the personages of heroic times were knownto us we might find that our highest imagination had been anticipatedin their consciousness. 

[Sidenote: History exists to be transcended. ]

Of the three parts into which the pursuit of history may bedivided--investigation, theory, and story-telling--not one attains idealfinality. Investigation is merely useful, because its intrinsicideal--to know every detail of everything--is not rational, and itsacceptable function can only be to offer accurate information upon suchpoints as are worth knowing for some ulterior reason. Historical theory, in turn, is a falsification of causes, since no causes are other thanmechanical; it is an arbitrary foreshortening of physics, and itdissolves in the presence either of adequate knowledge or of clearideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, intoepics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself fromall allegiance to particular past facts. Thus history proves to be animperfect field for the exercise of reason; it is a provisionaldiscipline; its values, with the mind's progress, would empty intohigher activities. The function of history is to lend materials topolitics and to poetry. These arts need to dominate past events, thebetter to dominate the present situation and the ideal one. A good bookof history is one that helps the statesman to formulate and to carry outhis plans, or that helps the tragic poet to conceive what is mostglorious in human destiny. Such a book, as knowledge and ignorance arenow mingled, will have to borrow something from each of the methods bywhich history is commonly pursued. Investigation will be necessary, since the needful facts are not all indubitably known; theory will benecessary too, so that those facts may be conceived in their pertinenceto public interests, and the latter may thereby be clarified; andromance will not be wholly excluded, because the various activities ofthe mind about the same matter cannot be divided altogether, and adramatic treatment is often useful in summarising a situation, when allthe elements of it cannot be summoned up in detail before the mind. 

[Sidenote: Its great rôle. ]

Fragmentary, arbitrary, and insecure as historical conceptions mustremain, they are nevertheless highly important. In human consciousnessthe indispensable is in inverse ratio to the demonstrable. Sense is thefoundation of everything. Without sense memory would be both false anduseless. Yet memory rather than sense is knowledge in the pregnantacceptation of the word; for in sense object and process are hardlydistinguished, whereas in memory significance inheres in the datum, andthe present vouches for the absent. Similarly history, which is derivedfrom memory, is superior to it; for while it merely extends memoryartificially it shows a higher logical development than memory has andis riper for ideal uses. Trivial and useless matter has dropped out. Inference has gone a step farther, thought is more largelyrepresentative, and testimony conveyed by the reports of others orfound in monuments leads the speculative mind to infer events that musthave filled the remotest ages. This information is not passive or idleknowledge; it truly _informs_ or shapes the mind, giving it newaptitudes. As an efficacious memory modifies instinct, by levelling itwith a wider survey of the situation, so a memory of what humanexperience has been, a sense of what it is likely to be under specificcircumstances, gives the will a new basis. What politics or any largedrama deals with is a will cast into historic moulds, an imaginationbusy with what we call great interests. Great interests are a gift whichhistory makes to the heart. A barbarian is no less subject to the pastthan is the civic man who knows what his past is and means to be loyalto it; but the barbarian, for want of a trans-personal memory, crawlsamong superstitions which he cannot understand or revoke and amongpersons whom he may hate or love, but whom he can never think of raisingto a higher plane, to the level of a purer happiness. The whole dignityof human endeavour is thus bound up with historic issues; and asconscience needs to be controlled by experience if it is to becomerational, so personal experience itself needs to be enlarged ideally ifthe failures and successes it reports are to touch impersonal interests. 

CHAPTER III

MECHANISM

[Sidenote: Recurrent forms in nature. ]

A retrospect over human experience, if a little extended, can hardlyfail to come upon many interesting recurrences. The seasons make theirround and the generations of men, like the forest leaves, repeat theircareer. In this its finer texture history undoubtedly repeats itself. Astudy of it, in registering so many recurrences, leads to a descriptionof habit, or to natural history. To observe a recurrence is to divine amechanism. It is to analyse a phenomenon, distinguishing its form, whichalone recurs, from its existence, which is irrevocable; and that theflux of phenomena should turn out, on closer inspection, to be composedof a multitude of recurring forms, regularly interwoven, is the ideal ofmechanism. The forms, taken ideally and in themselves, are whatreflection first rescues from the flux and makes a science of; theyconstitute that world of eternal relations with which dialectic isconversant. To note here and there some passing illustration of theseforms is one way of studying experience. The observer, the poet, thehistorian merely _define_ what they see. But these incidentalillustrations of form (called by Plato phenomena) may have a method intheir comings and goings, and this method may in turn be definable. Itwill be a new sort of constant illustrated in the flux; and this we calla law. If events could be reduced to a number of constant forms movingin a constant medium according to a constant law, a maximum of constancywould be introduced into the flux, which would thereby be proved to bemechanical. 

The form of events, abstracted from their material presence, becomes ageneral mould to which we tend to assimilate new observations. Whateverin particular instances may contravene the accredited rule, we attributewithout a qualm to unknown variations in the circumstances, thus savingour faith in order at all hazards and appealing to investigation tojustify the same. Only when another rule suggests itself which leaves asmaller margin unaccounted for in the phenomena do we give up our firstgeneralisation. Not even the rudest superstition can be criticised ordislodged scientifically save by another general rule, more exact andtrustworthy than the superstition. The scepticism which comes fromdistrust of abstraction and disgust with reckoning of any sort is not ascientific force; it is an intellectual weakness. 

Generalities are indeed essential to understanding, which is apt toimpose them hastily upon particulars. Confirmation is not needed tocreate prejudice. It suffices that a vivid impression should once havecut its way into the mind and settled there in a fertile soil; it willentwine itself at once with its chance neighbours and these adventitiousrelations will pass henceforth for a part of the fact. Repetition, however, is a good means of making or keeping impressions vivid andalmost the only means of keeping them unchanged. Prejudices, howeverrefractory to new evidence, evolve inwardly of themselves. The mentalsoil in which they lie is in a continual ferment and their very vitalitywill extend their scope and change their application. Generalisations, therefore, when based on a single instance, will soon forget it andshift their ground, as unchecked words shift their meaning. But when aphenomenon actually recurs the generalisations founded on it arereinforced and kept identical, and prejudices so sustained by eventsmake man's knowledge of nature. 

[Sidenote: Their discovery makes the flux calculable. ]

Natural science consists of general ideas which look for verification inevents, and which find it. The particular instance, once noted, isthrown aside like a squeezed orange, its significance in establishingsome law having once been extracted. Science, by this flight into thegeneral, lends immediate experience an interest and scope which itsparts, taken blindly, could never possess; since if we remained sunk inthe moments of existence and never abstracted their character from theirpresence, we should never know that they had any relation to oneanother. We should feel their incubus without being able to distinguishtheir dignities or to give them names. By analysing what we find andabstracting what recurs from its many vain incidents we can discover asustained structure within, which enables us to foretell what we mayfind in future. Science thus articulates experience and reveals itsskeleton. 

Skeletons are not things particularly congenial to poets, unless it befor the sake of having something truly horrible to shudder at and tofrighten children with: and so a certain school of philosophers exhausttheir rhetoric in convincing us that the objects known to science areartificial and dead, while the living reality is infinitely rich andabsolutely unutterable. This is merely an ungracious way of describingthe office of thought and bearing witness to its necessity. A body isnone the worse for having some bones in it, even if they are not allvisible on the surface. They are certainly not the whole man, whonevertheless runs and leaps by their leverage and smooth turning intheir sockets; and a surgeon's studies in dead anatomy help himexcellently to set a living joint. The abstractions of science areextractions of truths. Truths cannot of themselves constitute existencewith its irrational concentration in time, place, and person, itshopeless flux, and its vital exuberance; but they can be true ofexistence; they can disclose that structure by which its parts coherematerially and become ideally inferable from one another. 

[Sidenote: Looser principles tried first. ]

Science becomes demonstrable in proportion as it becomes abstract. Itbecomes in the same measure applicable and useful, as mathematicswitnesses, whenever the abstraction is judiciously made and has seizedthe profounder structural features in the phenomenon. These features areoften hard for human eyes to discern, buried as they may be in theinternal infinitesimal texture of things. Things accordingly seem tomove on the world's stage in an unaccountable fashion, and to betraymagic affinities to what is separated from them by apparent chasms. Thetypes of relation which the mind may observe are multifarious. Anychance conjunction, any incidental harmony, will start a hypothesisabout the nature of the universe and be the parent image of a wholesystem of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standardimages are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience isthat offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine, having once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance thatthe world's true secret is that everything in the end is ordered foreverybody's benefit--and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill atease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, andconceive that the world is a dangerous place of trial. A somewhat moreobservant intellect may decide that what exists is a certain number ofdefinite natures, each striving to preserve and express itself; and insuch language we still commonly read political events and our friend'sactions. At the dawn of science a Thales, observing the ways and theconditions of things somewhat more subtly, will notice that rain, something quite adventitious to the fields, is what covers them withverdure, that the slime breeds life, that a liquid will freeze to stoneand melt to air; and his shrewd conclusion will be that everything iswater in one disguise or another. It is only after long accumulatedobservation that we can reach any exact law of nature; and this law wehardly think of applying to living things. These have not yet revealedthe secret of their structure, and clear insight is vouchsafed us onlyin such regions as that of mathematical physics, where cogency in theideal system is combined with adequacy to explain the phenomena. 

[Sidenote: Mechanism for the most part hidden. ]

These exact sciences cover in the gross the field in which human lifeappears, the antecedents of this life, and its instruments. To aspeculative mind, that had retained an ingenuous sense of nature'sinexhaustible resources and of man's essential continuity with othernatural things, there could be no ground for doubting that similarprinciples (could they be traced in detail) would be seen to presideover all man's action and passion. A thousand indications, drawn fromintrospection and from history, would be found to confirm thisspeculative presumption. It is not only earthquakes and floods, summerand winter, that bring human musings sharply to book. Love and ambitionare unmistakable blossomings of material forces, and the more intenseand poetical a man's sense is of his spiritual condition the more loudlywill he proclaim his utter dependence on nature and the identity of themoving principle in him and in her. 

Mankind and all its works are undeniably subject to gravity and to thelaw of projectiles; yet what is true of these phenomena in bulk seems toa superficial observation not to be true of them in detail, and a personmay imagine that he subverts all the laws of physics whenever he wagshis tongue. Only in inorganic matter is the ruling mechanism open tohuman inspection: here changes may be seen to be proportionate to theelements and situation in which they occur. Habit here seems perfectlysteady and is called necessity, since the observer is able to deduce itunequivocally from given properties in the body and in the externalbodies acting upon it. In the parts of nature which we call living andto which we impute consciousness, habit, though it be fatal enough, isnot so exactly measurable and perspicuous. Physics cannot account forthat minute motion and pullulation in the earth's crust of which humanaffairs are a portion. Human affairs have to be surveyed undercategories lying closer to those employed in memory and legend. Theselooser categories are of every sort--grammatical, moral, magical--andthere is no knowing when any of them will apply or in what measure. Between the matters covered by the exact sciences and vulgar experiencethere remains, accordingly, a wide and nebulous gulf. Where we cannotsee the mechanism involved in what happens we have to be satisfied withan empirical description of appearances as they first fall together inour apprehension; and this want of understanding in the observer is whatpopular philosophy calls intelligence in the world. 

[Sidenote: Yet presumably pervasive. ]

That this gulf is apparent only, being due to inadequacy and confusionin human perception rather than to incoherence in things, is aspeculative conviction altogether trustworthy. Any one who can at allcatch the drift of experience--moral no less than physical--must feelthat mechanism rules the whole world. There are doubleness and diversityenough in things to satiate the greatest lover of chaos; but that acosmos nevertheless underlies the superficial play of sense and opinionis what all practical reason must assume and what all comprehendedexperience bears witness to. A cosmos does not mean a disorder withwhich somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a necessity fromwhich every one must draw his happiness. If a principle is efficaciousit is to that extent mechanical. For to be efficacious a principle mustapply necessarily and proportionately; it must assure us that where thefactors are the same as on a previous occasion the quotient will be thesame also. 

Now, in order that the flux of things should contain a repetition, elements must be identified within it; these identical elements may thenfind themselves in an identical situation, on which the same result mayensue which ensued before. If the elements were not constant andrecognisable, or if their relations did not suffice to determine thesucceeding event, no observation could be transferred with safety fromthe past to the future. Thus art and comprehension would be defeatedtogether. Novelties in the world are not lacking, because the elementsentering at any moment into a given combination have never beforeentered into a combination exactly similar. Mechanism applies to thematter and minute texture of things; but its applying there will create, at each moment, fresh ideal wholes, formal unities which mind emanatesfrom and represents. The result will accordingly always be unprecedentedin the total impression it produces, in exact proportion to thesingularity of the situation in hand. Mechanical processes are not likemathematical relations, because they _happen_. What they express theform of is a flux, not a truth or an ideal necessity. The situation maytherefore always be new, though produced from the preceding situation byrules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itselfnovel. 

Mechanism might be called the dialectic of the irrational. It is such ameasure of intelligibility as is compatible with flux and withexistence. Existence itself being irrational and change unintelligible, the only necessity they are susceptible of is a natural or empiricalnecessity, impinging at both ends upon brute matters of fact. Theexistential elements, their situation, number, affinities, and mutualinfluence all have to be begged before calculation can begin. When thesesurds have been accepted at their face value, inference may set to workamong them; yet the inference that mechanism will continue to reign willnot amount to certain knowledge until the event inferred has come togive it proof. Calculation in physics differs from pure dialectic inthat the ultimate object it looks to is not ideal. Theory here mustrevert to the immediate flux for its sanction, whereas dialectic is acentrifugal emanation from existence and never returns to its point oforigin. It remains suspended in the ether of those eternal relationswhich forms have, even when found embedded in matter. 

[Sidenote: Inadequacy of consciousness. ]

If the total flux is continuous and naturally intelligible, why is thepart felt by man so disjointed and opaque? An answer to this questionmay perhaps be drawn from the fact that consciousness apparently arisesto express the functions only of extremely complicated organisms. Thebasis of thought is vastly more elaborate than its deliverance. It takesa wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. The mind starts, therefore, with a tremendous handicap. In order toattain adequate practical knowledge it would have to represent clearlyits own conditions; for the purpose of mind is its own furtherance andperfection, and before that purpose could be fulfilled the mind'sinterests would have to become parallel to the body's fortunes. Thismeans that the body's actual relations in nature would have to becomethe mind's favourite themes in discourse. Had this harmony beenattained, the more accurately and intensely thought was exercised themore stable its status would become and the more prosperous itsundertakings, since lively thought would then be a symptom of health inthe body and of mechanical equilibrium with the environment. 

The body's actual relations, however, on which health depends, areinfinitely complex and immensely extended. They sweep the whole materialuniverse and are intertwined most closely with all social and passionateforces, with their incalculable mechanical springs. Meantime the mindbegins by being a feeble and inconsequent ghost. Its existence isintermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its owninterests or the situations that might support or defeat thoseinterests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantasticimage which in no way represents its own complex basis. Thus theparasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughablyinsufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledgealtogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the onehand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant topractice, express the mind's vegetative instincts; hence art andmythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlationwith which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, themind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, theturning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematicand disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, aswe say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things notunderstood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, whilepractical, are meagre and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, ifnot invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense, like irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind'srepresentative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions. 

[Sidenote: Its articulation inferior to that of its objects. ]

In other words, sense ought to correspond in articulation with theobject to be represented--otherwise the object's structure, with thefate it imports; cannot be transferred into analogous ideas. Now thehuman senses are not at all fitted to represent an organism on the scaleof the human body. They catch its idle gestures but not the innerprocesses which control its action. The senses are immeasurably toogross. What to them is a _minimum visibile_, a just perceptible atom, isin the body's structure, very likely, a system of worlds, the innercataclysms of which count in producing that so-called atom's behaviourand endowing it with affinities apparently miraculous. What must theseed of animals contain, for instance, to be the ground, as itnotoriously is, for every physical and moral property of the offspring?Or what must the system of signals and the reproductive habit in a brainbe, for it to co-ordinate instinctive movements, learn tricks, andremember? Our senses can represent at all adequately only such objectsas the solar system or a work of human architecture, where the unit'sinner structure and fermentation may be provisionally neglected inmastering the total. The architect may reckon in bricks and theastronomer in planets and yet foresee accurately enough the practicalresult. In a word, only what is extraordinarily simple is intelligibleto man, while only what is extraordinarily complex can supportintelligence. Consciousness is essentially incompetent to understandwhat most concerns it, its own vicissitudes, and sense is altogether outof scale with the objects of practical interest in life. 

[Sidenote: Science consequently retarded. ]

One consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hardto attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required isviolent and frustrates all the mind's rhetorical habits. There is aconstant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue ofmyth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and istried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm forknowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannotbut reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic featuresin various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upona different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse, he is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in, accordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a differentone on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems todemand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, andthe more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneousprejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourageradical investigation. 

Thus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit ofthings altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, asthings then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, exceptthat divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensiblefaith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to betrue. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessaryto change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one regionand microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured wouldhave lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse. Without such a startling change of focus nature can never seemeverywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad humaninterests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom canpenetration and courage in thinking hold their own against themiscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moralvalues must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, solong as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived. Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, whilethe influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematicallyagainst enlightenment. 

[Sidenote: and speculation rendered necessary. ]

The maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: thatspeculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. Fordirect perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality, the subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be ashell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but thesurface. Since the function of perception is properly to giveunderstanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as itwere, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about sounintelligible and dense an apparition. Æsthetic enthusiasm caresnothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficaciousmovement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies ofperception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the objectthrough want of consideration. These æsthetic objects, which have nointrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy andinexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes, that life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds havefed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds. Imaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on theseapparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long, perhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we beginto pine for another, where just those images which here played sodeceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed andefficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with propheciesabout what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, inthe wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best indialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden worlddivined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than theobjects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reachthe permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience, something to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity. 

Science, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyondthe dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, asscience aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hiddenreality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on adifferent scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet ofhypothesis, to carry the observer to the ends of the universe or, changing his dimensions, to introduce him into those infinitesimalabysses where nature has her workshop. In this region, were itsufficiently explored, we might find just those solid supports andfaithful warnings which we were looking for with such ill success in ourrhetorical speculations. The machinery disclosed would not be human; itwould be machinery. But it would for that very reason serve the purposewhich made us look for it instead of remaining, like the lower animals, placidly gazing on the pageants of sense, till some unaccountable pangforced us to spasmodic movement. It is doubtless better to find materialengines--not necessarily inanimate, either--which may really serve tobring order, security, and progress into our lives, than to findimpassioned or ideal spirits, that can do nothing for us except, atbest, assure us that they are perfectly happy. 

[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural. ]

The reigning aversion to mechanism is partly natural and partlyartificial. The natural aversion cannot be wholly overcome. Like theaversion to death, to old age, to labour, it is called forth by man'snatural situation in a world which was not made for him, but in which hegrew. That the efficacious structure of things should not beintentionally spectacular nor poetical, that its units should not beterms in common discourse, nor its laws quite like the logic of passion, is of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however--not to speakof its incidental delights--is so extraordinarily good for people thatonly with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings canclearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds. And of course, if thematerial basis of human strength could be discovered and betterexploited, the free activity of the mind would be not arrested butenlarged. Geology adds something to the interest of landscape, andbotany much to the charm of flowers; natural history increases thepleasure with which we view society and the justice with which we judgeit. An instinctive sympathy, a solicitude for the perfect working of anydelicate thing, as it makes the ruffian tender to a young child, is asentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we betterperceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of everyspecific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward allforms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole realinspiration. 

[Sidenote: and partly artificial. ]

The artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit. When a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits andinstitutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conceptionincompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values themyth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may betransferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is toogreat to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not intofalse and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into thosewhich are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those whichare dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates "viewing withalarm" the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice isindeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wishedto rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimentalreligion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul shouldlearn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no moremanlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernicanstar-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine. Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive ofexcellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that thestars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thoughtthey were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not inthat sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease tomanifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from theseregions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come tomake their covenant with us, as with all generations. 

[Sidenote: Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia. ]

The emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied tomaterialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly aprimary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appearsas a destructive force and in the incongruous rôle of a critic. Onedogmatism is not fit to criticise another; their conflict can end onlyin insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift andirrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion. But a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The nextturn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buriedmay rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of alater day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuinesceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediateand observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate, the reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is notnecessarily destructive; some construction and some belief beingabsolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all, criticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying ourdogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice. Materialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and thedogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with noscruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thoroughexamination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possibleexpression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. Soapproached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification withit, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. Theemotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains. Causes having been found for what is given, these causes will be provedto have just that beneficent potency and just that distressinginadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the realityhas, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothingexcept the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all whatit is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledgeof physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, isitself an achievement and a new resource. 

[Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism. ]

A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terrormay not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method intoeverything that we know. Materialism has its distinct æsthetic andemotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and evenreversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling itaccidentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habitof believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue yourromantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopesmost unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you havenothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to thefaith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in coldwater, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. Hisdelight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous andbeautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should beof the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in amuseum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies intheir cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soonover; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitelyinteresting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitablethose absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be thesentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active, joyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not without atouch of scorn. 

To the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics thataccompanies materialism has never been insensible; on the contrary, likeother merciful systems, it has trembled too much at pain and tended towithdraw the will ascetically, lest the will should be defeated. Contempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive withhosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evilsborn of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by whichman persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe, laughter is the proper defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage, that it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and brotherlyunderstanding; as the laughter that greets Don Quixote's absurdities andmisadventures does not mock the hero's intent. His ardour was admirable, but the world must be known before it can be reformed pertinently, andhappiness, to be attained, must be placed in reason. 

[Sidenote: The material world not dead nor ugly, ]

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day havegenerally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegianceand affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worldswhich they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed incould not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Givingrhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature'smeagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilledthey spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when theirjudgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A manis not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, norevery muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is naturedead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is notobviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright andhot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like thesophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusionsof self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Takeoff the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsomebleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enoughin their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them;and a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer thefeatures of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world isnot therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outeraspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beautybeing an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful andliving which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities. 

[Sidenote: nor especially cruel. ]

It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for manand all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in thenatural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror, is it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present inexperience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong tothe eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces cantouch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds atthe thought of a merely natural existence is something trulyhysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem sointolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religioussatisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetualtorture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in hisinfinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire thatmight avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them. A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if weunderstood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies thatpursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythicalexpression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which amechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in anotherman seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we takefor granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afreshwhen we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science thatintroduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death. 

[Sidenote: Mechanism to be judged by its fruits. ]

The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does notprevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge inarbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may asreasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might bemore. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universeis not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must vieweverything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when lifeis so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of littleimportance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humanedemand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should notbe unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a qualitythat may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made byconscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described bymechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it aretentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vitalequilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and notheory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptiveeuphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what wefind: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearancein some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where thephysical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and anatural prosperity. 

CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD

[Sidenote: Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence. ]

When Democritus proclaimed the sovereignty of mechanism, he did so inthe oracular fashion proper to an ancient sage. He found it no harder toapply his atomic theory to the mind and to the gods than to solids andfluids. It sufficed to conceive that such an explanation might bepossible, and to illustrate the theory by a few scattered facts andtrenchant hypotheses. When Descartes, after twenty centuries of verbalphysics, reintroduced mechanism into philosophy, he made a strikingmodification in its claims. He divided existence into two independentregions, and it was only in one, in the realm of extended things, thatmechanism was expected to prevail. Mental facts, which he approachedfrom the side of abstracted reflection and Platonic ideas, seemed to himobviously non-extended, even when they represented extension; and withthem mechanism could have nothing to do. Descartes had recovered in thescience of mechanics a firm nucleus for physical theory, a strongholdfrom which it had become impossible to dislodge scientific methods. There, at any rate, form, mass, distance, and other mathematicalrelations governed the transformation of things. Yet the very clearnessand exhaustiveness of this mechanical method, as applied to gross massesin motion, made it seem essentially inapplicable to anything else. Descartes was far too radical and incisive a thinker, however, not tofeel that it must apply throughout nature. Imaginative difficulties dueto the complexity of animal bodies could not cloud his rational insight. Animal bodies, then, were mere machines, cleancut and cold engines likeso many anatomical manikins. They explained themselves and all theiroperations, talking and building temples being just as truly a matter ofphysics as the revolution of the sky. But the soul had dropped out, andDescartes was the last man to ignore the soul. There had dropped outalso the secondary qualities of matter, all those qualities, namely, which are negligible in mechanical calculations. Mechanism was in truthfar from universal; all mental facts and half the properties of matter, as matter is revealed to man, came into being without asking leave; theywere interlopers in the intelligible universe. Indeed, Descartes waswilling to admit that these inexplicable bystanders might sometimes puttheir finger in the pie, and stir the material world judiciously so asto give it a new direction, although without adding to its substance orto its force. 

The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellentchance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-bornmechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in onequarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable totreat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it istrue, the only existences that remained remained entirely withoutcalculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower ofideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not beunwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues, that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristicof modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the backgroundand chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmascould be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted asufficient literary success, and what became of science was of littlemoment in comparison. 

[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative. ]

Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceededin its patient course without caring particularly what status themetaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even anadvantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapthis methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, withoutinsisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy ofhis discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in hisspeculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newtonto prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believingthat it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In naturalhistory, observation has not yet come within range of accurateprocesses; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations. Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, theultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recentimmense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature ratherthan in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater_naturalness_ have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies inthings, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but theinner texture of the process has not been laid bare. 

This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to thescientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is anotherproof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It iswilling to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where itcannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated itwill describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; andwhere types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. Inthis way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose theirresults, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, inanthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philologyand archæology, have reached tentatively very important results; it isenough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fundof information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to hismind: and if his apprehension follows that movement--not breaking inupon it with extraneous matter--it will be scientific apprehension. 

[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects. ]

What confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is thedifficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of decidingwhat the element native to the object is. In political economy, forinstance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, andtherefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it isdescriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Areyou formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if bothsimultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, ina given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are youtaking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, inorder to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the firstcase you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you aredefining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anythingexcept of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever takesuch a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one youare excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by anysuch absolute plan. 

For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are anaturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do wellnot to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A naturalphilosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moralterms in his calculation. If you use such terms--and to forbid their usealtogether would be pedantic--you should take them for conventionalliterary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views andintentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and theirexistence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, whereprocesses hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him. If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they representthe material processes that have brought them into being. Theexistential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter asDescartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritusthat matter is what makes them up (as it well might if "matter" weretaken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is inmechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moralunities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moralunities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and forthat reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences theyenclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move inunison with the rest of nature. 

People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they studyphysics, and _vice versa_, since it is only by feeling how the twospheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk onboth feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholasticsubtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one forthe other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid scienceis sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convinceus of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics andof cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and themethod double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausiblefor the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringingforward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting yourachievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take theplace of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals, metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of politicaleconomy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world. 

[Sidenote: "Physic of metaphysic begs defence. "]

The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carrytheir principles over into speculation, has left the greater part ofphysics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they havemade of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly notbeen a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that thereshould be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is morethan a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, whichdoes not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythicalphysics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in termsquite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affectedthis scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, inmechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even ofnatural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the generalaspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine ofevolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that halfof the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusioncould hold undisputed sway. 

[Sidenote: Evolution by mechanism. ]

There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in anymechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, instrangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might havebeen produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenumat rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; somuch so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable chargethat he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was asupposition contrary to fact, and that though the world _might_ havebeen so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, inantiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradualcrystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles, had anticipated Darwin's philosophy without Darwin's knowledge. It isclear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical, and therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, thoseforces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can haveproduced it. Darwin's discoveries, like every other advance in physicalinsight, are nothing but filling for that abstract assurance. They showus how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, inone stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us howmechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and thepoetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes mightsecure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, soconceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins. 

[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction. ]

At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour aboutit which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding ofa bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predeterminedand glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of afull-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise, the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolutionsuggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequentmanifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixedconsummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yetevolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exactdenial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be areturn to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for itwas the essence of Aristotle's physics--of which his theology was anintegral part and a logical capping--that the forms which beingsapproached pre-existed in other beings from which they had beeninherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterflyshrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them totheir origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency ofseeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation theymight possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolvedinto a chicken not by mechanical necessity--for an egg had acomparatively simple structure--but by virtue of an ideal harmony inthings; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a henshould lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent, hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into theparent's semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to theperfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was whyAristotle's God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be atthe same time an actual existence; since the world would not have knownwhich way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal, already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement anddirection into the world's structureless substance. 

The underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since thenatures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. Anindividual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but thespecific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far ashe was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance inthe matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax bydefect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remainunchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material. 

[Sidenote: If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution. ]

The contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalismlike that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it, is that new species may arise. The very title of Darwin's book "TheOrigin of Species" is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnantsense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by eachgeneration may differ from that approached by the previous one; thatnot merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, mayvary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentialityderived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal, but on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may graduallychange and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneousvariations--of course mechanically caused[C]--may occur and may modifythe hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon oneanother, may in time constitute a nature wholly unlike its firstoriginal. This accidental, cumulative evolution accordingly justifies adeclaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the naturemy father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In menature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a newspiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, andthe ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, isunprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and withoutauthority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine. 

[Sidenote: Intrusion of optimism. ]

All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution isaccordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies atthe basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at abreath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even bySpencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised andhidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution withprogress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominentin any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century, when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a worldthat happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that hasnothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not bethose with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities. The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or totough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being thatcircumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better diveunder and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that renderit inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstanceshave no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in thepopular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality therebyintroduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mockingindifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be, and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in theguise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when theirpolitical ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among uswhen the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimessaid that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, andthe Stoics that one should fill one's appointed place in nature, becausesuch was the practice of clouds and rivers. 

[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel. ]

Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men's attitudes andopinions; he had no need of Darwin's facts to convince him that in morallife, at least, there were no permanent species and that every postureof thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. Hisearly contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to thatopinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowedeverything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately beidentified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, andthey would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegelwas no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seekingformulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning theheart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same timehe was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physicalprinciple in things, and though the traditional myths suffered crueloperations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythicalprinciple itself remained untouched and was the very breath of hisnostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growthof experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose couldthe world have than to express the formula according to which it wasbeing generated?

In this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste forcorrect physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists. If physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcertingto find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard tounderstand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution ofthis perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should bemore worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office. A myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation ofits character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obviousthat accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its ownstandard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all idealsmight be, since the only use of them was to express a principle oftransition, and this principle was being realised, eternally andunawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rollingin the flux. 

[Sidenote: The conservative interpretation. ]

This philosophy might not be much relished if it were more franklyexpressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most mindswhen they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: inthis sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfoldingitself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamicphysics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predeterminedideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but oneoverarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described bysaying that this is Aristotle's view adapted to a world in which thereis only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of lifeare an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phasesexpress more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and theassumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what wentbefore. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, hissingle desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he wouldembody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after. So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity anddestined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled byapotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event, something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolutionmight really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumablybetter sort of existence--existence in the eternal. Somewhat in thisfashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine itwith a refreshed patristic theology. 

[Sidenote: The radical one. ]

There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is morein sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendentalphilosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goalcan be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could onlyopen our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will beretroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved ismystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise ofulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no otherideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, manya beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood isincapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good isreally to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anythingbut their totality--the infinite history of experience viewed under theform of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom ofHeaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time, is "taken up into a higher unity. " There could be no real pre-eminencein one man's works over those of another; and if faith, or insight intothe equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilegereserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, sincethose who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be asuseful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference forknowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human andfinite ideal--something to be outgrown. 

[Sidenote: Megalomania. ]

What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism andnaturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is astandard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and thejustifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignityin the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things beingequal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression ofthe world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of itany one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth wouldnot come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particularideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till theoriginal soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable. This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be "strivingonward. " Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centreand omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised thesupreme vocation of vortices, to have "their centre everywhere and theircircumference nowhere. " This somewhat troubled situation might seemsublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reachthe most remarkable and doubtless the "highest" form ofoptimism--optimism in hell. 

[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind. ]

Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the fieldwhere mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of materialoperations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broodsover the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. Thedifficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledgedhere, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seemsto know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal andideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection andintelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, orfinally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which ischaracteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtlessoften designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us torecognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of tryingto build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter, when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as withthe Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or theseat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, orperhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matteritself. [D]

[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness. ]

To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catchsome glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it, we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning themind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in theirprimitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category andtraceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and noself-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might havebeen as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, onebudding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them. These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at thesame time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothingoriginally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it mayseem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence mightas easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover itto have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and nothaving even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life northeir passions from their environment, might well stand in the presenceof facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction;indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort thatwe call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assignedthem to distinct sequences and alternative spheres. 

The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are notall artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even whereprejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient andingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive totalconfusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It wasimpossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthlyscene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passionsstalking through space. Material and mental elements, connectionsnatural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yetinseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud acrossthe sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science isthat dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out. 

The flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discriminationand enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Itsinconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could befixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flocktogether. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things aboutthem, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal inparticular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower thanany dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but oftenspontaneously exerted--a phenomenon which appeared in no other part ofthe world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object wasthus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all theothers, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed. 

[Sidenote: The notion of spirit. ]

The external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind, seemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just asone's own body was moved by passions and thoughts which no one elsecould see--and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder andself-congratulation--so evidently other things had a spirit within orabove them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much tocontain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could verywell feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden forceinto the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching, this spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to haveunaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Thingspast, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was notcredited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more orless resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimescould pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. Thefuture, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the samefashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant andpreternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubtthat all those objects existed; the only question was where they mightlie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation anda dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as itcould dart in every direction over both space and time, so it couldcome thence into a man's presence or even into his body, to takepossession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not beendistinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination, so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding. 

The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth, the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied bymen, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal somequick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper tophenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception ofnature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part tothat fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those thingswhich were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive wereconceived to have had in the interval a material existence. Morestirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their materialconstituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. Westill say, for instance, that war _comes on_. That phrase would oncehave been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, mustexist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; thatrage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god. Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owedtheir divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness ofantiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought howabsolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which thosefigures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world. 

[Sidenote: The notion of sense. ]

Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When materialobjects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparativelyfixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one's bodyall other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to apermanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be foundagain unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when wereceded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching andmeasuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspectsor views of things were accordingly distinguished from the thingsthemselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised aboveanybody's sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspectswere due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended onits presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one'shead or, if they were emotional, in one's heart; but anatomy would havehad some difficulty in finding them there. They constituted what isproperly called the mind--the region of sentience, emotion, andsoliloquy. 

The mind was the region where those aspects which real things presentto the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedlyand from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirelyon the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divineand ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very farfrom depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a lateschool of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, withits ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Itsprophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than materialappearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous andinspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable inevery sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal, since absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by naturepresent wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; thedreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities withthings to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to bedivinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses' voice heard in aprofound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind ofclairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit mightnaturally be expected to pass into another world, since it already dweltthere at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Itsincursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent athrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh. 

[Sidenote: Competition between the two. ]

The ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first assomething sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or privateproduct, and though its destiny might be to pass half the time, likePersephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The humanmind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was afamiliar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bredcontempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation ofindividuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important oredifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge. As each man's whole experience is bound to his body no less than is themost trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendentalground or _ratio cognoscendi_ of every other sphere. It suffices, therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practicaland dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all thediscoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience inwhich they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeedinconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning andno faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses, now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are veryeasy and exciting feats for criticism to perform. 

Passions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values whenremoved from their objects will naturally fall into the body's mind, andbe allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves toattribute almost all the body's acts to some preparatory intention ormotive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of humannature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions, as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in thisupper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that ithas a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversalsof science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery istoo tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; andaccordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, thesphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rationalworlds, the material and the ideal. 

[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism. ]

Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things, will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and idealrealm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have noplace among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified withdecaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves willbe retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptichas packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere ofsensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was thatit changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealistswill declare that all body is a part of some body's mind. Thus, by acurious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopelesscontradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refractionand intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to bequite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when thethings it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. Theintellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing itsostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse intothe dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had onceextricated a world. 

The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we followthe thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth weshall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorousmonster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and trulytranscendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out ofplace, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception ordiscovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. Soadministered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and willnot inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every beliefwill subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that abelief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for notentertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance. But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychologyitself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience forphysics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly inbewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanishin its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once theeffect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. Acalculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior, would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positivesciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinaryobjects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to thinkabout. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited toaddressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in thebeginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it mightwell have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or apractical universe. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote B: The term "matter" (which ought before long to reappear inphilosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology itcommonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritusor the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Itsparticles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a givenhypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong onlybecause this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise thatthe hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent itsconstitution. 

On the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter meanssomething good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion indiscourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent ofevery existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, likeeverything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actuallove, for instance, differs _materially_ from the mere idea orpossibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body ofit were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it agrander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysicalwill. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existenceor presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strainand dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in thepremises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of bruteexistence. The surd in experience--its non-ideal element--is not anindifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by callingit pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting orrejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, thesurd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possiblequantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree ofperfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These importantfactors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it aserious and indispensable rôle in describing and feeling the world. 

Aristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency tothe dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him forsubstance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excusefor this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is apiece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as merematerial for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat ismatter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical andnon-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everythingcould glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class ofthings. ]

[Footnote C: It has been suggested--what will not party spiritcontrive?--that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin becausenot predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysicalsense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free, these acts might deflect evolution--like Descartes' soul acting on thepineal gland--into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, andgradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessaryimplication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. Itmay not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutelyfree, _i. E. , _ intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which wayquite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they werekept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would notbe free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magicdestiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round toAristotelian physics again. ]

[Footnote D: The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, becausethey had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginablewas the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of amultitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take thelatter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to becontained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, weare given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding toapparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitativeaggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanicallygoverned, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is thesubstance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality ofthought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That anymaterial must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but ouridealists, in their eagerness to show that _Gefuehl ist Alles_, havethought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expressionand wishing to make it a stuff. 

There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashfulname for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in anyactual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have torely on the _system_ into which that material has fallen; thesubstantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows itsintensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This formdepends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relationswhich are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions. ]

CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

[Sidenote: Mind reading not science. ]

If psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology containshould be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besideshaving a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities, makes a certain inner music in the beholder's mind, inciting him toenter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which hemight lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has notpassed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in thatluxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to thepasser-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with thingsinanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following themovement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at bestpoetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men's minds ismade of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, whichpresumably might be a fair sample of what men's minds are; butunfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassedand idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obviousreasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, andblameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but aninsipid and impractical view of mankind. 

In fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men issuggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gestureand expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their noveltyand alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkwardways, create a notion of our friends' natures which is extremely vividand seldom extremely flattering. 

Such romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it ispersuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has alwaysbeen about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the potentialin one's self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughtsof men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouringnatures; and they doubtless vary much more than our triteclassifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions, religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick ofthem is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to oneanother than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men creditfor originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of itto show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that allmemories are not furnished with the like material images, but oftenhave no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged thatthe disparity in men's soliloquies is enormous, and that some races, perhaps, live content without soliloquising at all. 

[Sidenote: Experience a reconstruction. ]

Nevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given viewof things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybodywas agreed about what universal experience is and had personallygathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only hisown, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis ofthis his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, withwhatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others. Universal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly idealconstruction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which ofcourse is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmittingmaterially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also totheir mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, andinstitutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to arational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment ismaterial, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred byus anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Pastexperience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortalreach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectualtruth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves, starting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. Thisreconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, betterevidence of what we are than of what other men have been. 

[Sidenote: The honest art of education. ]

When we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to dealwith is our interlocutor's power of imagining that experience; for thereal experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neitheranswer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do nottouch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All ourproofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purposeand best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate anideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In thesematters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. Wemay perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them forthe moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in theirnatures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhatsharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would bemore profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walkingtogether along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the materialfacts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actualways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus, with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respondof itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another tounderstand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it inantiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; andwhile the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science ofpeople's states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity inourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance. 

[Sidenote: Arbitrary readings of the mind. ]

In what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is oftenpursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any genericexperience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must bereconstructed _ad hoc_; it is not the experience that necessitates thedescription, but the description that recalls the experience, definingit in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that thereis something about our friend's troubles that secretly pleases us, manycircumstances in our own lives, or in other people's, may suddenly recurto us to illustrate that _aperçu_; and we may be tempted to say, Thereis a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit ofsatire, a ray from a literary flashlight, giving a partial clearness fora moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volumeof Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannotbut enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and thatanother man's imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him adistress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, weshall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and aprofounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientificdiscovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happenor help us to decompose a single event, accurately and withoutambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thingimpossible, but the Scotch philosopher's amiable generalities, perhapslargely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenthcentury, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and everynew shade of brute born into the world will ground a new "theory of themoral sentiments. "

The whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease withwhich the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in hisown past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regardfacts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show nocontinuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them, consequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is nomethod in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it. The views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be morenatural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better theessential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forwardcontinually out of the past what can have a value for the present. Thespiritual life in which this value lies is practical in itsassociations, because it understands and dominates what touches action;yet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists inknowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can findyourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal toimagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trainsimagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science isinstrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes ofknowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. Butwhen it is science and accurate knowledge that we pursue, we should notbe satisfied with literature. 

[Sidenote: Human nature appealed to rather than described. ]

When discourse on any subject would be persuasive, it appeals to theinterlocutor to think in a certain dynamic fashion, inciting him, notwithout leading questions, to give shape to his own sentiments. Knowledge of the soul, insight into human nature and experience, are nodoubt requisite in such an exercise; yet this insight is in these casesa vehicle only, an instinctive method, while the result aimed at isagreement on some further matter, conviction and enthusiasm, rather thanpsychological information. Thus if I declare that the storms of winterare not so unkind as benefits forgot, I say something which if true hasa certain psychological value, for it could be inferred from thatassertion that resentment is generally not proportionate to the injuryreceived but rather to the surprise caused, so that it springs from ourown foolishness more than from other people's bad conduct. Yet myobservation was not made in the interest of any such inferences: it wasmade to express an emotion of my own, in hopes of kindling in others asimilar emotion. It was a judgment which others were invited to share. There was as little exact science about it as if I had turned it intofrank poetry and exclaimed, "Blow, blow, thou winter's wind!" Knowledgeof human nature might be drawn even from that apostrophe, and a veryfine shade of human feeling is surely expressed in it, as Shakespeareutters it; but to pray or to converse is not for that reason the samething as to pursue science. 

Now it constantly happens in philosophic writing that what is supposedto go on in the human mind is described and appealed to in order tosupport some observation or illustrate some argument--as continually, for instance, in the older English critics of human nature, or in thesevery pages. What is offered in such cases is merely an invitation tothink after a certain fashion. A way of grasping or interpreting somefact is suggested, with a more or less civil challenge to the reader toresist the suasion of his own experience so evoked and represented. Sucha method of appeal may be called psychological, in the sense that itrelies for success on the total movement of the reader's life and mind, without forcing a detailed assent through ocular demonstration or puredialectic; but the psychology of it is a method and a resource ratherthan a doctrine. The only doctrine aimed at in such philosophy is ageneral reasonableness, a habit of thinking straight from the elementsof experience to its ultimate and stable deliverance. This is what inhis way a poet or a novelist would do. Fiction swarms with such sketchesof human nature and such renderings of the human mind as a criticalphilosopher depends upon for his construction. He need not be interestedin the pathology of individuals nor even in the natural history of man;his effort is wholly directed toward improving the mind's economy andinfusing reason into it as one might religion, not without diligentself-examination and a public confession of sin. The human mind isnobody's mind in particular, and the science of it is necessarilyimaginative. No one can pretend in philosophic discussion any more thanin poetry that the experience described is more than typical. It isgiven out not for a literal fact, existing in particular moments orpersons, but for an imaginative expression of what nature and life haveimpressed on the speaker. In so far as others live in the same worldthey may recognise the experience so expressed by him and adopt hisinterpretation; but the aptness of his descriptions and analyses willnot constitute a science of mental states, but rather--what is a fargreater thing--the art of stimulating and consolidating reflection ingeneral. 

[Sidenote: Dialectic in psychology. ]

There is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed ascience, but not a science of matters of fact--I mean the dialectic ofideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and thisrelation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, impliesfurther that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both. Every idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out intoa curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of thatidea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure andrelations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, itsdialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love allthose who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatevertends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however, that those who resembled him most in amiability--say by flattering me noless than he did--were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of myaffections would become somewhat involved. I might end either bystriving to reconcile the rivals or by discovering that what I loved wasnot the man at all, but only an office exercised by him in my regardwhich any one else might also exercise. 

These inner lucubrations, however, while they lengthen the moment'svista and deepen present intent, give no indication whatever about theorder or distribution of actual feelings. They are out of place in apsychology that means to be an account of what happens in the world. Forthese dialectical implications do not actually work themselves out. Theyhave no historical or dynamic value. The man that by mistake or courtesyI call a father may really have no son, any more than Herodotus forbeing the father of history; or having had a son, he may have lost him;or the creature sprung from his loins may be a misshapen idiot, havingnothing ideal in common with his parent. Similarly my affection for afriend, having causes much deeper than discourse, may cling to himthrough all transformations in his qualities and in his attitude towardme; and it may never pass to others for resembling him, nor take, in allits days, a Platonic direction. The impulse on which that dialectic wasbased may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may benipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of thingsunborn. 

[Sidenote: Spinoza on the passions. ]

Spinoza's account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialecticalpsychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities andimpossibilities in such a method. Spinoza began with self-preservation, which was to be the principle of life and the root of all feelings. Theviolence done to physics appears in this beginning. Self-preservation, taken strictly, is a principle not illustrated in nature, whereeverything is in flux, and where habits destructive or dangerous to thebody are as conspicuous as protective instincts. Physical mechanismrequires reproduction, which implies death, and it admits suicide. Spinoza himself, far too noble a mind to be fixed solely on preservingits own existence, was compelled to give self-preservation anextravagant meaning in order to identify it with "intellectual love ofGod" or the happy contemplation of that natural law which destroyed allindividuals. To find the self-preserving man you must take him after hehas ceased to grow and before he has begun to love. Self-preservation, being thus no principle of natural history, the facts or estimationsclassed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two otherprinciples--either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or todialectical consistency in judgment. 

Self-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceivedevents acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrestedmomentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts andtensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes andrelations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterwarditself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity orconflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation isdialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. Itmight accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in theself-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by thatdialectic would discover its ideal scope. 

Such a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of thatattitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the idealrelations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one ofits moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path andmade the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to tracethe sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes inlife were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life mightbe at a single instant. The arrow's flight was to be deduced from itsinstantaneous position. A passion's history was to be the history ofwhat would have been its expression if it had had no history at all. 

[Sidenote: A principle of estimation cannot govern events. ]

A man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchangedemotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much inSpinoza's way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, whensomewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know theirfriends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, forinstance, that I feel some titillation on reading a propositionconcerning the contrast between Paul's idea of Peter and Peter's idea ofhimself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, itsexternal cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately loveits cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external causeis, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I loveSpinoza. Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to anotherdemonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy--Hobbes, for instance--my delight in Spinoza's increased perfection, consequentupon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, itsexternal cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbesas well. Thus the periphery of my affections may expand indefinitely, till it includes the infinite, the ultimate external cause of all mytitillations. But how these interesting discoveries are interruptedbefore long by a desire for food, or by an indomitable sense that Hobbesand the infinite are things I do _not_ love, is something that mydialectic cannot deduce; for it was the values radiating from a givenimpulse, the implications of its instant object, that were beingexplicated, not at all the natural forces that carry a man through thatimpulse and beyond it to the next phase of his dream, a phase which ifit continues the former episode must continue it spontaneously, by graceof mechanical forces. 

When dialectic is thus introduced into psychology, an intensiveknowledge of the heart is given out for distributive knowledge ofevents. Such a study, when made by a man of genius, may furnish goodspiritual reading, for it will reveal what our passions mean and whatsentiments they would lead to if they could remain fixed and dictate allfurther action. This insight may make us aware of strangeinconsistencies in our souls, and seeing how contrary some of our idealsare to others and how horrible, in some cases, would be their ultimateexpression, we may be shocked into setting our house in order; and intrying to understand ourselves we may actually develop a self that canbe understood. Meantime this inner discipline will not enlighten usabout the march of affairs. It will not give us a key to evolution, either in ourselves or in others. Even while we refine our aspirations, the ground they sprang from will be eaten away beneath our feet. Insteadof developing yesterday's passion, to-day may breed quite another in itsplace; and if, having grown old and set in our mental posture, we areincapable of assuming another, and are condemned to carrying on thedialectic of our early visions into a new-born world, to be aschoolmaster's measuring-rod for life's infinite exuberance, we shallfind ourselves at once in a foreign country, speaking a language thatnobody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of thedialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day amessage which every day grows less applicable and less significant. 

[Sidenote: Scientific psychology a part of biology. ]

That remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a scienceof matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history andconstitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originallydistinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation inthe body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was inAristotle's _De Anima_--an ill-developed branch of natural science, pieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasionaldramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic elementconsists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and naturalsituations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same timethat bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a manbegins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand thatthey are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with suchexternal objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enterinto the things' texture. The images and emotions remain, however, attached to those things, for they are refractions of them throughbodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passionsfixed upon them as their object. 

In parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitateto refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, whichthey may occasionally read in an animal's aspect. Darwin, for instance, constantly uses psychical language: his birds love one another's plumageand their æsthetic charms are factors in natural selection. Such littlefables do not detract from the scientific value of Darwin'sobservations, because we see at once what the fables mean. Thedescription keeps close enough to the facts observed for the reader tostop at the latter, rather than at the language in which they arestated. In the natural history of man such interpretation into mentalterms, such microscopic romance, is even easier and more legitimate, because language allows people, perhaps before their feelings are longpast, to describe them in terms which are understood to refer directlyto mental experience. The sign's familiarity, to be sure, often hides inthese cases a great vagueness and unseizableness in the facts; yet abeginning in defining distinctly the mental phase of natural situationshas been made in those small autobiographies which introspective writerssometimes compose, or which are taken down in hospitals and laboratoriesfrom the lips of "subjects. " What a man under special conditions may sayhe feels or thinks adds a constituent phase to his natural history; andwere these reports exact and extended enough, it would become possibleto enumerate the precise sensations and ideas which accompany everystate of body and every social situation. 

[Sidenote: Confused attempt to detach the psychic element. ]

This advantage, however, is the source of that confusion and sophistrywhich distinguish the biology of man from the rest of physics. Attentionis there arrested at the mental term, in forgetfulness of the situationwhich gave it warrant, and an invisible world, composed of theseimagined experiences, begins to stalk behind nature and may even bethought to exist independently. This metaphysical dream may be said tohave two stages: the systematic one, which is called idealism, and anincidental one which pervades ordinary psychology, in so far as mentalfacts are uprooted from their basis and deprived of their expressive orspiritual character, in order to be made elements in a dynamic scheme. This battle of feelings, whether with atoms or exclusively with theirown cohorts, might be called a primitive materialism, rather than anidealism, if idealism were to retain its Platonic sense; for forms andrealisations are taken in this system for substantial elements, and aremade to figure either as a part or as the whole of the world's matter. 

[Sidenote: Differentia of the psychic. ]

Phenomena specifically mental certainly exist, since natural phenomenaand ideal truths are concentrated and telescoped in apprehension, besides being weighted with an emotion due to their effect on the personwho perceives them. This variation, which reality suffers in beingreported to perception, turns the report into a mental factdistinguishable from its subject-matter. When the flux is partlyunderstood and the natural world has become a constant presence, thewhole flux itself, as it flowed originally, comes to be called a mentalflux, because its elements and method are seen to differ from theelements and method embodied in material objects or in ideal truth. Theprimitive phenomena are now called mental because they all deviate fromthe realities to be ultimately conceived. To call the immediate mentalis therefore correct and inevitable when once the ultimate is in view;but if the immediate were all, to call it mental would be unmeaning. 

The visual image of a die, for instance, has at most three faces, noneof them quite square; no hired artificer is needed to produce it; itcannot be found anywhere nor shaken in any box; it lasts only for aninstant; thereafter it disappears without a trace--unless it flits backunaccountably through the memory--and it leaves no ponderable dust orashes to attest that it had a substance. The opposite of all this istrue of the die itself. But were no material die in existence, the imageitself would be material; for, however evanescent, it would occupyspace, have geometrical shape, colour, and magic dynamic destinies. Itstransformations as it rolled on the idea of a table would betransformations in nature, however unaccountable by any steady law. Suchmaterial qualities a mental fact can retain only in the spiritual formof representation. A representation of matter is immaterial, but amaterial image, when no object exists, is a material fact. If theAbsolute, to take an ultimate case, perceived nothing but space andatoms (perceiving itself, if you will, therein), space and atoms wouldbe its whole nature, and it would constitute a perfect materialism. Thefact that materialism was true would not of itself constitute anidealism worth distinguishing from its opposite. For a vehicle or locusexists only when it makes some difference to the thing it carries, presenting it in a manner not essential to its own nature. 

[Sidenote: Approach to irrelevant sentience. ]

The qualification of being by the mental medium may be carried to anylength. As the subject-matter recedes the mental datum ceases to havemuch similarity or inward relevance to what is its cause or its meaning. The report may ultimately become, like pure pain or pleasure, almostwholly blind and irrelevant to any world; yet such emotion is none theless immersed in matter and dependent on natural changes both for itsorigin and for its function, since a significant pleasure or pain makescomments on the world and involves ideals about what ought to behappening there. 

Mental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over adead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure oflife is independent of that of their objects, since thought may beprophetic or reminiscent and is intermittent even when its object enjoysa continuous existence. Mental facts are similar to their objects, sincethings and images have, intrinsically regarded, the same constitution;but images do not move in the same plane with things and their parts arein no proportionate dynamic relation to the parts of the latter. Thought's place in nature is exiguous, however broad the landscape itrepresents; it touches the world tangentially only, in some ferment ofthe brain. It is probably no atom that supports the soul (as Leibnitzimagined), but rather some cloud of atoms shaping or remodelling anorganism. Mind in this case would be, in its physical relation tomatter, what it feels itself to be in its moral attitude toward thesame; a witness to matter's interesting aspects and a realisation of itsforms. 

[Sidenote: Perception represents things in their practical relation tothe body. ]

Mental facts, moreover, are highly selective; especially does thisappear in respect to the dialectical world, which is in itself infinite, while the sum of human logic and mathematics, though too long for mostmen's patience, is decidedly brief. If we ask ourselves on whatprinciple this selection and foreshortening of truth takes place in themind, we may perhaps come upon the real bond and the deepest contrastbetween mind and its environment. The infinity of formal truth isdisregarded in human thought when it is irrelevant to practice and tohappiness; the infinity of nature is represented there in violentperspective, centring about the body and its interests. The seat andstarting-point of every mental survey is a brief animal life. A mindseems, then, to be a consciousness of the body's interests, expressed interms of what affects that body, as if in the Babel of nature a manheard only the voices that pronounced his name. A mind is a privateview; it is gathered together in proportion as physical sensibilityextends its range and makes one stretch of being after another tributaryto the animal's life, and in proportion also as this sensibility isintegrated, so that every organ in its reaction enlists the resources ofevery other organ as well. A personal will and intelligence thus arise;and they direct action from within with a force and freedom which areexactly proportionate to the material forces, within and without thebody, which the soul has come to represent. 

In other words, mind raises to an actual existence that _form_ inmaterial processes which, had the processes remained wholly material, would have had only ideal or imputed being--as the stars would not havebeen divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye ofastrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any valuecoming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anythingfortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding orwithering of a flower. Some of nature's automata, however, lovethemselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; theseconstellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness andtheir interest in their own individuality rescues that individualityfrom the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits. 

[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual. ]

That the basis of mind lies in the body's interests rather than in itsatoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet maynot poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, beperhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with thepractical and prospective character of consciousness, with its totaldependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and itsformal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body likea useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it isintermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes, processes irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterialessence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body assumes an attitudewhich, being an attitude, supervenes upon the body's elements and cannotbe contained within them. This attitude belongs to the whole body in itssignificant operation, and the report of this attitude, its expression, requires survey, synthesis, appreciation--things which constitute whatwe call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of thatmaterial situation; it is the voice of that particular body in thatparticular pass. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis(being a _form_ of material existence and not matter itself) is neithervainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in theprocess. 

Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus thosemechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentiallyand at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makesthis delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actualcentres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continuesto be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has createdvalues which, being due to imputation, could not exist without beingimputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed withoutbeing attached to one object or event rather than to another. Materialdramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own bybeing expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind isthe entelechy of an organic body. [E] It is a region where form breeds anexistence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt. Mind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the constitutionof being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offerssomething in which it is possible to ground an interest. 

That Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially sonatural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness inconceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on hisown part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theoryonly an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficientcause. Analysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident thatall dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain onlyamong objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful thatmental facts can have no connection except through their material basisand no mutual relevance except through their objects. 

[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics. ]

There is indeed a strange half-assumption afloat, a sort of reservedfaith which every one seems to respect but nobody utters, to the effectthat the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideasintelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, tobe sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to thecosmos, so that the passage from idea to idea in experience need not bedue, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy inthese ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at allby such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation tosome science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisionallife. Their own understanding is of things merely in the gross, becausethey fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough, some interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, inmaking a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. Thelaws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It isonly the "possibilities" of sensation that stand and change according tolaw; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanentpossibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream. 

Correct and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its facebackward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements ofknowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looksforward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it wouldrise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relationswhich attach the moments of feeling together are material relations, implying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceivenothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this isthe only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybodycan think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented toimmerse flying experience in experience understood, it would becomeordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, forno very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of anunwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does notbelieve in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in theprevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovershow he has formed it, and that our ancestors--at least the remoterones--begin to exist when we discover them. 

When Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, wasasked by admiring ladies to say something about the passions, what cameinto his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, hethought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. Thesoul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted fromthat rational path by the waves of passion that beat against it andsometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal entitiesin dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course, from the other half of the world; because while a material mechanismmight be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not beconceived without a material mechanism--at least a representedone--lying beneath and between. Spinoza made a great improvement in thesystem by attaching the mind more systematically to the body, andstudying the parts which organ and object played in qualifyingknowledge; but his conception of mental unities and mental processesremained literary, or at best, as we have seen, dialectical. No shadowof a principle at once psychic and genetic appeared in his philosophy. All mind was still a transcript of material facts or a deepening ofmoral relations. 

[Sidenote: Association not efficient]

The idea of explaining the flow of ideas without reference to bodiesappeared, however, in the principle of association. This is the nearestapproach that has yet been made to a physics of disembodiedmind--something which idealism sadly needs to develop. A terribleincapacity, however, appears at once in the principle of association;for even if we suppose that it could account for the flow of ideas, itdoes not pretend to supply any basis for sensations. And as the moreefficient part of association--association by contiguity--is only arepetition in ideas of the order once present in impressions, the wholequestion about the march of mental experience goes back to whatassociation does not touch, namely, the origin of sensations. Whateverybody assumed, of course, was that the order and quality ofsensations were due to the body; but their derivation was not studied. Hume ignored it as much as possible, and Berkeley did not sacrifice agreat deal when he frankly suggested that the production of sensationmust be the direct work of God. 

This tendency not to recognise the material conditions of mind showeditself more boldly in the treatment of ideation. We are not plainlyaware (in spite of headaches, fatigue, sleep, love, intoxication, andmadness) that the course of our thoughts is as directly dependent on thebody as is their inception. It was therefore possible, without glaringparadox, to speak as if ideas caused one another. They followed, inrecurring, the order they had first had in experience, as when we learnsomething by heart. Why, a previous verse being given, we shouldsometimes be unable to repeat the one that had often followed it before, there was no attempt to explain: it sufficed that reverie often seemedto retrace events in their temporal order. Even less dependent onmaterial causes seemed to be the other sort of association, associationby similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump fromChina to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash outbetween them. 

[Sidenote: It describes coincidences. ]

Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea offinding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws orintelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention ordivert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of associationwere gathered and classified. It was the young ladies' botany of mind. Under association could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, athousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, onceled a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once?The wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of KingCharles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have ledany one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been agood royalist and a good Christian--and then only by a curious accident. It was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggestedone another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world, opened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one caredto observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled, associated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor wasthe matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among allsimilar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor howamong a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should berecalled for contiguity's sake. 

[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed indialectic. ]

The best instance, perhaps, of regular association might be found inlanguage and its meaning; for understanding implies that each wordhabitually calls up its former associates. Yet in what, psychologicallyconsidered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants doesthe word "horse" involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image suchas a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one viewof one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vaguesense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which thatobject lies. The word "kite" would immediately make a different regionwarm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn inidea to the sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of amore buoyant sort of locomotion. 

Understanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome, since the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, willnot suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something whicheach half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential tofeeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to sciencebecause they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know whatto do and what to say in the sign's presence; and this practicalknowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at thesame time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the mostsuperficial part of its effect. Because I understand what "horse" means, the word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured. This understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase maybe pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely, that contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; andthe sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashesand makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body'seducation. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative, vibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Somegenerative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mindand lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are notprocesses in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are æsthetic ordialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in anexistence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien toassociation: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not agenesis. 

[Sidenote: Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, ]

For these and other reasons association has fallen into some disrepute;but it is not easy to say what, in absolute psychology, has come to takeits place. If we speak of suggestion, a certain dynamic turn seems to begiven to the matter; yet in what sense a perception suggests its futuredevelopment remains a mystery. That a certain ripening and expansion ofconsciousness goes on in man, not guided by former collocations ofideas, is very true; for we do not fall in love for the first timebecause this person loved and these ardent emotions have been habituallyassociated in past experience. And any impassioned discourse, opening atevery turn into new vistas, shows the same sort of vegetation. Yet toobserve that consciousness is automatic is not to disclose the mechanismby which it evolves. The theory of spontaneous growth offers lessexplanation of events, if that be possible, than the theory ofassociation. It is perhaps a better description of the facts, since atleast it makes no attempt to deduce them from one another. 

[Sidenote: and will another. ]

If, on the contrary, a relation implied in the burden or will of themoment be invoked, the connection established, so far as it goes, isdialectical. Where a dialectical correspondence is not found, a materialcause would have to be appealed to, Such a half-dialectical psychologywould be like Schopenhauer's, quite metaphysical. It might be a greatimprovement on an absolute psychology, because it would restore, even ifin mythical terms, a background and meaning to life. The unconsciousAbsolute Will, the avid Genius of the Species, the all-attractingPlatonic Ideas are fabulous; but beneath them it is not hard to divinethe forces of nature. This volitional school supplies a goodstepping-stone from metaphysics back to scientific psychology. Itremains merely to substitute instinct for will, and to explain thatinstinct--or even will, if the term be thought more consoling--is merelya word covering that operative organisation in the body which controlsaction, determines affinities, dictates preferences, and sustainsideation. 

[Sidenote: Double attachment of mind to nature. ]

What scientific psychology has to attempt--for little has beenaccomplished--may be reduced to this: To develop physiology andanthropology until the mechanism of life becomes clear, at least in itsgeneral method, and then to determine, by experiment and by well-siftedtestimony, what conscious sublimation each of those material situationsattains, if indeed it attains any. There will always remain, no doubt, many a region where the machinery of nature is too fine for us to traceor eludes us by involving agencies that we lack senses to perceive. Inthese regions where science is denied we shall have to be satisfied withlandscape-painting. The more obvious results and superficial harmoniesperceived in those regions will receive names and physics will bearrested at natural history. Where these unexplained facts are mental itwill not be hard to do more systematically what common sense has donealready, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to thenatural crises that subtend them. 

This placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental factsthemselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and evenwhen the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study itsmeaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for aroundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It issuperfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger:hunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and itsextreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that wantof nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwisewith higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us indoubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say, square the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, orsteal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and italso says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out ofthe land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence, clearly enough declares what it springs from--a social tradition; andwhat it represents--the interests, real or imaginary, of the communityin which you were reared. 

Where psychology depends on literature, where both its units and itsmethod are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly, or as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of aman's character or a river's god. Particulars in illustration may havegood historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Suchmetaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted tocontinue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods;and since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we maycontinue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse. 

[Sidenote: Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?]

When psychology is a science, then, it describes the flyingconsciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feelingor absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such apsychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge ofreality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have tobe answered in the negative, yet not without some previousdiscriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is asort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The firstCartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, thatfeeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science thatdescribes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet thisself-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it rendersit in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps thesorriest illusion. 

[Sidenote: Sentience is representable only in fancy]

"Reality" is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, thensentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we meanby sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we containit, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can beconceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were anextension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledgeof reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts thatmight be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so muchfeeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time, while our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discovernor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different;and the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brutesentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that sciencereaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; thesestates of mind are approached from without and are defined by theirsurrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known bybeing enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware. Apart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which isendured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage, it cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined andre-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledgeunless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributedto some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would alwaysattach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to anothermind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it, so that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredientof present sentience. 

It is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that there-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes an object ofknowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel--precious orfalse--must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is theonly instrument for knowing this sort of "reality. " A flying moment, ifat all _understood_ or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would benot known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be knownscientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, strivingto pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeatwhat dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the verynotion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior orsubstance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on thecontrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be lookedfor beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body asmusic about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the printand paper. To look for it _within_ is not to understand what we arelooking for. 

Knowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in itsmethod, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact, it is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate, while absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitelyignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worstsense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true aboutit, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind"reality" or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, wemust rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancyin us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at leastmisleading to give the name of "reality" to this appearance, which isentirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its ownstatus, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, asa dream might call to another dream. 

[Sidenote: The conditions and objects of sentinence, which are notsentinence, are also real. ]

It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let"reality" designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is trueabout those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympatheticsort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other handscientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would havereality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true aboutsentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedlyinto their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach anddescribe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, andshow us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling. This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentiencewould be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, aconscious moment might represent the environing world eitherscientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, byinstinctive readiness to meet it. 

[Sidenote: Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents otherthings. ]

What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathicpoet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon's life-longsoliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientificpsychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and theirrelation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon's thoughts hadhad no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; orif by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we shouldattribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting thatthey had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, evenwhere it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for itsprojection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to whichhis thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinentto it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him. Napoleon's consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified withthe truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because heseems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master ofthe forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes andfunction, and knew that he had _arisen_, like all the rest of history, and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greaterthings. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too, possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not besaid of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only materialbeing, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understandingof itself. 

The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness arethus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known anddistinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realitieswould be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowingthat Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, weknow appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality. And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon's long soliloquy, wereseparated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong toNapoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics, with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum ofwhat is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence, the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define theconstituent elements of his reality, which could not be better knownthan through their means. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such abody. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it ispossessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in itsfirst entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second. Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of itsbody. ]

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

[Sidenote: Dialectic better than physics. ]

Common knowledge passes from memory to history and from history tomechanism; and having reached that point it may stop to look back, notwithout misgivings, over the course it has traversed, and thus becomepsychology. These investigations, taken together, constitute physics, orthe science of existence. But this is only half of science and on thewhole the less interesting and less fundamental half. No existence is ofmoment to a man, not even his own, unless it touches his will andfulfils or thwarts his intent. Unless he is concerned that existencesshould be of specific kinds, unless he is interested in form, he canhardly be interested in being. At the very least in terms of pleasureversus pain, light versus darkness, comfort versus terror, the flyingmoment must be loaded with obloquy or excellence if its passage is notto remain a dead fact, and to sink from the sphere of actualityaltogether into that droning limbo of potentialities which we callmatter. Being which is indifferent to form is only the material ofbeing. To exist is nothing if you have nothing to do, if there isnothing to choose or to distinguish, or if those things which belong toa chosen form are not gathered into it before your eyes, to express whatwe call a truth or an excellence. 

Existence naturally precedes any idealisation of it which men cancontrive (since they, at least, must exist first), yet in the order ofvalues knowledge of existence is subsidiary to knowledge of ideals. Ifit be true that a good physics is as yet the predominant need inscience, and that man is still most troubled by his ignorance of mattersof fact, this circumstance marks his illiberal condition. Withoutknowledge of existence nothing can be done; but nothing is really doneuntil something else is known also, the use or excellence that existencemay have. It is a great pity that those finer temperaments that arenaturally addressed to the ideal should have turned their energies toproducing bad physics, or to preventing others from establishing naturaltruths; for if physics were established on a firm basis the idealistswould for the first time have a free field. They might then recovertheir proper function of expressing the mind honestly, and disdain thesorry attempt to prolong confusion and to fish in troubled waters. 

[Sidenote: Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous andunpleasant. ]

Perhaps if physical truth had not been so hugely misrepresented in men'sfaith and conduct, it would not need to be minutely revealed orparticularly emphasised. When the conditions surrounding life are notrightly faced by instinct they are inevitably forced upon reflectionthrough painful shocks; and for a long time the new habit thus forcedupon men brings to consciousness not so much the movement ofconsciousness itself as the points at which its movement impinges on theexternal world and feels checks and frictions. Physics thus becomesinordinately conspicuous (as when philology submerges the love ofletters) for lack of a good disposition that should allow us to takephysics for granted. Much in nature is delightful to know and to keep inmind, but much also (the whole infinite remainder) is obscure anduninteresting; and were we practically well adjusted to its issue wemight gladly absolve ourselves from studying its processes. In a worldthat in extent and complexity so far outruns human energies, physicalknowledge ought to be largely virtual; that is, nature ought to berepresented by a suitable attitude toward it, by the attitude whichreason would dictate were knowledge complete, and not by explicit ideas. 

[Sidenote: Physics should be largely virtual. ]

The ancients were happily inspired when they imagined that beyond thegods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyreanbeyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one's self about. Many existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have soinfinitesimal an influence on his experience that they may besufficiently represented there by an atom of star-dust; and it isprobable that if, out of pure curiosity, we wished to consider veryremote beings and had the means of doing so, we should find the detailof existence in them wholly incommensurable with anything we canconceive. Such beings could be known virtually only, in that we mightspeak of them in the right key, representing them in appropriatesymbols, and might move in their company with the right degree ofrespectful indifference. 

[Sidenote: and dialectic explicit. ]

The present situation of science, however, reverses the ideal one. Physics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with ouracquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by theshock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions andassumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give usstill greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things, remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only inrevulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandaloussituation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left, after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as afine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we areseeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or rather notinitiated. 

A further bad consequence of this illiberal state is that, among manywho have, in spite of the times, adoration in their souls, to adorephysics, to worship Being, seems a philosophical religion, whereas, ofcourse, it is the essence of idolatry. The true God is an object ofintent, an ideal of excellence and knowledge, not a term belonging tosense or to probable hypothesis or to the prudent management of affairs. After we have squared our accounts with nature and taken sufficientthought for our bodily necessities, the eyes can be lifted for the firsttime to the eternal. The rest was superstition and the quaking use of afalse physics. That appeal to the supernatural which while the dangerthreatens is but forlorn medicine, after the blow has fallen may turn tosublime wisdom. This wisdom has cast out the fear of material evils, anddreads only that the divine should not come down and be worthilyentertained among us. In art, in politics, in that form of religionwhich is superior, and not inferior, to politics and art, we define andembody intent; and the intent embodied dignifies the work and lendsinterest to its conditions. So, in science, it is dialectic that makesphysics speculative and worthy of a free mind. The baser utilities ofmaterial knowledge would leave life itself perfectly vain, if they didnot help it to take on an ideal shape. Ideal life, in so far as itconstitutes science, is dialectical. It consists in seeing how thingshang together perspicuously and how the later phases of any process fillout--as in good music--the tendency and promise of what went before. This derivation may be mathematical or it may be moral; but in eithercase the data and problem define the result, dialectic being insightinto their inherent correspondence. 

[Sidenote: Intent is vital and indescribable. ]

Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect's essence ispractical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds totransition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology isobliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as afeeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other, intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an objectwhich not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapableof being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under theEleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. Theparts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them awhole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories, because while you may give place and date for every feeling thatsomething is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what thesefeelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. Theimportance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is thispronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makesthe intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moralworld; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgmentto bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by notingits existence, but by estimating its value, by collating it with yourown intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are nocounter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he saidso. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some riskyourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four. 

[Sidenote: It is analogous to flux in existence]

Feelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do notretain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in theirnative medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality ortranscendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in whichevery initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would beunthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instancehas, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely andamiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiarmysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constituteor contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, thatbodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence issuspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals ismysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is anexpedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumventsmortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst ofchange, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what existsno longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished bythought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments, together with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere imageof what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is notknowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply anothermore fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent thatprojects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only inuse, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong, because it takes something ulterior for its standard. 

[Sidenote: It expresses natural life. ]

We may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember thatthought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the worldand to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is toexperience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulativestructure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is anexpression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure. What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things thatinspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character, namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in otherwords, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translateinto consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but totranslate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and toexpress its response to those environing presences, intent and conscioussignification are required. Intellect transcends the given and meansthe absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment orentelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As lifedepends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyondthe individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition ofoutlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by whichthey are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we usethe word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, asAristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life. [F] The flux is sopervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles whichsuspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm, but only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, thepolitical or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, iscondemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal. Its scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extendits sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothingin common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what isnot themselves. 

[Sidenote: It has a material basis. ]

This moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is ofcourse not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does notconsist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful. When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take uproom and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attentionupon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occurwithout a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate andsupernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams andmadness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspendedaltogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressingkindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the dispositionand habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the worldhave not yet begun to think about it. 

There is, of course, an inner dialectical relevance among allpropositions that have the same ideal theme, no matter how remote orunknown to one another those who utter the propositions may be; but themedium in which this infinite dialectical network is woven ismotionless, and indifferent to the direction in which thought mighttraverse it; in other words, it is not discourse or intelligence buteternal truth. From the point of view of experience this priordialectical relation of form to form is merely potential; for thethoughts between which it would obtain need never exist or be enacted. There is society only among incarnate ideas; and it is only byexpressing some material situation that an idea is selected out of theinfinity of not impossible ideas and promoted to the temporal dignity ofactual thought. 

[Sidenote: It is necessarily relevant to earth. ]

Moreover, even if the faculty of intelligence were disembodied and couldexist in a vacuum, it would still be a vain possession if no data weregiven for it to operate upon and if no particular natural structure, animal, social, or artistic, were at hand for intelligence to allyitself to and defend. Reason would in that case die of inanition; itwould have no subject-matter and no sanction, as well as no seat. Intelligence is not a substance; it is a principle of order and of art;it requires a given situation and some particular natural interest tobring it into play. In fact, it is nothing but a name for the empirewhich conscious, but at bottom irrational, interests attain over thefield in which they operate; it is the fruition of life, the token ofsuccessful operation. 

Every theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinctrooted in the body and incidental to natural organisation. The intent bywhich memory refers to past or absent experience, or the intent by whichperception becomes recognition, is a transcript of relations in whichevents actually stand to one another. Such intent representsmodifications of structure and action important to life, modificationsthat have responded to forces on which life is dependent. Both desireand meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent, mechanical relations subsisting in nature. These mechanical relationsgive practical force to the thought that expresses them, and thethought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserveit. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing materialpotentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and inthe other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things andmanifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desireto disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the materialworld which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her evenmore, for a theme. 

In private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed inreverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten. Desire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely idealrealm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the wholeprocess. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodiedlife which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and nativeform of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thoughtthey deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma toreach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mysticallogicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisitesuicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight areannihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloonconsumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found withoutan organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is thatorgan's visible emanation; and none would be significant without asubject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part. 

[Sidenote: The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language. ]

The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, andits existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind theanalogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. Thishypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions whichimply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smileor a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have beenat work in the body while thought occupied the mind--even if, as moreoften happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce thefeeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is saidto cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that suchinvoluntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out offeeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion whichdetermines their material character, so that laughter, for instance, becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just aswell have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself isconcerned. 

In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage andsuperficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the pointof view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplayingimpulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay thebudding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies theperfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniablycontinues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity haveknown physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hiddencomplexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; theybecome recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received bythe ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature;through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis isextended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; forits expression enters into the chain of its future conditions andbecomes an omen of that thought's continuance, repetition, andimprovement. Thought's rational function consists, as we then perceive, in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation byexpressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequatestate of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions. Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thoughtdrew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining andself-assured. 

A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been awordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be adisembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude ofwill, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolutemoral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to afellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, thedesire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself inthe mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue ofits cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy, which even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes inlanguage an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objectsand processes. 

Language is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. Itis an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the samesense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Wordsunderlie the thought they are said to express--in truth it is thethought that is the flower and expression of the language--much as thebody underlies the mind. 

[Sidenote: Intent starts from a datum. ]

Language contains, side by side two distinct elements. One is themeaning or sense of the words--a logical projection given to sensuousterms. The other is the sensuous vehicle of that meaning--the sound, sign, or gesture. This sensuous term is a fulcrum for the lever ofsignification, a _point d'appui_ which may be indefinitely attenuated inrapid discourse, but not altogether discarded. Intent though it vaultshigh must have something to spring from, or it would lend meaning tonothing. The minimal sensuous term that subsists serves as a clue to awhole system of possible assertions radiating from it. It becomes thesign for an essence or idea, a logical hypostasis corresponding indiscourse to that material hypostasis of perceptions which is called anexternal thing. 

The hypostasised total of rational and just discourse is the truth. Likethe physical world, the truth is external and in the main potential. Itsideal consistency and permanence serve to make it a standard andbackground for fleeting assertions, just as the material hypostasiscalled nature is the standard and background for all momentaryperceptions. What exists of truth in direct experience is at any momentinfinitesimal, as what exists of nature is, but all that either containsmight be represented in experience at one time or another. [G]

[Sidenote: and is carried by a feeling. ]

The tensions and relations of words which make grammar or make poetryare immediate in essence, the force of language being just as empiricalas the reality of things. To ask a thinker what he means by meaning isas futile as to ask a carpenter what he means by wood; to discover ityou must emulate them and repeat their experience--which indeed you willhardly be able to do if some sophist has so entangled your reason thatyou can neither understand what you see nor assert what you mean. But asthe carpenter's acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined ifhe became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casualspeaker's sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialecticand more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital actcalled intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical, would remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spirituallife as radical and specific as the sense of heat. 

[Sidenote: It demands conventional expression. ]

Significant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, containedin the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses inpropositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man's mind at any momentis a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance, a transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanentexpression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the moreurgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of whatwas once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in avacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, itwould be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve noimmortality in the world of representation; for the experience and itsexpression would remain identical and perish together, just as aperception and its object would remain identical and perish together ifthere were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which theperplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneousexpression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effectexpressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to anideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which itsspontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption intoa common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment maythen reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial. 

Intent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul ofgrammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logicalreasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts whichwe call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom ofSocrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass overfrom existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature oflife which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge which wasnot itself in some way transitive and ambitious. Intent, though it looksaway from existence and the actual, is the most natural and pervasive ofthings. Physics and dialectic meet in this: that the second brings tofruition what the first describes, namely, existence, and that both havetheir transcendental root in the flux of being. Matter cannot existwithout some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it mayproclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness orinfinitude. Nor can form, without the treacherous aid of matter, passfrom its ideal potentiality into selected and instant being. 

[Sidenote: A fable about matter and form. ]

In order to live--if such a myth may be allowed--the Titan Matter waseager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to besomething. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company ofForms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though theirnumber was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed themhypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered theirnames in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence andtoil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance--at least such ofthem as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They werepresently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in thatmoment's union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to whichthey returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It wascrossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some ofits lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that theyhad awakened a passion, and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved astrange indomitable giant to art and love. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote F: Cf. The motto on the title-page. ]

[Footnote G: Not, of course, in human experience, which is incapable ofcontaining the heart of a flea, much less what may be endured in remoterspheres. But if an intelligence were constructed _ad hoc_ there isnothing real that might not fall within the scope of experience. Thedifference between existence and truth on the one side and knowledge orrepresentation on the other may be reduced to this: that knowledgebrings what exists or what is true under apperception, while beingdiffuses what is understood into an impartial subsistence. As truth isindistinguishable from an absolute motionless intellect, which should nolonger be a function of life but merely a static order, so existence isindistinguishable from an absolute motionless experience, which shouldno longer be a foreshortening or representation of anything. Thisexistence would be motionless in the sense that it would "mark time, "for of course every fact in it might be a fact of transition. The wholesystem, however, would have a static ideal constitution, since the factthat things change in a certain way or stand in a certain order is asmuch a fact as any other; and it is not a logical necessity, either, buta brute matter of fact that might well have been otherwise. ]

CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

[Sidenote: Dialectic elaborates given forms. ]

The advantage which the mechanical sciences have over history is drawnfrom their mathematical form. Mathematics has somewhat the same place inphysics that conscience has in action; it seems to be a directiveprinciple in natural operations where it is only a formal harmony. Theformalistic school, which treats grammar in all departments as if itwere the ground of import rather than a means of expressing it, takesmathematics also for an oracular deliverance, springing full-armed outof the brain, and setting up a canon which all concrete things mustconform to. Thus mathematical science has become a mystery which a mythmust be constructed to solve. For how can it happen, people ask, thatpure intuition, retreating into its cell, can evolve there a prodigioussystem of relations which it carries like a measuring-rod into the worldand lo! everything in experience submits to be measured by it? Whatpre-established harmony is this between the spinning cerebral silkwormand nature's satins and brocades?

If we but knew, so the myth runs, that experience can show no patternsbut those which the prolific Mind has woven, we should not wonder atthis necessary correspondence. The Mind having decreed of its ownmotion, while it sat alone before the creation of the world, that itwould take to dreaming mathematically, it evoked out of nothing allformal necessities; and later, when it felt some solicitation to playwith things, it imposed those forms upon all its toys, admitting none ofany other sort into the nursery. In other words, perception perfectedits grammar before perceiving any of its objects, and having imputedthat grammar to the materials of sense, it was able to perceive objectsfor the first time and to legislate further about their relations. 

The most obvious artifices of language are often the most deceptive andbring on epidemic prejudices. What is this Mind, this machine existingprior to existence? The mind that exists is only a particular departmentor focus of existence; its principles cannot be its own source, muchless the source of anything in other beings. Mathematical principles inparticular are not imposed on existence or on nature _ab extra_, but arefound in and abstracted from the subject-matter and march of experience. To exist things have to wear some form, and the form they happen to wearis largely mathematical. This being the case, the mind in shaping itsbarbarous prosody somewhat more closely to the nature of things, learnsto note and to abstract the form that so strikingly defines them. Onceabstracted and focussed in the mind, these forms, like all forms, revealtheir dialectic; but that things conform to that dialectic (when theydo) is not wonderful, seeing that it is the obvious form of things thatthe mind has singled out, not without practical shrewdness, for moreintensive study. 

[Sidenote: Forms are abstracted from existence by intent. ]

The difference between ideal and material knowledge does not lie in theungenerated oracular character of one of them in opposition to theother; in both the data are inexplicable and irrational, and in bothinvestigation is tentative, observant, and subject to control by thesubject-matter. The difference lies, rather, in the direction ofspeculation. In physics, which is at bottom historical, we study whathappens; we make inventories and records of events, of phenomena, ofjuxtapositions. In dialectic, which is wholly intensive, we study whatis; we strive to clarify and develop the essence of what we find, bringing into focus the inner harmonies and implications of forms--formswhich our attention or purpose has defined initially. The intuitionsfrom which mathematical deduction starts are highly generic notionsdrawn from observation. The lines and angles of geometers are ideals, and their ideal context is entirely independent of what may be theircontext in the world; but they are found in the world, and their idealsare suggested by very common sensations. Had they been invented, bysome inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have beena marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions ofthis inapplicable sort--usually, however, not very recondite in theirorigin--to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, musthave taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in therealm of logic, too, nothing submits to be governed withoutrepresentation. 

[Sidenote: Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguousintent. ]

When dialectic is employed, as in ethics and metaphysics, upon highlycomplex ideas--concretions in discourse which cover large blocks ofexistence--the dialectician in defining and in deducing often reachesnotions which cease to apply in some important respect to the objectoriginally intended. Thus Socrates, taking "courage" for his theme, treats it dialectically and expresses the intent of the word by sayingthat courage must be good, and then develops the meaning of good, showing that it means the choice 01 the greater benefit; and finallyturns about and ends by saying that courage is consequently the choiceof the greater benefit and identical with wisdom. Here we have a processof thought ending in a paradox which, frankly, misrepresents theoriginal meaning. For "courage" meant not merely something desirable butsomething having a certain animal and psychological aspect. The emotionand gesture of it had not been excluded from the idea. So that whilethe argument proves to perfection that unwise courage is a bad thing, itdoes not end with an affirmation really true of the original concept. The instinct which we call courage, with an eye to its psychic andbodily quality, is not always virtuous or wise. Dialectic, when itstarts with confused and deep-dyed feelings, like those which ethicaland metaphysical terms generally stand for, is thus in great danger ofproving unsatisfactory and being or seeming sophistical. 

The mathematical dialectician has no such serious dangers to face. When, having observed the sun and sundry other objects, he frames the idea ofa circle and tracing out its intent shows that the circle meant cannotbe squared, there is no difficulty in reverting to nature and sayingthat the sun's circle cannot be squared. For there is no difference inintent between the circularity noted in the sun and that which is thesubject of the demonstration. The geometer has made in his firstreflection so clear and violent an abstraction from the sun's actualbulk and qualities that he will never imagine himself to be speaking ofanything but a concretion in discourse. The concretion in nature isnever legislated about nor so much as thought of except possibly when, under warrant of sense, it is chosen to illustrate the conceptinvestigated dialectically. It does not even occur to a man to ask ifthe sun's circle can be squared, for every one understands that the sunis circular only in so far as it conforms to the circle's ideal nature;which is as if Socrates and his interlocutors had clearly understoodthat the _virtue_ of courage in an intemperate villain meant onlywhatever in his mood or action was rational and truly desirable, and hadthen said that courage, so understood, was identical with wisdom or withthe truly rational and desirable rule of life. 

[Sidenote: The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical. ]

The applicability of mathematics is not vouched for by mathematics butby sense, and its application in some distant part of nature is notvouched for by mathematics but by inductive arguments about nature'suniformity, or by the character which the notion, "a distant part ofnature, " already possesses. Inapplicable mathematics, we are told, isperfectly thinkable, and systematic deductions, in themselves valid, maybe made from concepts which contravene the facts of perception. We maysuspect, perhaps, that even these concepts are framed by analogy out ofsuggestions found in sense, so that some symbolic relevance orproportion is kept, even in these dislocated speculations, to the matterof experience. It is like a new mythology; the purely fictitious ideahas a certain parallelism and affinity to nature and moves in a humanand familiar way. Both data and method are drawn from applicablescience, elements of which even myth, whether poetic or mathematical, may illustrate by a sort of variant or fantastic reduplication. 

The great glory of mathematics, like that of virtue, is to be usefulwhile remaining free. Number and measure furnish an inexhaustiblesubject-matter which the mind can dominate and develop dialectically asit is the mind's inherent office to develop ideas. At the same timenumber and measure are the grammar of sense; and the more this innerlogic is cultivated and refined the greater subtlety and sweep can begiven to human perception. Astronomy on the one hand and mechanical artson the other are fruits of mathematics by which its worth is made knowneven to the layman, although the born mathematician would not need thesanction of such an extraneous utility to attach him to a subject thathas an inherent cogency and charm. Ideas, like other things, havepleasure in propagation, and even when allowance is made for birth-pangsand an occasional miscarriage, their native fertility will alwayscontinue to assert itself. The more ideal and frictionless the movementof thought is, the more perfect must be the physiological engine thatsustains it. The momentum of that silent and secluded growth carries themind, with a sense of pure disembodied vision, through the logicallabyrinth; but the momentum is vital, for the truth itself does notmove. 

[Sidenote: Its moral value is therefore contingent. ]

Whether the airy phantoms thus brought into being are valued andpreserved by the world is an ulterior point of policy which the pregnantmathematician does not need to consider in bringing to light thelegitimate burden of his thoughts. But were mathematics incapable ofapplication, did nature and experience, for instance, illustrate nothingbut Parmenides' Being or Hegel's Logic, the dialectical cogency whichmathematics would of course retain would not give this science a veryhigh place in the Life of Reason. Mathematics would be an amusement, andthough apparently innocent, like a game of patience, it might even turnout to be a wasteful and foolish exercise for the mind; because todeepen habits and cultivate pleasures irrelevant to other interests is away of alienating ourselves from our general happiness. Distinction anda curious charm there may well be in such a pursuit, but this quality isperhaps traceable to affinities and associations with other moresubstantial interests, or is due to the ingenious temper it denotes, which touches that of the wit or magician. Mathematics, if it werenothing more than a pleasure, might conceivably become a vice. Thoseaddicted to it might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense oftheir humanity. It would then be in the position now occupied bymythology and mysticism. Even as it is, mathematicians share withmusicians a certain partiality in their characters and mentaldevelopment. Masters in one abstract subject, they may remain childrenin the world; exquisite manipulators of the ideal, they may be erraticand clumsy in their earthly ways. Immense as are the uses and wide theapplications of mathematics, its texture is too thin and inhuman toemploy the whole mind or render it harmonious. It is a science whichSocrates rejected for its supposed want of utility; but perhaps he hadanother ground in reserve to justify his humorous prejudice. He may havefelt that such a science, if admitted, would endanger his thesis aboutthe identity of virtue and knowledge. 

[Sidenote: Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment. ]

Mathematical method has been the envy of philosophers, perplexed andencumbered as they are with the whole mystery of existence, and theyhave attempted at times to emulate mathematical cogency. Now thelucidity and certainty found in mathematics are not inherent in itsspecific character as the science of number or dimension; they belong todialectic as a whole which is essentially elucidation. The effort toexplain meanings is in most cases abortive because these meanings meltin our hands--a defeat which Hegel would fain have consecrated, togetherwith all other evils, into necessity and law. But the merit ofmathematics is that it is so much less Hegelian than life; that it holdsits own while it advances, and never allows itself to misrepresent itsoriginal intent. In all it finds to say about the triangle it nevercomes to maintain that the triangle is really a square. The privilege ofmathematics is simply to have offered the mind, for dialecticaltreatment, a material to which dialectical treatment could be honestlyapplied. This material consists in certain general aspects ofsensation--its extensity, its pulsation, its distribution into relatedparts. The wakefulness that originally makes these abstractions is ableto keep them clear, and to elaborate them infinitely withoutcontradicting their essence. 

For this reason it is always a false step in mathematical science, astep over its brink into the abyss beyond, when we try to reduce itselements to anything not essentially sensible. Intuition must continueto furnish the subject of discourse, the axioms, and the ultimatecriteria and sanctions. Calculation and transmutation can never maketheir own counters or the medium in which they move. So that space, number, continuity, and every other elementary intuition remains atbottom opaque--opaque, that is, to mathematical science; for it is noparadox, but an obvious necessity, that the data of a logical operationshould not be producible by its workings. Reason would have nothing todo if it had no irrational materials. Saint Augustine's rhetoricaccordingly covered--as so often with him--a profound truth when he saidof time that he knew what it was when no one asked him, but if any oneasked him he did not know; which may be restated by saying that time isan intuition, an aspect of crude experience, which science may work withbut which it can never arrive at. 

[Sidenote: Constancy and progress in intent. ]

When a concretion is formed in discourse and an intent is attained inconsciousness, predicates accrue to the subject in a way which isperfectly empirical. Dialectic is not retrospective; it does not consistin recovering ground previously surveyed. The accretion of newpredicates comes in answer to chance questions, questions raised, to besure, about a given theme. The subject is fixed by the mind's intent andit suffices to compare any tentative assertion made about it with thatintent itself to see whether the expression suggested for it is trulydialectical and thoroughly honest. Dialectic verifies byreconsideration, by equation of tentative results with fixed intentions. It does not verify, like the sciences of existence, by comparing ahypothesis with a new perception. In dialectic no new _perception_ iswanted; the goal is to understand the old fact, to give it an aureoleand not a progeny. It is a transubstantiation of matter, a passage fromexistence to eternity. In this sense dialectic is "synthetic _apriori_"; it analyses an intent which demanded further elucidation andhad fixed the direction and principle of its expansion. If this intentis abandoned and a new subject is introduced surreptitiously, a fallacyis committed; yet the correct elucidation of ideas is a true progress, nor could there be any progress unless the original idea were betterexpressed and elicited as we proceeded; so that constancy in intent andadvance in explication are the two requisites of a cogent deduction. 

The question in dialectic is always what is true, what can be said, about _this_; and the demonstrative pronoun, indicating an act ofselective attention, raises the object it selects to a concretion indiscourse, the relations of which in the universe of discourse it thenproceeds to formulate. At the same time this dialectical investigationmay be full of surprises. Knowledge may be so truly enriched by it that_knowledge_, in an ideal sense, only begins when dialectic has givensome articulation to being. Without dialectic an animal might followinstinct, he might have vivid emotions, expectations, and dreams, but hecould hardly be said to know anything or to guide his life withconscious intent. The accretions that might come empirically into anyfield of vision would not be new predicates to be added to a knownthing, unless the logical and functional mantle of that thing fell uponthem and covered them. While the right of particulars to existence istheir own, granted them by the free grace of heaven, their ability toenlarge our knowledge on any particular subject--their relevance orincidence in discourse--hangs on their fulfilling the requirements whichthat subject's dialectical nature imposes on all its expressions. 

[Sidenote: Intent determines the functional essence of objects. ]

It is on this ground, for instance, that the image of a loaf of bread isso far from being the loaf of bread itself. External resemblance isnothing; even psychological derivation or superposition is nothing; theintent, rather, which picks out what that object's function and meaningshall be, alone defines its idea; and this function involves a locus anda status which the image does not possess. Such admirable iridescence asthe image might occasionally put on--in the fine arts, forinstance--would not constitute any iridescence or transformation in thething; nor would identity of aspect preserve the thing if its soul, ifits utility, had disappeared. Herein lies the ground for the essentialor functional distinction between primary and secondary qualities inthings, a distinction which a psychological scepticism has so hastilydeclared to be untenable. If it was discovered, said these logicians, that space was perceived through reading muscular sensations, space, andthe muscles too, were thereby proved to be unreal. This remarkablesophism passed muster in the philosophical world for want of attentionto dialectic, which might so easily have shown that what a thing _means_is spatial distinction and mechanical efficacy, and that the origin ofour perceptions, which are all equally bodily and dependent on materialstimulation, has nothing to do with their respective claims tohypostasis. It is intent that makes objects objects; and the sameintent, defining the function of things, defines the scope of thosequalities which are essential to them. In the flux substances andshadows drift down together; it is reason that discerns the difference. 

[Sidenote: Also the scope of ideals. ]

Purposes need dialectical articulation as much as essences do, andwithout an articulate and fixed purpose, without an ideal, action wouldcollapse into mere motion or conscious change. It is notably in thisregion that elucidation constitutes progress; for to understand theproperties of number may be less important than empirically to count;but to see and feel the values of things in all their distinction andfulness is the ultimate fruit of efficiency; it is mastery in that artof life for which all the rest is apprenticeship. Dialectic of this sortis practised intuitively by spiritual minds; and even when it has to becarried on argumentatively it may prove very enlightening. That theexcellence of courage is identical with that of wisdom still needs to bedriven home; and that the excellence of poetry is identical with that ofall other things probably sounds like a blind paradox. Yet did not allexcellences conspire to one end and meet in one Life of Reason, howcould their relative value be estimated, or any reflective sanction befound for them at all? The miscellaneous, captious fancies of the will, the menagerie of moral prejudices, still call for many a Socrates totame them. So long as courage means a grimace of mind or body, the loveof it is another grimace. But if it meant the value, recognisable byreason and diffused through all life, which that casual attitude orfeeling might have, then we should be launched upon the quest forwisdom. 

The want of integration in moral views is like what want of integrationwould be in arithmetic if we declared that it was the part of a man anda Christian to maintain that _my_ two equals four or that a _green_fifteen is a hundred. These propositions might have incidental lightsand shades in people's lives to make them plausible and precious; butthey could not be maintained by one who had clarified his intent innaming and adding. For then the arithmetical relations would beabstracted, and their incidental associates would drop out of theaccount. So a man who is in pursuit of things for the good that is inthem must recognise and (if reason avails) must pursue what is good inthem all. Strange customs and unheard-of thoughts may then find theirappropriate warrant; just as in higher mathematical calculations verywonderful and unforeseen results may be arrived at, which a man will notaccept without careful reconsideration of the terms and problem beforehim; but if he finds the unexpected conclusion flowing from thosepremises, he will have enlarged his knowledge of his art and discovereda congenial good. He will have made progress in the Socratic science ofknowing his own intent. 

[Sidenote: Double status of mathematics. ]

Mathematics, for all its applications in nature, is a part of idealphilosophy. It is logic applied to certain simple intuitions. Theseintuitions and many of their developments happen to appear in thatefficacious and self-sustaining moiety of being which we call material;so that mathematics is _per accidens_ the dialectical study of nature'sefficacious form. Its use and application in the world rather hide itsdialectical principle. Mathematics owes its public success to the happychoice of a simple and widely diffused subject-matter; it owes its innercogency, however, to its ideality and the merely adventitiousapplication it has to existence. Mathematics has come to seem the typeof good logic because it is an illustration of logic in a sphere sohighly abstract in idea and so pervasive in sense as to be at oncemanageable and useful. 

The delights and triumphs of mathematics ought, therefore, to be a greatencouragement to ideal philosophy. If in a comparatively uninterestingfield attention can find so many treasures of harmony and order, whatbeauties might it not discover in interpreting faithfully ideas noblerthan extension and number, concretions closer to man's spiritual life?But unfortunately the logic of values is subject to voluntary andinvoluntary confusions of so discouraging a nature that the flight ofdialectic in that direction has never been long and, even when short, often disastrous. What is needed, as the example of mathematics shows, is a steadfast intent and an adventurous inquiry. It would not occur toa geometer to ask with trepidation what difference it would make to thePythagorean proposition if the hypothenuse were said to be wise andgood. Yet metaphysicians, confounding dialectic with physics andthereby corrupting both, will discuss for ever the difference it makesto substance whether you call it matter or God. Nevertheless, nodecorative epithets can give substance any other attributes than thosewhich it has; that is, other than the actual appearances that substanceis needed to support. Similarly, neither mathematicians nor astronomersare exercised by the question whether [Greek: pi] created the ring ofSaturn; yet naturalists and logicians have not rejected the analogousproblem whether the good did or did not create the animals. 

[Sidenote: Practical rôle of dialectic. ]

So long as in using terms there is no fixed intent, no concretion indiscourse with discernible predicates, controversy will rage asconceptions waver and will reach no valid result. But when the force ofintellect, once having arrested an idea amid the flux of perceptions, avails to hold and examine that idea with perseverance, not only does aflash of light immediately cross the mind, but deeper and deeper vistasare opened there into ideal truth. The principle of dialectic isintelligence itself; and as no part of man's economy is more vital thanintelligence (since intelligence is what makes life aware of itsdestiny), so no part has a more delightful or exhilarating movement. Tounderstand is pre-eminently to live, moving not by stimulation andexternal compulsion, but by inner direction and control. Dialectic isrelated to observation as art is to industry; it uses what the otherfurnishes; it is the fruition of experience. It is not an alternative toempirical pursuits but their perfection; for dialectic, like art, has nospecial or private subject-matter, nor any obligation to be useless. Itssubject-matter is all things, and its function is to compare them inform and worth, giving the mind speculative dominion over them. Itprofits by the flux to fix its signification. This is precisely whatmathematics does for the abstract form and multitude of sensible things;it is what dialectic might do everywhere, with the same incidentalutility, if it could settle its own attitude and learn to make thepassions steadfast and calm in the consciousness of their ultimateobjects. 

[Sidenote: Hegel's satire on dialectic. ]

The nature of dialectic might be curiously illustrated by reference toHegel's Logic; and though to approach the subject from Hegel's satiricalangle is not, perhaps, quite honest or fair, the method has a certainspice. Hegel, who despised mathematics, saw that in other departmentsthe instability of men's meanings defeated their desire to understandthemselves. This insecurity in intent he found to be closely connectedwith change of situation, with the natural mutability of events andopinions in the world. Instead of showing, however, what inroadspassion, oblivion, sophistry, and frivolity may make into dialectic, hebethought himself to represent all these incoherences, which are indeedsignificant of natural changes, as the march of dialectic itself, thusidentified with the process of evolution and with natural law. Theromance of an unstable and groping theology, full of warm intentions andimpossible ideas, he took to be typical of all experience and of allscience. 

In that impressionable age any effect of _chiaro-oscuro_ caught in themoonlight of history could find a philosopher to exalt it into thedarkly luminous secret of the world. Hegel accordingly decreed thatmen's habit of self-contradiction constituted their providentialfunction, both in thought and in morals; and he devoted his Logic toshowing how every idea they embraced (for he never treated an ideaotherwise than as a creed), when pressed a little, turned into itsopposite. This opposite after a while would fall back into somethinglike the original illusion; whereupon a new change of insight wouldoccur and a new thought would be accepted until, the landscape changing, attention would be attracted to a fresh aspect of the matter andconviction would wander into a new labyrinth of false steps andhalf-meanings. The sum total of these wanderings, when viewed fromabove, formed an interesting picture. A half-mystical, half-cynicalreflection might take a certain pleasure in contemplating it; especiallyif, in memory of Calvin and the Stoics, this situation were called theexpression of Absolute Reason and Divine Will. 

We may think for a moment that we have grasped the elusive secret ofthis philosophy and that it is simply a Calvinism without Christianity, in which God's glory consists in the damnation of quite all hiscreatures. Presently, however, the scene changes again, and we recognisethat Creator and creation, ideal and process, are identical, so that theglory belongs to the very multitude that suffers. But finally, as we rubour eyes, the whole revelation collapses into a platitude, and wediscover that this glory and this damnation were nothing but unctuousphrases for the vulgar flux of existence. 

That nothing is what we mean by it is perfectly true when we in no caseknow what we mean. Thus a man who is a mystic by nature may very wellbecome one by reflection also. Not knowing what he wants nor what he is, he may believe that every shift carries him nearer to perfection. Atemperamental and quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and roomto move on lent a certain triumphant note to Hegel's satire; he was sureit all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate inhimself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotisticalreader, is a long demonstration of man's ineptitude and of nature'scontemptuous march over a path paved with good intentions. It is anidealism without respect for ideals; a system of dialectic in which apsychological flux (not, of course, psychological science, which wouldinvolve terms dialectically fixed and determinate) is madesystematically to obliterate intended meanings. 

[Sidenote: Dialectic expresses a given intent. ]

This spirited travesty of logic has enough historical truth in it toshow that dialectic must always stand, so to speak, on its apex; forlife is changeful, and the vision and interest of one moment are notunderstood in the next. Theological dialectic rings hollow when oncefaith is dead; grammar looks artificial when a language is foreign;mathematics itself seems shallow when, like Hegel, we have no love fornature's intelligible mechanism nor for the clear structure andconstancy of eternal things. Ideal philosophy is a flower of the spiritand varies with the soil. If mathematics suffers so littlecontradiction, it is only because the primary aspects of sensation whichit elaborates could not lapse from the world without an utter break inits continuity. Otherwise though mathematics might not be refuted itmight well be despised, like an obsolete ontology. Its boasted necessityand universality would not help it at all if experience should change somuch as to present no further mathematical aspect. Those who expect topass at death into a non-spatial and super-temporal world, where therewill be no detestable extended and unthinking substances, and nothingthat need be counted, will find their hard-learned mathematics sadlysuperfluous there. The memory of earthly geometry and arithmetic willgrow pale amid that floating incense and music, where dialectic, if itsurvives at all, will have to busy itself on new intuitions. 

So, too, when the landscape changes in the moral world, when newpassions or arts make their appearance, moral philosophy must startafresh on a new foundation and try to express the ideals involved in thenew pursuits. To this extent experience lends colour to Hegel'sdialectical physics; but he betrayed, like the sincere pantheist he was, the finite interests that give actual values to the world, and he wishedto bestow instead a groundless adoration on the law that connected anddefeated every ideal. Such a genius, in spite of incisive wit and acertain histrionic sympathy with all experience, could not be trulyfree; it could not throw off its professional priestcraft, its habit ofceremonious fraud on the surface, nor, at heart, its inhuman religion. 

[Sidenote: Its empire is ideal and autonomous. ]

The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human, Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for itsbasis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician hasthe gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from thethrone of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuousheart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its owninterest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it;so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the worldhe may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify hismind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and facultieshad entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve. Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a newmethod of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forcesstealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being thatwould frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, andfree; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embodythem at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfiguredlife, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art. 

CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

[Sidenote: Empirical alloy in dialectic. ]

When a polyglot person is speaking, foreign words sometimes occur tohim, which he at once translates into the language he happens to beusing. Somewhat in the same way, when dialectic develops an idea, suggestions for this development may come from the empirical field; yetthese suggestions soon shed their externality and their place is takenby some genuine development of the original notion. In constructing, forinstance, the essence of a circle, I may have started from a hoop. I mayhave observed that as the hoop meanders down the path the roundness ofit disappears to the eye, being gradually flattened into a straightline, such as the hoop presents when it is rolling directly away fromme. I may now frame the idea of a mathematical circle, in which alldiameters are precisely equal, in express contrast to the series ofellipses, with very unequal diameters, which the floundering hoop hasillustrated in its career. When once, however, the definition of thecircle is attained, no watching of hoops is any longer requisite. Theellipse can be generated ideally out of the definition, and would havebeen generated, like asymptotes and hyperbolas, even if neverillustrated in nature at all. Lemmas from a foreign tongue have onlyserved to disclose a great fecundity in the native one, and thelegitimate word that the context required has supplanted the casualstranger that may first have ushered it into the mind. 

When the idea which dialectic is to elaborate is a moral idea, a purposetouching something in the concrete world, lemmas from experience oftenplay a very large part in the process. Their multitude, with the smallshifts in aspiration and esteem which they may suggest to the mind, often obscures the dialectical process altogether. In this case theforeign term is never translated into the native medium; we never makeout what ideal connection our conclusion has with our premises, nor inwhat way the conduct we finally decide upon is to fulfil the purposewith which we began. Reflection merely beats about the bush, and when asufficient number of prejudices and impulses have been driven fromcover, we go home satisfied with our day's ranging, and feeling that wehave left no duty unconsidered; and our last bird is our finalresolution. 

[Sidenote: Arrested rationality in morals. ]

When morality is in this way non-dialectical, casual, impulsive, polyglot, it is what we may call prerational morality. There is indeedreason in it, since every deliberate precept expresses some reflectionby which impulses have been compared and modified. But such chancereflection amounts to moral perception, not to moral science. Reason hasnot begun to educate her children. This morality is like knowing chairsfrom tables and things near from distant things, which is hardly what wemean by natural science. On this stage, in the moral world, are thejudgments of Mrs. Grundy, the aims of political parties and theirmaxims, the principles of war, the appreciation of art, the commandmentsof religious authorities, special revelations of duty to individuals, and all systems of intuitive ethics. 

[Sidenote: Its emotional and practical power. ]

Prerational morality is vigorous because it is sincere. Actualinterests, rooted habits, appreciations the opposite of which isinconceivable and contrary to the current use of language, are embodiedin special precepts; or they flare up of themselves in impassionedjudgments. It is hardly too much to say, indeed, that prerationalmorality is morality proper. Rational ethics, in comparison, seems akind of politics or wisdom, while post-rational systems are essentiallyreligions. If we thus identify morality with prerational standards, wemay agree also that morality is no science in itself, though it maybecome, with other matters, a subject for the science of anthropology;and Hume, who had never come to close quarters with any rational orpost-rational ideal, could say with perfect truth that morality was notfounded on reason. Instinct is of course not founded on reason, but_vice versa_; and the maxims enforced by tradition or conscience areunmistakably founded on instinct. They might, it is true, becomematerials for reason, if they were intelligently accepted, compared, andcontrolled; but such a possibility reverses the partisan and spasmodicmethods which Hume and most other professed moralists associate withethics. Hume's own treatises on morals, it need hardly be said, are purepsychology. It would have seemed to him conceited, perhaps, to inquirewhat ought really to be done. He limited himself to asking what mentended to think about their doings. 

The chief expression of rational ethics which a man in Hume's worldwould have come upon lay in the Platonic and Aristotelian writings; butthese were not then particularly studied nor vitally understood. Thechief illustration of post-rational morality that could have fallenunder his eyes, the Catholic religion, he would never have thought of asa philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition andpolicy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterraneanpeoples. Under such circumstances ethics could not be thought of as ascience; and whatever gradual definition of the ideal, whateverprescription of what ought to be and to be done, found a place in thethoughts of such philosophers formed a part of their politics orreligion and not of their reasoned knowledge. 

[Sidenote: Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part ofanthropology. ]

There is, however, a dialectic of the will; and that is the sciencewhich, for want of a better name, we must call ethics or moralphilosophy. The interweaving of this logic of practice with variousnatural sciences that have man or society for their theme, leads to muchconfusion in terminology and in point of view. Is the good, we may ask, what anybody calls good at any moment, or what anybody calls good onreflection, or what all men agree to call good, or what God calls good, no matter what all mankind may think about it? Or is true good somethingthat perhaps nobody calls good nor knows of, something with no othercharacteristic or relation except that it is simply good?

Various questions are involved in such perplexing alternatives; some arephysical questions and others dialectical. Why any one values anythingat all, or anything in particular, is a question of physics; it asks forthe causes of interest, judgment, and desire. To esteem a thing good isto express certain affinities between that thing and the speaker; and ifthis is done with self-knowledge and with knowledge of the thing, sothat the felt affinity is a real one, the judgment is invulnerable andcannot be asked to rescind itself. Thus if a man said hemlock was goodto drink, we might say he was mistaken; but if he explained that hemeant good to drink in committing suicide, there would be nothingpertinent left to say: for to adduce that to commit suicide is not goodwould be impertinent. To establish that, we should have to go back andask him if he valued anything--life, parents, country, knowledge, reputation; and if he said no, and was sincere, our mouths would beeffectually stopped--that is, unless we took to declamation. But wemight very well turn to the bystanders and explain what sort of bloodand training this man possessed, and what had happened among the cellsand fibres of his brain to make him reason after that fashion. Thecauses of morality, good or bad, are physical, seeing that they arecauses. 

The science of ethics, however, has nothing to do with causes, not inthat it need deny or ignore them but in that it is their fruit andbegins where they end. Incense rises from burning coals, but it isitself no conflagration, and will produce none. What ethics asks is notwhy a thing is called good, but whether it is good or not, whether it isright or not so to esteem it. Goodness, in this ideal sense, is not amatter of opinion, but of nature. For intent is at work, life is inactive operation, and the question is whether the thing or the situationresponds to that intent. So if I ask, Is four really twice two? theanswer is not that most people say so, but that, in saying so, I am notmisunderstanding myself. To judge whether things are _really_ good, intent must be made to speak; and if this intent may itself be judgedlater, that happens by virtue of other intents comparing the first withtheir own direction. 

Hence good, when once the moral or dialectical attitude has beenassumed, means not what is called good but what is so; that is, what_ought_ to be called good. For intent, beneath which there is no moraljudgment, sets up its own standard, and ideal science begins on thatbasis, and cannot go back of it to ask why the obvious good is good atall. Naturally, there is a reason, but not a moral one; for it lies inthe physical habit and necessity of things. The reason is simply thepropulsive essence of animals and of the universal flux, which rendersforms possible but unstable, and either helpful or hurtful to oneanother. That nature should have this constitution, or intent thisdirection, is not a good in itself. It is esteemed good or bad as theintent that speaks finds in that situation a support or an obstacle toits ideal. As a matter of fact, nature and the very existence of lifecannot be thought wholly evil, since no intent is wholly at war withthese its conditions; nor can nature and life be sincerely regarded aswholly good, since no moral intent stops at the facts; nor does theuniversal flux, which infinitely overflows any actual synthesis, altogether support any intent it may generate. 

[Sidenote: Estimation the soul of philosophy. ]

Philosophers would do a great discourtesy to estimation if they soughtto justify it. It is all other acts that need justification by this one. The good greets us initially in every experience and in every object. Remove from anything its share of excellence and you have made itutterly insignificant, irrelevant to human discourse, and unworthy ofeven theoretic consideration. Value is the principle of perspective inscience, no less than of rightness in life. The hierarchy of goods, thearchitecture of values, is the subject that concerns man most. Wisdom isthe first philosophy, both in time and in authority; and to collectfacts or to chop logic would be idle and would add no dignity to themind, unless that mind possessed a clear humanity and could discern whatfacts and logic are good for and what not. The facts would remain factsand the truths truths; for of course values, accruing on account ofanimal souls and their affections, cannot possibly create the universethose animals inhabit. But both facts and truths would remain trivial, fit to awaken no pang, no interest, and no rapture. The firstphilosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets whoknew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the betterto understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. Before theirday, too, wisdom had spoken in proverbs. _It is better_ every adagebegan: _Better this than that_. Images or symbols, mythical or homelyevents, of course furnished subjects and provocations for thesejudgments; but the residuum of all observation was a settled estimationof things, a direction chosen in thought and life because it was better. Such was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still. 

[Sidenote: Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable. ]

To one brought up in a sophisticated society, or in particular under anethical religion morality seems at first an external command, a chillingand arbitrary set of requirements and prohibitions which the youngheart, if it trusted itself, would not reckon at a penny's worth. Yetwhile this rebellion is brewing in the secret conclave of the passions, the passions themselves are prescribing a code. They are inventinggallantry and kindness and honour; they are discovering friendship andpaternity. With maturity comes the recognition that the authorisedprecepts of morality were essentially not arbitrary; that they expressedthe genuine aims and interests of a practised will; that their allegedalien and supernatural basis (which if real would have deprived them ofall moral authority) was but a mythical cover for their forgottennatural springs. Virtue is then seen to be admirable essentially, andnot merely by conventional imputation. If traditional morality has muchin it that is out of proportion, much that is unintelligent and inert, nevertheless it represents on the whole the verdict of reason. It speaksfor a typical human will chastened by a typical human experience. 

[Sidenote: A choice of proverbs. ]

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs dependfor their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almostevery wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it; sothat a man rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find avenerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be taking. In respectto foresight, for instance, we are told, Make hay while the sun shines, A stitch in time saves nine, Honesty is the best policy, Murder willout, Woe unto you, ye hypocrites, Watch and pray, Seek salvation withfear and trembling, and _Respice finem_. But on the same authoritiesexactly we have opposite maxims, inspired by a feeling that mortalprudence is fallible, that life is shorter than policy, and that onlythe present is real; for we hear, A bird in the hand is worth two in thebush, _Carpe diem, Ars longa, vita brevis_. Be not righteous overmuch, Enough for the day is the evil thereof, Behold the lilies of the field, Judge not, that ye be not judged, Mind your own business, and It takesall sorts of men to make a world. So when some particularly shockingthing happens one man says, _Cherchez la femme_, and another says, Greatis Allah. 

That these maxims should be so various and partial is quite intelligiblewhen we consider how they spring up. Every man, in moral reflection, isanimated by his own intent; he has something in view which he prizes, heknows not why, and which wears to him the essential and unquestionablecharacter of a good. With this standard before his eyes, he observeseasily--for love and hope are extraordinarily keen-sighted--what inaction or in circumstances forwards his purpose and what thwarts it;and at once the maxim comes, very likely in the language of theparticular instance before him. Now the interests that speak in a manare different at different times; and the outer facts or measures whichin one case promote that interest may, where other less obviousconditions have changed, altogether defeat it. Hence all sorts ofprecepts looking to all sorts of results. 

[Sidenote: Their various representative value. ]

Prescriptions of this nature differ enormously in value; for they differenormously in scope. By chance, or through the insensible operation ofexperience leading up to some outburst of genius, intuitive maxims maybe so central, so expressive of ultimate aims, so representative, Imean, of all aims in fusion, that they merely anticipate what moralscience would have come to if it had existed. This happens much as inphysics ultimate truths may be divined by poets long before they arediscovered by investigators; the _vivida vis animi_ taking the place ofmuch recorded experience, because much unrecorded experience hassecretly fed it. Such, for instance, is the central maxim ofChristianity, Love thy neighbour as thyself. On the other hand, what isusual in intuitive codes is a mixture of some elementary precepts, necessary to any society, with others representing local traditions orancient rites: so Thou shalt not kill, and Thou shalt keep holy theSabbath day, figure side by side in the Decalogue. When Antigone, inher sublimest exaltation, defies human enactments and appeals tolaws which are not of to-day nor yesterday, no man knowing whencethey have arisen, she mixes various types of obligation in a mostinstructive fashion; for a superstitious horror at leaving a bodyunburied--something decidedly of yesterday--gives poignancy in her mindto natural affection for a brother--something indeed universal, yethaving a well-known origin. The passionate assertion of right is here, in consequence, more dramatic than spiritual; and even its dramaticforce has suffered somewhat by the change in ruling ideals. 

[Sidenote: Conflict of partial moralities. ]

The disarray of intuitive ethics is made painfully clear in theconflicts which it involves when it has fostered two incompatiblegrowths in two centres which lie near enough to each other to come intophysical collision. Such ethics has nothing to offer in the presence ofdiscord except an appeal to force and to ultimate physical sanctions. Itcan instigate, but cannot resolve, the battle of nations and the battleof religions. Precisely the same zeal, the same patriotism, the samereadiness for martyrdom fires adherents to rival societies, and firesthem especially in view of the fact that the adversary is no lessuncompromising and fierce. It might seem idle, if not cruel andmalicious, to wish to substitute one historical allegiance for another, when both are equally arbitrary, and the existing one is the morecongenial to those born under it; but to feel this aggression to becriminal demands some degree of imagination and justice, and sectarieswould not be sectaries if they possessed it. 

Truly religious minds, while eager perhaps to extirpate every religionbut their own, often rise above national jealousies; for spirituality isuniversal, whatever churches may be. Similarly politicians oftenunderstand very well the religious situation; and of late it has becomeagain the general practice among prudent governments to do as the Romansdid in their conquests, and to leave people free to exercise whatreligion they have, without pestering them with a foreign one. On theother hand the same politicians are the avowed agents of a quite patentiniquity; for what is their ideal? To substitute their own language, commerce, soldiers, and tax-gatherers for the tax-gatherers, soldiers, commerce, and language of their neighbours; and no means is thoughtillegitimate, be it fraud in policy or bloodshed in war, to secure thisabsolutely nugatory end. Is not one country as much a country asanother? Is it not as dear to its inhabitants? What then is gained byoppressing its genius or by seeking to destroy it altogether?

Here are two flagrant instances where prerational morality defeats theends of morality. Viewed from within, each religious or nationalfanaticism stands for a good; but in its outward operation it producesand becomes an evil. It is possible, no doubt, that its agents arereally so far apart in nature and ideals that, like men and mosquitoes, they can stand in physical relations only, and if they meet can meetonly to poison or to crush one another. More probably, however, humanityin them is no merely nominal essence; it is definable ideally, asessences are defined, by a partially identical function and intent. Inthat case, by studying their own nature, they could rise above theirmutual opposition, and feel that in their fanaticism they were takingtoo contracted a view of their own souls and were hardly doing justiceto themselves when they did such great injustice to others. 

[Sidenote: The Greek ideal. ]

How prerational morality may approach the goal, and miss it, is wellillustrated in the history of Hellenism. Greek morals may be said tohave been inspired by two prerational sentiments, a naturalisticreligion and a local patriotism. Could Plato have succeeded in makingthat religion moral, or Alexander in universalising that patriotism, perhaps Greece might have been saved and we might all be now at a verydifferent level of civilisation. Both Plato and Alexander failed, inspite of the immense and lasting influence of their work; for in bothcases the after-effects were spurious, and the new spirit was smotheredin the dull substances it strove to vivify. 

Greek myth was an exuberant assertion of the rights of life in theuniverse. Existence could not but be joyful and immortal, if it hadonce found, in land, sea, or air, a form congruous with that element. Such congruity would render a being stable, efficient, beautiful. Hewould achieve a perfection grounded in skilful practice and in athorough rejection of whatever was irrelevant. These things the Greekscalled virtue. The gods were perfect models of this kind of excellence;for of course the amours of Zeus and Hermes' trickery were, in theirhearty fashion, splendid manifestations of energy. This natural divinevirtue carried no sense of responsibility with it, but it could not failto diffuse benefit because it radiated happiness and beauty. Theworshipper, by invoking those braver inhabitants of the cosmos, felt hemight more easily attain a corresponding beauty and happiness in hispaternal city. 

[Sidenote: Imaginative exuberance and political discipline. ]

The source of myth had been a genial sympathy with nature. The observer, at ease himself, multiplied ideally the potentialities of his being; buthe went farther in imagining what life might yield abroad, freed fromevery trammel and necessity, than in deepening his sense of what lifewas in himself, and of what it ought to be. This moral reflection, absent from mythology, was supplied by politics. The family and thestate had a soberer antique religion of their own; this hereditarypiety, together with the laws, prescribed education, customs, andduties. The city drew its walls close about the heart, and while itfostered friendship and reason within, without it looked to little butwar. A splendid physical and moral discipline was established to serve asuicidal egoism. The city committed its crimes, and the individualindulged his vices of conduct and estimation, hardly rebuked byphilosophy and quite unrebuked by religion. Nevertheless, religion andphilosophy existed, together with an incomparable literature and art, and an unrivalled measure and simplicity in living. A liberal fancy anda strict civic regimen, starting with different partial motives andblind purposes, combined by good fortune into an almost rational life. 

It was inevitable, however, when only an irrational tradition supportedthe state, and kept it so weak amid a world of enemies, that this stateshould succumb; not to speak of the mean animosities, the license inlife, and the spirit of mockery that inwardly infested it. The myths, too, faded; they had expressed a fleeting moment of poetic insight, aspatriotism had expressed a fleeting moment of unanimous effort; but whatforce could sustain such accidental harmonies? The patriotism soon lostits power to inspire sacrifice, and the myth its power to inspirewonder; so that the relics of that singular civilisation were scatteredalmost at once in the general flood of the world. 

[Sidenote: Sterility of Greek example. ]

The Greek ideal has fascinated many men in all ages, who have sometimesbeen in a position to set a fashion, so that the world in general haspretended also to admire. But the truth is Hellas, in leaving so manyheirlooms to mankind, has left no constitutional benefit; it has taughtthe conscience no lesson. We possess a great heritage from Greece, butit is no natural endowment. An artistic renaissance in the fifteenthcentury and a historical one in the nineteenth have only affected thetrappings of society. The movement has come from above. It has not foundany response in the people. While Greek morality, in its contents or inthe type of life it prescribes, comes nearer than any other prerationalexperiment to what reason might propose, yet it has been less usefulthan many other influences in bringing the Life of Reason about. TheChristian and the Moslem, in refining their more violent inspiration, have brought us nearer to genuine goodness than the Greek could by hisidle example. Classic perfection is a seedless flower, imitable only byartifice, not reproducible by generation. It is capable of influencingcharacter only through the intellect, the means by which character canbe influenced least. It is a detached ideal, responding to no crying andactual demand in the world at large. It never passed, to win the rightof addressing mankind, through a sufficient novitiate of sorrow. 

[Sidenote: Prerational morality among the Jews. ]

The Hebrews, on the contrary, who in comparison with the Greeks had abarbarous idea of happiness, showed far greater moral cohesion underthe pressure of adversity. They integrated their purposes into afanaticism, but they integrated them; and the integrity that resultedbecame a mighty example. It constituted an ideal of character not theless awe-inspiring for being merely formal. We need not marvel thatabstract commandments should have impressed the world more than concreteideals. To appreciate an ideal, to love and serve it in the full lightof science and reason, would require a high intelligence, and, what israrer still, noble affinities and renunciations which are not to belooked for in an undisciplined people. But to feel the truth andauthority of an abstract maxim (as, for instance, Do right and shame thedevil), a maxim applicable to experience on any plane, nothing is neededbut a sound wit and common honesty. Men know better what is right andwrong than what is ultimately good or evil; their conscience is morevividly present to them than the fruits which obedience to consciencemight bear; so that the logical relation of means to ends, of methods toactivities, eludes them altogether. What is a necessary connectionbetween the given end, happiness, and the normal life naturallypossessing it, appears to them as a miraculous connection betweenobedience to God's commands and enjoyment of his favour. The evidence ofthis miracle astonishes them and fills them with zeal. They arestrengthened to persevere in righteousness under any stress ofmisfortune, in the assurance that they are being put to a temporary testand that the reward promised to virtue will eventually be theirs. 

[Sidenote: The development of conscience. ]

Thus a habit of faithfulness, a trust in general principles, is fosteredand ingrained in generation after generation--a rare and preciousheritage for a race so imperfectly rational as the human. Reason wouldof course justify the same constancy in well-doing, since a course ofconduct would not be right, but wrong, if its ultimate issue were humanmisery. But as the happiness secured by virtue may be remote and maydemand more virtue to make it appreciable, the mere rationality of ahabit gives it no currency in the world and but little moral glow in theconscience. We should not, therefore, be too much offended at theillusions which play a part in moral integration. Imagination is oftenmore efficacious in reaching the gist and meaning of experience thanintelligence can be, just because imagination is less scrupulous andmore instinctive. Even physical discoveries, when they come, are thefruit of divination, and Columbus had to believe he might sail westwardto India before he could actually hit upon America. Reason cannot createitself, and nature, in producing reason, has to feel her wayexperimentally. Habits and chance systems of education have to arisefirst and exercise upon individuals an irrational suasion favourable torational ends. Men long live in substantial harmony with reality beforethey recognise its nature. Organs long exist before they reach theirperfect function. The fortunate instincts of a race destined to longlife and rationality express themselves in significant poetry beforethey express themselves in science. 

The service which Hebraism has rendered to mankind has beeninstrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative. Hebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it amatter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganismhad left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewishsystem has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda and intolerance; atendency which would not have proved nefarious had this religion alwaysremained true to its moral principle; for morality is coercive and noman, being autonomous, has a right to do wrong. Conscience, thusreinforced by religious passion, has been able to focus a generalabhorrence on certain great scandals--slavery and sodomy could bepractically suppressed among Christians, and drunkenness among Moslems. The Christian principle of charity also owed a part of its force toHebraic tradition. For the law and the prophets were full of mercy andloving kindness toward the faithful. What Moses had taught his peopleChrist and his Hellenising disciples had the beautiful courage to preachto all mankind. Yet this virtue of charity, on its subtler and moremetaphysical side, belongs to the spirit of redemption, to that asceticand quasi-Buddhistic element in Christianity to which we shall presentlyrevert. The pure Jews can have no part in such insight, because itcontradicts the positivism of their religion and character and theirideal of worldly happiness. 

[Sidenote: Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims. ]

As the human body is said to change all its substance every seven years, and yet is the same body, so the Hebraic conscience might change all itstenets in seven generations and be the same conscience still. Could thisabstract moral habit, this transferable earnestness, be enlisted inrational causes, the Life of Reason would have gained a valuableinstrument. Men would possess the "single eye, " and the art, sodifficult to an ape-like creature with loose moral feelings, of actingon principle. Could the vision of an adequate natural ideal fall intothe Hebraising mind, already aching for action and nerved to practicalenthusiasm, that ideal vision might become efficacious and be largelyrealised in practice. The abstract power of self-direction, ifenlightened by a larger experience and a more fertile genius, might givethe Life of Reason a public embodiment such as it has not had since thebest days of classic antiquity. Thus the two prerational moralities outof which European civilisation has grown, could they be happilysuperposed, would make a rational polity. 

[Sidenote: Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers noprogramme. ]

The objects of human desire, then, until reason has compared andexperience has tested them, are a miscellaneous assortment of goods, unstable in themselves and incompatible with one another. It is a happychance if a tolerable mixture of them recommends itself to a prophet orfinds an adventitous acceptance among a group of men. Intuitive moralityis adequate while it simply enforces those obvious and universal lawswhich are indispensable to any society, and which impose themselveseverywhere on men under pain of quick extinction--a penalty which manyan individual and many a nation continually prefers to pay. But whenintuitive morality ventures upon speculative ground and tries to guideprogress, its magic fails. Ideals are tentative and have to becritically viewed. A moralist who rests in his intuitions may be a goodpreacher, but hardly deserves the name of philosopher. He cannot findany authority for his maxims which opposite maxims may not equallyinvoke. To settle the relative merits of rival authorities and ofhostile consciences it is necessary to appeal to the only realauthority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the living man. Noother test is conceivable and no other would be valid; for no good manwould ever consent to regard an authority as divine or binding whichessentially contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience which isirreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied with itself, andnot conscientious enough: it needs cultivation by dialectic. It neglectsto extend to all human interests that principle of synthesis and justiceby which conscience itself has arisen. And so soon as the consciencesummons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and ofuniversal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason. So, too, when the spirit summons its traditional faiths, to subject them toa similar examination, that exercise is not called religion, butphilosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the purestreligion and reason the ultimate conscience; but so to name them wouldbe misleading. The things commonly called by those names have seldomconsented to live at peace with sincere reflection. It has been feltvaguely that reason could not have produced them, and that they mightsuffer sad changes by submitting to it; as if reason could be the_ground_ of anything, or as if everything might not find itsconsummation in becoming rational. 

CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

[Sidenote: Moral passions represent private interests. ]

In moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I mean thathatred which an animal may sometimes feel for other animals on accountof their strange aspect, or because their habits put him to seriousinconvenience, or because these habits, if he himself adopted them, might be vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rationalsentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature merely for notresembling another, or for nourishing in a different physical or moralenvironment. It has been an unfortunate consequence of mythicalphilosophies that moral emotions have been stretched to objects withwhich a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has beenfilled with monsters more or less horrible, according as the forces theyrepresented were more or less formidable to human life. In the samespirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime amongthose engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed aninsidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any materialobstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion, however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enoughnot to be constituted like the average of his neighbours. 

Ethics, if it is to be a science and not a piece of arbitrarylegislation, cannot pronounce it sinful in a serpent to be a serpent; itcannot even accuse a barbarian of loving a wrong life, except in so faras the barbarian is supposed capable of accusing himself of barbarism. If he is a perfect barbarian he will be inwardly, and therefore morally, justified. The notion of a barbarian will then be accepted by him asthat of a true man, and will form the basis of whatever rationaljudgments or policy he attains. It may still seem dreadful to him to bea serpent, as to be a barbarian might seem dreadful to a man imbued withliberal interests. But the degree to which moral science, or thedialectic of will, can condemn any type of life depends on the amount ofdisruptive contradiction which, at any reflective moment, that lifebrings under the unity of apperception. The discordant impulses thereinconfronted will challenge and condemn one another; and the court ofreason in which their quarrel is ventilated will have authority topronounce between them. 

The physical repulsion, however, which everybody feels to habits andinterests which he is incapable of sharing is no part of rationalestimation, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices andsuperstitions which prerational morality abounds in. The strongestfeelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; theyexpress merely physical antipathies. 

Toward alien powers a man's true weapon is not invective, but skill andstrength. An obstacle is an obstacle, not a devil; and even a morallife, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, ismerely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it ismoral, but only in so far as its morality represents a materialorganism, physically incompatible with what the thinker has at heart. 

[Sidenote: Common ideal interests may supervene. ]

Material conflicts cannot be abolished by reason, because reason ispowerful only where they have been removed. Yet where opposing forcesare able mutually to comprehend and respect one another, common idealinterests at once supervene, and though the material conflict may remainirrepressible, it will be overlaid by an intellectual life, partlycommon and unanimous. In this lies the chivalry of war, that weacknowledge the right of others to pursue ends contrary to our own. Competitors who are able to feel this ideal comity, and who leadingdifferent lives in the flesh lead the same life in imagination, areincited by their mutual understanding to rise above that materialambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies. They mayultimately wish to renounce that temporal good which deprives them ofspiritual goods in truth infinitely greater and more appealing to thesoul--innocence, justice, and intelligence. They may prefer an enlargedmind to enlarged frontiers, and the comprehension of things foreign tothe destruction of them. They may even aspire to detachment from thoseprivate interests which, as Plato said, [H] do not deserve to be takentoo seriously; the fact that we must take them seriously being theignoble part of our condition. 

Of course such renunciations, to be rational, must not extend to thewhole material basis of life, since some physical particularity andefficiency are requisite for bringing into being that very rationalitywhich is to turn enemies into friends. The need of a material basis forspirit is what renders partial war with parts of the world theinevitable background of charity and justice. The frontiers at whichthis warfare is waged may, however, be pushed back indefinitely. Withinthe sphere organised about a firm and generous life a Roman peace can beestablished. It is not what is assimilated that saps a creative will, but what remains outside that ultimately invades and disrupts it. Inexact proportion to its vigour, it wins over former enemies, civilisesthe barbarian, and even tames the viper, when the eye is masterful andsympathetic enough to dispel hatred and fear. The more rational aninstitution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others; forthese concessions, being just, propagate its essence. The idealcommonwealth can extend to the limit at which such concessions cease tobe just and are thereby detrimental. Beyond or below that limit strifemust continue for physical ascendancy, so that the power and the will tobe reasonable may not be undermined. Reason is an operation in nature, and has its root there. Saints cannot arise where there have been nowarriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hiddenin the depths. 

[Sidenote: To this extent there is rational society. ]

Perhaps the art of politics, if it were practised scientifically, mightobviate open war, religious enmities, industrial competition, and humanslavery; but it would certainly not leave a free field for all animalsnor for all monstrosities in men. Even while admitting the claims ofmonsters to be treated humanely, reason could not suffer them to absorbthose material resources which might be needed to maintain rationalsociety at its highest efficiency. We cannot, at this immense distancefrom a rational social order, judge what concessions individual geniuswould be called upon to make in a system of education and government inwhich all attainable goods should be pursued scientifically. Concessionswould certainly be demanded, if not from well-trained wills, still frominevitable instincts, reacting on inevitable accidents. There is tragedyin perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises isitself imperfect. Accidents will always continue to harass the mostconsummate organism; they will flow in both from the outer world andfrom the interstices, so to speak, of its own machinery; for a rationallife touches the irrational at its core as well as at its periphery. Inboth directions it meets physical force and can subsist only byexercising physical force in return. The range of rational ethics islimited to the intermediate political zone, in which existences haveattained some degree of natural unanimity. 

It should be added, perhaps, that the frontiers between moral andphysical action are purely notional. Real existences do not lie whollyon one or the other side of them. Every man, every material object, hasmoral affinities enveloping an indomitable vital nucleus or brutepersonal kernel; this moral essence is enveloped in turn by untraceablerelations, radiating to infinity over the natural world. The stars entersociety by the light and knowledge they afford, the time they keep, andthe ornament they lavish; but they are mere dead weights in theirsubstance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You and I possessmanifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has hispoor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. Beyond the littlespan of his foresight and love, each is merely a physical agency, preparing the way quite irresponsibly for undreamt-of revolutions andalien lives. 

[Sidenote: A rational morality not attainable, ]

A truly rational morality, or social regimen, has never existed in theworld and is hardly to be looked for. What guides men and nations intheir practice is always some partial interest or some partialdisillusion. A rational morality would imply perfect self-knowledge, sothat no congenial good should be needlessly missed--least of allpractical reason or justice itself; so that no good congenial to othercreatures would be needlessly taken from them. The total value whicheverything had from the agent's point of view would need to bedetermined and felt efficaciously; and, among other things, the totalvalue which this point of view, with the conduct it justified, wouldhave for every foreign interest which it affected. Such knowledge, suchdefinition of purpose, and such perfection of sympathy are clearlybeyond man's reach. All that can be hoped for is that the advance ofscience and commerce, by fostering peace and a rational development ofcharacter, may bring some part of mankind nearer to that goal; but thegoal lies, as every ultimate ideal should, at the limit of what ispossible, and must serve rather to measure achievements than to prophesythem. 

[Sidenote: but its principle clear. ] In lieu of a rational morality, however, we have rational ethics; and this mere idea of a rationalmorality is something valuable. While we wait for the sentiments, customs, and laws which should embody perfect humanity and perfectjustice, we may observe the germinal principle of these ideal things; wemay sketch the ground-plan of a true commonwealth. This sketchconstitutes rational ethics, as founded by Socrates, glorified by Plato, and sobered and solidified by Aristotle. It sets forth the method ofjudgment and estimation which a rational morality would applyuniversally and express in practice. The method, being very simple, canbe discovered and largely illustrated in advance, while the completeself-knowledge and sympathy are still wanting which might avail toembody that method in the concrete and to discover unequivocally whereabsolute duty and ultimate happiness may lie. 

[Sidenote: It is the logic of an autonomous will. ]

This method, the Socratic method, consists in accepting any estimationwhich any man may sincerely make, and in applying dialectic to it, so asto let the man see what he really esteems. What he really esteems iswhat ought to guide his conduct; for to suggest that a rational beingought to do what he feels to be wrong, or ought to pursue what hegenuinely thinks is worthless, would be to impugn that man's rationalityand to discredit one's own. With what face could any man or god say toanother: Your duty is to do what you cannot know you ought to do; yourfunction is to suffer what you cannot recognise to be worth suffering?Such an attitude amounts to imposture and excludes society; it is theattitude of a detestable tyrant, and any one who mistakes it for moralauthority has not yet felt the first heart-throb of philosophy. 

[Sidenote: Socrates' science. ]

More even than natural philosophy, moral philosophy is something Greek:it is the appanage of freemen. The Socratic method is the soul ofliberal conversation; it is compacted in equal measure of sincerity andcourtesy. Each man is autonomous and all are respected; and nothing isbrought forward except to be submitted to reason and accepted orrejected by the self-questioning heart. Indeed, when Socrates appearedin Athens mutual respect had passed into democracy and liberty intolicense; but the stalwart virtue of Socrates saved him from being asophist, much as his method, when not honestly and sincerely used, mightseem to countenance that moral anarchy which the sophists had expressedin their irresponsible doctrines. Their sophistry did not consist in theprivate _seat_ which they assigned to judgment; for what judgment isthere that is not somebody's judgment at some moment? The sophismconsisted in ignoring the living moment's _intent_, and in suggestingthat no judgment could refer to anything ulterior, and therefore that nojudgment could be wrong: in other words that each man at each moment wasthe theme and standard, as well as the seat, of his judgment. 

Socrates escaped this folly by force of honesty, which is what savesfrom folly in dialectic. He built his whole science precisely on thatintent which the sophists ignored; he insisted that people shoulddeclare sincerely what they meant and what they wanted; and on thatliving rock he founded the persuasive and ideal sciences of logic andethics, the necessity of which lies all in free insight and in actualwill. This will and insight they render deliberate, profound, unshakable, and consistent. Socrates, by his genial midwifery, helpedmen to discover the truth and excellence to which they were naturallyaddressed. This circumstance rendered his doctrine at once moral andscientific; scientific because dialectical, moral because expressive ofpersonal and living aspirations. His ethics was not like what has sincepassed under that name--a spurious physics, accompanied by commandmentsand threats. It was a pliant and liberal expression of ideals, inwardlygrounded and spontaneously pursued. It was an exercise inself-knowledge. 

[Sidenote: Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy. ]

Socrates' liberality was that of a free man ready to maintain his willand conscience, if need be, against the whole world. The sophists, onthe contrary, were sycophants in their scepticism, and having inwardlyabandoned the ideals of their race and nation--which Socrates defendedwith his homely irony--they dealt out their miscellaneous knowledge, ortheir talent in exposition, at the beck and for the convenience ofothers. Their theory was that each man having a right to pursue his ownaims, skilful thinkers might, for money, furnish any fellow-mortal withinstruments fitted to his purpose. Socrates, on the contrary, conceivedthat each man, to achieve his aims must first learn to distinguish themclearly; he demanded that rationality, in the form of an examination andclarification of purposes, should precede any selection of externalinstruments. For how should a man recognise anything useful unless hefirst had established the end to be subserved and thereby recognised thegood? True science, then, was that which enabled a man to disentangleand attain his natural good; and such a science is also the art of lifeand the whole of virtue. 

The autonomous moralist differs from the sophist or ethical sceptic inthis: that he retains his integrity. In vindicating his ideal he doesnot recant his human nature. In asserting the initial right of everyimpulse in others, he remains the spokesman of his own. Knowledge of theworld, courtesy, and fairness do not neutralise his positive life. He isthoroughly sincere, as the sophist is not; for every man, while helives, embodies and enacts some special interest; and this truth, whichthose who confound psychology with ethics may think destructive of allauthority in morals, is in fact what alone renders moral judgmentpossible and respectable. If the sophist declares that what his natureattaches him to is not "really" a good, because it would not be a good, perhaps, for a different creature, he is a false interpreter of his ownheart, and rather discreditably stultifies his honest feelings andactions by those theoretical valuations which, in guise of a mysticalethics, he gives out to the world. Socratic liberality, on the contrary, is consistent with itself, as Spinozistic naturalism is also; for itexercises that right of private judgment which it concedes to others, and avowedly builds up the idea of the good on that natural innerfoundation on which everybody who has it at all must inevitably buildit. This functional good is accordingly always relative and good forsomething; it is the ideal which a vital and energising soul carrieswith it as it moves. It is identical, as Socrates constantly taught, with the useful, the helpful, the beneficent. It is the complementneeded to perfect every art and every activity after its own kind. 

[Sidenote: Its vitality]

Rational ethics is an embodiment of volition, not a description of it. It is the expression of living interest, preference, and categoricalchoice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for thedescription of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slippingfar-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as tolend a non-natural origin to human aspirations. It even recognises, asan emanation of its own force, that uncompromising truthfulness withwhich science assigns all forms of moral life to their place in themechanical system of nature. But the rational moralist is not on thataccount reduced to a mere spectator, a physicist acknowledging nointerest except the interest in facts and in the laws of change. His ownspirit, small by the material forces which it may stand for and express, is great by its prerogative of surveying and judging the universe;surveying it, of course, from a mortal point of view, and judging itonly by its kindliness or cruelty to some actual interest, yet, even so, determining unequivocally a part of its constitution and excellence. Therational moralist represents a force energising in the world, discovering its affinities there and clinging to them to the exclusionof their hateful opposites. He represents, over against the chancefacts, an ideal embodying the particular demands, possibilities, andsatisfactions of a specific being. 

This dogmatic position of reason is not uncritically dogmatic; on thecontrary, it is the sophistical position that is uncritically neutral. All criticism needs a dogmatic background, else it would lack objectsand criteria for criticism. The sophist himself, without confessing it, enacts a special interest. He bubbles over with convictions about thepathological and fatal origin of human beliefs, as if that could preventsome of them from being more trustworthy and truer than others. He isdoubtless right in his psychology; his own ideas have their naturalcauses and their chance of signifying something real. His scepticismmay represent a wider experience than do the fanaticisms it opposes. Butthis sceptic also lives. Nature has sent her saps abundantly into him, and he cannot but nod dogmatically on that philosophical tree on whichhe is so pungent a berry. His imagination is unmistakably fascinated bythe pictures it happens to put together. His judgment falls unabashed, and his discourse splashes on in its dialectical march, everystepping-stone an unquestioned idea, every stride a categoricalassertion. Does he deny this? Then his very denial, in its promptnessand heat, audibly contradicts him and makes him ridiculous. Honestcriticism consists in being consciously dogmatic, and conscientiouslyso, like Descartes when he said, "I am. " It is to sift and harmonise allassertions so as to make them a faithful expression of actual experienceand inevitable thought. 

[Sidenote: Genuine altruism is natural self-expression. ]

Now will, no less than that reason which avails to render willconsistent and far-reaching, animates natural bodies and expresses theirfunctions. It has a radical bias, a foregone, determinate direction, else it could not be a will nor a principle of preference. The knowledgeof what other people desire does not abolish a man's own aims. Sympathyand justice are simply an expansion of the soul's interests, arisingwhen we consider other men's lives so intently that something in usimitates and re-enacts their experience, so that we move partly inunison with their movement, recognise the reality and initial legitimacyof their interests, and consequently regard their aims in our action, inso far as our own status and purposes have become identical with theirs. We are not less ourselves, nor less autonomous, for this assimilation, since we assimilate only what is in itself intelligible and congruouswith our mind and obey only that authority which can impose itself onour reason. 

The case is parallel to that of knowledge. To know all men's experienceand to comprehend their beliefs would constitute the most cogent andsettled of philosophies. Thought would then be reasonably adjusted toall the facts of history, and judgment would grow more authoritative andprecise by virtue of that enlightenment. So, too, to understand all thegoods that any man, nay, that any beast or angel, may ever have pursued, would leave man still necessitous of food, drink, sleep, and shelter; hewould still love; the comic, the loathsome, the beautiful would stillaffect him with unmistakable direct emotions. His taste might no doubtgain in elasticity by those sympathetic excursions into the polyglotworld; the plastic or dramatic quality which had enabled him to feelother creatures' joys would grow by exercise and new overtones would beadded to his gamut. But the foundations of his nature would stand; andhis possible happiness, though some new and precious threads might bewoven into it, would not have a texture fundamentally different. 

The radical impulses at work in any animal must continue to speak whilehe lives, for they are his essence. A true morality does not have to beadopted; the parts of it best practised are those which are neverpreached. To be "converted" would be to pass from one self-betrayal toanother. It would be to found a new morality on a new artifice. Themorality which has genuine authority exists inevitably and speaksautonomously in every common judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, orpassion that fills the vulgar day. The pursuit of those goods which arethe only possible or fitting crown of a man's life is predetermined byhis nature; he cannot choose a law-giver, nor accept one, for none whospoke to the purpose could teach him anything but to know himself. Rational life is an art, not a slavery; and terrible as may be theerrors and the apathy that impede its successful exercise, the standardand goal of it are given intrinsically. Any task imposed externally on aman is imposed by force only, a force he has the right to defy so soonas he can do so without creating some greater impediment to his naturalvocation. 

[Sidenote: Reason expresses impulses. ]

Rational ethics, then, resembles prerational precepts and half-systemsin being founded on impulse. It formulates a natural morality. It is asettled method of achieving ends to which man is drawn by virtue of hisphysical and rational constitution. By this circumstance rational ethicsis removed from the bad company of all artificial, verbal, and unjustsystems of morality, which in absolving themselves from relevance toman's endowment and experience merely show how completely irrelevantthey are to life. Once, no doubt, each of these arbitrary systemsexpressed (like the observance of the Sabbath) some practical interestor some not unnatural rite; but so narrow a basis of course has to bedisowned when the precepts so originating have been swollen intouniversal tyrannical laws. A rational ethics reduces them at once totheir slender representative rôle; and it surrounds and buttresses themon every side with all other natural ideals. 

[Sidenote: but impulses reduced to harmony. ]

Rational ethics thus differs from the prerational in being complete. There is one impulse which intuitive moralists ignore: the impulse toreflect. Human instincts are ignorant, multitudinous, and contradictory. To satisfy them as they come is often impossible, and often disastrous, in that such satisfaction prevents the satisfaction of other instinctsinherently no less fecund and legitimate. When we apply reason to lifewe immediately demand that life be consistent, complete, andsatisfactory when reflected upon and viewed as a whole. This view, as itpresents each moment in its relations, extends to all moments affectedby the action or maxim under discussion; it has no more ground forstopping at the limits of what is called a single life than at thelimits of a single adventure. To stop at selfishness is not particularlyrational. The same principle that creates the ideal of a self createsthe ideal of a family or an institution. 

[Sidenote: Self-love artificial. ]

The conflict between selfishness and altruism is like that between anytwo ideal passions that in some particular may chance to be opposed; butsuch a conflict has no obstinate existence for reason. For reason theperson itself has no obstinate existence. The _character_ which a manachieves at the best moment of his life is indeed something ideal andsignificant; it justifies and consecrates all his coherent actions andpreferences. But _the man's life_, the circle drawn by biographersaround the career of a particular body, from the womb to thecharnel-house, and around the mental flux that accompanies that career, is no significant unity. All the substances and efficient processes thatfigure within it come from elsewhere and continue beyond; while all therational objects and interests to which it refers have a trans-personalstatus. Self-love itself is concerned with public opinion; and if a manconcentrates his view on private pleasures, these may qualify thefleeting moments of his life with an intrinsic value, but they leave thelife itself shapeless and infinite, as if sparks should play over apiece of burnt paper. 

The limits assigned to the mass of sentience attributed to each man areassigned conventionally; his prenatal feelings, his forgotten dreams, and his unappropriated sensations belong to his body and for that reasononly are said to belong to him. Each impulse included within theselimits may be as directly compared with the represented impulses ofother people as with the represented impulses expected to arise later inthe same body. Reason lives among these represented values, all of whichhave their cerebral seat and present efficacy over the passing thought;and reason teaches this passing thought to believe in and to respectthem equally. Their right is not less clear, nor their influence lessnatural, because they may range over the whole universe and may awaittheir realisation at the farthest boundaries of time. All that isphysically requisite to their operation is that they should be vividlyrepresented; while all that is requisite rationally, to justify them inqualifying actual life by their influence, is that the present actshould have some tendency to bring the represented values about. Inother words, a rational mind would consider, in its judgment and action, every interest which that judgment or action at all affected; and itwould conspire with each represented good in proportion, not to thatgood's intrinsic importance, but to the power which the present actmight have of helping to realise that good. 

[Sidenote: The sanction of reason is happiness. ]

If pleasure, because it is commonly a result of satisfied instinct, mayby a figure of speech be called the aim of impulse, happiness, by a likefigure, may be called the aim of reason. The direct aim of reason isharmony; yet harmony, when made to rule in life, gives reason a noblesatisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and eveninconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind drivenby craving, pleasure, and fear. The moralists who speak disparagingly ofhappiness are less sublime than they think. In truth their philosophy istoo lightly ballasted, too much fed on prejudice and quibbles, forhappiness to fall within its range. Happiness implies resource andsecurity; it can be achieved only by discipline. Your intuitive moralistrejects discipline, at least discipline of the conscience; and he ispunished by having no lien on wisdom. He trusts to the clash of blindforces in collision, being one of them himself. He demands that virtueshould be partisan and unjust; and he dreams of crushing the adversaryin some physical cataclysm. 

Such groping enthusiasm is often innocent and romantic; it captivates uswith its youthful spell. But it has no structure with which to resistthe shocks of fortune, which it goes out so jauntily to meet. It turnsonly too often into vulgarity and worldliness. A snow-flake is soon asmudge, and there is a deeper purity in the diamond. Happiness is hiddenfrom a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by along education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfectedinstitutions. It is discipline that renders men rational and capable ofhappiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed toattain a beautiful naturalness. Discipline discredits the randompleasures of illusion, hope, and triumph, and substitutes those whichare self-reproductive, perennial, and serene, because they express anequilibrium maintained with reality. So long as the result of endeavouris partly unforeseen and unintentional, so long as the will is partlyblind, the Life of Reason is still swaddled in ignominy and the animalbarks in the midst of human discourse. Wisdom and happiness consist inhaving recast natural energies in the furnace of experience. Nor is thisexperience merely a repressive force. It enshrines the successfulexpressions of spirit as well as the shocks and vetoes of circumstance;it enables a man to know himself in knowing the world and to discoverhis ideal by the very ring, true or false, of fortune's coin. 

[Sidenote: Moral science impeded by its chaotic data. ]

With this brief account we may leave the subject of rational ethics. Itsdevelopment is impossible save in the concrete, when a legislator, starting from extant interests, considers what practices serve to renderthose interests vital and genuine, and what external alliances mightlend them support and a more glorious expression. The difficulty incarrying rational policy very far comes partly from the refractorymaterials at hand, and partly from the narrow range within which moralscience is usually confined. The materials are individual willsnaturally far from unanimous, lost for the most part in frivolouspleasures, rivalries, and superstitions, and little inclined to listento a law-giver that, like a new Lycurgus, should speak to them ofunanimity, simplicity, discipline, and perfection. Devotion andsinglemindedness, perhaps possible in the cloister, are hard toestablish in the world; yet a rational morality requires that all layactivities, all sweet temptations, should have their voice in theconclave. Morality becomes rational precisely by refusing either toaccept human nature, as it sprouts, altogether without harmony, or tomutilate it in the haste to make it harmonious. The condition, therefore, of making a beginning in good politics is to find a set ofmen with well-knit character and cogent traditions, so that there may bea firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughingthe quicksands. 

[Sidenote: and its unrecognised scope. ]

When such a starting-point is given, moral values radiate from it to thevery ends of the universe; and a failure to appreciate the range overwhich rational estimation spreads is a second obstacle to sound ethics. Because of this failure the earnest soul is too often intent on escapingto heaven, while the gross politician is suffered to declaim about thenational honour, and to promise this client an office, this district afavour, and this class an iniquitous advantage. Politics is expected tobe sophistical; and in the soberest parliaments hardly an argument isused or an ideal invoked which is not an insult to reason. Majoritieswork by a system of bribes offered to the more barren interests of menand to their more blatant prejudices. The higher direction of theirlives is relegated to religion, which, unhappily, is apt to suffer fromhereditary blindness to natural needs and to possible progress. The ideathat religion, as well as art, industry, nationality, and science, should exist only for human life's sake and in order that men may livebetter in this world, is an idea not even mooted in politics and perhapsopposed by an official philosophy. The enterprise of individuals or ofsmall aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we callcivilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered abouta variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But theuniversal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, theempire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, andphilosophical worship, is mentioned no more. An unformulated conception, the prerational ethics of private privilege and national unity, fillsthe background of men's minds. It represents feudal traditions ratherthan the tendency really involved in contemporary industry, science, orphilanthropy. Those dark ages, from which our political practice isderived, had a political theory which we should do well to study; fortheir theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was in turnthe echo of a former age of reason, when a few men conscious of rulingthe world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule itjustly. 

Modern rational ethics, however, or what approaches most nearly to sucha thing, has one advantage over the ancient and mediæval; it hasprofited by Christian discipline and by the greater gentleness of modernmanners. It has recognised the rights of the dumb majority; it hasrevolted against cruelty and preventable suffering and has bent itselfon diffusing well-being--the well-being that people want, and not theso-called virtues which a supercilious aristocracy may find itconvenient to prescribe for them. It has based ethics on the foundationon which actual morality rests; on nature, on the necessities of sociallife, on the human instincts of sympathy and justice. 

[Sidenote: Fallacy in democratic hedonism. ]

It is all the more to be regretted that the only modern school of ethicswhich is humane and honestly interested in progress should have given abad technical expression to its generous principles and should havesubstituted a dubious psychology for Socratic dialectic. The mere factthat somebody somewhere enjoys or dislikes a thing cannot givedirection to a rational will. That fact indicates a moral situation butdoes not prescribe a definite action. A partial harmony or maladjustmentis thereby proved to exist, but the method is not revealed by which theharmony should be sustained or the maladjustment removed. A givenharmony can be sustained by leaving things as they are or by changingthem together. A maladjustment can be removed by altering theenvironment or by altering the man. Pleasures may be attached toanything, and to pursue them in the abstract does not help to define anyparticular line of conduct. The particular ideal pre-exists in theobserver; the mathematics of pleasure and pain cannot oblige him, forinstance, to prefer a hundred units of mindless pleasure enjoyed indreams to fifty units diffused over labour and discourse. He need notlimit his efforts to spreading needless comforts and silly pleasuresamong the million; he need not accept for a goal a child's capricesmultiplied by infinity. Even these caprices, pleasures, and comfortsdoubtless have their claims; but these claims have to be adjudicated bythe agent's autonomous conscience, and he will give them the place theyfill in his honest ideal of what it would be best to have in the world, not the place which they might pretend to usurp there by a sort ofphysical pressure. A conscience is a living function, expressing aparticular nature; it is not a passive medium where heterogeneous valuescan find their balance by virtue of their dead weight and number. 

A moralist is called upon, first of all, to decide in what thingspleasure ought to be found. Of course his decision, if he is rational, will not be arbitrary; it will conscientiously express his ownnature--on which alone honest ideals can rest--without attempting tospeak for the deafening and inconstant convocation of the whole sentientuniverse. Duty is a matter of self-knowledge, not of statistics. Aliving and particular will therein discovers its affinities, broadensits basis, acknowledges its obligations, and co-operates with everythingthat will co-operate with it; but it continues throughout to unfold aparticular life, finding its supports and extensions in the state, thearts, and the universe. It cannot for a moment renounce its autonomywithout renouncing reason and perhaps decreeing the extinction both ofits own bodily basis and of its ideal method and policy. 

[Sidenote: Sympathy a conditional duty. ]

Utilitarianism needs to be transferred to Socratic and dialecticalground, so that interest in absent interests may take its place in aconcrete ideal. It is a noble thing to be sensitive to others'hardships, and happy in their happiness; but it is noble because itrefines the natural will without enfeebling it, offering it rather a newand congenial development, one entirely predetermined by the fundamentalstructure of human nature. Were man not gregarious, were he not made tobe child, friend, husband, and father by turns, his morality would notbe social, but, like that of some silk-worm or some seraph, whollyindustrious or wholly contemplative. Parental and sexual instincts, social life and the gift of co-operation carry sympathy implicitly withthem, as they carry the very faculty to recognise a fellow-being. Tomake this sympathy explicit and to find one's happiness in exercising itis to lay one's foundations deeper in nature and to expand the range ofone's being. Its limits, however, would be broken down and moraldissolution would set in if, forgetting his humanity, a man should bidall living creatures lapse with him into a delicious torpor, or run intoa cycle of pleasant dreams, so intense that death would be sure toprecede any awakening out of them. Great as may be the advance incharity since the days of Socrates, therefore, the advance is within thelines of his method; to trespass beyond them would be to recede. 

This situation is repeated on a broader stage. A statesman entrustedwith power should regard nothing but his country's interests; to regardanything else would be treason. He cannot allow foreign sentiment orprivate hobbies to make him misapply the resources of hisfellow-countrymen to their own injury. But he may well have anenlightened view of the interests which he serves; he might indeed beexpected to take a more profound and enlightened view of them than hiscountrymen were commonly capable of, else he would have no right to hiseminent station. He should be the first to feel that to inflict injuryor foster hatred among other populations should not be a portion of apeople's happiness. A nation, like a man, is something ideal. Indestructible mountains and valleys, crawled over by any sort of race, do not constitute its identity. Its essence is a certain spirit, andonly what enters into this spirit can bind it morally, or preserve it. 

[Sidenote: All life, and hence right life, finite and particular. ]

If a drop of water contains a million worlds which I, in swallowing, mayruin or transform, that is Allah's business; mine is to clarify my ownintent, to cling to what ideals may lie within the circle of myexperience and practical imagination, so that I may have a naturalground for my loyalties, and may be constant in them. It would not be arational ambition to wish to multiply the population of China by two, orthat of America by twenty, after ascertaining that life there containedan overplus of pleasure. To weed a garden, however, would be rational, though the weeds and their interests would have to be sacrificed in theprocess. Utilitarianism took up false ground when it made right conductterminate in miscellaneous pleasures and pains, as if in their isolationthey constituted all that morality had to consider, and as if respectoffered to them, somehow in proportion to their quantity, were the trueconscience. The true conscience is rather an integrated natural will, chastened by clear knowledge of what it pursues and may attain. Whatmorality has to consider is the form of life, not its quantity. In aworld that is perhaps infinite, moral life can spring only from definitecentres and is neither called upon nor able to estimate the whole, norto redress its balance. It is the free spirit of a part, finding itsaffinities and equilibrium in the material whole which it reacts on, andwhich it is in that measure enabled to understand. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote H: Laws. VII. 803. B. ]

CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

[Sidenote: Socratic ethics retrospective. ]

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rationalethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. Oneby his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by hispreponderating interest in history and analysis, showed clearly enoughhow little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquentepitaph on their country. They were publishing the principles of whathad been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpretingits momentary achievement. The spirit of liberty and co-operation wasalready dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and pettyquarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He hadbegun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and ofjustice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul, he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. Hefelt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen mighthave preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him whichalone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his materialprofit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegratedsociety began to drive him to artificial excitements and superstitions. Democracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom publicinterest was still represented, the few whose nobler temper andtraditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriotswere gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spiritthat rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer sufferedto have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stagehad shaken off all allegiance to art or reason. 

[Sidenote: Rise of disillusioned moralities. ]

The biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequentattitudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they allembodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned theeffort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they couldsupport no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive thesoul with some substitute for happiness. Life is older and morepersistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment inrationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetationwhich they possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent ofcivilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espousewhatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance ofmeaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour ofbuilding this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positiveelements. 

Not to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as theyare, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view fromwhich the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of itssatirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they mayprecede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciouslyembraced in view of reason's failure, they have a quite particularvalue. Aversion to rational ideals does not then come, as theintuitionist's aversion does, from moral incoherence or religiousprejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On thecontrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too readyapprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationalityof nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, maymake it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, thephilosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even asthe beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which heand all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he maycry, in his contemplative spleen, that _all_ is vanity. 

If you should still confront him with a theory of the ideal, he wouldnot be reduced, like the pre-rational moralists in a similar case, tomere inattention and bluster. If you told him that every art and everyactivity involves a congruous good, and that the endeavour to realisethe ideal in every direction is an effort of which reason necessarilyapproves, since reason is nothing but the method of that endeavour, hewould not need to deny your statements in order to justify himself. Hemight admit the naturalness, the spontaneity, the ideal sufficiency ofyour conceptions; but he might add, with the smile of the elder and thesadder man, that he had experience of their futility. "You Hellenisers, "he might say, "are but children; you have not pondered the littlehistory you know. If thought were conversant with reality, if virtuewere stable and fruitful, if pains and policy were ultimately justifiedby a greater good arising out of them--then, indeed, a life according toreason might tempt a philosopher. But unfortunately not one of thosefond assumptions is true. Human thought is a meaningless phantasmagoria. Virtue is a splendid and laborious folly, when it is not a pompousgarment that only looks respectable in the dark, being in truth full ofspots and ridiculous patches. Men's best laid plans become, in thecasual cross-currents of being, the occasion of their bitterestcalamities. How, then, live? How justify in our eyes, let us not say theways of God, but our own ways?"

[Sidenote: The illusion subsisting in them. ]

Such a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whateverpositive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he livescannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does notcollapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath ofcriticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are notpre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more orless explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at leastimaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from anintolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matterof fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are nevereluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part ofthe natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all therest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of thatnatural ideal because, compared with the commoner passions on which itreacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope--the appealto some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utterchange in the conditions of life. 

Post-rational morality thus constitutes, in intention if not in fact, acriticism of all experience. It thinks it is not, like pre-rationalmorality, an arbitrary selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It isan effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to some singleeventual good. For it occurs to the founders of these systems that byestranging oneself from the world, or resting in the moment's pleasure, or mortifying the passions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, orstudying a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may gainadmission to some sort of residual mystical paradise; and this thought, once conceived, is published as a revelation and accepted as a panacea. It becomes in consequence (for such is the force of nature) thefoundation of elaborate institutions and elaborate philosophies, intowhich the contents of the worldly life are gradually reintroduced. 

When human life is in an acute crisis, the sick dreams that visit thesoul are the only evidence of her continued existence. Through them shestill envisages a good; and when the delirium passes and the normalworld gradually re-establishes itself in her regard, she attributes herregeneration to the ministry of those phantoms, a regeneration due, intruth, to the restored nutrition and circulation within her. In this waypost-rational systems, though founded originally on despair, in a laterage that has forgotten its disillusions may come to pose as the onlypossible basis of morality. The philosophers addicted to each sect, andbrought up under its influence, may exhaust criticism and sophistry toshow that all faith and effort would be vain unless their particularnostrum was accepted; and so a curious party philosophy arises in which, after discrediting nature and reason in general, the sectary putsforward some mythical echo of reason and nature as the one saving andnecessary truth. The positive substance of such a doctrine isaccordingly pre-rational and perhaps crudely superstitious; but it isintroduced and nominally supported by a formidable indictment ofphysical and moral science, so that the wretched idol ultimately offeredto our worship acquires a spurious halo and an imputed majesty by beingraised on a pedestal of infinite despair. 

[Sidenote: Epicurean refuge in pleasure. ]

Socrates was still living when a school of post-rational morality aroseamong the Sophists, which after passing quickly through various phases, settled down into Epicureanism and has remained the source of a certainconsolation to mankind, which if somewhat cheap, is none the lessgenuine. The pursuit of pleasure may seem simple selfishness, with atendency to debauchery; and in this case the pre-rational andinstinctive character of the maxim retained would be very obvious. Pleasure, to be sure, is not the direct object of an unspoiled will; butafter some experience and discrimination, a man may actually guidehimself by a foretaste of the pleasures he has found in certain objectsand situations. The criticism required to distinguish what pays fromwhat does not pay may not often be carried very far; but it maysometimes be carried to the length of suppressing every natural instinctand natural hope, and of turning the philosopher, as it turned Hegesiasthe Cyrenaic, into a eulogist of death. 

The post-rational principle in the system then comes to the fore, and wesee clearly that to sit down and reflect upon human life, picking outits pleasant moments and condemning all the rest, is to initiate acourse of moral retrenchment. It is to judge what is worth doing, not bythe innate ambition of the soul, but by experience of incidentalfeelings, which to a mind without creative ideas may seem the onlyobjects worthy of pursuit. That life ought to be accompanied by pleasureand exempt from pain is certain; for this means that what is agreeableto the whole process of nature would have become agreeable also to thevarious partial impulses involved--another way of describing organicharmony and physical perfection. But such a desirable harmony cannot bedefined or obtained by picking out and isolating from the rest thoseoccasions and functions in which it may already have been reached. Thesepartial harmonies may be actual arrests or impediments in the wholewhich is to be made harmonious; and even when they are innocent orhelpful they cannot serve to determine the form which the generalharmony might take on. They merely illustrate its principle. Theorganism in which this principle of harmony might find pervasiveexpression is still potential, and the ideal is something of which, inits concrete form, no man has had experience. It involves a propitiousmaterial environment, perfect health, perfect arts, perfect government, a mind enlarged to the knowledge and enjoyment of all its externalconditions and internal functions. Such an ideal is lost sight of when aman cultivates his garden-plot of private pleasures, leaving it tochance and barbarian fury to govern the state and quicken the world'spassions. 

Even Aristippus, the first and most delightful of hedonists, who reallyenjoyed the pleasures he advocated and was not afraid of the incidentalpains--even Aristippus betrayed the post-rational character of hisphilosophy by abandoning politics, mocking science, making his peacewith all abuses that fostered his comfort, and venting his wit on allambitions that exceeded his hopes. A great temperament can carry off arough philosophy. Rebellion and license may distinguish honourable soulsin an age of polite corruption, and a grain of sincerity is better, inmoral philosophy, than a whole harvest of conventionalities. Theviolence and shamelessness of Aristippus were corrected by Epicurus; anda balance was found between utter despair and utter irresponsibility. Epicureanism retrenched much: it cut off politics, religion, enterprise, and passion. These things it convicted of vanity, without stopping todistinguish in them what might be inordinate from what might berational. At the same time it retained friendship, freedom of soul, andintellectual light. It cultivated unworldliness without superstitionand happiness without illusion. It was tender toward simple and honestthings, scornful and bitter only against pretence and usurpation. Itthus marked a first halting-place in the retreat of reason, a stagewhere the soul had thrown off only the higher and more entangling partof her burden and was willing to live, in somewhat reducedcircumstances, on the remainder. Such a philosophy expresses well thegenuine sentiment of persons, at once mild and emancipated, who findthemselves floating on the ebb-tide of some civilisation, and enjoyingits fruits, without any longer representing the forces that brought thatcivilisation about. 

[Sidenote: Stoic recourse to conformity. ]

The same emancipation, without its mildness, appeared in the Cynics, whose secret it was to throw off all allegiance and all dependence oncircumstance, and to live entirely on inner strength of mind, on prideand inflexible humour. The renunciation was far more sweeping than thatof Epicurus, and indeed wellnigh complete; yet the Stoics, inunderpinning the Cynical self-sufficiency with a system of physics, introduced into the life of the sect a contemplative element which verymuch enlarged and ennobled its sympathies. Nature became a sacredsystem, the laws of nature being eulogistically called rational laws, and the necessity of things, because it might be foretold in auguries, being called providence. There was some intellectual confusion in allthis; but contemplation, even if somewhat idolatrous, has a purifyingeffect, and the sad and solemn review of the cosmos to which the Stoicdaily invited his soul, to make it ready to face its destiny, doubtlessliberated it from many an unworthy passion. The impressive spectacle ofthings was used to remind the soul of her special and appropriatefunction, which was to be rational. This rationality consisted partly ininsight, to perceive the necessary order of things, and partly inconformity, to perceive that this order, whatever it might be, couldserve the soul to exercise itself upon, and to face with equanimity. 

Despair, in this system, flooded a much larger area of human life;everything, in fact, was surrendered except the will to endure whatevermight come. The concentration was much more marked, since only a formalpower of perception and defiance was retained and made the sphere ofmoral life; this rational power, at least in theory, was the one peakthat remained visible above the deluge. But in practice much more wasretained. Some distinction was drawn, however unwarrantably, betweenexternal calamities and human turpitude, so that absolute conformity andacceptance might not be demanded by the latter; although the chiefoccasion which a Stoic could find to practise fortitude and recognisethe omnipresence of law was in noting the universal corruption of thestate and divining its ruin. The obligation to conform to nature(which, strictly speaking, could not be disregarded in any case) wasinterpreted to signify that every one should perform the officesconventionally attached to his station. In this way a perfunctorycitizenship and humanity were restored to the philosopher. But therestored life was merely histrionic: the Stoic was a recluse paradingthe market-place and a monk disguised in armour. His interest and faithwere centred altogether on his private spiritual condition. Hecultivated the society of those persons who, he thought, might teach himsome virtue. He attended to the affairs of state so as to exercise hispatience. He might even lead an army to battle, if he wished to test hisendurance and make sure that philosophy had rendered him indifferent tothe issue. 

[Sidenote: Conformity the core of Islam. ]

The strain and artifice of such a discipline, with merely formal goalsand no hope on earth or in heaven, could not long maintain itself; anddoubtless it existed, at a particular juncture, only in a few souls. Resignation to the will of God, says Bishop Butler, is _the whole ofpiety_; yet mere resignation would make a sorry religion and thenegation of all morality, unless the will of God was understood to bequite different from his operation in nature. To turn Stoicism into aworkable religion we need to qualify it with some pre-rational maxims. Islam, for instance, which boasts that in its essence it is nothing butthe primitive and natural religion of mankind, consists in abandoningoneself to the will of God or, in other words, in accepting theinevitable. This will of God is learned for the most part by observingthe course of nature and history, and remembering the fate meted outhabitually to various sorts of men. Were this all, Islam would be a pureStoicism, and Hebraic religion, in its ultimate phase, would be simplythe eloquence of physics. It would not, in that case, be a moralinspiration at all, except as contemplation and the sense of one'snothingness might occasionally silence the passions and for a momentbewilder the mind. On recovering from this impression, however, menwould find themselves enriched with no self-knowledge, armed with noprecepts, and stimulated by no ideal. They would be reduced to enactingtheir incidental impulses, as the animals are, quite as if they hadnever perceived that in doing so they were fulfilling a divine decree. Enlightened Moslems, accordingly, have often been more Epicurean thanStoical; and if they have felt themselves (not without some reason)superior to Christians in delicacy, in _savoir vivre_, in kinship withall natural powers, this sense of superiority has been quiterationalistic and purely human. Their religion contributed to it onlybecause it was simpler, freer from superstition, nearer to a clean andpleasant regimen in life. Resignation to the will of God being granted, expression of the will of man might more freely begin. 

[Sidenote: enveloped in arbitrary doctrines. ]

What made Islam, however, a positive and contagious novelty was theassumption that God's will might be incidentally revealed to prophetsbefore the event, so that past experience was not the only source fromwhich its total operation might be gathered. In its opposition togrosser idolatries Islam might appeal to experience and challenge thosewho trusted in special deities to justify their worship in face of thefacts. The most decisive facts against idolaters, however, were not yetpatent, but were destined to burst upon mankind at the last day--andmost unpleasantly for the majority. Where Mohammed speaks in the name ofthe universal natural power he is abundantly scornful toward that fondpaganism which consists in imagining distinct patrons for variousregions of nature or for sundry human activities. In turning to suchpatrons the pagan regards something purely ideal or, as the Koranshrewdly observes, worships his own passions. Allah, on the contrary, isoverwhelmingly external and as far as possible from being ideal. He isindeed the giver of all good things, as of all evil, and while hismercies are celebrated on every page of the Koran, these mercies consistin the indulgence he is expected to show to his favourites, and theexceeding reward reserved for them after their earthly trials. Allah'smercy does not exclude all those senseless and unredeemed cruelties ofwhich nature is daily guilty; nay, it shines all the more conspicuouslyby contrast with his essential irresponsibility and wanton wrath, a partof his express purpose being to keep hell full of men and demons. 

The tendency toward enlightenment which Islam represents, and the limitsof that enlightenment, may be illustrated by the precept about uncleananimals. Allah, we are told, being merciful and gracious, made the worldfor man's use, with all the animals in it. We may therefore justlyslaughter and devour them, in so far as comports with health; but, ofcourse, we may not eat animals that have died a natural death, nor thoseoffered in sacrifice to false gods, nor swine; for to do so would be anabomination. 

[Sidenote: The latter alone lend it practical force. ]

Unfortunately religious reformers triumph not so much by their rationalinsight as by their halting, traditional maxims. Mohammed felt the unityof God like a philosopher; but people listened to him because hepreached it like a sectary. God, as he often reminds us, did not makethe world for a plaything; he made it in order to establish distinctionsand separate by an immense interval the fate of those who conform to thetruth from the fate of those who ignore it. Human life is indeed besetwith enough imminent evils to justify this urgent tone in the Semiticmoralist and to lend his precepts a stern practical ring, absent frommerely Platonic idealisms. But this stringency, which is calledpositivism when the conditions of welfare are understood, becomesfanaticism when they are misrepresented. Had Mohammed spoken only of thedynamic unity in things, the omnipresence of destiny, and the actualconditions of success and failure in the world, he would not have beencalled a prophet or have had more than a dozen intelligent followers, scattered over as many centuries; but the weakness of his intellect, andhis ignorance of nature, made the success of his mission. It is easierto kindle righteous indignation against abuses when, by abating them, wefurther our personal interests; and Mohammed might have been lesszealous in denouncing false gods had his own God been altogether thetrue one. But, in the heat of his militancy, he descends so far as tospeak of _God's interests_ which the faithful embrace, and of fightingin _God's cause_. By these notions, so crudely pre-rational, we areallowed to interpret and discount the pantheistic sublimities with whichin most places we are regaled; and in order that a morality, too weak tobe human, may not wither altogether in the fierce light of the Absolute, we are led to humanise the Absolute into a finite force, needing oursupport against independent enemies. So complete is the bankruptcy ofthat Stoic morality which thinks to live on the worship of That whichIs. 

[Sidenote: Moral ambiguity in pantheism. ]

As extremes are said to meet, so we may say that a radical position isoften the point of departure for opposite systems. Pantheism, orreligion and morality abdicating in favour of physics, may, in practice, be interpreted in contrary ways. To be in sympathy with the Whole mayseem to require us to outgrow and discard every part; yet, on the otherhand, there is no obvious reason why Being should love its essence in afashion that involves hating every possible form of Being. Theworshipper of Being accordingly assumes now one, now the other, of twoopposite attitudes, according as the society in which he lives is in aprerational or a post-rational state of culture. Pantheism isinterpreted pre-rationally, as by the early Mohammedans, or by theHegelians, when people are not yet acquainted, or not yet disgusted, with worldliness; the Absolute then seems to lend a mystical sanction towhatever existences or tendencies happen to be afoot. Morality isreduced to sanctioning reigning conventions, or reigning passions, onthe authority of the universe. Thus the Moslems, by way of servingAllah, could extend their conquests and cultivate the arts and pleasurescongenial to a self-sufficing soul, at once indolent and fierce; whilethe transcendentalists of our times, by way of accepting their part inthe divine business, have merely added a certain speculative loftinessto the maxims of some sect or the chauvinism of some nation. 

[Sidenote: Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology. ]

To accept everything, however, is not an easy nor a tolerable thing, unless you are naturally well pleased with what falls to your share. However the Absolute may feel, a moral creature has to hate some formsof being; and if the age has thrust these forms before a man's eyes, andimposed them upon him, not being suffered by his pantheism to blame theAbsolute he will (by an inconsistency) take to blaming himself. It willbe his finitude, his inordinate claims, his enormous effrontery inhaving any will or any preference in particular, that will seem to himthe source of all evil and the single blot on the infinite lucidity ofthings. Pantheism, under these circumstances, will issue in apost-rational morality. It will practise asceticism and look for amystical deliverance from finite existence. 

Under these circumstances myth is inevitably reintroduced. Without it, no consolation could be found except in the prospect of death and, awaiting that, in incidental natural satisfactions; whereby absorptionin the Absolute might come to look not only impossible but distinctlyundesirable. To make retreat out of human nature seem a possiblevocation, this nature itself must, in some myth, be represented asunnatural; the soul that this life stifles must be said to come fromelsewhere and to be fitted to breathe some element far rarer and finerthan this sublunary fog. 

[Sidenote: A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic. ]

A curious foothold for such a myth was furnished by the Socraticphilosophy. Plato, wafted by his poetic vision too far, perhaps, fromthe utilitarianism of his master, had eulogised concretions in discourseat the expense of existences and had even played with cosmologicalmyths, meant to express the values of things, by speaking as if thesevalues had brought things into being. The dialectical terms thuscontrasted with natural objects, and pictured as natural powers, furnished the dogmas needed at this juncture by a post-rationalreligion. The spell which dialectic can exercise over an abstracted mindis itself great; and it may grow into a sacred influence and a positiverevelation when it offers a sanctuary from a weary life in the world. Out of the play of notions carried on in a prayerful dream wonderfulmysteries can be constructed, to be presently announced to the peopleand made the core of sacramental injunctions. When the tide of vulgarsuperstition is at the flood and every form of quackery is welcome, weneed not wonder that a theosophy having so respectable acore--something, indeed, like a true logic misunderstood--should gainmany adherents. Out of the names of things and of virtues a mysticladder could be constructed by which to leave the things and the virtuesthemselves behind; but the sagacity and exigencies of the school wouldnot fail to arrange the steps in this progress--the end of which wasunattainable except, perhaps, in a momentary ecstasy--so that theobvious duties of men would continue, for the nonce, to be imposed uponthem. The chief difference made in morals would be only this: that thepositive occasions and sanctions of good conduct would no longer bementioned with respect, but the imagination would be invited to dwellinstead on mystical issues. 

[Sidenote: The Herbraic cry for redemption. ]

Neo-Platonic morality, through a thousand learned and vulgar channels, permeated Christianity and entirely transformed it. OriginalChristianity was, though in another sense, a religion of redemption. TheJews, without dreaming of original sin or of any inherent curse in beingfinite, had found themselves often in the sorest material straits. Theyhoped, like all primitive peoples, that relief might come bypropitiating the deity. They knew that the sins of the fathers werevisited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. Theyhad accepted this idea of joint responsibility and vicarious atonement, turning in their unphilosophical way this law of nature into a principleof justice. Meantime the failure of all their cherished ambitions hadplunged them into a penitential mood. Though in fact pious and virtuousto a fault, they still looked for repentance--their own or theworld's--to save them. This redemption was to be accomplished in theHebrew spirit, through long-suffering and devotion to the Law, with theHebrew solidarity, by vicarious attribution of merits and demeritswithin the household of the faith. 

Such a way of conceiving redemption was far more dramatic, poignant, andindividual than the Neo-Platonic; hence it was far more popular andbetter fitted to be a nucleus for religious devotion. However much, therefore, Christianity may have insisted on renouncing the world, theflesh, and the devil, it always kept in the background this perfectlyJewish and pre-rational craving for a delectable promised land. Thejourney might be long and through a desert, but milk and honey were toflow in the oasis beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental or revulsionfrom nature complete, there would have been no much-trumpeted lastjudgment and no material kingdom of heaven. The renunciation was onlytemporary and partial; the revulsion was only against incidental evils. Despair touched nothing but the present order of the world, though atfirst it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate destruction. This was the sort of despair and renunciation that lay at the bottom ofChristian repentance; while hope in a new order of this world, or of onevery like it, lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice, it was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spiritmiraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature had grudged orpunished, grace was to offer as a reward for faith and patience. Theearthly life which was vain as an experience was to be profitable as atrial. Normal experience, appropriate exercise for the spirit, wouldthereafter begin. 

[Sidenote: The two factors meet in Christianity. ]

Christianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism, a rationalismintercepted by a supernatural version of the conditions of happiness. Its moral principle is reason--the only moral principle there is; itsmotive power is the impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy. Christianity merely renews and reinstates these universal principlesafter a first disappointment and a first assault of despair, by openingup new vistas of accomplishment, new qualities and measures of success. The Christian field of action being a world of grace enveloping theworld of nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values maytake place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility, obedience, self-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may all acquire areligious worth which reason, in its direct application, might scarcelyhave found in them; yet these reversed appreciations are merelyincidental to a secret rationality, and are justified on the ground thathuman nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged andtransformed before it can safely manifest its congenital instincts andbecome again an authoritative criterion of values. In the kingdom of Godmen would no longer need to do penance, for life there would be trulynatural and there the soul would be at last in her native sphere. 

This submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being a heritage fromthe Jews; and those Protestant communities that have rejected the paganand Platonic elements that overlaid it have little difficulty inrestoring it to prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul ofthe gospel; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed in the languageof Messianic hopes, is really post-rational. It was not to marry and begiven in marriage, or to sit on thrones, or to unravel metaphysicalmysteries, or to enjoy any of the natural delights renounced in thislife, that Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and tofollow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his self-surrender. Itwas not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises oftheir exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; andthe change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a freshexcitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporaryausterity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all humandesires, so that a perfect charity and contemplative justice, fallinglike the Father's gifts ungrudgingly on the whole creation, might takethe place of ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was arenunciation which, at least in Christ himself and in his more spiritualdisciples, did not spring from disappointed illusion or lead to otherunregenerate illusions even more sure to be dispelled by events. Itsprang rather from a native speculative depth, a natural affinity tothe divine fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was thespirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure soul can fetchfrom contemplation. 

[Sidenote: Consequent electicism. ]

This mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged old Jewish optimism, gave Christianity a double aspect, and had some curious consequence inlater times. Those who were inwardly convinced--as most religious mindswere under the Roman Empire--that all earthly things were vanity, andthat they plunged the soul into an abyss of nothingness if not oftorment, could, in view of brighter possibilities in another world, carry their asceticism and their cult of suffering farther than a purelynegative system, like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For adiscipline that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict naturemore boldly than one intended to take nature's place. The hope ofunimaginable benefits to ensue could drive religion to greater frenziesthan it could have fallen into if its object had been merely to silencethe will. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound ittracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furioushatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, likeBuddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. Itlooked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should becrowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. Thesewere rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snappedat, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from hisnatural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent andmuch more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world withanæsthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire. 

Another consequence of combining, in the Christian life, post-rationalwith pre-rational motives, a sense of exile and renunciation with hopesof a promised land, was that esoteric piety could choose between the twofactors, even while it gave a verbal assent to the dogmas that includedboth. Mystics honoured the post-rational motive and despised thepre-rational; positivists clung to the second and hated the first. Tothe spiritually minded, whose religion was founded on actual insight anddisillusion, the joys of heaven could never be more than a symbol forthe intrinsic worth of sanctity. To the worldling those heavenly joyswere nothing but a continuation of the pleasures and excitements of thislife, serving to choke any reflections which, in spite of himself, mightoccasionally visit him about the vanity of human wishes. So thatChristianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds ofmorality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in disruptivemovements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of oneChristian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may bepractising a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while thebusy-bodies of their respective creeds are fostering, in God's name, alltheir hot and miscellaneous passions. 

[Sidenote: The negation of naturalism never complete. ]

This contradiction, present in the overt morality of Christendom, cannotbe avoided, however, by taking refuge again in pure asceticism. Everypost-rational system is necessarily self-contradictory. Its despaircannot be universal nor its nihilism complete so long as it remains acoherent method of action, with particular goals and a steady faith thattheir attainment is possible. The renunciation of the will must stop atthe point where the will to be saved makes its appearance: and as thisdesire may be no less troublesome and insistent than any other, as itmay even become a tormenting obsession, the mystic is far from the endof his illusions when he sets about to dispel them. There is onerational method to which, in post-rational systems, the world is stillthought to be docile, one rational endeavour which nature is sure tocrown with success. This is the method of deliverance from existence, the effort after salvation. There is, let us say, a law of Karma, bywhich merit and demerit accruing in one incarnation pass on to the nextand enable the soul to rise continuously through a series of stages. Thus the world, though called illusory, is not wholly intractable. Itprovides systematically for an exit out of its illusions. On thisrational ordinance of phenomena, which is left standing by an imperfectnihilism, Buddhist morality is built. Rational endeavour remainspossible because experience is calculable and fruitful in this onerespect, that it dissolves in the presence of goodness and knowledge. 

Similarly in Christian ethics, the way of the cross has definitestations and a definite end. However negative this end may be thought tobe, the assurance that it may be attained is a remnant of natural hopein the bosom of pessimism. A complete disillusion would have involvedthe neglect of such an assurance, the denial that it was possible or atleast that it was to be realised under specific conditions. Thatconversion and good works lead to something worth attaining is a newsort of positivistic hope. A complete scepticism would involve a doubt, not only concerning the existence of such a method of salvation, butalso (what is more significant) concerning the importance of applying itif it were found. For to assert that salvation is not only possible buturgently necessary, that every soul is now in an intolerable conditionand should search for an ultimate solution to all its troubles, arestoration to a normal and somehow blessed state--what is this but toassert that the nature of things has a permanent constitution, byconformity with which man may secure his happiness? Moreover, we assertin such a faith that this natural constitution of things is discoverablein a sufficient measure to guide our action to a successful issue. Belief in Karma, in prayer, in sacraments, in salvation is a remnant ofa natural belief in the possibility of living successfully. The remnantmay be small and "expressed in fancy. " Transmigration or an atonementmay be chimerical ideas. Yet the mere fact of reliance upon something, the assumption that the world is steady and capable of rationalexploitation, even if in a supernatural interest and by semi-magicalmeans, amounts to an essential loyalty to postulates of practicalreason, an essential adherence to natural morality. 

The pretension to have reached a point of view from which _all_ impulsemay be criticised is accordingly an untenable pretension. It isabandoned in the very systems in which it was to be most thoroughlyapplied. The instrument of criticism must itself be one impulsesurviving the wreck of all the others; the vision of salvation and ofthe way thither must be one dream among the rest. A single suggestion ofexperience is thus accepted while all others are denied; and although acertain purification and revision of morality may hence ensue, there isno real penetration to a deeper principle than spontaneous reason, norevelation of a higher end than the best possible happiness. Onesporadic growth of human nature may be substituted for its wholeluxuriant vegetation; one negative or formal element of happiness maybe preferred to the full entelechy of life. We may see the Life ofReason reduced to straits, made to express itself in a niggardly andfantastic environment; but we have, in principle and essence, the Lifeof Reason still, empirical in its basis and rational in its method, itssubstance impulse and its end happiness. 

[Sidenote: Spontaneous values rehabilitated. ]

So much for the umbilical cord that unites every living post-rationalsystem to the matrix of human hopes. There remains a second point ofcontact between these systems and rational morality: the reinstatednatural duties which all religions and philosophies, in order to subsistamong civilised peoples, are at once obliged to sanction and somehow todeduce from their peculiar principles. The most plausible evidence whicha supernatural doctrine can give of its truth is the beauty andrationality of its moral corollaries. It is instructive to observe thata gospel's congruity with natural reason and common humanity is regardedas the decisive mark of its supernatural origin. Indeed, wereinspiration not the faithful echo of plain conscience and vulgarexperience there would be no means of distinguishing it from madness. Whatever poetic idea a prophet starts with, in whatever intuition oranalogy he finds a hint of salvation, it is altogether necessary that heshould hasten to interpret his oracle in such a manner that it maysanction without disturbing the system of indispensable natural duties, although these natural duties, by being attached artificially tosupernatural dogmas, may take on a different tone, justify themselves bya different rhetoric, and possibly suffer real transformation in someminor particulars. Systems of post-rational morality are not originalworks: they are versions of natural morality translated into differentmetaphysical languages, each of which adds its peculiar flavour, its owngenius and poetry, to the plain sense of the common original. 

[Sidenote: A witness out of India. ]

In the doctrine of Karma, for instance, experience of retribution isideally extended and made precise. Acts, daily experience teaches us, form habits; habits constitute character, and each man's character, asHeraclitus said, is his guardian deity, the artisan of his fate. We needbut raise this particular observation to a solitary eminence, after themanner of post-rational thinking; we need but imagine it to underlie andexplain all other empirical observations, so that character may come tofigure as an absolute cause, of which experience itself is an attendantresult. Such arbitrary emphasis laid on some term of experience is thesource of each metaphysical system in turn. In this case the survivingdogma will have yielded an explanation of our environment no less thanof our state of heart by instituting a deeper spiritual law, a certainbalance of merit and demerit in the soul, accruing to it through aseries of previous incarnations. This fabulous starting-point wasgained by an imaginary extension of the law of moral continuity andnatural retribution; but when, accepting this starting-point, thebeliever went on to inquire what he should do to be saved and to cancelthe heavy debts he inherited from his mythical past, he would merelyenumerate the natural duties of man, giving them, however, a newsanction and conceiving them as if they emanated from his new-bornmetaphysical theory. This theory, apart from a natural conscience andtraditional code, would have been perfectly barren. The notion thatevery sin must be expiated does not carry with it any information aboutwhat acts are sins. 

This indispensable information must still be furnished by commonopinion. Those acts which bring suffering after them, those acts whicharouse the enmity of our fellows and, by a premonition of that enmity, arouse our own shame--those are assumed and deputed to be sinful; andthe current code of morality being thus borrowed without begging leave, the law of absolute retribution can be brought in to paint the pictureof moral responsibility in more glaring colours and to extend the vistaof rewards and punishments into a rhetorical infinite. Buddhisticmorality was natural morality intensified by this forced sense of minuteand boundless responsibility. It was coloured also by the negative, pessimistic justification which this dogma gives to moral endeavour. Every virtue was to be viewed as merely removing guilt and alleviatingsuffering, knowledge itself being precious only as a means to that end. The ultimate inspiration of right living was to be hope of perfectpeace--a hope generously bestowed by nature on every spirit which, beinglinked to the flux of things, is conscious of change and susceptible ofweariness, but a hope which the irresponsible Oriental imagination haddisturbed with bad dreams. A pathetic feminine quality was therebyimparted to moral feeling; we were to be good for pity's sake, for thesake of a great distant deliverance from profound sorrows. 

[Sidenote: Dignity of post-rational morality. ]

The pathetic idiosyncrasy of this religion has probably enabled it totouch many a heart and to lift into speculation many a life otherwisedoomed to be quite instinctive animal. It has kept morality pure--freefrom that admixture of worldly and partisan precepts with which lesspessimistic systems are encumbered. Restraint can be rationally imposedon a given will only by virtue of evils which would be involved in itssatisfaction, by virtue, in other words, of some actual demand whosedisappointment would ensue upon inconsiderate action. To save, to cure, to nourish are duties far less conditional than would be a supposed dutyto acquire or to create. There is no harm in merely not being, andprivation is an evil only when, after we exist, it deprives us ofsomething naturally requisite, the absence of which would defeatinterests already launched into the world. If there is something in apurely remedial system of morality which seems one-sided and extreme, wemust call to mind the far less excusable one-sidedness of thosemoralities of prejudice to which we are accustomed in the Occident--theethics of irrational acquisitiveness, irrational faith, and irrationalhonour. Buddhistic morality, so reasonable and beautifully persuasive, rising so willingly to the ideal of sanctity, merits in comparison theprofoundest respect. It is lifted as far above the crudities ofintuitionism as the whisperings of an angel are above a schoolboy'scode. 

A certain bias and deviation from strict reason seems, indeed, inseparable from any moral reform, from any doctrine that is to bepractically and immediately influential. Socratic ethics was too perfectan expression to be much of a force. Philosophers whose hearts are seton justice and pure truth often hear reproaches addressed to them by thefanatic, who contrasts the conspicuous change in this or that directionaccomplished by his preaching with the apparent impotence of reason andthought. Reason's resources are in fact so limited that it is usuallyreduced to guerilla warfare: a general plan of campaign is useless whenonly insignificant forces obey our commands. Moral progress is for thatreason often greatest when some nobler passion or more fortunateprejudice takes the lead and subdues its meaner companions withoutneeding to rely on the consciousness of ultimate benefits hence accruingto the whole life. So a pessimistic and merely remedial morality mayaccomplish reforms which reason, with its broader and milder suasion, might have failed in. If certain rare and precious virtues can thus beinaugurated, under the influence of a zeal exaggerating its ownjustification, there will be time later to insist on the complementarytruths and to tack in the other direction after having been carriedforward a certain distance by this oblique advance. 

[Sidenote: Absurdities nevertheless involved. ]

At the same time neglect of reason is never without its dangers and itswaste. The Buddhistic system itself suffers from a fundamentalcontradiction, because its framers did not acknowledge the actual limitsof retribution nor the empirical machinery by which benefits andinjuries are really propagated. It is an onerous condition whichreligions must fulfil, if they would prevail in the world, that theymust have their roots in the past. Buddhism had its mission ofsalvation; but to express this mission to its proselytes it was obligedto borrow the language of the fantastic metaphysics which had precededit in India. The machinery of transmigration had to serve as ascaffolding to raise the monument of mercy, purity, and spirituality. But this fabulous background given to life was really inconsistent withwhat was best in the new morality; just as in Christianity thepost-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and regeneration, of thehuman will mystically reversed, were radically incompatible with thepre-rational myths about a creation and a political providence. Thedoctrine of Karma was a hypostasis of moral responsibility; but inmaking responsibility dynamic and all-explaining, the theorydiscountenanced in advance the charitable efforts of Buddhism--thedesire to instruct and save every fellow-creature. For if all myfortunes depend upon my former conduct, I am the sole artificer of mydestiny. The love, the pity, the science, or the prayers of others canhave no real influence over my salvation. They cannot diminish by onetittle my necessary sufferings, nor accelerate by one instant the periodwhich my own action appoints for my deliverance. Perhaps another'sinfluence might, in the false world of time and space, change the orderor accidental vesture of my moral experiences; but their quantity andvalue, being the exact counterpart of my free merits and demerits, couldnot be affected at all by those extraneous doings. 

Therefore the empirical fact that we can help one another remains inBuddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious inconsistency;and since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral efficacy can beattributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and saving mankind, anything inconsistent with it is fundamentally repugnant to the wholesystem. Yet on that repugnant and destructive dogma of Karma Buddhismwas condemned to base its instruction. This is the heavy price paid formythical consolations, that they invalidate the moral values they areintended to emphasise. Nature has allowed the innocent to suffer for theguilty, and the guilty, perhaps, to die in some measure unpunished. Tocorrect this imperfection we feign a closed circle of personalretributions, exactly proportionate to personal deserts. But thereby, without perceiving it, we have invalidated all political and socialresponsibility, and denied that any man can be benefited or injured byany other. Our moral ambition has overleaped itself and carried us intoa non-natural world where morality is impotent and unmeaning. 

[Sidenote: The soul of positivism in all ideals. ]

Post-rational systems accordingly mark no real advance and offer nogenuine solution to spiritual enigmas. The saving force each of theminvokes is merely some remnant of that natural energy which animates thehuman animal. Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by manat the lowest ebb of his fortunes; it is as far as possible from beingthe source of that normal vitality which subsequently, if his fortunesmend, he may gradually recover. Under the same religion, with the sameposthumous alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about them, different races, or the same race at different periods, will manifestthe most opposite moral characteristics. Belief in a thousand hells andheavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back thepassionate from passion; while a newly planted and ungalled community, in blessed forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of cosmic needs orcelestial sanctions, will know how to live cheerily and virtuously forlife's own sake, putting to shame those thin vaticinations. To hope fora second life, to be had gratis, merely because this life has lost itssavour, or to dream of a different world, because nature seems toointricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely to play with words; sincethe supernatural has no permanent aspect or charm except in so far as itexpresses man's natural situation and points to the satisfaction of hisearthly interests. What keeps supernatural morality, in its betterforms, within the limits of sanity is the fact that it reinstates inpractice, under novel associations and for motives ostensibly different, the very natural virtues and hopes which, when seen to be merelynatural, it had thrown over with contempt. The new dispensation itself, if treated in the same spirit, would be no less contemptible; and whatmakes it genuinely esteemed is the restored authority of those humanideals which it expresses in a fable. 

The extent of this moral restoration, the measure in which nature issuffered to bloom in the sanctuary, determines the value ofpost-rational moralities. They may preside over a good life, personalor communal, when their symbolism, though cumbrous, is not deceptive;when the supernatural machinery brings man back to nature throughmystical circumlocutions, and becomes itself a poetic echo of experienceand a dramatic impersonation of reason. The peculiar accent and emphasiswhich it will not cease to impose on the obvious lessons of life neednot then repel the wisest intelligence. True sages and truecivilisations can accordingly flourish under a dispensation nominallysupernatural; for that supernaturalism may have become a mere form inwhich imagination clothes a rational and humane wisdom. 

[Sidenote: Moribund dreams and perennial realities. ]

People who speak only one language have some difficulty in conceivingthat things should be expressed just as well in some other; a prejudicewhich does not necessarily involve their mistaking words for things orbeing practically misled by their inflexible vocabulary. So itconstantly happens that supernatural systems, when they have longprevailed, are defended by persons who have only natural interests atheart; because these persons lack that speculative freedom and dramaticimagination which would allow them to conceive other moulds for moralityand happiness than those to which a respectable tradition has accustomedthem. Sceptical statesmen and academic scholars sometimes suffer fromthis kind of numbness; it is intelligible that they should mistake theforms of culture for its principle, especially when their genius is notoriginal and their chosen function is to defend and propagate the localtraditions in which their whole training has immersed them. Indeed, inthe political field, such concern for decaying myths may have a patheticjustification; for however little the life of or dignity of man may hejeopardised by changes in language, languages themselves are notindifferent things. They may be closely bound up with the peculiarhistory and spirit of nations, and their disappearance, howevernecessary and on the whole propitious, may mark the end of some stirringchapter in the world's history. Those whose vocation is not philosophyand whose country is not the world may be pardoned for wishing to retardthe migrations of spirit, and for looking forward with apprehension to afuture in which their private enthusiasms will not be understood. 

The value of post-rational morality, then, depends on a doubleconformity on its part with the Life of Reason. In the first place somenatural impulse must be retained, some partial ideal must still betrusted and pursued by the prophet of redemption. In the second placethe intuition thus gained and exclusively put forward must be made thestarting-point for a restored natural morality. Otherwise the faithappealed to would be worthless in its operation, as well as fanciful inits basis, and it could never become a mould for thought or action in acivilised society. 

CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

The same despair or confusion which, when it overtakes human purposes, seeks relief in arbitrary schemes of salvation, when it overtakes humanknowledge, may breed arbitrary substitutes for science. There arepost-rational systems of nature as well as of duty. Most of these aremyths hardly worth separating from the post-rational moralities theyadorn, and have been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter; but a fewaspire to be critical revisions of science, themselves scientific. Itmay be well, in bringing this book to a close, to review these proposedrevisions. The validity of science is at stake, and with it the validityof that whole Life of Reason which science crowns, and justifies toreflection. 

[Sidenote: Various modes of revising science. ]

There are many degrees and kinds of this critical retractation. Sciencemay be accepted bodily, while its present results are modified bysuggesting speculatively what its ultimate results might be. This isnatural philosophy or legitimate metaphysics. Or science may be acceptedin part, and in part subjected to control by some other alleged vehicleof knowledge. This is traditional or intuitive theology. Or science maybe retracted and withdrawn altogether, on the ground that it is butmethodological fiction, its facts appearances merely, and its principlestendencies to feign. This is transcendentalism; whereupon a dilemmapresents itself. We may be invited to abstain from all hypostasis orhearty belief in anything, and to dwell only on the consciousness ofimaginative activity in a vacuum--which is radical idealism. Or we maybe assured that, science being a dream, we may awake from it intoanother cosmos, built upon principles quite alien to those illustratedin nature or applicable in practice--which is idealism of the mythicalsort. Finally it may occur to us that the criticism of science is anintegral part of science itself, and that a transcendental method ofsurvey, which marshals all things in the order of their discovery, farfrom invalidating knowledge can only serve to separate it fromincidental errors and to disclose the relative importance of truths. Science would then be rehabilitated by criticism. The primary movementof the intellect would not be condemned by that subsequent reflectionwhich it makes possible, and which collates its results. Science, purgedof all needless realism and seen in its relation to human life, wouldcontinue to offer the only conception of reality which is pertinent orpossible to the practical mind. 

We may now proceed to discuss these various attitudes in turn. 

[Sidenote: Science its own best critic. ]

A first and quite blameless way of criticising science is to point outthat science is incomplete. That it grows fast is indeed its commonestboast; and no man of science is so pessimistic as to suppose that itsgrowth is over. To wish to supplement science and to regard itsconclusions as largely provisional is therefore more than legitimate. Itis actually to share the spirit of inquiry and to feel the impulsetoward investigation. When new truths come into view, old truths arethereby reinterpreted and put in a new light; so that the acquisitionsof science not only admit of revision but loudly call for it, notwishing for any other authority or vindication than that which theymight find in the context of universal truth. 

To revise science in this spirit would be merely to extend it. No newmethod, no transverse philosophy, would be requisite or fitted for thetask. Knowledge would be transformed by more similar knowledge, not bysome verbal manipulation. Yet while waiting for experience to grow andaccumulate its lessons, a man of genius, who had drunk deep ofexperience himself, might imagine some ultimate synthesis. He mightventure to carry out the suggestions of science and anticipate theconclusions it would reach when completed. The game is certainlydangerous, especially if the prophecy is uttered with any air ofauthority; yet with good luck and a fine instinct, such speculation mayactually open the way to discovery and may diffuse in advance thatvirtual knowledge of physics which is enough for moral and poeticpurposes. Verification in detail is needed, not so much for its own sakeas to check speculative errors; but when speculation is by chance welldirected and hits upon the substantial truth, it does all that acompleted science would do for mankind; since science, if evercompleted, would immediately have to be summed up again and reduced togeneralities. Under the circumstances of human life, ultimate truth mustforego detailed verification and must remain speculative. The curse ofmodern philosophy is only that it has not drawn its inspiration fromscience; as the misfortune of science is that it has not yet saturatedthe mind of philosophers and recast the moral world. The Greekphysicists, puerile as was their notion of natural mechanism, had a moreintegral view of things. They understood nature's uses and man'sconditions in an honest and noble way. If no single phenomenon had beenexplained correctly by any philosopher from Thales to Lucretius, yet bytheir frank and studious contemplation of nature they would haveliberated the human soul. 

[Sidenote: Obstruction by alien traditions. ]

Unfortunately the supplements to science which most philosophers supplyin our day are not conceived in a scientific spirit. Instead ofanticipating the physics of the future they cling to the physics of thepast. They do not stimulate us by a picture, however fanciful, of whatthe analogies of nature and politics actually point to; they seek ratherto patch and dislocate current physics with some ancient myth, once thebest physics obtainable, from which they have not learned to extricatetheir affections. 

Sometimes these survivals are intended to modify scientific conceptionsbut slightly, and merely to soften a little the outlines of a cosmicpicture to which religion and literature are not yet accustomed. Thereis a school of political conservatives who, with no specific interest inmetaphysics, cannot or dare not break with traditional modes ofexpression, with the customs of their nation, or with the clericalclasses. They accordingly append to current knowledge certainsentimental postulates, alleging that what is established by traditionand what appeals to the heart must somehow correspond to something whichis needful and true. But their conventional attachment to a religionwhich in its original essence was perhaps mystical and revolutionary, scarcely modifies, in their eyes, the sum of practical assurances or theaim of human life. As language exercises some functions which sciencecan hardly assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) sotheology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages, might provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that liesin the dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations andmysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore besuffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with anyclear fact or natural duty. They might continue to decorate with amystical aureole the too prosaic kernel of known truth. 

[Sidenote: Needless anxiety for moral interests. ]

Mythology and ritual, with the sundry divinations of poets, might infact be kept suspended with advantage over human passion and ignorance, to furnish them with decent expression. But once indulged, divination isapt to grow arrogant and dogmatic. When its oracles have becometraditional they are almost inevitably mistaken for sober truths. Hencethe second kind of supplement offered to science, so that revelationswith which moral life has been intertwined may find a place beside orbeyond science. The effort is honest, but extraordinarily short-sighted. Whatever value those revelations may have they draw from actualexperience or inevitable ideals. When the ground of that experience andthose ideals is disclosed by science, nothing of any value is lost; itonly remains to accustom ourselves to a new vocabulary and to shiftsomewhat the associations of those values which life contains orpursues. Revelations are necessarily mythical and subrational; theyexpress natural forces and human interests in a groping way, before theadvent of science. To stick in them, when something more honest andexplicit is available, is inconsistent with caring for attainablewelfare or understanding the situation. It is to be stubborn andnegligent under the cloak of religion. These prejudices are a drag onprogress, moral no less than material; and the sensitive conservatismthat fears they may be indispensable is entangled in a patheticdelusion. It is conservatism in a ship-wreck. It has not the insight toembrace the fertile principles of life, which are always ready to renewlife after no matter what natural catastrophe. The good laggards have nocourage to strip for the race. Rather than live otherwise, and livebetter, they prefer to nurse the memories of youth and to die with aretrospective smile upon their countenance. 

[Sidenote: Science an imaginative and practical art. ]

Far graver than the criticism which shows science to be incomplete isthat which shows it to be relative. The fact is undeniable, though theinferences made from it are often rash and gratuitous. We have seen thatscience is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore asmuch an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human couragein the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action. Like lifeitself, like any form of determinate existence, it is altogetherautonomous and unjustifiable from the outside. It must lean on its ownvitality; to sanction reason there is only reason, and to corroboratesense there is nothing but sense. Inferential thought is a venture notto be approved of, save by a thought no less venturesome andinferential. This is once for all the fate of a living being--it is thevery essence of spirit--to be ever on the wing, borne by inner forcestoward goals of its own imagining, confined to a passing apprehension ofa represented world. Mind, which calls itself the organ of truth, is apermanent possibility of error. The encouragement and corroborationwhich science is alleged to receive from moment to moment may, for aughtit knows, be simply a more ingenious self-deception, a form of thatcumulative illusion by which madness can confirm itself, creating awhole world, with an endless series of martyrs, to bear witness to itssanity. 

To insist on this situation may seem idle, since no positive doctrinecan gain thereby in plausibility, and no particular line of action inreasonableness. Yet this transcendental exercise, this reversion to theimmediate, may be recommended by way of a cathartic, to free the mindfrom ancient obstructions and make it hungrier and more agile in itsrational faith. Scepticism is harmless when it is honest and universal;it clears the air and is a means of reorganising belief on its naturalfoundations. Belief is an inevitable accompaniment of practice andintent, both of which it will cling to all the more closely after athorough criticism. When all beliefs are challenged together, the justand necessary ones have a chance to step forward and to re-establishthemselves alone. The doubt cast on science, when it is an ingenuous andimpartial doubt, will accordingly serve to show what sort of thingscience is, and to establish it on a sure foundation. Science will thenbe seen to be tentative, genial, practical, and humane, full of idealityand pathos, like every great human undertaking. 

[Sidenote: Arrière-pensée in transcendentalism. ]

Unfortunately a searching disintegration of dogma, a conscientiousreversion to the immediate, is seldom practised for its own sake. Soviolent a disturbance of mental habits needs some great social upheavalor some revolutionary ambition to bring it about. The transcendentalphilosophy might never have been put forward at all, had its authorsvalued it for what it can really accomplish. The effort would haveseemed too great and the result too nugatory. Their criticism ofknowledge was not freely undertaken, with the pure speculative motive ofunderstanding and purifying human science. They were driven on by themalicious psychology of their predecessors, by the perplexities of asophistical scepticism, and by the imminent collapse of traditionalmetaphysics. They were enticed at the same time by the hope of finding anew basis for the religious myths associated with that metaphysics. Inconsequence their transcendentalism was not a rehearsal of the Life ofReason, a retrospect criticising and justifying the phases of humanprogress. It was rather a post-rational system of theology, thedangerous cure to a harmless disease, inducing a panic to introduce afable. The panic came from the assumption (a wholly gratuitous one) thata spontaneous constructive intellect cannot be a trustworthy instrument, that appearances cannot be the properties of reality, and that thingscannot be what science finds that they are. We were forbidden to believein anything we might discover or to trust in anything we could see. Theartificial vacuum thus produced in the mind ached to be filled withsomething, and of course a flood of rhetorical commonplaces was at hand, which might rush in to fill it. 

[Sidenote: Its romantic sincerity. ]

The most heroic transcendentalists were but men, and having imaginedthat logic obliged them to abstain from every sort of hypostasis, theycould not long remain true to their logic. For a time, being of abuoyant disposition, they might feel that nothing could be moreexhilarating than to swim in the void, altogether free from settledconditions, altogether the ignorant creators of each moment's vision. Such a career evidently affords all sorts of possibilities, exceptperhaps the possibility of being a career. But when a man has strainedevery nerve to maintain an absolute fluidity and a painful fidelity tothe immediate, he can hardly be blamed if he lapses at last into someflattering myth, and if having satisfied himself that all science isfiction he proclaims some fairy-tale to be the truth. The episodes ofexperience, not being due to any conceivable machinery beneath, mightcome of mere willing, or at the waving of a dialectical wand. Yet apartfrom this ulterior inconsistency and backsliding into credulity, transcendentalism would hear nothing of causes or grounds. All phenomenaexisted for it on one flat level. We were released from all dogma andreinstated in the primordial assurance that we were all there was, butwithout understanding what we were, and without any means of controllingour destiny, though cheered by the magnificent feeling that that destinywas great. 

[Sidenote: Its constructive importance. ]

It is intelligible that a pure transcendentalism of this sort should notbe either stable or popular. It may be admired for its analytic depthand its persistency in tracing all supposed existences back to theexperience that vouches for them. Yet a spirit that finds its onlyexercise in gloating on the consciousness that it is a spirit, one thathas so little skill in expression that it feels all its embodiments tobe betrayals and all its symbols to be misrepresentations, is a spiritevidently impotent and confused. It is self-inhibited, and cannot fulfilits essential vocation by reaching an embodiment at once definitive andideal, philosophical and true. We may excuse a school that has done oneoriginal task so thoroughly as transcendentalism has thing could besaid of it, would be simply an integral term in the discourse thatdescribed it. And this discourse, this sad residuum of reality, wouldremain an absolute datum without a ground, without a subject-matter, without a past, and without a future. 

[Sidenote: Its futility. ]

It suffices, therefore, to take the supposed negative implication intranscendentalism a little seriously to see that it leaves nothingstanding but negation and imbecility; so that we may safely concludethat such a negative implication is gratuitous, and also that in takingthe transcendental method for an instrument of reconstruction itsprofessors were radically false to it. They took the starting-point ofexperience, on which they had fallen back, for its ultimate deliverance, and in reverting to protoplasm they thought they were rising to God. Thetranscendental method is merely retrospective; its use is to recovermore systematically conceptions already extant and inevitable. Itinvalidates nothing in science; much less does it carry with it anyrival doctrine of its own. Every philosophy, even materialism, may finda transcendental justification, if experience as it develops will yieldno other terms. What has reason to tremble at a demand for itscredentials is surely not natural science; it is rather those mysticaltheologies or romantic philosophies of history which aspire to take itsplace. Such lucubrations, even if reputed certain, can scarcely bereally credited or regarded in practice; while scientific tenets arenecessarily respected, even when they are declared to be fictions. Thisnemesis is inevitable; for the mind must be inhabited, and the ideaswith which science peoples it are simply its involuntary perceptionssomewhat more clearly arranged. 

[Sidenote: Ideal science is self-justified. ]

That the relativity of science--its being an emanation of human life--isnothing against its truth appears best, perhaps, in the case ofdialectic. Dialectic is valid by virtue of an intended meaning and feltcongruity in its terms; but these terms, which intent fixes, areexternal and independent in their ideal nature, and the congruitybetween them is not created by being felt but, whether incidentally feltor not, is inherent in their essence. Mathematical thinking is theclosest and most intimate of mental operations, nothing external beingcalled in to aid; yet mathematical truth is as remote as possible frombeing personal or psychic. It is absolutely self-justified and isnecessary before it is discovered to be so. Here, then, is a conspicuousregion of truth, disclosed to the human intellect by its own internalexercise, which is nevertheless altogether independent, being eternaland indefeasible, while the thought that utters it is ephemeral. 

[Sidenote: Physical science is presupposed in scepticism. ]

The validity of material science, not being warranted by pure insight, cannot be so quickly made out; nevertheless it cannot be deniedsystematically, and the misunderstood transcendentalism which belittlesphysics contradicts its own basis. For how are we supposed to know thatwhat call facts are mere appearances and what we call objects merecreations of thought? We know this by physics. It is physiology, a partof physics, that assures us that our senses and brains are conditions ofour experience. Were it not for what we know of the outer world and ofour place in it, we should be incapable of attaching any meaning tosubjectivity. The flux of things would then go on in their own medium, not in our minds; and no suspicion of illusion or of qualification bymind would attach to any event in nature. So it is in a dream; and it isour knowledge of physics, our reliance on the world's materialcoherence, that marks our awakening, and that constitutes our discoverythat we exist as minds and are subject to dreaming. It is quite truethat the flux, as it exists in men, is largely psychic; but only becausethe events it contains are effects of material causes and the images init are flying shadows cast by solid external things. This is the meaningof psychic existence, and its differentia. Mind is an expression, weighted with emotion, of mechanical relations among bodies. Suppose thebodies all removed: at once the images formerly contrasted with thosebodies would resume their inherent characteristics and mutual relation;they would become existences in their own category, large, moving, coloured, distributed to right and left; that is, save for their values, they would become material things. 

[Sidenote: It recurs in all understanding of perception. ]

Physics is accordingly a science which, though hypothetical and onlyverifiable by experiment, is involved in history and psychology andtherefore in any criticism of knowledge. The contradiction would becurious if a man should declare that his ideas were worthless, being dueto his organs of sense, and that therefore these organs (since he had anidea of them) did not exist. Yet on this brave argument idealism chieflyrests. It asserts that bodies are mere ideas, because it is through ourbodies that we perceive them. When physics has discovered the conditionsunder which knowledge of physics has arisen, physics is supposed to bespirited away; whereas, of course, it has only closed its circle andjustified its sovereignty. Were all science retracted and reduced tosymbolic calculation nothing would remain for this calculation tosymbolise. The whole force of calling a theory merely a vehicle ormethod of thought, leading us to something different from itself, liesin having a literal knowledge of this other thing. But such literalknowledge is the first stage of science, which the other stages merelyextend. So that when, under special circumstances, we really appeal toalgebraic methods of expression and think in symbols, we do so in thehope of transcribing our terms, when the reckoning is over, into thelanguage of familiar facts. Were these facts not forthcoming, thesymbolic machinery would itself become the genuine reality--since it isreally given--and we should have to rest in it, as in the ultimatetruth. This is what happens in mythology, when the natural phenomenaexpressed by it are forgotten. But natural phenomena themselves aresymbols of nothing, because they are primary data. They are theconstitutive elements of the reality they disclose. 

[Sidenote: Science contains all trustworthy knowledge. ]

The validity of science in general is accordingly established merely byestablishing the truth of its particular propositions, in dialectic onthe authority of intent and in physics on that of experiment. It isimpossible to base science on a deeper foundation or to override it by ahigher knowledge. What is called metaphysics, if not an anticipation ofnatural science, is a confusion of it with dialectic or a mixture of itwith myths. If we have the faculty of being utterly sincere and ofdisintegrating the conventions of language and religion, we must confessthat knowledge is only a claim we put forth, a part of that unfathomablecompulsion by force of which we live and hold our painted world togetherfor a moment. If we have any insight into mind, or any eye for humanhistory, we must confess at the same time that the oracular substitutesfor knowledge to which, in our perplexities, we might be tempted tofly, are pathetic popular fables, having no other sanctity than thatwhich they borrow from the natural impulses they play upon. To live byscience requires intelligence and faith, but not to live by it is folly. 

[Sidenote: It suffices for the Life of Reason. ]

If science thus contains the sum total of our rational convictions andgives us the only picture of reality on which we should care to dwell, we have but to consult the sciences in detail to ascertain, as far asthat is possible, what sort of a universe we live in. The result is asyet far from satisfactory. The sciences have not joined hands and madetheir results coherent, showing nature to be, as it doubtless is, all ofone piece. The moral sciences especially are a mass of confusion. Negative, I think, must be the attitude of reason, in the present stateof science, upon any hypothesis far outrunning the recorded history andthe visible habitat of the human race. Yet exactly the same habits andprinciples that have secured our present knowledge are still activewithin us, and promise further discoveries. It is more desirable toclarify our knowledge within these bounds than to extend it beyond them. For while the reward of action is contemplation or, in more modernphrase, experience and consciousness, there is nothing stable orinteresting to contemplate except objects relevant to action--thenatural world and the mind's ideals. 

Both the conditions and the standards of action lie well within theterritory which science, after a fashion, already dominates. But thereremain unexplored jungles and monster-breeding lairs within our nominaljurisdiction which it is the immediate task of science to clear. Thedarkest spots are in man himself, in his fitful, irrational disposition. Could a better system prevail in our lives a better order wouldestablish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of keensenses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer world, thatmankind have fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and superstition. Ithas been for want of good character, good example, and good government. There is a pathetic capacity in men to live nobly, if only they wouldgive one another the chance. The ideal of political perfection, vagueand remote as it yet seems, is certainly approachable, for it is asdefinite and constant as human nature. The knowledge of all relevanttruth would be involved in that ideal, and no intellectualdissatisfaction would be felt with a system of ideas that should expressand illumine a perfect life.