In Search of a Way of Life 9780231884242

Citation preview

IN S E A R C H OF A W A Y MATCHETTE

FOUNDATION NUMBER

Delivered

at Columbia '947

OF

LIFE

LECTURES

I

University

EDGAR A. SINGER, JR.

I N S E A R C H OF A

WAY OF L I F E

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW

YORK

•

1948

COPYRIGHT 1948 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN AND INDIA BY GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON AND BOMBAY

Manufactured

in the United States of

America

FOREWORD

T

H E Franklin J . Matchette Foundation, Inc., under whose

sponsorship the lectures which compose this book were

presented at Columbia University in April, 1947, was established by a bequest provided in the will of Franklin J . Matchette, one of those rare and admirable phenomena in

American life, the disinterested amateur in philosophy and education. In a long career as both inventor and business man, he was increasingly led to reflect on the philosophical issues involved in human experience and in the problems of education. In 1930, at the age of sixty-seven, he retired from business to devote his full time to the formulation and development of a philosophical system which had been evolving in his mind for some forty years. This system he called the Absolute-Relative theory, and in 1939 Mr. Matchette published a series of pamphlets giving his theory in condensed form, describing the movement of nature as he saw it from the Zero-Atom to the Absolute. The Matchette Foundation has hopes of editing and publishing the manuscripts of Franklin J . Matchette to provide eventually a systematic view of his philosophy. Mr. Matchette left a considerable part of his fortune f o r a foundation to interest the public in philosophy. The lectures published in this volume are the first fruit of that benefaction; with their combined humanism and sense of responsibility to scientific knowledge, they have a happy consonance with the intentions of the Matchette Foundation. IRWIN

Columbia University January, 1948

EDMAN

C O N T E N T S

FOREWORD, BY IRWIN E D M A N

I.

O L D W A Y S AND N E W BEGINNINGS: OF SCIENCE

AND OF MORALS

11.

IN.

V

3

O F THE POWER OF A R T

35

O F THE FUTURE AND THE E N D

63

INDEX

91

IN SEARCH OF A WAY OF LIFE

I. O L D W A Y S A N D N E W OF S C I E N C E A N D OF

BEGINNINGS: MORALS

I

N A small volume of the year 1788 appear these few lines: "For a rational but finite being, the only possible life is an infinite progress from lower to higher stages of moral perfection"—toward (one's own thought adds the words) the ideal of absolute perfection. The volume is Kant's Critique of the Practical Reason; the second of a trilogy of Critiques, which together compose one of the most complete examinations into the nature and limits of human knowledge in all history. Because the performance of these Critiques is so fully in accord with their titles, the historians have generally called the doctrine they present the "Critical Philosophy." And because this Critical Philosophy is throughout, what it so obviously is in the passage quoted, a thoroughgoing idealism, it is more specifically referred to as "Critical Idealism." Critical Idealism struck the most thoughtful minds of its day, to whom alone it was addressed, with the impact of a blow. One of the shrewdest of these minds dubbed its author "der Allzermalmer" (the All-shatterer). Traditional counsels on the practical way of life were not the only things Kant demolished; but no doubt they were the demolitions that most shook his public, for while not everyone is moved to reexamine the presuppositions of science, or the meaning and function of art, none who thinks at all can escape facing some time or other the fateful question, How shall I live if I would

4

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

have of life the best it has to offer? And to this question Kant returned an answer that none had dreamt of through all the ages, and which seemed to its own day, as perhaps to most of this day, unintelligible: "So live (we might word his thought) that all your desires shall be subordinated to the needs of your progress toward an unattainable ideal; this, when the ideal is rightly chosen, is the only life that can content a reasoning mail." Is it any wonder that to one who hears this sentence for the first time it should seem quite indifferent what ideal was to be called the right ideal? In any case, to make one's life an unremitting struggle to approach a little closer to an infinitely remote, an unattainable, goal, was not this to hitch one's wagon to a star, indeed—a star that never was nor could be? And yet, as we shall presently see, this voice the eighteenth century so little understood was caught by the ear of the nineteenth century, its message repeated in varied tones, with ever-spreading influence on the lives of men—or, if not on the lives men lived, at least on the lives they felt themselves bound to live if they would know contentment. What, one asks oneself, was the reason for this change? The answer, I am bound to think, lies in the spreading and deepening disillusionment of good minds, as they reflected on all those other ways of life which the world had so far accepted as exhausting the possibilities open to man. The deeper one looked into the promise of each counsel offered, the deeper did one see into its deception, the wider did one's disappointment spread; until there was nothing left to say but: "Either life for an ideal, or—nothing!" T o understand the reason for this disillusionment, one has only to review those old ways to which life had been restricted from

OLD W A Y S AND N E W B E G I N N I N G S

J

the beginning of time, and to which most still think it limited. But to do this with any assurance that nothing which should have been considered has been left unconsidered, one must invoke the technique of the pure logician. Of the logician we ask that he classify for us all possible ways of life; just as, for the biologist, he has classified all known forms of life. The task is not beyond the logician's skill, not, indeed, beyond the skill he had already acquired in Plato's time; and nothing would interest me more than to let the logician complete his perfect work and then examine (as Plato would have us examine) the broadest genera under one or the other of which every life-plan must fall. Such a complete classification and examination of life-plans was offered in a little work of some years ago called the Contented Life. To reproduce its thoroughness here would be spendthrift of our limited time. Instead, let me apply the logician's method in a special way better adapted to our present use. We may, I suggest, divide all possible lives into but two classes—the religious and the irreligious, or secular, defining the religious as imposing, the secular as not accepting, two conditions necessary of fulfillment by any life that would know contentment. The two conditions that religion imposes are, first, that a religious life must subordinate all other desires to one; namely, the will to move consistently forward toward one supreme and ultimate end, and, second, that this end must be regarded as one and the same for all men, of all times. This classification made, I must take up my story of post-Kantian reflection at the point at which a critical mind will have abandoned hope of finding contentment in any type of secular life; whether such as live to no purpose at all, or such as live each to his own good end without pretending that this end must seem good to any

6

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

other. On behalf of these disillusioned ones, I can only say in passing, Let those who still look for comfort in one or another of the many plans of secular existence read and digest the earlier chapters of Ecclesiastes and tell us then how they would answer back to the wisdom of him who was one time King in Jerusalem and whose last retrospective word on a life of vast achievements was the melancholy refrain, vanitas, vamtatum, dTTtnia vanitas.

But if our only chance of contentment lies in accepting one or another religious plan of life, which of the many such plans history offers to one's choice is a rational being to accept as his own? These many religions are distinguished from one another by the supreme and ultimate end that each several religion sets up as its God. Its "God," I say, remembering the words with which the divine voice in the Ifnitatio spoke to the devout Christian: "My son, I ought to be thy supreme and ultimate end, if thou would be truly blessed." So has the God of each faith spoken, not only to his faithful but to all the sons of man; though only a handful of these sons have ever heard and heeded the voice of any one God. In this historic confusion, we know how thoughtful men, careful in their weighing of evidence, have been impressed with the difficulty of finding evidence sufficient to determine which of these many gods was the true one; and how, for lack of convincing evidence in favor of any one, they have felt themselves excluded from all traditional theologies. But the blow which the All-shatterer struck to historic religions was not that which many a skeptic, the like of Hume and the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment, aimed at the evidences on which these traditional theologies rested the claim of their respective gods. His Critical Idealism was much more shatter-

OLD W A Y S A N D N E W

BEGINNINGS

7

ing to all tradition than any skepticism could be; for, first, it established to the satisfaction of his critical mind that no evidence could ever be found either by experience or reflection to prove the existence of any God; and then it contended in the spirit of idealism that nothing history had to offer in the way of a heaven, or a City of God could be the sort of place or condition that a rational being would want to make his ultimate goal and final abiding place. For these historic heavens, however they might differ in other respects, had at least two characteristics in common: ( i ) they were all attainable; within a finite time, longer or shorter, the saved soul could arrive at the heaven he had sought; (2) they were all ultimate resting places; the soul that had once arrived could go no further; all was done, all striving ended, all progress ceased, only peace remained. For Kant the only City of God that could have meaning for the mind and give direction to the life of a reasoning finite being could never become a resting place, must forever remain an unattained goal of approach, a pure ideal. And so we have heard him saying to an eighteenth century nearing its end: "For a rational but finite being, the only possible life is an infinite progress from lower to higher degrees of moral perfection." T o the rational being here portrayed, no prospect of eternal rest, but its very opposite—assurance of eternal struggle, eternal progress—is the only condition of life that could make life livable. Is it any wonder Kant was called by his day an Allzermalmer? And yet, one has only to wait thirteen years after the appearance of the Critique of the Practical Reason to hear a voice coming from the very heart of Christianity itself which repeats this same thought. T o Chateaubriand, in his Génie du Christianisme, the static heaven of the Irmtatio, of all historic Chris-

8

OLD W A Y S A N D N E W

BEGINNINGS

tianity, suggests only dreariness (froideur). To escape the weariness of this heavenly prospect, this eternal and eternally self-repeating felicity of the just, Chateaubriand is willing to go to almost any length—certainly, to the length of introducing tears and sighs into any endurable heaven. "We might," he thinks, "try to image [there] some hope, some expectation of greater happiness to come. We might bring the state of the departed into closer likeness with the humanity we know . . . by attributing longings, even passions, to the elect. The Scriptures tell us of the hopes and the holy regrets of heaven. Why then should not paradise know such tears as only the saints may shed?" And as the nineteenth century advanced, these few voices of its beginning were joined by more and more, to form an impressive chorus; so that we of the twentieth century are no longer disturbed, no longer estranged by reading in Stevenson's Virginibus Puerisque that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor." We are no longer offended to hear Tennyson singing of virtue (by which I take him to mean the virtuous soul): She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, T o rest in golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky; Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. "Wages," 1868. And most of us who in our youth sat at William James's feet were in full sympathy with the master when we heard him say in one of his lectures, "Let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of deepest significance in life does seem to

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

9

be progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present." But if so much of Kant's philosophy of the practical life has grown in favor since his day, another part has not. Like the poet's virtuous soul, the philosopher's rational but finite being, struggling on from lower to higher grade of moral worth, "desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just"; but he does demand "the wages of going on, and not to die." For these two, eighteenth-century philosopher and nineteenth-century poet, and for many another, the rational finite being can find contentment in a struggling progressive life only on condition that he may assume this life "not to die." Contentment in progress toward an unattainable goal presupposes not only the endlessness of progress, but the endlessness, the immortality, of the progressor. This immortality of the rational finite being Kant did not pretend to be a provable assumption; on the contrary, he convinced himself that it could never be proven; but then, on the same showing, it could never be disproven. A rational finite being who would decide to dedicate his life to progress must decide to live as though he were immortal, although nothing could ever happen to him to let him know whether he was acting on a true or false hypothesis. I need not say that to an age in which the thoughtful soul is accustomed to subject the hypotheses on which it shall act to the most careful, patient test—not only of general experience but of exact experiment—the rationality of Kant's rational finite being is surrendered the moment he decides to act as though he were what there is nothing, can never be anything, to show him to be. For many, perhaps for most, of our experimentally minded

IO

OLD W A Y S

AND

NEW

BEGINNINGS

day, this is the end of the new way of life opened to man in the year 1788. For them, that way, the purely Kantian way, is already closed. But if one, while maintaining the hardness of his head, can still sustain the stoutness of his heart long enough to search among the unquestioned facts of life for what may lie there of things the past has left unconsidered, it may be that among them he will find some apt to restore his comfort in a certain progressive way of life without demanding his acceptance of hypothetical immortalities. Suppose you or me to have gone so far with the increasing number who agree with Kant as to admit that to a sufficiently thoughtful man no span of his life could appear satisfactory in which he could recognize no trace of progress; does it follow that the prospect of his remaining years, loyally devoted to an onward struggle, must lose all flavor of contentment the moment he realizes the number of these years to be limited? It must, of course, for one whose understanding of a contenting life is held to the vision of some gradual self-perfectioning, bringing one's own personality more and more into the likeness of some ideally perfect being. Such would seem to be the conception of a religious life that from Augustine through Aquinas and on, expressed itself in the familiar phrases, ad Devm tendere, Christum inatari, se Deo adsimilari, "to grow in god-likeness or in godliness." And such, one cannot but feel, remained the conception of Kant. One can readily understand that to a mortal who had no other idea of a progressive life than this, it must seem little worth while, little rational, to set out on the arduous way of self-perfecting, when with one's utmost effort one can go but a few steps along that way and then—the end. But are not we of a riper experience and later reflection able to frame a

OLD W A Y S A N D N E W

BEGINNINGS

II

more generous, a more other-regarding, conception of a pro» gressive life than this self-centered one of older days? What if everything essential to contentment were fulfilled in a life dedicated to pushing forward a little way along the endless road whose only limit was an unattainable ideal, not one's lonely self alone, but all those who make up one's kind? May not the progress of one's kind, to which the labor of one's own days has contributed what it could, be contentedly left to the toil and moil of those of that kind who shall survive and to those who shall come after, and after, as long as the kind shall endure in the world? But now, suppose one to have gone all this way toward liberalizing his conception of that progressive living which is taken by Kant and his followers to be the necessary condition to contented living; he will have gone far, but will be vastly deceived if he suppose that what remains to be done in the way of designing his life is to be easily done. Arduous, indeed, must be the ways of thought that can bring us nearer to the solution of two simultaneous problems: the one, to find the ideal toward which must tend all lives whose guiding interest is to promote and participate in one another's progress toward it; the other, to find the practical ways by which each who would contribute to that progress may carry out his intention. So well do I know how long is the way to any, even tentative, solution of these correlated problems, that I can pretend to do no more in this brief study than to lay before you for your leisurely consideration the main results to which my own thought has so far led me, suggesting as much as I may of an argument which seems to support them. First, then, as to the ideal. Life that has accepted an ideal as

12

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

its own supreme and ultimate end will have fulfilled but one of the two conditions that make a way of life religious. To be classed with religious men, the individual must further maintain that the ideal he has made his own ought to be made the supreme and ultimate end of every man who would know true contentment. But no ideal could so speak to all men unless it were a goal such that each toilsome step toward it promised with its achievement something that every man must want; the difference between the faithful and the infidel lying solely in this, that to the faithful the gain, only to be had at the cost of a forward step, seems more worth while than anything this step may cost in the taking; to the infidel this gain seems less worth while than many another objective of those that would have to be sacrificed to the winning of it. But, is there—how could there be—anything to be won by human effort that all men must desire—some more, some less, but some, at least, sufficiently to make them willing to lose whatever must be lost to win this thing? That there is such a thing is a matter on which every man may convince himself with unexpected ease; at no greater cost, indeed, than to put to himself this simple question: Is there anything that anyone could wish to have, but that he must, at the very same time, wish he had more power than he has to achieve that thing? Surely, all desirous beings, conscious enough to reflect upon their state, must recognize in themselves the eternal desire for greater power, greater control over events, greater emancipation from fate, heightened probability of achievement, lessened probability of defeat. And what shall we say of endless generations of such beings, each subordinating other desires to that of increasing in power, each mortal enough, yet each able to pass on his gains to his successors

OLD W A Y S A N D N E W

BEGINNINGS

13

—will not the line of these generations, as it lengthens, progress toward an ideal? And what would that unattainable but always approachable ideal be? If, with Kant, one conceives an infinite progress from lower to higher degrees of moral perfection, to approach the limiting conception of absolute goodness, shall one not conceive a like progress from lower to higher degrees of power, to approach the limiting conception of absolute power, of omnipotence? T h e r e is, then, at least one limiting conception satisfying some of the conditions that an idealistic religion would impose upon its Gottesidee.

But does it satisfy them all? Is there no other ideal

that might serve as well as omnipotence to define the godhood of some other idealistic religion? If so, neither of these ideals could retain its divinity, for neither could be shown by its followers to be the one goal of approach that ought to be accepted by all men as the supreme and ultimate end of their lives. But that there is no such second ideal is as easily shown as that there is the first; and, indeed, follows from the very same reasoning that has established the first. F o r if one ask oneself whether there is any other wish than the wish for greater power to achieve attainable objectives that must remain invariant through all the ages, however the nature of these objectives may change, must one not answer in the negative? What makes us so sure of the invariance of this wish for power? Is it not that its presence is implied b y the definition of volition itself, or, if you please, of the criterion that distinguishes the real from the illusory in the domain of desires? If anyone were to pretend that he wanted this or that, yet assured us that he cared for no better chance of getting it than he already had, should we not conclude that, for some of those many reasons that have always led men t o think

14

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

they wanted what they did not really want, he had mistaken the real object of his desire? This, at least, is the reasoning on which the present study must proceed; for it, there is one, and only one, limiting conception that could qualify as the god-idea of any idealistic religion. And therewith is answered the first of our two questions. But what of the second? If one accepts the omnipotent as his god, how shall he so conduct his life as to let him progressively approach that unattainable end—how shall he, in Thomas' wording, se Deo adsimilari? Having come thus to the threshold of the practical life, one feels the need of a more practical definition of the one term about which all our future discussion must turn: power, the greater and less of power. No doubt any one of the more or less colloquial phrases here used to introduce the concept would be accepted by polite conversation as conveying with sufficient clarity the idea of power and degrees of power; but of them all, only one could find place in the vocabulary of that science on whose conception of evidence our argument must depend for all its acceptances and rejections—experimental science. For such science has long and increasingly recognized the validity of a suggestion thrown out by Fechner years ago, in his initial eifort to measure a quantity that had never before been thought of as measurable, intensity of sensation. Science, he said, in effect, must lack comprehension of the meaning of any quantitative term, so long as it is unable, when it speaks of the greater and less of that quantity, to answer the question Wie viel? How much greater or less? Now of the array of expressions used in bringing the concept of power onto the stage, there was one and only one that conveyed the idea of greater and less power

OLD W A Y S A N D N E W B E G I N N I N G S

15

in terms that referred to a well-recognized numerical scale in which the question How much? could be definitely answered: it was the expression that related increase in power to enhanced probability of success. Probability, the exactest possible measure of it, enters into every experimental determination of a quantity, whether metric or statistic in nature, and degrees of probability are universally expressed in terms of a numerical scale ranging from zero to one, or more popularly, from 0% to 100%. T o "probability," or its correlated term, "chance," we are restricted in defining "power," or its cognate term "strength," in a way that would bring the problem of measuring the thing we mean by that term within the reach of experimental method. But though we all agree that any increase in power implies enhanced probability of some attainment or other, none of us would take this proposition to be convertible. No one would suppose the farmer whose crop-outlook had improved with change of wind to owe his brighter prospect to some increase in his power over wind and weather. Beside good management, there is such a thing as good luck. Now, if we were of the simpler ages of man, or of the simpler men of any age, we should naturally think of Fortuna or her equivalent as a goddess whose favor might be invoked by one who was master of the arts to which she was bound to respond. And we should rightly estimate the medicine man or magician who knew the master word to be a more powerful member of society than his simpler neighbors who ignored it. But being of the time and company we are, we know the only additional strength man can gain through mastery of chance to be such ability to eliminate or allow for it as his science may win for him. Armed with a measure of this ability, your statistician may estimate with a

l6

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

definiteness beyond the layman's reach a question the layman will always have to meet in some way: How much a given sample of success owes to good luck; how much to good management? And the more advanced our science in making such analyses, the more definite the meaning it gives to a few propositions, which, while they do not sum up to a definition of power, yet give us sufficient initial understanding of the empirical problem involved in determining different degrees of power and of the scale in which they are measured. We say then: ( 1 ) Any difference in degree of power is proportionate to a difference in the probability not attributable to chance of attaining one or another objective. (2) Generalizing a little, for this "one or another objective" we may substitute "any random one of a given range of objectives." This still limits our ability to compare the power of two men, or of one man at two moments of his history, to the case in which the range of objectives sought is the same for both. How, and in what way, the most general concept of progress from lower to higher degrees of human power lays conditions on the range of objectives that a progressive humanity may seek, is one of the most important questions our study will have to consider. In ways consistent with such prosaic, experimentally measurable beginnings, the concepts of power and strength will be interchangeably used throughout the sequel— concepts which the literature of the past has been given to decking out in more impressive trappings. N o less prosaic would be the most careful wording one could give to the maxim which is to serve a» guiding principle to a life subordinating all other desires to the controlling interest of achieving maximum power. The maxim would be this:

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

17

So live the moment that every future moment may find you stronger than you would have been had you lived in any other way. Considering this formula, one will say to himself, Why, this is strange! Here is the plan of a life so lived as to subordinate all other of its desires to the only one that, since it is the only one common to all men past, present, or to come, could possibly urge all men to its progressive fulfillment. So to live is, then, a necessary condition to an idealism that would find man's ultimate contentment to lie in his having so lived as to have contributed the most he could to human progress toward an infinitely remote but eternally approachable goal. Yet, what could be less idealistic, more realistic, less religious, more secular, than the samples of life one could point to as having followed precisely the rule the proposed maxim prescribes? These samples range from the trivial to the terrible, from the innocent to the inhuman, from figures of fun to monsters of fury. At one end of the spectrum would be little Mr. Prudence, aiming to preserve himself in the best of bodily health, mental vigor, economic ease to the greenest of green old ages. At the other end, the long line of Nietzschian heroes, inspired only by the Wille zur Macht, leaving behind them the after-worlds of your Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons, captains of industry, bosses of labor, and, recently, your dictators, Nazi, Fascist, Communist. What has either puny prudence or ruthless violence done to advance humanity from lower to higher degrees of power to satisfy its wants? Nothing; they affected human progress only as the one by its normality, the other by its enormity, worsened the conditions under which that progress would have to be made. As to what contentment those living either sample

l8

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

of life, or any other lying between these extremes, found in their own way of being—who knows with any certainty as to that? All we need consider here is the problem facing one who, having taken to heart the reflections of the Ecclesiast, has left the secular life so far behind him that all these ways of being secular, the innocent and the infamous, have no meaning for him. And yet, have they not all abided in different ways by the maxim to follow which would seem to be a necessary condition to progress being made? That is our question. Do all of these samples of life illustrate so many ways of living out our primary maxim; or have none of them caught the true meaning of its prescription? There seems to be but one way of approaching an answer to this question, and that way begins by putting to ourselves another question. Suppose one, willing to conform his ways to the rule of our maxim, were to ask himself: If you would add to your present power of winning such objectives as you may set yourself, to what source of new strength are you to turn in your need? And thereupon another question each may address to his own experience of life: Have you ever observed any bettering of a man's chances of winning a given objective to have come to man save, luck apart, from man? T o this question the "experimentalist" (as we shall call him) unhesitatingly answers, No! and expects the same answer from all his kind; but he is far too experienced to expect a like answer from every man. No, the random man of today is little less likely than the random man of yesterday to invoke in his need the help of a "power more than human." Throughout the ages, man's appeal to superhuman powers has been as widespread as humanity itself. In the cultures lying nearest our own, these

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

19

powers have been reduced to one Power which, as "omnipotent," is able to further any human enterprise, but, as "good," is willing to further only such as are good. The power with which every desirous being would willingly see his own increased must be like in kind if not in degree to the Power invoked by these historic cultures. It must be the kind of power which, if it could be brought to supplement one's own, would be of help in any enterprise, but which could be brought to one's help only in the furtherance of enterprises fulfilling certain conditions. The nature of these conditions would, as before, be determined by the nature of the source from which the desired help was to come. It is not, then, in his conception of the kind of power universally desired by man that the experimentalist differs from the "religious mind" of all the ages; it is in his understanding of the source from which this power can come. This difference of final belief is consequent on an initial difference of opinion as to what constitutes evidence; and this is the most fundamental difference that can divide one philosophy from another. Its part in the present discussion is to distinguish between those great cultural religions whose theologies call themselves "confessions of faith" and those recommendations to a God-serving life whose theologies pronounce themselves "conclusions of science"—a science whose theory of evidence gives no place to deliverances of faith. Lives dedicated to a God known only to faith, lives serving a God found only through science—are both these lives to be called religious, or is one religious, the other not? It is a question on which opinions differ and have differed throughout history. To it our discussion may well return in the end; at the beginning, our only course can be to

20

OLD W A Y S

AND

NEW

BEGINNINGS

see what follows from the premises already accepted: ( i ) that every desirous being who wants anything must wish it were more in his power than it is to get the thing he wants, and (2) that any help a man may look for in fulfillment of this wish must come from man. The next questions in order of practical importance would seem to be these: From what man is this help to be expected? What form may it take? How may it be secured? T o the first of these questions logic offers its usual contribution: an exhaustive classification of the possibilities of the case. With respect to any given man, every man that is or ever was falls within one or another of three groups: ( 1 ) the man himself; (2) his contemporaries; (3) his forerunners. From one or more of these three groups must come any help that man can have from man. But as any unearned help (i.e., any betterment of chances of success) that might come to the individual from other individuals without any of the beneficiary's own doing, would be but a stroke of luck; and as we have expressly excluded lucky improvements in one's chances-of-success from those that mark increase of strength, our classification of the three possible sources of help defines three possible ways of increasing strength only in so far as it defines three possible classes of co-operators, in all of which the man himself must be one. These three classes are evidently ( 1 ) the man and himself; (2) the man and a contemporary; (3) the man and a forerunner. With this classification in mind, our second question takes on new precision: what kind of help, if any, can each one of these groups of possible co-operators afford any given man in the furtherance of any given desire? One can only know by examining each possibility in turn.

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

21

First, then, is there any way in which a man may help himself to a better chance of fulfilling his desires? Surely, there is at least one. Every man can help himself to more and more science, to more and more of that "knowledge which is power." And power, indeed, such knowledge brings, for there is no objective at all within a given man's possibility of attainment, but that, by increasing his store of some branch of science he will better his chances of attaining it. Certainly, the increment of power he may gain from his own growth in science is little enough compared with the help he might have from the growing science of others, if so be these others are willing to come to his help. But will they be? And if so, under what conditions? It is a question to be discussed under our next heading; but nothing this later discussion might bring to light could controvert our present finding: any man can help himself to such old science as he can master; some one man—some lonely investigator—must help himself to any new science humanity can come by. Turning, then, to this next question, one asks: What help could one expect to win from his contemporaries did he plan so to live each moment that every future moment should find him stronger than he would have been had he lived in any other way? No one could fail to grasp the importance of the question; for no one, whatever the aim of his existence, could ignore the power of his contemporaries to help or hinder his undertakings. No life, to whatever end lived, but would wish to increase the willingness of those able and the ability of those willing to help it on its way. For the progressive (as we may begin to call the character under observation) the question is: How should

22

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

he so conduct himself toward his fellows as to realize this twofold wish? Now, it would seem apparent that one would gain the best good-will of his neighbor if the undertaking for which he solicited it was one from whose success this neighbor might himself profit. But there is no life your progressive can serve with greater profit to himself than that of a fellow progressive. This may sound a strange and unwarranted pronouncement, in view of the completely egoistic suggestion of our maxim. And, indeed, this maxim not only suggests but proclaims its fundamental egoism. But so must the ultimate formula of every life that does not fall into a final irrationality. When the moralist and the devout point with praise to the lives they take to be selfless, they offer but an unfinished portrait of any of the lives whose sacrifices they applaud. Yes, the glorious company of the apostles and the noble army of martyrs gave up the world —the world which encompasses all things the worldling thinks desirable. Or, if of worldly things there were any that remained dear to this unworldly humanity, it was not of their own, but of their neighbor's well-being they were solicitous. True, the saints withdrew from the contest for the world's comforts, either to those solitudes where their incessant prayer might be offered in vicarious confession of and atonement for the worldliness of their fellow-mortals, or into communities of their kind, dedicated to the healing of the sick and feeding of the hungry. True, the martyr went to death not only to save his own soul from death—had he not heard it said that he who would save his soul should lose it?—but to save from death the one faith that could make men whole. But for so doing, all these "selfless" ones expected ultimately to enter upon their reward: a reward

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

23

they counted more precious than anything they must sacrifice to earn it. No, the godly and humane were not the insane; their plan of existence did not end in ultimate self-sacrifice; they gave up much that was dear to others, nothing of what was most dear to themselves. And so will it prove of our progressive, his ultimate egoism is not ungenerous, not disregardful of the desires of others. In his relations with his fellow progressives, his conduct could not, without defeating its own purpose, be other than careful of others whose wants would be the same as his own. For, in what world could each so surely count on the best good-will of his contemporaries as in one in which all lived in observance of this simple maxim: So live each moment that the object of its striving be such as to further with its attainment the striving of each other conforming with the same law? This we might call the moral law of a co-operative world, or the law of a co-operative society. But then, of course, no one does, no one ever will live in a world wherein all men accepted as the guiding thread of their lives the progressive maxim, and, as a corollary, conformed their conduct in theory and in practice to the co-operative morality the acceptance of this maxim implies. And this situation, changing its particular form, but never its essential nature, presents the progressive thinker with an eternal and eternally difficult problem. Consider this problem as it would present itself to a progressive who, living within knowledge and reach of a certain number of his kind, may be counted one of a progressive community. T o view the situation through the eyes of a member of such a community robs the prospect of none of its generality, for the "certain number" of fellow members that with any given member might constitute a progressive

24

OLD

WAYS

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

community may vary from zero to a figure that would count in the whole world of contemporary humanity. What would be the practical life of a lonely progressive who had failed as yet to persuade a single contemporary to share his views and co-operate with him is so readily deducible from such principles as may be found to hold for the general case that it may safely be left to the reflection of any who cares to think the matter out. But as the most general situation with which our own analysis could begin must still retain a measure of particularity, one asks oneself whether experience gives any indication of the sort of particular case from which later generalization could most easily spread out. It may recommend itself to anyone to start with the problemsetting most likely to be presented the moment our lonely progressive has gathered about him or found already gathered a progressive community of a more or less numerous membership. It is easy to see in what relation to the rest of humanity any such community that may exist today, or might arise tomorrow, would find itself at the outset, and indeed for an indefinitely long time thereafter. T o bring the picture as close to realities as our knowledge of facts permits, let us begin with a community now in existence and of no very recent origin, whose manner of being and functioning conforms as near as may be to the rules of a progressive community. It is the community of pure scientists. Worldwide in its organization, we may for our convenience consider any one of the national associations that together constitute the world-organization. Each of these closely co-operative units will form part of a larger politico-economic community not at present organized on a co-operative basis. Take, for example, the community of American scientists, com-

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

25

posing but a fraction of the citizenry of these United States. Here we find a numerous company of men who in their professional capacity are as fully co-operative as their own best effort can make them. As scientists, the individual objective of each is one that if attained will further every other in the pursuit of his own chosen objective; while the constant preoccupation of all is to improve the mechanism of intercommunication, that the report of success achieved by one may be the quicker brought to the notice of all. Now, of course, so long as this co-operative morality is observed by the scientist only in his professional functioning, without any effort on his part to bring all his activities under its rule, the community of scientists falls short of being what is here meant by a progressive community. But it taxes the imagination not at all to suppose that tomorrow or next day a certain number of these scientists should think themselves into the position of our progressive, each integrating his whole life as a human being under the regulative principle of his professional life as a scientist. All men of this mind would put themselves as promptly as possible in communication with one another to constitute themselves into a completely progressive community, accepting the principle of a co-operative morality, not as before in a limited range of their activities, but in all they do and think and teach. Consider, then, how such a community would stand related to the rest of humanity, and first of all to the remaining citizenry of that state or nation in which it now exists as a minority culture. The relations in which one is here interested are limited to the mutual action and reaction of a majority and a minority culture, differentiated, in the case in hand, by their respective moralities; that of the minority being co-operative;

26

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

that of the majority, prevailingly competitive. In posing and coping with this problem, the practical procedure of the sociologist is not unlike that of the astronomer studying the action and reaction of two component parts of the solar system. The astronomer attacks his problem by treating sun, planets, satellites, as a closed gravitational system, though the very law he uses in making his calculations denies the possibility of any fragment of the universe forming a closed system. What the astronomer takes advantage of, is a fact of experience. He finds the solar system to be the smallest congeries of masses sufficiently closed to permit of its treatment as a closed system without risk of appreciable errors appearing in the result. So with the sociologist; a nation, at least as strong a nation as these United States, is the smallest group of humanity that he may treat as a socially closed system, without gross miscalculation, though he is increasingly aware that to take this national isolation to be complete andfinalis to invite the gravest consequences. Now, it needs no argument to show that the condition of belonging to a scattered minority of the citizenry of any sufficiently closed politico-economic unit imposes upon every member of a progressive community an obligation over and above that of maintaining co-operative relations with his fellow members; he must bend all his efforts to converting the majority culture to the morality of the minority; he must struggle to advance his community from the condition of being a minority toward that of being not only a majority, but a totality of the citizenry of the state. But with any picture of a state converted as a whole into a progressive community, thought merely pauses at a comma, it has come to no final period. For, in the first place, we must

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

27

suppose this state to be surrounded by a humanity not yet absorbed into itself. It is as we have said sufficiently closed to support itself and to survive in a sea of humanity to whose action it lies open. But it is still exposed to any storm of passion that may whip up this sea. So exposed, so condemned to waste much of the co-operative labor that might win for its citizenry a more abundant enjoyment of the good and innocent things of life, your citizen of a progressive state would have but one course open for him: to convert the entire world of man into the only completely closed state there can be, a world-state committed to the obligations of progressive living. But now, since there can never be more than a finite number of contemporaries that could make up the citizenry of the worldstate of any given day, would not the realization of so much of the objective a progressive community sets before itself be a finite task—a matter of centuries, if you will, but not of eternities? Can, then, our progressive world-state present itself to one who would labor for its realization as anything more than a difficultly attainable Utopia; something less, then, than an unattainable ideal? What, if this is the end of our story, will have become of that idealism which found the solace of our irremediable finitude in the sense of participation in a human progress that could outlive the finite mortal of any day, however remote, by so much of the future as held a humanity dedicated to the cause of progress yet to be made? But, to be sure, our story of the progressive life does not end with the vision of an entire humanity someday converted to the acceptance of a co-operative morality. Two vast hosts of mortal men would be left out of the picture if this world-wide state of professed progressives were to be our closed and framed con-

28

OLD

WAYS

AND

NEW

BEGINNINGS

ception of finalities. Those two hosts are made up, the one, of the men of the past; the other, of the men of the future. The former concerns us as children of our fathers; the latter, as fathers of our children. Early Christianity, as no doubt the early days of every great cultural religion now grown old, found reason for its more important moral precepts in many a figure and fable which we now see to have clothed in the garb of childlike fiction a core of solid unwelcome fact. So it is with the doctrine of original sin, the sin into which every mother's son of us must fall for the fault of having been born the son of his mother. W e thus pay for the trespass of Adam and his fall from the state of innocence in which his Maker had at first invested him. Of this story of a fall from original grace, the only part our modern science cannot confirm is that original state of effortless virtue. The consequences a primitive theology attributed to a fall, our modern science blames on failure to rise. Older than the humanity of today is the man of the far-distant past from whom the cultural development of humanity set out; older than humanity itself is that life out of which humanity evolved. The longer of these ancestries has left us with a biological inheritance of primitive reactions that our intentions have long outgrown, but not our bodies on which depends the living up to these intentions. Here, indeed, we confess, with more contrition than ability to reform, that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. The briefer of these ancestries, the all-human, leaves us with a cultural inheritance little if any less difficult to contravene than the biological: the mores of a more primitive past have through the centuries become a human habit so inveterate that all our insight into their faults and stupidities cannot give us strength

OLD W A Y S

AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

2Ç

enough to emancipate ourselves from them. Nor, if these things are true of the human condition of today, will they be less true of the state of man in any future day: the far future man may, indeed, have rid himself of the trammels of our ancient past; in their place he will have acquired others from a past unknown to us, ancient to him. And, since these things are so, we may truly say that though the task of converting world-wide humanity to a profession of the progressive science and morality is not essentially endless, the struggle of man to live up to that profession is so. The goal such a struggle sets itself can be nothing other than an ideal, eine reine Idee, which, however, if it ever becomes an ideal that inspires men to struggle toward it, can be a mighty force in the world of action. As to that other host of humans springing from those born into, yet destined to outlive, the world of our contemporaries, it, too, imposes a problem on all who console themselves for the brevity of their own contribution to progress with the thought that in making it they are doing what they can to participate in a development that can go on without them and beyond them. The nearest future lies in the hands of our children; the progress we are here thinking of is no blind force of nature or trend of fate that must go on anyway, whatever the humanity it concerns do to help or hinder it. No, it lies with man to make his world; and each of us must say to child of his what another said to everyman's child: Crée-toi ton monde. Only, your progressive would add: See that you create it after a pattern that makes for progress, if you would live in the best creatable world. But what more can we do than repeat this injunction; no doubt as emphatically and eloquently as our rhetoric can compass; it will still be only preaching? Why, of course, we shall be doing more than sermon-

30

OLD W A Y S

AND

NEW

BEGINNINGS

ize, if we patiently educate our children in the ways best fitted to make them both want to and fit to carry on our work. So doing, with all the thought and study we can bring to bear on the task, we shall have done the best our reflection has so far discovered to advance humanity toward something more than a world-wide progressive community; that something more will be a worldwide and world-long progressive civilization. If, now, we were to draw into one quick picture the help a progressive may derive ( i ) from himself alone and (2) from his contemporary, we should come to this result.—It is to be remembered that as a society grows more and more co-operative, the chances grow more and more favorable that any new knowledge gained by one of its members will be used to further any lawful and restrain any unlawful purpose entertained by another. From this it follows that the self-interest of every member of a progressive community engages him to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to further the community along two distinct but mutually helpful lines of progress: the one, moral progress toward an ideal world of co-operative perfection; the other, scientific progress toward an ideal world of collective omniscience. Neither of these goals is to be conceived as attainable; were either so, it would not be an ideal. But it must not be forgotten that a well-defined ideal is a no less practical guide to conduct than the most attainable of objectives; for the ideal would not be welldefined did it not at each stage of approximation actually achieved set clearly before its accepter the next step to be taken along the way of approach. If, with this insight into the meaning of progressive living, we

OLD W A Y S

AND M E W

BEGINNINGS

31

would strike the balance of prospective profit and loss coming to a life so lived, the debit and credit would sum up to this— On the profit side, such a life could look forward to the maximum fulfillment of the one desire common to all desirous beings that ever were or could be; for has there ever been, could there ever be, a man who wanted anything, but that he also wished he had more power (i.e., a better chance) to get the thing he wanted? But if this wish for more power is a desire, the one desire, common to all desirous beings, it is plain that the missionary of progress, in urging man so to live as to satisfy this desire, is only asking humanity to do what it has always wanted to do. He is only asking all men to translate an otherwise idle wish into effective deed. For what is the progressive but one who, instead of letting the wish for power spend itself in helpless prayer to luck or to whatever gods there be, so orders his life as always to earn an increasing measure of the thing the unprogressive merely prays for? No, the apostle of progress would not if he could, could not if he would, change the permanent in human nature; he would only restrict a man's passing wants to such as if fulfilled would also meet his lasting want for more power. But what would it cost humanity to live primarily for the fulfillment of its own eternal prayer? At first glance it would seem to cost little or nothing. Of the many kinds of passing want filling the lives of most men, or of lasting want occasional to some men, how very few need be suppressed to sustain the growth of power! Perhaps only one of those that have greatly influenced conduct. So rich and varied are the lives to be lived in full harmony with the maxim of progressive living, that all will want to put to me the question I have so often put to myself: Since all

32

OLD W A Y S

AND

NEW

BEGINNINGS

want to live contentedly, if to live contentedly is to live progressively, and if, to live progressively costs so little, why is it that among the vast multitude of men who have come and gone along the ways of time we find so few progressive individuals, fewer progressive communities, no progressive civilization? It is a searching question, and yet one to which the most convincing answer is one that depends for its force on the most readily observed and generally accepted fact of human history. This answer begins by pointing out that though the sacrifices called for by the spirit of progress may be few in kind, yet they must be great in cost. For if we consider what these sacrifices are, we find that they do, indeed, fall into only one of the many classes into which the multitude of human desires fall. But then, the desires of this class are among the most potent springs of action humanity knows. For to the class of ambitions the progressive is bound to fight in himself and others belong all those that can be fulfilled for one only by being defeated for some or all others. The classic image of a figure expressly created to portray the individual all of whose desires are subordinated to the will to overpower his neighbor is the Nietzschian "Man of Might," to whom the closest historic approximation is the Caesarean conqueror. Needless to say, the would-be world conquerors of equal date could hardly come together to form a progressive community, a community expressly defined to be one in which each member gives to all and receives from all his fellow members the maxium co-operation. Two Caesars of any day could help one another only to the extent of each providing the other with a good enemy to conquer; the already subjugated vassals of either could be of assistance to those of the other only to the extent of each host furnishing the other with a foe worthy of its steel. To

OLD W A Y S A N D N E W

BEGINNINGS

33

be sure, such mighty men are rare in history, and few of us, I suppose, have been ridden by the dream of becoming out Caesar out nihil; but the same type of will on a smaller scale is plentiful enough in the world; it is to be found in any man whose ambition is such that all men having the same ambition must necessarily stand in competition with him and with each other. Judge then, how prevalent in any age we can either tell of or foretell, must be the embodiment of that will to overpower which the progressive must in some measure replace by the simple will to power, if he is to induce humanity to advance morally. Judge how much influence one such progressive, or one million such, would be likely to exercise in the world of any day we can remember or foresee, to move that world even a little way in the direction of a co-operative civilization. Judge, finally, from your memory of history, how well the progressive moralists of any day are likely to fare at the hands of their contemporaries. And would the cause of scientific progress cost its militant proponent any less than the cause of moral progress? True, the technique of martyrdom reserved for the great innovators of science will change from age to age, but these revolutionaries, together with the first adherents of their new doctrines, will, one foresees, always pay the same price for their disturbance of the peace, though each pay in the coin of his day. Perhaps I could say more of the conditions progress has to contend with in its struggle to win its way. There is, for example, besides the hostile will to overpower, that almost universal unwill, that massive inertia, with which both things animate and things inanimate do not so much actively oppose, as passively resist change. But I have said enough to answer an old question and prepare the way for a new one.

34

OLD W A Y S AND N E W

BEGINNINGS

Why, it was asked, have there been so few progressives, and these so unsuccessful? The fact is, that just as the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, so the price of progress is eternal toil, eternal risk, eternal facing of danger. And if, indeed, to persevere in a progressive life is a necessary condition to contentment, then to win contentment one needs all the qualities of the hero. Now, man is not inherendy heroic, or if he be, yet is he not easily stirred to display his heroism in action. Seeing which, we cannot but reflect that if there were any source from which man could draw new heroism, new power to carry on the fight for power, how invaluable to his contentment would be the discovery of this source! But if, indeed, the only one to whom man can turn for help is man, and if all a man can do for himself and all his neighbor can do for him is exhausted in the scientific and moral equipment already organized into the texture of a progressive community, he cannot turn at the moment of acting to any living being for additional help. Such help as the living are able to give has already been given. What remains? Beside the living, what other humanity is there to turn to, except the dead? And what possible help could the living hope to draw from the dead? What hope, indeed, of help from the dead? And yet—but what thought lies behind this "and yet" must wait another occasion for the telling.

II. OF T H E P O W E R O F A R T

T

H E FIRST chapter of this study ended with a question: What help to the living could come from the dead? In particular, what help could be won from the dead by one who would live the life that chapter called the "progressive," a life whose guiding maxim should be; "So live the moment that every future moment may find you stronger than you would have been had you lived in any other way." Let me not repeat here what was there said of the ways in which one dedicated to such an existence might win the help of the living; these matters are bound to repeat themselves in the sequel. Enough to say that when all the ways of gaining the co-operation of the living had been examined and exploited, the prospect of the work that lay before the progressive held little of the easy and soft, much of the arduous and the hard. Was there, then, no other source of strength to which these strugglers might turn for their reinforcement? N o human source, one would say, since the only humanity not included among the living was the company of the dead. And what help could the living, however they would live, hope from the dead? How strange, then, it must have seemed when the chapter closed with the enigmatical words "and yet!" What thought lay behind this "and yet" the present chapter is to explain. Any proposal to exploit this only remaining possibility sounds absurd, I know. There was a time, of course, when man called on ancestral and other departed spirits to fight his battles for

36

OF

THE

POWER

OF

ART

him; but it is not of record that the spirits invoked by the traditional rites of ancestor worship and necromancy ever did much to win a living fray that without them would have been lost. And yet, it may be that the practitioner of these cults and arts was only mistaken in his way of conceiving the ghosts he prayed to, their abode, the appeal to which they might respond, the way in which their response could help or hinder his undertakings. In fact, we no longer look for the "souls of men outworn" in the tombs where their bodies crumble, or in any "dank house of Hades" to which their shades may have fled, or anywhere else in heaven or earth save in the heart of those that live, breathe, struggle for their several objects of desire. But there, in the very core of us, the dead do live. The dead live in us as an inheritance; indeed, as was remarked in an earlier context, they live in us as two inheritances. The one, biological, is transmitted from generation to generation, part from the dawn of life, other parts from the successive moments of evolutionary history at which appeared new forms of all those changing forms of life from which the species homo sapiens is descended. The other, cultural, goes no further back than the appearance of this homo sapiens himself. The difference between the two is profound; along the biological line, no acquired characteristics are transmitted from ancestor to descendant; along the cultural, only the characteristics acquired by a human being in a human lifetime are handed down from parent to offspring. Different as they are, the two kinds of inheritance are equally important in determining how far and in what ways our ancestry shapes our lives, how influentially the dead live in the living. It is only reluctantly, then, that I foresee how little I shall be able to say of the part played in our modern lives by the ancient ways of

OF T H E P O W E R OF A R T

37

living, thinking, and feeling, long ago outlived by the progressing culture of which our own is the latest development. But much of interest to those who would know what the dead who live in us can do for or against our struggle to progress is to be learned from biology alone. This biological inheritance science accepts as the condition on which depends all the reflexive, instinctive, passionate, emotional life of man. Now, heaven forbid that I should here dip into those troubled waters of biology, physiology, psychology wherein a groping science seeks to correlate and yet to distinguish these four types of behavior, so suggestive of continuous development from a common origin, so different in present expression. But merely to recall examples of each in the order of their mention is bound to bring to most minds a certain suggestion. Take first the sucking reflex of the newborn babe; then the older child's instinctive fear of the dark and of the strange; next the immature youth's passionate outbursts, by which he is swept off his feet, as we say, out of all life's purposeful paths, into mad courses of love, furious ways of hate, panicky flights of fear, blind rushes of courage. Finally, take the mature man's gentler emotions, which, though they bear the very names the passions go by, yet impel to none of the overt acts the passions inspire, but, as though they were passionate outbursts nipped in the bud, express themselves at most in such blushes and flushes, pallors and pantings, smiles and tears as only the sympathetic need observe and be affected by. Does not this ordering of human springs of action suggest an ordering of the depths of biological life from which they are severally sprung? Shall we not lay the reflexes, which our infancy shares with the lowest forms of life, to an ancestry as old as life itself? The instinctive re-

38

OF T H E P O W E R OF

ART

sponses, which our childhood shares with the insect, to an ancestry no older than the moment of biological history when the line that developed instinctive behavior separated from the line that did not? The passionate outbursts, which our wild youth shares with many a cousin of the wild, to an ancestry no older than the later moment when the line that developed animal passions separated from the line that did not? While the gentler emotions of human maturity, those most restrained by the discipline of social adjustment, can they have any ancestor more remote than the first progenitors of that social, culturally progressive animal, man? Now, I should be quite sure that this rapid sketch of a theory was too diagrammatic to direct the course of further thought, were I not equally sure that the principle it is meant to recall is quite familiar to all. This is generally known as the recapitulation theory. As a principle of embryology, where we are dealing with the ontogeny and phylogerty of living forms, the theory can be definitely enough stated and well enough supported by experimental evidence to make it acceptable to the biologist. As a principle of psychology, where we are dealing with the ontogeny and phylogeny of living behavior, the theory is susceptible of neither such clear formulation nor such convincing demonstration; yet, in the conservative use I mean to make of it, it is soundly enough based in experience to deserve our serious consideration. And, indeed, the first reflection it suggests is a serious enough threat to the hopes of any who would look for ancestral support in their struggle to progress. For what can we conclude from what has just been said but that the older the ancestry, the

OF T H E P O W E R OF ART

39

more basic the heredity of a type of human behavior, the more humanly immature and biologically primitive the behavior, and the more immature and primitive a man's behavior the weaker and less effective the man? But then, to say this is but to repeat in the empirically meaningful idiom of evolutionary theory a principle that Plato formulated in the figurative language of a fictitious soul-theory. In the type of behavior Plato blamed on a lustful soul imprisoned in the belly, we now recognize our deepest atavisms-, in that which he attributed to a contentious soul confined in the breast, our more proximate atavisms; while only in the behavior he took to be inspired by a soul enthroned in the head do we recognize what we might still call our specifically human way of life. Here reason rules alone, or as a modern might want to add, surrounded and warmed but undisturbed by socially curbed emotions. But with only that difference, are we not repeating in terms of man's older inheritances just what Plato said in terms of man's lower souls? Namely, that whatever influence stirs these springs of feeling to "lust and anger and all the other affections of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action,—[whatever does this] feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; [and] lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind is ever to be increased in happiness and virtue."

1

So far, then, modern science has only succeeded in finding sounder reasons for the sound opinions of antiquity; it has found that a man giving way to his passion, instead of being dragged down by one of his lower souls, is dragged back by one of his older selves. And if all the past can do for a man is to drag him 1

Republic Bk. X , 1. 609, tr. by Jowett.

40

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

back, it is hard to see what our progressive can hope to have from the dead as a help and succor to the living. If our thought has to stop here, surely, nothing. And why should our thought not stop here? What remains to be thought of? Well, this at least occurs to one, though its relevance may not at first seem clear. Every schoolboy remembers, perhaps not without tears, that long passage in indirect discourse in which Caesar seeks to hearten his hesitating troops, fear-stricken by reports of the superhuman size and strength of the Germani against whom they are about to be led: What, pray, have you to fear? W h y do you despair of your own courage or of my competence? W e have made trial of this foe in the rime of our fathers, on the occasion when, in the defeat of the Cimbri and Teutoni by Gaius Marius, the army was deemed to have deserved no less praise than the commander himself. W e have made further trial of late in Italy, in the slave revolt. . . . You may judge from this what profit there is in a good courage.

And what follows on these words? By the delivery of this speech the spirit of all ranks was changed in a remarkable fashion; the greatest keenness and eagerness for action was engendered.2

Yes, Caesar's was a good way, and one frequently resorted to before and since, to meet situations of the kind. There is, in fact, no better way to put new heart into a man who is losing his old one than to remind him of the prowess of his personal and ancestral past. But if of all that lies behind a man, only so much can stand behind him in his moment of need as he can remember or be reminded of, how little this forward push of recalled activities can do to offset the back-drag of forgotten heredities! 2

De bello gallico i. 40.

OF T H E

POWER

OF ART

41

Is it, though, so? Is it true that nothing of a man's past can bear on his present potentialities of action, save only so much as he can recall or have recalled to him? Few, if any, think so; but of those who do not, few, if any, are able to forego the use of a term suspect of all empirically minded people. It is the term "memory." What but memory can recall the past? And what but some special kind of memory can bring back a past forgotten by or never known to the actor or, often enough, to anyone else? Those feeling least responsibility for their use of terms are like to invoke an "unconscious" memory. Others, willing to be more cautious, only end in being more timid; borrowing from Vaihinger a locution Vaihinger borrowed from Kant, they feel safe in saying that everything happens "as though" memory steered the course of things. Few, however, who are unhappy in a world of unconscious memories are any happier in a world of the als ob. But there is one interpretation of the way memory enters into our problem that cannot fail to make sense, and may bring profit. The memory here in question is not the actor's memory at all, but that of the thoughtful onlooker who would try to understand the actor, to explain what he had done, and predict what he was likely to do. For what is plainly true is this, that the more of an actor's history the onlooker knows and keeps in mind, the better can he explain, the more successfully can he predict, the actor's conduct. And, indeed, the principle holds for a far wider class of performers than human beings, or even living beings; it holds for all those things to which we attribute a function, things whose behavior we describe as one or another kind of functioning. W h o would think of betting on the performance of a car, a pipe, a fiddle, or any other instrument meant

42

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

to serve a purpose, without knowing something of what that instrument had been through, how old it was, how hard used, how well handled? And who would not bet with the greater confidence, the more of that instrument's history he knew and could call to mind? Yet no one thinks of endowing these inanimate things with an unconscious memory or sees any advantage in suggesting that they behave as though so endowed. Or, yes, one man did. Kipling did just that in his tale of "The Ship That Found Herself." But then, Kipling was an artist, and who expects sanity of an artist? Besides, come to think of it, it was not an unconscious, but a garrulously conscious memory with which he fitted out that ship and all her parts. Which, I suppose, is an artist's way, God bless him, of making sense of his own nonsense. However, as scientists, we are only interested in the things the scientist had better keep in mind, if he would understand the nature of things that have a purpose, whether their own, or another's, and for the moment our interest is limited to such of these things as have a purpose of their own: to living beings, and principally to human beings. Surely, though, the principle holds for the species as for the genus: the more of a purposeful thing's past one can draw on, the more of that thing's present can one understand. And now comes a question no scientist could long leave unasked: how far back does that history go which it will be profitable to know and keep in mind in trying to understand a human being and predict his behavior? To the moment of his birth, of his conception, of die dawn of that human ancestry whose heritage is implicit in his conception? In short, will not something be lost to our understanding of human nature if we miss any part of a tale that goes back as far as there has been any life

OF T H E P O W E R OF ART

43

to tell of? There is one of our generation who has thought so for a long time. Let me recall something of his thought. Looking back on the history of the collective thing called Life in the singular, it is not hard to see how Henri Bergson came to think of it as the epic of a single hero, urged to those successive adventures whose past achievements include all the many forms of evolving life, made familiar to our eyes in the biologist's picture of the branching tree of life. It is a tree whose roots reach down to whatnot amoeboid or even humbler beginning; whose blossoming attains to the Aristotles, Newtons, Kants, Darwins of our human species. It is not hard to think of this heroic life as animated by a single spirit urging it to all its experiments in self-embodiment, as though inspired by a sustained longing to approach some ideal goal immanent in, yet unknown to, its beginnings, gradually unfolding itself to the consciousness of its later forms, defining itself with greater and greater clarity, the nearer the evolving embodiments of Life approach the goal implicit in its origin. This one, continuous, undying urge of Life to express itself in progressively higher forms of mortal lives, Bergson calls Félon vital. In his late work, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, Bergson draws from this reflective vision of life, which any student of biology may attain to, a new practical significance which only those who deeply feel can know, and only those who know can profit by. For, he reasons, the deeper a human feeling, the nearer does its origin come to the source of that immortal urge which is one in all the lives that live, that have lived, that shall live, as long as life shall endure in its onward struggle. What if by voiding our mind of thought we could let feeling reach down to the ultimate depths, to depths that could only

44

OF T H E P O W E R OF ART

derive from the very fountainhead of life's onflowing stream! In his thought on the way in which mortal man may attain to this intimate communion with immortal life, Bergson is an avowed mystic and places himself in line with all those who from the prophets of ancient Israel and the arahands of ancient India might have spoken with a common voice the words of St. Augustine: Noli foras ire, m te redi (Go not without, turn into thyself; in the inner man dwells truth). Why do I recall, here, this imaginative account of a way in which one's life of the moment may gather strength from all the Life that has gone before, to help one carry on, in the Life that lies ahead, the struggle that from the beginning has been the cost of Life's progressive evolution? T o be sure, we empirically minded people would not care to—indeed would not know how to—follow Bergson's mystical prescription for availing ourselves of any such a vis a tergo as his élan vital might provide, did we but know how to invoke its help. How stifle the intellect, with all its accumulated science? What new strength could be expected to well up in the void thus created? But need we immerse ourselves in all this mysticism in order to experience just such a sense of revival as Bergson takes to be, and many a poet would liken to, a quickening drawn from the very spring of Life? If one, in a discouraged moment, were to ask me how best to renew the flagging, work-weary, world-weary spirit within him, I should answer him: Go listen to music; make music if you can; find music if you can't. And that counsel would be no more mystical than any other wisdom born of having lived, labored, wearied, and found new strength to carry on. Only, of course, the experience of others may not have taught them to turn first

OF T H E P O W E R OF ART

45

to music for their refreshment. Some would have recourse to other arts andfindtheir strength renewed in high poetry, in deep tragedy, in the work of the painter's brush or the sculptor's chisel. Yet others would put behind them all the works of man and lose their weariness in only nature's work, themselves bringing to her offering the poet's magic that transforms the warm sweet breath of the world without into the sustaining spirit of the life within. But, indeed, I think he must be weary beyond remedy who, without art of his own, was beyond reach of the artist's art. And so, it would appear that the least mystical and the most mystical of men can accept the same word, renewal, to express their respective reactions to two very different kinds of experience: the one, subjection to the influence of art; the other, submission to a vast force of nature. Wherewith a thought suggests itself to the empirical mind, especially one that has already considered how forcibly the forgotten course of all Life may bear upon the response of each life to the stimuli that play upon it. Can it be that M. Bergson, in what may seem to some no more than a poet's vision, has hit upon a scientific truth? Whatever we may think of the mystical communion that he makes the condition of experiencing renewal, may we not take seriously the suggestion that the sense of renewal wrought in us by art will ultimately resolve itself into some such pressure of all Life on each life, as he figures forth in his theory of an élan vital? If, as many think, the first condition to art's deeply affecting us is that it deeply stir the emotions, and if, as we have found some reason to suppose, the emotional life of man is the product of a gradual evolution out of the most primitive springs of action known to life, and if, as we all know, what lies behind a life has all sorts of

46

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

bearing on what lies before it, why, then, it would not be strange if art should indeed renew in us an urge to live as all Life has lived, progressively. But what is this I am saying; that art may do, without mysticism, what mysticism cannot do without art? That art can put new life into us, precisely because it stirs the relics of all the old Life that has gone before? But any such suggestion must meet at the outset the contradiction of one of the most authoritative voices of all the past. In fact, we have already met this historic censor of art. All will have recognized in the passage quoted from Plato, the clinching argument of that thinker (himself a master artist) for excluding the artist from citizenship in his Utopian Republic. In condemning a certain baneful influence that "feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up, and lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to be increased in happiness and virtue," it was the poet, the "maker" of art, Plato had in mind. And who can doubt that at least one of the premises on which Plato bases his censure of the artist is in accord with everybody's experience? Who can doubt that a man in the throes of strong emotion is in a dangerous way? All too readily will a circumstance that in a calmer mood would not have affected his social self-control arouse him to a violence of action the like of that we commonly expect of the brute? The symptoms of such passion appearing in a man are taken by his fellowmen to portend a readiness to break through those social restraints that civilization has dearly bought with centuries of suffering as safeguards of its peace, laws under which men may live together, if not in mutual helpfulness, at least in mutual tolerance and comparative freedom from fear of one another. So threatened, society, in-

OF T H E P O W E R OF A R T

47

stead of giving what help it normally would to the socially acceptable aims of one of its members, arms itself against the impassioned man as it would against the brute to whose nature he has reverted. Surely Plato has all the world with him in maintaining that a man fallen into this condition has lost much of his human strength and relapsed into subhuman weakness. And yet, cogent as is his argument, Plato does not carry all opinion, not even all classic opinion with him. One is still close enough to Plato's day when he comes upon a knower of art, at least of the literary arts, whose fineness of feeling is second to none in history: Longinus. A Longinus who could look worshipfully back across but a few centuries on a Plato whom he saw as one "steady in his majestic dignity, but far from cold," yet a Longinus who, when he asks himself what the supreme poet can have in mind to inspire his making, answers himself in terms exactly opposite to those in which Plato's reasoning concludes. Among many other things, he says, the sublime poets must have had it in mind that Nature has distinguished man, as a creature of no mean or ignoble quality. A s if she were inviting us rather to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of all that she has made and eager competitors for honour; and she therefore, from the first, breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. Thus within the scope of human enterprise there lie such powers of contemplation and thought that even the whole universe cannot satisfy them, but our ideas often pass beyond the limits that earing us.5

N o r does Longinus resort to any of the several reconciling devices suggested by others who, in the course of history, have 3

On the Sublime (Loeb edition), p. 35.

48

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

felt, with Plato, the grave reason there is for fearing the power of strong emotion to upset the processes of farseeing thought; and yet have felt with Longinus, the power of art to "breathe into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves." For, in presence of this apparent antinomy, some have thought to solve it either by denying that art stirred any emotion at all, or by pretending that the emotion stirred by art was unrelated to, and in no way evolved from animal passion, or finally by proposing that though art did stir emotions sprung from passion, yet stirred them so gently that their awakening might warm, without disturbing, the considered ways of thought. None of these "reconciliations," mitigating or eliminating the part played by passion in man's deepest response to art, accommodates all of Longinus' thought. No, Longinus agrees with Plato, that great art stirs great emotions not remote from the passions that, singly stirred by other experiences of life, may sweep one off one's feet. But he would "confidently maintain that nothing makes so much for grandeur as genuine emotion in the right place. It inspires the [poet's] words as it were with a fine frenzy and fills them with divine efflatus." And here we have a conflict of attitudes toward art that runs through all history, and all art. M. C. Nahm, in his recent Aesthetic Experience4 presents the conflict as an antinomy, and under the thesis, antithesis, and various attempts to effect a synthesis, he is able to classify with scrupulous regard for sources, the bewildering array of aesthetic theory that has filled the pages of history. The solution that Nahm himself offers 5 is one from which the conclusions of the present study feel them* Aesthetic Experience and Its Presuppositions (New York, 1946). See 5 chap. ¡, "Antinomies." Ibid., chap, xvii, "Aesthetic Mood."

OF T H E

POWER

OF A R T

49

selves not remote, though the steps by which they have been here approached may not in all instances be such as would meet with Nahm's approval. Such as these steps are, they may be put in an orderly way as a succession of conditions that a response to stimulus must fulfill, if that response is to be recognized by the present study as an aesthetic response. It will remain for the critical to consider whether their personal experience or observation of others leads them to recognize such responses as existing in fact; if so, by what laws of biology and psychology their appearance is to be explained; finally, what, in the light of this explanation, may we expect to be the strengthening or weakening effect of aesthetic experience on the one who has undergone its influence. Let us say, then, that to have called forth an aesthetic response ( 1 ) the stimulus must have awakened in the responsive subject at least one emotion; the deeper the emotion, the stronger the aesthetic response. This condition, read against the background of that general experience which, confirming Plato, recognizes a man in the throes of a great emotion to be in a weaker position for attaining his more remote objectives than one of a calm, calculating mind, almost irresistibly leads one to conclude, with Plato, that the aesthetic experience is a weakening influence on the lives of those subjected to it. But is this conclusion forced? Can our thought stop here without overlooking one of the commonest lessons of human experience? It may be that a man prey to any one strong emotion (love, hate, anger, fear) is more likely than that same man at a calmer moment to relapse into the primitive, the culturally and biological atavistic. But need he be so, if played upon by more than one emotion? A ship making for an eastern port against a strong east wind will be seen to lie, now on a

50

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

northeast, now on a southeast tack. Did she lay a continuous course in either direction, she would be carried far from the harbor where she would be. But as she makes the best of adverse conditions, these conditions are seen to serve her purpose better than others that might have been. Had there been no wind, she must have lain idle; had she never steered out of her course, she could never have made her port. As it is, zigzagging now on one, now on a contrary tack, she assures herself a resultant progress always toward a goal that lies on neither tack. Here, to be propelled by the winds of heaven is not to be blown hither and thither at their mercy. May it not be that the master artist, blowing on us alternately with the breath of contrasting emotions, will produce a resultant impulsion in a sense quite other than that in which the sustained blast of either passion would have swept us? Not to overlook, as Plato does, the possibility that though a stimulus leaving us prey to a single strong emotion weakens our chances of winning our more ultimate objectives, yet a stimulus stirring a succession of different emotions may have quite the opposite effect, we lay upon any stimulus that can move us to an aesthetic response the second condition: (2) the stimulus must have awakened in the responsive subject more than one emotion. But common experience no more lets us stop with this second condition than with the first. There is, no doubt, a fairly large public that considers the artist to have done all it asks of him, all it could enjoy of his creation, when he has given it a moment of strong and crowded emotions. And this public is not confined to the inexperienced or the uncultivated in matters of art. Take but a page from almost any symphony program of not so long ago, or follow the words of many a radio commentator

O F T H E P O W E R OF

ART

5'

of today—one is bound to come upon the like of this analysis of what happened to be Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony." W e begin with deep earnestness, out of which springs perturbation; after which almost painful anxieties are conjured up till the dissolution draws the veil from an unexpected solace, which is soon infused with cheerfulness, to be however abrupdy checked. After an instant of apprehension, we are startled by a threat destructive to the very capability of rest, which in its turn subsides. From the terrible we pass to the joyful, and soon to playfulness and tenderness; a placid character which is quickly reversed by a tone of anger, continued till it leads up to a repetition of all that has gone before. Then comes the unfolding of a tale of passionate aspiration and depression, which works up to a culmination; after which some repetition of the already twice-heard perturbation and what follows it leads us to the final part, where, after being led in an unearthly way to abstract our thoughts from the present and its surroundings, we at last conclude in the strange mystery with which we set out, though just at the very end there is an effort to shut the mind against its incertitude.® Could one tell, without having been told, whether the writer had spent his afternoon at a symphony concert or at a cinema thriller? And yet there is about this rhapsody of emotions something significant that goes beyond furnishing a somewhat ludicrous example of what an aesthetic response is not. It gives a hint of what an aesthetic response may be. Whatever the aesthetic response may turn out to be, the revolt against the theory that it is a sort of socially sanctioned, flower-scented, spice-aromaed emotional orgy goes quite a way back, as far back, anyway, as Eduard Hanslick's Von Musikalischschdnen (1854), with its vigorous chapter "Das aesthetische ' Quoted by J. W. N. Sullivan in his Beethoven and reprinted here by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., copyright 1927 by J. W. N. Sullivan. Italics mine; see infra, p. 59.

OF T H E P O W E R OF ART

Aufnehmen gegenüber dem pathologischen." Many have given expression in many different ways to the same sentiment; perhaps none more simply and effectively than Sullivan, in his previously mentioned Beethoven.

What he there says in terms of the art

with which his subject is concerned, could have been put in the idiom of any other art. Music, as an expressive art, evokes states of consciousness in the hearer which are analogous to states that may be produced by extramusical means. It is usual to describe these states as "emotions" but this word, unless carefully used, is misleading. Psychologists have tabulated human emotions, that is, they have given a list of those emotions for which names exist. But it is difficult to find a musical composition whose effect is adequately described as evoking one or more of these emotions. No composition, for instance, can be adequately described as "melancholy" or "joyful." Such emotions, if they enter at all into the total effect, never enter as isolated elements. . . . There are as few melancholy or joyful poems as there are musical compositions. It may be that our reaction to a work of art is a synthesis of relatively simple emotions, but the analysis would probably teach us little. For the effect exists as a whole and not as an assemblage of its elements, just as a living creature is more than an assemblage of its constituent molecules. Such synthetic wholes are doubdess the highest experience of which we are capable, but they are probably too rare and of too little practical importance to have received names. There is no harm in calling them emodons, provided it is realized that we are only rarely referring to named emotions.7 If, then, the aesthetic response presupposes awakened emotions, yet is itself no one and no complex of these, what is it? What can it be? The literature of the subject shows those who are most at one in their opinion of what this response is not, to T

Sullivan, Beethoven, pp. y i - j 3.

OF T H E P O W E R OF ART

53

be in no accord with one another as to what it is; and, indeed, if we were to review with Sullivan the answers that have been proposed to the question asked, I think we should agree with him that none is acceptable. The response we are seeking might, he thinks, be called a "fusion" or "synthesis" of emotions; but then, he confesses, the terms are not very illuminating; in the end he leaves us where he found us, "in presence of the mystery that attends our reaction to any work of art." But if we, too, must leave matters here, we must give up hope of answering the question on which all our interest in the subject hangs: can art do something or nothing to increase the power of man to progress, as progress has here been defined? If it can, from what source comes that power? Well, where one can find no help from others, one must either help himself or go without; and where the going is difficult, a staff is no mean thing to lean on; and by way of a staff, an analogy sometimes serves well enough for the initial steps of the going. An analogy that eased my own first steps a little may be gathered from any garden. There, we know the rose for the flower of a plant whose roots are in the soil; and the more of its richness this soil owes to the neighboring dung hill, the more perfect the rose. Yet what trace is there of soil in the pure beauty of the rose? What taint of dung in its perfumed breath? And just as there is nothing recognizable in the rose of all that earth and air without which no rose could come into being, so, I suggest, there is nothing to be recognized in our enjoyment of art of all that emotional matter without which, I am quite ready to admit, there could have been no aesthetic response. But what, then, is the effect, the feeling produced in us by a work of art, that is analogous to the beauty and perfume of the

54

OF T H E

POWER

OF

ART

rose? Well, it has seemed to me on other occasions that one might suggest a psychological category for which our English tongue has a familiar name, the name of a certain state of mind that seems to presuppose an emotional context, an emotional soil from which it is sprung, yet to permit of endless variation in the emotional make-up of this soil without loss of its own peculiar quality. It is that disposition of mind which we call a mood, and as such is more like a steady, enduring color diffused over all the emotional and perceptual life, as that life happens along, than it is like any perception or emotion that may go to make up this life. Yet, it is more our emotional than our perceptual experience that induces our moods and changes of mood; for example, such moods as those we call seeing the world en rose, or seeing it en noir. Like the rose of our analogy, our moods are grown in emotional soil, yet they do not partake of the nature of the soil that grows them. They are not themselves any one or any number of those emotions whose names are inherited from the animal passions from which they themselves are descended. But seeing things en rose and seeing things en noir are not the only moods we know and give name to. Among the states of being commonly, and, as I think, properly classed as moods is one we call the heroic. Under its sway we see things neither in rosy red nor somber black, face things neither with emotionally drunken courage nor emotionally stricken fear. The hero looks on the chances that lie before him with all the clarity of vision his intelligence can command; he faces the known risk with neither fear nor fury in his heart; he accepts the dangerous game for but one reason: realising that some objective dear to himself and his kind is only to be won by someone taking the inevitable risk of trying for it, he offers himself as that one, or quietly ac-

OF T H E P O W E R

OF ART

55

cepts at the hands of fate the role for which fate has cast him. Such heroism as this has no biological past. It is not a biologist's category; the hero did not come into being until the artist, the tragic artist, created him. And since he, with the mood to which he gives his name, is essentially a work of art, is it not into such as he that the artist makes us when he moves us out of ourselves? When he moves us out of our ordinary humdrum selves into a newness of being strange to us? It may well be that the artist, to induce this heroic mood which is above all emotions, must work upon the emotions of each one he moves. But he cannot leave it at that, if he would have his work awaken in a sufficiently sensitive percipient an aesthetic response. What more he must do brings us to the third and last of the conditions our thought would impose upon a stimulus that should awaken such a response. It must, indeed, have stirred a number of contrasting emotions, the deeper the better, but it must have presented this constituent emotional material in a certain form. We know of no prescription for, put no restrictions on, this so-called form, other than such as human experience will have found to meet the following requirement: to awaken an aesthetic response (3) the stimulus must have stirred emotions so related in kind and ordered in time as to produce an heroic mood. Casting an eye back on the long history of canons of proportion, rules of harmony, counterpoint, and the like attempts to fix the requirements of art forms, one sees that our theory can promise the artist no comparable help, but neither does it subject him to any comparable hindrance in working out his own creative salvation. Not that we need deride these historic attempts to provide the maker some initial guidance in his creative

56

OF T H E P O W E R

OF ART

effort. The various nonfunctional reasons that various formalists offered for their rules of composition in various ages may have been as wide as you will of the real reasons that gave their formulas some validity, yet the rules themselves may have approximated conditions that experience had shown to have been closely observed in such works of art as did call forth the desired response. There is little evidence to show that creative artists ever took these "canons" to be more than that: rules of composition that could not with safety be too widely departed from; not formulas whose strict observance would guarantee an artistic success. Even so, each of these helpful suggestions of theorists was helpful only to its day; the next period of creation could only be hampered by the rules of its predecessors. Later reflection would show these newer creations to have conformed more closely to new canons; and so we must suppose these matters to go on forever; the only invariant condition that the art of all ages must fulfill is so to compose emotional material as to leave the percipient in a lasting mood; and that mood we take to be the one having the qualities here attributed to the heroic. But here a word of explanation, too long deferred—a badly needed word, for I can hear the entire company exclaiming with one voice, "Does the man really mean to say that every work of art must induce in us any one more-or-less lasting state of mind, call it a certain mood or what you will? A stately tragedy of Aeschylus and a roaring comedy of Plautus; a symphony of Beethoven and a ballet of Delibes; Michael Angelo's contribution to the Sistine, and Boucher's to an interior of a palace of Mme de Pompadour; Dante's Divine Comedy and Austin Dobson's vers de société? Of course, no one could seriously propose any such interpretation of art and its workings. There is no one

O F T H E P O W E R OF A R T

57

thing you can say about the response to all works of art, taken distributively, other than that taken collectively they all contribute to one effect. There is nothing one can say of every stone of a mosaic, save that if it were not what it is the mosaic would have lost something of its effectiveness. Please understand, then, that though for economy's sake, this study has spoken of a work of art as though it were any one of an indefinite number equally deserving of that name, what it has really meant by "work of art" is the collective work of Art, a collection which includes every work of man or god that has done its part toward lending to one's days the capacity to feel the pitiful suffering of the human condition, not just as something tearfully pathetic, but as something heroically tragic. For the rest, there are single works of art that approach nearer than others to containing within themselves the elements of which all works collectively are the only complete contributors. T h e deepest tragedies will have their comic interludes; the noblest symphonies, their scherzi; the sublimest cathedrals, their gargoyles. Since this is so, and since one who has the hardihood to attempt a vision of life and death within the space of a page or two will be allowed his little economies, let me continue in the simplified idiom of the preceding discussion to speak of a work of art as though it were such a work as played upon a sufficiently sensitive and experienced beholder with the effect of all art concentrated in a single masterpiece. This explanation made, let us return to the topic which two authors previously quoted and numberless others, refer to as the "mystery of art." That red, yellow, blue should separately have the feelingful quality which gives all the world its red-letter days, its golden moments, its blue Mondays is itself a problem

58

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

over which the psychologist has thought long and seriously. W h y , too, does a major chord leave us cheerful; a minor, sad; a discord, in agonized need of its resolution? W h y do highlights and shadows cast their respective light and shade over our feelings? These and many others like them are phenomena that may well leave us mystified; but we have sufficient confidence in our psychologists to feel that the mystifying will not ultimately be recognized as mysterious and beyond subsumption under recognized laws of nature. But puzzling as is the emotional effect of relatively simple stimuli, it does not stir our wonder so to the depths as does the mood in which the great artist leaves us when he lets these stimuli play upon us in rich complexity and savant ordering. Yet one may see some promise of relieving this wonder of its sense of mystery in a fact all will have observed. There is one word that no one studious of art—artist, critic, psychologist —leaves long unspoken: it is the word "rhythm." With this is to be associated another term recently introduced into the vocabulary of the aestherician. Some word was needed to replace the old familiar "symmetry," which, having lost its original broad use, had lost its general usefulness. That proper proportioning of the parts of an art pattern to each other and to the whole which to the classic tongue was "symmetry," to the modern has become "eurhythmy." Every work of every art presents its example of rhythmic composition of parts: not only the arts whose stimuli are ordered in sequence (music, poetry, drama) but also the arts whose stimuli are presented simultaneously (painting, sculpture, architecture). For though in this latter class the stimuli exist simultaneously, they do not stimulate simultaneously, but only in the order in which they are exploited

OF T H E P O W E R OF A R T

59

by the eye of the perceiver as it wanders from part to part of the composition. But if one ask oneself how any rhythm of presentation could act eurhythmically, i.e., in such wise as to leave a sufficiently experienced and sensitive being affected by it in a heroic mood, it is not easy to answer. Yet if one would have an example of the play of emotions awakened by a work of art which, though not in itself of heroic proportions, is yet a major contribution to the heroic effect that we take to be the work of all art collectively, one has only to turn back to our program-writer's analysis of his own emotional response to the Schubert symphony. Our thought would be that, not in having had any or all of the many emotions there listed, still less in having recognized them as they passed, would lie the experience we call an aesthetic response to that musical creation. Nor would it have lain, as Hanslick suggests, in any play of phantasy released by the music; not in scenes of moonlit parks or rain-drenched gardens, in sounds of surging seas or whispering woods, in sense of velvety softness or silky smoothness. Not in any of these things that may or may not accompany an aesthetic response does the response itself consist; but in a something that arises out of some such experience as that recorded by our analyst: a rapid alternation of light- and dark-colored feelings, with the wider spaced "returns" and "recurrences" of the same feeling.8 Out of some such more or less complicated rhythm of emotions as this arises the nonemotional mood called the heroic. Now, in experiencing the rhythmic play of such emotions— our inheritances from all the living past—do we not live through 8

See italics introduced into quotation p. 51, supra.

6o

OF T H E P O W E R

OF

ART

in a moment what life has struggled through in the course of ages? Has struggled through from the beginning and must struggle through to the end if it is to continue to progress? And as the environment—a succession of stimuli to fight or flight, love or hate—has with alternating rhythm and recurrent repetition played upon the long life of Life, in what resultant direction has the rhythm of life's responsive gestures, successively reflexive, instinctive, passionate, emotional, moved it? In the direction, has it not, of progress from impotence to power? If, then, the artist by his peculiar gift knows how to let the changing movements of his symphonies, acts of his dramas, colors of his palette, lights and shadows of his carvings play upon our biologically old emotions with like alternating effect, shall not the quick rhythm of these changing emotions induce in us the mood to take those risks, brave those dangers, without which no progress can be made? That the artist should have been able so to order his composition as to bring about this result is wonderful, but not mysterious. It would have been mysterious had we been forced to invoke some unconscious memory to explain how, by stirring emotions of opposite tension in an alternating rhythm, grouping them together by recurrences, summing them up in recapitulations, he had led one in a moment to relive Life. But if one sees no mystery in assuming that the way a car is likely to go depends on what it has gone through, that the way a man is likely to act depends on his past reactions, that the way an embryo is likely to develop depends on the way its species has been evolved, then one need suspect no more mystery in the assumption that the way a man is likely to feel when played upon by a given stimulus

OF T H E

P O W E R OF

ART

61

depends on the biological and cultural history of feeling. If there were no sense in which a recapitulation theory that holds for the embryonic development of life forms holds, with due reserve, for the maturation of behavior patterns, then the theory of an aesthetic response here developed would have no more empirical backing than has Bergson's imagining of a mystically acquired will-to-live-on, under the impulsion of an urge immanent in life from its beginnings. But if our admittedly groping science is not altogether at fault, then there is nothing mystical or even mystifying in our proposal. It is not that the experiencing mind be filled with an unconscious memory, but that the reflective mind be equipped with a conscious science of all that Life has lived through. When so equipped, reflection may consider that however atavistic it would be to be so moved by whatever stimulus as to revert to any one ancestral pattern of action, A or B or C or D, it would not be atavistic to be so moved by the artist's recapitulation of life's moments as to be swept on, as Life itself has swept on in its tremendous way, through the successive stages A and B and C and D. Swept on to what? It could only be to a condition related to all the states that had gone before as each had been related to its forerunners. But Life's course through these stages has all been in one direction: from a condition of less to one of greater power; from a life barely able to live and propagate, on through stages of evolution whose successive developments depended for their appearance on the chances of biological mutation, on, finally, to a species able to plan and control the course of its own progress. T o one who remembers this, is it strange that recapitulating art should be able to put man in the mood

62

OF T H E

POWER

OF

ART

to carry on, to progress still farther along the road to power? But that, and just that, is the mood of the tragic hero—the heroic mood. W i t h this the present chapter has done what it could to show in what way the maximum co-operation of the dead was to be won b y one who would so live the moment that every future moment might find him stronger than he would have been had he lived in any other way. If in so doing our thought has dwelt at greater length on the study of the help to be had of the dead than it did on the help to be had of the living, this is not because it imagined the power given by art to be greater than that afforded the progressive spirit by the developing science and co-operative morality of contemporaries, but because of the greater difficulty, recognized by all history, of gaining any insight into the working of art on the humanity responsive to it. If much of the use here made of the recapitulation theory is strange to the pages of aestheticians past and present, yet it seems not at all remote from the expression given b y one who knows art and is an artist to a personal understanding of the nature of art and of one's response to it. Let me close by borrowing from the pages of Nahm, in the work previously alluded to, a quotation gathered from the pen of Rebecca West. T o Miss West, "art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips to be tasted." 9 If I have said more than this, I have said more than I meant. If I have given no good reason for saying this much, I have done less than I hoped. 9

Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, I, jy.

III. O F T H E

FUTURE

AND

THE

END

f T H E close of its last chapter this study had done what it could to map the practical life of one who would so live the day that every future day might find him stronger than he would have been had he lived in any other way. It had examined and exploited every kind of help that could come from human source to one of human kind who had accepted this progressive maxim as the guiding principle of his days. Its logic had furnished it with a classification of all possible collaborators in the ways of a life so planned: the individual could collaborate with himself, to the increase of his science; with his neighbor, to the enrichment of the fruits of co-operative effort; with the life that had gone before, to the strengthening, through art, of that heroic spirit whose workings depend upon his legacy from all that upward-struggling past. In the prospect of that superior strength which must come to him and his kind through the exploitation of all these sources of power, have we exhausted all the inducements that might urge a thoughtful being to prefer the life our maxim has defined to any other, secular or religious, of which history offers example or imagination lends vision? The question carries us back to beginnings, or rather to a little study previously alluded to that preceded the opening of this one by the matter of a decade, On the Contented. Life. There the matter that concerned it was stated somewhat more fully than in the opening sentence of the present reflections. Instead of the wording here given— "How to make the best of life"—

64

OF T H E

FUTURE

AND

THE

END

the earlier essay put its problem in the form; " H o w live the most contented life and die the least reluctant death?" But did the wordier phrasing raise any issue that the briefer one leaves untouched? Would one have made the best of life who carried in his heart a fear of death that by taking thought he might have stilled? However introduced, it is time that our thought turn from living to dying. Or rather, return to the topic, for it was already present to our minds in the Kantian sentence that opened the present discussion. One will remember how in that sentence Kant implied the irrationality of a life lived to progress from lower to higher degrees of moral perfection toward an infinitely remote ideal unless the straggler along that endless way were assured of the endlessness of his own existence. And yet, this convinced idealist could not convince himself that any evidence of such immorality could ever be forthcoming. He had to resign himself, since he was bent on living according to the rules of this infinite progress, to live "as though" he were never to die. It is this condition to living the only life Kant considered possible for a rational but finite being that is beyond the power of a scientific mind to accept. Instead, a mind so conditioned may set itself to considering whether such a postulated immortality of the finite individual is as necessary a condition to an idealistic life-plan as Kant thought it to be. On this point our study threw out a suggestion, to which it would now return. In pursuing the topic, we may come to see why the maxim that sums up the practical life of one who lives for power is not a precept of the gross realism it seems at first to prescribe. It only takes on the likeness to a Nietzschian Wille zur Macbt if one sup-

OF T H E F U T U R E A N D T H E E N D

65

ply it with words that are not there; if, namely, one assume the only future days on which one could be stronger or weaker are those that end with the day of one's death. If the maxim did not say that, it is because the maxim did not mean that. W h y it need not, could not, mean that has been left for this closing chapter of our reflection on life and death to explain. T o begin with, has our logic deceived us in supposing all the humanity with which we should be concerned in considering the help that can come to man from man to be limited to the man himself, his contemporaries, his forerunners? Of course, we are limited to these classes of actual beings who might be our coproducers of any result whatever; the man of tomorrow can no more be counted among the producers of things of today than next year's apples can have had part in producing this year's apple trees. Yet we will all agree that considerations regarding next year's apples may have had an important place among the conditions without which this year's trees would not have been produced. And so, not to make a long story of a matter that has all too long a history, we must not leave unexamined any place the man of the future may have, if not among the efficient, then among the final causes affecting every man's and, it may be, profoundly affecting a wise man's present behavior. A beautiful French song of many years ago begins with the words of an equally beautiful poem: "Ne crois pas que les morts soient morts." What could such words mean to one whose conception of evidence was such as has been witnessed at every stage of the present study? That they could not mean much of what they have meant to traditional cultures goes without saying; but must they therefore have come to mean nothing? Omnes sed non

66

O F T H E F U T U R E AND T H E

END

omne moriamur is another old saying. Can it mean nothing to a modern to hear that though all men are mortal, yet no man is altogether mortal? Well, of course, it is true enough that not a leaf falls in the forest or a raindrop into the sea but that the consequences of each happening must go on for all time and spread through all space. And so must the consequences of every life that shall ever be lived, however lived. But no one understands these consequences of a life to be any more a continuation of that life than he counts the effects of falling leaves or dropping rain among the survivals of those transient things. But there are ways in which we are accustomed to think that something of some lives does not die with death. Horace did, indeed, build himself a monument aere perennius: he lives on in the lives of men as does no humble tiller of the soil of his Sabine farm. But if Horace made himself an enduring place in the memories of men, did not Attila, Alaric, Genghis Khan, Bluebeard, and the Marquis de Sade do as much, and on larger scale? Yet one hears of the immortal Horace, Plato, Shakespeare, but who ever heard of immortal Vandal, Hun, or other monster of the past? Is it that the memory of these immortals is warm with gratitude for something they have given the lives that live after them, while the memory of those destroyers is frozen in horror? This may account for something of the result, but hardly for all. Many other memories are fresh enough and grateful enough, but do not put the names they bear in the Pantheon of immortals. Many will have had an experience the like of mine when, as a lad, I was first introduced to France. Two things equally surprised me: the general ignorance of most things American, and the no less general familiarity with a few names we had come to think

OF T H E F U T U R E A N D T H E E N D

67

of as peculiarly American—among them, our Benjamin Franklin. Yet not altogether our Benjamin, either; not the Franklin that helped shape our form of government, founded schools and universities, sponsored learned societies, and in manifold ways shaped our cultural pattern of life toward its present form. No, the Franklin France remembers is one his own country has all but forgotten: the Franklin who invented a certain stove. And what is the point of this trivial reminiscence? It is to suggest that men may still treasure with gratitude the names of those who gave their own remote day things much desired of that day: but we confer immortality only on those who gave all the days since their own, things these later days continued to desire, to use, to profit by. Yet to have attained to even this longevity, or to any postmortem age however great, but still finite, is not to have achieved an assured immortality of service; history is full of benefits long recognized as of continued value, which nevertheless have fallen, if not into oblivion, yet into the museum of treasured antiquities. There is, however, a sort of accidental exception to this feeling toward the contributors of outlived utilities: sometimes a sufficiently thoughtful mind will recognize that inventions man can no longer use were, nevertheless, indispensable steps to the invention of things he can and does use. This has often been remarked of certain cultural institutions. A paragraph of Wynwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, startling to its day, is a commonplace in this: If we compare the present with the past, if we trace events of all epochs to their causes, if we examine the elements of human growth, we find that Nature has raised us to what we are, not by fixed laws, but by expedients, and that the principle which in one age effected

68

OF T H E

FUTURE

AND T H E

END

the advancement of a nation, in the next age retarded the mental movement or even destroyed it altogether. War, despotism, slavery, and superstition, are now injurious to the progress of Europe, but they were once the agents by which progress was produced. And to what does this review of imperfect immortalities bring us? T o a question that from having been too gradually led up to must be too summarily considered. It is this: if of all the ways in which something of a finite being's having lived may outlive his death, that way has the best chance of attaining to a real immortality which contributes to humanity something humanity is bound always to desire, and which without this finite contribution it must always have lacked. Now, as we have seen, there is but one thing that all desirous beings, however their wants may otherwise change, must always want. That one thing is greater power than any given power. For, to repeat, he does not really desire any objective who does not wish he had more power than he has to attain it. Shall we not say, then, that the man has least reason to look forward with unhappy eye to his ever-approaching death who has most reason to think that, though he die, his life-work need not? But we have now examined the day-by-day existence of one who would so live—his obligation toward the promotion of science, morals, art, and to the education of the youth of his day, that it may continue in his way of life tomorrow. If we call a progressive community that survives from generation to generation and from age to age a "progressive civilization," this last obligation of the progressive citizen may receive a wording analogous to the previous three: it is to promote the life expectancy of a civilization that the progressive community of any day would hope to have established for all days to come.

OF T H E F U T U R E

AND T H E END

69

"Life expectancy"! The word raises a new problem, or rather an old question. Nothing man can do will raise the probable survival of a progressive civilization, however widespread and of however long tradition, to the rank of a certainty. As long as desirous beings continue and remain aware of their needs, they must, indeed, desire an increase in their power to meet these needs; but that does not assure their continued willingness to curb those transient, but insistent, cravings whose satisfaction is only to be had by the squandering of power won and at the expense of further winnings. No day should know this better than our own, which has witnessed the accumulated power of science put at the service of a morality so degraded as not only to destroy dreams recently held of a more co-operative humanity, but to doom the very humanity that had dreamed these dreams. Not only may mankind fail mankind, but who can exclude the possibility of such sudden cosmic cataclysms or ultimate desolations as would annihilate the very dwelling of the only life that, so far as we know, could make progress possible? Facing these facts squarely, what effect do they have on our conception of the best life open to our choice? None at all; we cannot do better than so to live the day as to give us the maximum power to avert both moral decay and physical calamity. But in saying this, are we not back in precisely the position the scientific mind condemned so utterly in the Kantian solution of much the same problem? Axe we not accepting the philosophy of the als ob, are we not basing our practical existence on postulates we know to be beyond proof or disproof? We are, indeed, but with this profound difference: nothing in Kant's manner of thought suggests that he recognized the acceptance or nonacceptance of any one of his three postulates to have any bearing

JO

or

THE

FUTURE

AND T H E

END

on the existence or nonexistence of the three conditions postulated. In living as though there were no limit to the degree in which we might free ourselves from the bondage of natural passions, or as though we might have infinite time in which to work out this progressive emancipation, or as though there were a divine order of things which would reward the religious life for the sacrifice of its secular cravings, Kant sees no suggestion that the three possibilities would stand a better chance of being actualized than had we lived in any other way. But from our study's initial suggestion of a sense in which the mind of science might recognize a life surviving biological death, it has been plain that such survival was conditioned on the way that life was lived. Let me not repeat or supplement the argument advanced to show that there is only one way of finite life that stands a chance of endless survival in the form of a progress this life has spent itself to promote; that only so much of such a life survives as has lived up to the responsibility progressive living imposes; that the longevity of the postmortem existence of mortals, in the form of a civilization in which the contribution of each is preserved, depends upon the will to have it survive, a will effective only if expressed in the form of work. Let me, instead, consider how far the concept of survival here presented performs the function that traditional immortalities are supposed to perform for those who can accept them; or rather, first, the measure of likeness and difference between the historic and the newly offered form of the immortality concept. It would, one thinks, be generally recognized that the idioms in which the most widely spread cults of today express themselves on the meaning and significance of immortality share a characteristic easily recognizable in the Christian communion:

OF T H E F U T U R E

AND T H E END

71

they are survivals, taking themselves to be significant modifications, of the language in which a Homer or a Hesiod expressed himself on the subject of the "souls of men outworn." These modifications are in the nature of purifications, washings away of meanings too grossly material, originally attached to that psyche, that warm vaporish breath of life which at death fled the body and, as a vague cloud, drifted away to the house of the shades, or else, for lack of the proper rites to speed it on its way, was left to haunt the living. T o translate psyche into spiritus; to derive from this all the adjectives of spirituality which in course of time Western civilization came to attach to the soul and its functions; to attentuate both psyche and spiritus into a still vaguer "ether" which, under the name "quintessence," was to b e differentiated from any form of matter that might fall under the senses; finally, to let the soul's volume dwindle away to a mathematical point—all this could be but to accumulate affirmations of what the immortal in man was not. In the end, nothing is left to differentiate the dematerialized soul concept from nonentity, save the conception of a something that during its incarnation is somehow associated with the space-time co-ordinates individuating a certain human body and after death travels b y unknown paths to its ultimate resting place in heaven. But to say that to the mind of science even this last thread attaching the immaterial spirit to the world of thinkable things —this individuation of the soul by space-time co-ordinates—has snapped, is this to say that the ancient soul has lost all meaning for the modern mind? In one sense, surely not. H o w many men of Christian origin have found a thing the like of which will surely be known to men of other cults and cultures! However deep their science, they will have found themselves still respond-

72

OF T H E F U T U R E AND T H E

END

ing with some sense of warmth and comfort to a certain passage of Paul to the Corinthians, words they have heard read so sadly often from the order for burial of kinsman or friend. For our emotional life is far slower to lose its response to the words of creeds outworn than is our intellectual life to renounce its assent to them. This body of irrational feelings is the principal part of that cultural inheritance, of which the last chapter made mention, but for lack of room and leisure was constrained to leave undiscussed. Any discussion of it would have shown all the arts of all civilized ages, to have made constant appeal to this inheritance.10 Its role in our experience is analogous to and supplements that of our biological inheritance; stirred by art, it brings the dead to the help of the living, it strengthens the living in that heroism without which it would be hard indeed to face the tragedy of life and, in particular, death.11 But while to have added the role of our cultural inheritance to the vigor-giving potentialities of our biological inheritance would have strengthened our argument for the power of art, yet to have omitted to do so left that argument sufficiently forceful to convince the critic that our theory was little inclined to under-estimate this power. Nevertheless, one would not willingly find one's sole resource in facing the frustration of death to lie in the power of art to transform a tearful acceptance of the pathetic 10

T h e part played by cultural inheritance in all aesthetic experience is admirably studied and richly illustrated in Nahm's chapters XIII and X I V under the general heading "Cultural Appercepzionsviass," op. cit. pp. 387— 424. 11 One recalls the concluding lines of the playwright Grillpartzer's verses on the death of a fellow-artist, a great tragedian of his day.— W i r dienen einer Kunst Die jeden tiefen Schmerz erquicklich macht Und schmackhaft auch den T o d .

OF T H E F U T U R E

AND T H E END

73

into a heroic facing of the tragic. Not, that is, if there is anything left unconsidered in the way of robbing death of its unwelcome shadow on thoughtful life. And there is, perhaps, something left unconsidered; there is at least this, which begins by pointing to a "soul" entering no less intimately into our common speech than the souls of old cultures, yet a soul neither associated with historic theories of nonmaterial embodiment nor dissociated from all thought of survival. It has, indeed, no other embodiment than that of the living being whose behavior reveals its essence, and it can survive in no other lives than those whose behavior shows them to have gathered something of this essence into themselves. It is that entity to which we refer when we speak of "getting at the soul of a man," and it is the same entity we have in mind when we sing of John Brown's body lying mouldering in the grave, while his soul goes marching on. As to this soul of the living man which we seek to divine by studying his conduct, what do we mean by it, or what would reveal it to us? Would it not stand revealed if we could come to some conclusion as to what was that man's supreme and ultimate end? Whatever a man's immediate objectives may be, do we not consider only those whose attainment appears to be either a necessary condition or a promising means to this ultimate end to be "in character"? All others are set down to such passing aberrations as those to which seductive temptations, ignorance of conditions, ill-calculated strategy, subject all of us. On the other hand, whatever it may be that our observation and reflection take to be the real purpose of a man, is it not that which has spoken to him with a different voice, but with the same message as that which the divine spirit of the Imitatio addresses to the

74

OF T H E

FUTURE

AND T H E

END

one who would call him Father: " M y son, I ought to be thy supreme and ultimate end, if thou would be truly blessed"? This our common speech recognizes when it says of this one, " H e has the soul of a miser; he has made gold his god," or of that one, " H e has the soul of a glutton; he has made a god of his belly." And so, to know the desire of a man's deepest soul is to know his highest god, and conversely. T h a t one who does not worship another man's god should speak of that god with contempt and of its worshipper with reprobation means not that he takes this god to be no god and its worshipper no worshipper; but rather, that he takes this god to be a false god, and its worshipper an idolater. Now, all this conception of a soul and its god is empirical enough; so empirical, that the psychologists have already made modest progress in the experimental treatment of a problem that, called by whatever laboratory name, comes in plain layman's language to be a search for what a man really wants. Their problem is not easy; it is infinitely difficult. Even if the question concerned only what a man wants first, the answering of it would not be without its tricks and deceptions. But when it comes to asking what a man wants last, what is the deepest of his desires and the topmost of his aspirations, it will be long before experimental methods can effectively supplement the little our natural shrewdness and experience of life can do to approach the real soul and true god, whether of another or of oneself. Nevertheless, it is not without comfort to an experimentalist to find that these realities are beginning to be sought by methods akin to those by which science has come closer and closer to finding the real length of a line or size of an angle. It helps us to realize that what in all these cases we are looking for under the name of a

OF T H E

FUTURE

AND T H E

END

75

reality, is the limiting conception of that to which a series of progressive approximations more and more closely approximates. So much for the moment on the meaning of soul and its object of worship, its god; and now to come back to the question of a soul's survival of its onetime body and how far this depends on what is that soul's self and what its god. We all know on the feet of what armies the soul of John Brown marched on. The result for which he longed, those armies accomplished; and the longing for which he died, they realized. So that, if the emancipation of slaves was the ultimate desire of that soul, that soul must, with the fulfillment of its heart's desire, have nothing left to live for; and the soul that has nothing to live for cannot be said to live. Not that we have reason to take this to have been, or occasion to enquire what may have been the case of John Brown, but only to let the song of him point a moral true for all men. Namely, this: if a man would have the depths of himself march on the feet of future men, long as there be men, though that be forever, he must set his deepest desire on an infinitely remote, but indefinitely approachable goal, an ideal. And if, in the language of the Fathers and Doctors, we call this supreme and ultimate end his god, then the service of such a god is the only one that can conform to the other requirement of a religious life; namely, that the god to be religiously served by one, is the god to be served by all. For only an end beyond finite attainment could be served by all men throughout all time. So far, then, with Kant: the only life possible for a rational but finite being must be an infinite progress from lower to higher degrees of approach to a god or city of god that must in all these finite beings exist and act as a reine Idee, a pure ideal. But the rest of our story departs from Kant in the direction

76

OF T H E F U T U R E AND T H E

END

already indicated, which to recall, brings us to the end of our tale of a life to be lived in greatest contentment, awaiting a death to be died with least reluctance. T h e difference, it was said, between eighteenth-century beginnings and twentieth-century developments of an idealistic life-plan goes deep. T o live on the unverifiable assumption that certain conditions are actually fulfilled is one thing. So to live as to give certain future conditions the best chance of being fulfilled is another. And if our experimentally controlled thought convinces us that to give our souls the best chance of marching on eternally is so to live that all who follow the same way of living must have for their goal and god an endlessly approachable but unattainable ideal, does that rob our souls and their god of any intelligible reality? The real length of a line, the real size of an angle, is no less an ideal, yet such an ideal is the only meaning experimental science can attach to any one of its "realities." True, no ideal has actuality, save as it exists in the minds of men and bears fruit in their action; but what a mighty force to transform the world would be the ideal which inspired men to dedicate their lives to the service of the god whose being and whose service the present study has been struggling to make clear to itself and others! And suppose men so living to find comfort for their finitude, zest for the living of it, in the thought that whatever end death shall put to their own progress will be the starting point of the progress to be made by those who shall continue in their religious way of living. Shall we not say, the comfort such lives owe to their religion lies in the assurance it brings them of having done all that mortal can do to save his soul immortal? Of a soul nourished in this religion, it may, indeed, be said and proven, that

OF T H E F U T U R E AND T H E END

77

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, T o rest in golden grove, or to bask in summer sky; Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. And shall this deathlessness not be given to her—if to any? But at the cost of what sacrifice and at the expense of what toil is the comfort of this religion to be won? Our study has done what it could to define and weigh the obligations of its religion; it has not underestimated the burden of them. That humanity for all the length of its days should continue to grow in power, it is necessary that every mortal man should spend every passing day in unsparing effort to advance humanity along each of three dimensions of progress, science, morals, art. These dimensions are independent in the sense that finite progress could be made along any one of them, though none were made along the others; they are interdependent in the sense that at no time in history would the conditions of human life endow mortal man with the strength or provide him opportunity to progress indefinitely along but one of these lines, for want of the augmented strength and bettered opportunity only to be expected from a humanity that had advanced along the others. N o one could fail to realize the heavy price the individual, devout in the religion of progress, would have to pay for the comfort that religion promised him. He would have to scorn many an old delight, spend himself in many a new labor. But in return his days would not be overcast with the ancient shadow of approaching death; and they would be brightened by a sense of new power—an ever-increasing confidence in his ability to obtain any desired one of an ever-increasing abundance of the good and innocent things of life open to the choice of the religious man.

78

OF T H E F U T U R E A N D T H E

END

One last word of caution. From the little that has been said of the various parts to be played by various men in this onward struggle toward the ideal of power, conditioned as it is on coordinated strivings along the ways of science, morals, arr, let no one imagine the scientist, moralist, artist to be the only mortals capable of contributing to and, therefore, the only ones free to dedicate themselves to progress and to earn the rewards promised those who do so dedicate themselves. T o explain, let me use for a moment that makeshift word "genius"; not, however, with the nineteenth-century Romanticists' mystical acknowledgment of its finality, but merely to stand for a man and mind whose work falls under no rule of normality our science has as yet discovered. Then, let me say that the genius of -the scientist, moralist, artist fashions what we might call the spear heads of our battle for power, but the support of these spearheads by every disciple of progress is the only force that can make their potentiality of progress an actuality. How, you ask, can the man in the street help genius to wield the weapon fate has put in its hands? By willingly foregoing some portion of the fruits of the earth that might have been his to enjoy had genius been harnessed to the plough instead of being sustained by the labor of others in a life of whatever unproductive activity the genius may choose for himself. And when I say "unproductive," I do not forget the large and liberally supported body of scientists that man the technological research laboratories of our time. Though turning out no "consumer goods" today, they are readily excused by the most "realistic" thought from adding to the day's abundance, for the sake of the more abundant and more desirable consumer goods their studies promise for the morrow. Such goods, however, are but

OF T H E F U T U R E A N D T H E E N D

79

the ostensible fruits of a science whose growth springs from its roots. The genius that devotes itself to nourishing, spreading, deepening these roots promises no new fruits that you or I shall live to enjoy. Why should we, why should the man in the street support such genius in its dreams? So, many a sound realist, willing enough to support the technological scientist, has reasoned, and on his reasoning acted, argued, voted. And as with science, so with morals and art. Yes, we can readily exempt from the production of immediately consumable goods the "practical moralist" whose gift of persuasion can bring men to move the lines of their lives from a lower to what we conceive to be a higher plane of living, insofar as we may live to enjoy the benefits of the new social order this practical moralist shall have persuaded men to accept. But in a moral progress that is to go on in infinitum it will be the far future man who catches, holds and profits by the vision that inspires the great seer and prophet of any given day. Why should the man in the street forego any enjoyment lying within the power of his day to provide him, for the sake of enhancing the power of a day he shall not live to see to give its children what they want? As for the art, whose business is not to adorn its day with softness and ease but to strengthen it in an heroic willingness to fight on in an eternally tragic battle, what is that art to the man in the street, or the man in the street, to it? To all these questions your progressive can give but one answer. Unless the man in the street, himself without genius to create progress, is willing to be "taxed" for the support of those who have it, progress will not be made. The street on which that man lives is no thoroughfare of a progressive community; those who walk it are treading the way of one or another of

8o

OF T H E F U T U R E AND T H E

END

those secular lives toward such rewards as the Ecclesiast has forshadowed. No, in all this hastily sketched picture of the sacrifice that every member of a progressive community must make for the cause of its three dimensional progress toward power, there can be no difference in the measure in which genius at the spearhead and patience at the butt contribute to the cause; no difference, then, in the contentment that is the like reward of great and small. The words of that sweet poet of simple piety, George Herbert, come back to one. If bliss had lien on art or strength, None but the wise and strong had gained it; Where now by faith all arms are of a length, One size does all conditions fit. "Faith." And though there is little room in the thoughts with which this study closes for such faith as George Herbert had in mind, or at least at heart, there is room for a faithfulness, in which abiding one size of contentment must, indeed, all conditions fit. And since I have spoken of these thoughts as the conclusions of this study of life, why, so let them conclude it; to add a word or two by way of putting a bit of flesh here and a bit of flesh there upon the bare bones of its argument could not improve it as a body, but only spoil it as a skeleton. Instead, then, of wasting the moment or two still at our disposal in any further effort to clarify or strengthen what has been said on behalf of a way of life, let me recall some things others have said when in conversation they voiced their comment on the way now laid before you.

OF T H E F U T U R E

AND T H E E N D

8l

Need I say that these comments were principally in the form of complaints, of which the most lenient conceded that there might be something to be said for making the best of a bad bargain? But to begin with the least lenient and most frequent, it takes the form of a question: how call a life lived as here planned in any sense contenting? Is it not rather a life of eternal unrest, which a poetic imagination might find some honorific solace in calling divine, but which the mortal man called upon to live it could only find hellish? T o this I can only answer that the very restrained word "contentment" was chosen to describe the promise held forth by the progressive life, only after a preliminary study had done all that a cold logical dichotomy could do by way of spreading before the mind an exhaustive display of all possible samples of life. Then the word "contenting" was taken to apply to the life presented in the present study in the sole sense of the Latin verb teneo, tenere, from which it is derived. T o accept as contenting the life here described means precisely this: that, having surveyed all possible ways of life, our study has found no reason why one should let g o of the progressive in favor of any one of the alternative ways of spending one's days or, as a last resource, of spilling them at once into the lap of nonbeing. One is not, therefore, promised happiness as Kant, quite in the spirit of our everyday mood, defines happiness, the condition of one for whom "everything goes according to his wish and wanting." Within the limits of what can be established by experimental evidence, no such happiness is within the reach of mortal man or of his immortal remains, however he may have spent his days. With the understanding, then, that we mean by a contented life one whose plan recommends itself to man's best thought as

82

OF T H E F U T U R E

AND T H E

END

preferable to any other way of living or of dying, let us consider whether the acceptance of this life plan is fairly to be called "making the best of a bad bargain." To begin with, where is there room for driving a bargain with life, good, bad, or indifferent? Yes, I can see one sense in which one can put himself in the attitude of a bargainer. But let me put this sense in the form of a single example, of which an infinity of others will readily occur to everyone. At the opening of his Jardin