Chapter VII: Part 7

Thus far through this essay I have by implication rather than direct statement contrasted genuine interest in intellectual things with the kind of intellectual life led by women. Let me say now that no intention is less mine than to contribute to the old controversy concerning the respective intellectual capacities of the two sexes. If I use the adjective “masculine” to denote a more valid type of intellectual impulse than is expressed by the adjective “feminine,” it is not to belittle the quality of the second impulse; it is a matter of definition. Further, the relative degree of “masculine” and “feminine” traits possessed by an individual are almost as much the result of acquired training as of native inheritance. The young, independent college girl of to-day is in fact more likely to possess “masculine” intellectual habits than is the average Y.M.C.A. director. I use the adjectives to express broad, general characteristics as they are commonly understood.

For a direct examination of the intellectual life of women--which, I repeat, is practically the intellectual life of the nation--in the United States shows the necessity of terms being defined more sharply. Interest in intellectual things is first, last, and all the time _disinterested_; it is the love of truth, if not exclusively for its own sake, at least without fear of consequences, in fact with precious little thought about consequences. This does not mean that such exercise of the native disposition to think, such slaking of the natural metaphysical curiosity in all of us, is not a process enwrapped--as truly as the disposition to make love or to get angry--with an emotional aura of its own, a passion as distinctive as any other. It merely means that the occasions which stimulate this innate intellectual disposition are of a different sort than those which stimulate our other dispositions. An imaginative picture of one’s enlarged social self will arouse our instincts of ambition or a desire to found a family, whereas curiosity or wonder about the mystery of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate nature of God (objects of desire as truly as other objects) will arouse our intellectual disposition. These occasions, objects, hypotheses are of necessity without moral significance. The values inherent in them are the values of satisfied contemplation and not of practical result. Their immediate utility--although their ultimate, by the paradox that is constantly making mere common sense inadequate, may be very great--is only subjective. In this sense, they seem wayward and masculine; and, cardinal sin of all, useless.

Perhaps the meaning of the “feminine” approach to the intellectual life may be made somewhat clearer by this preliminary definition. The basic assumption of such an approach is that ideas are measured for their value by terms outside the ideas themselves, or, as Mrs. Mary Austin recently said in a magazine article, by “her [woman’s] deep sense of social applicability as the test of value.” Fundamentally, in a word, the intellectual life is an instrument of moral reform; the real test of ideas lies in their utilitarian success. Hence it is hardly surprising that the intellectual life, as I have defined it, of women in America turns out on examination not to be an intellectual life at all, but sociological activity. The best of modern women thinkers in the United States--and there are many--are oftenest technical experts, keen to apply knowledge and skill to the formulation of a technique for the better solution of problems _the answers to which are already assumed_. The question of fundamental ends is seldom if ever raised: for example, the desirability of the modern family, the desirability of children glowing with health, the desirability of monogamy are not challenged. They are assumed as ends desirable in themselves, and what women usually understand by the intellectual life is the application of modern scientific methods to a sort of enlarged and subtler course in domestic science.

This attitude of contempt for mere intellectual values has of course been strengthened by the native pioneer suspicion of all thought that does not issue immediately in successful action. The remarkable growth of pragmatism, and its sturdy offspring instrumentalism, where ideas become but the lowly handmaidens of “getting on,” has been possible to the extent to which we see it to-day precisely because the intellectual atmosphere has been surcharged with this feminized utilitarianism. We are deeply uncomfortable before introspection, contemplation, or scrupulous adherence to logical sequence. Women do not hesitate to call these activities cold, impersonal, indirect--I believe they have a phrase for them, “the poobah tradition of learning.” With us the concept of the intellect as a soulless machine operating in a rather clammy void has acquired the force of folklore because we have so much wished to strip it of warmth and colour. We have wanted to discredit it in itself; we have respected it only for what it could do. If its operations lead to better sanitation, better milk for babies, and larger bridges over which, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, we might cross more rapidly from one dismal, illiberal city to another dismal, illiberal city, then those operations have been justified. That the life of the mind might have an emotional drive, a sting or vibrancy of its own, constituting as valuable a contribution to human happiness as, say, the satisfied marital felicity of the bacteria-less suburbanite in his concrete villa has been incomprehensible. Every science must be an _applied_ science, the intellect must be _applied_ intellect before we thoroughly understand it. We have created an environment in which the intellectual impulses must become fundamentally social in quality and mood, whereas the truth of the matter is that these impulses, like the religious impulse, in their pristine spontaneity are basically individualistic and capricious rather than disciplined.

But such individualism in thought, unless mellowed by contact with institutions that assume and cherish it and thus can, without patronizing, correct its wildnesses, inevitably turns into eccentricity. And such, unfortunately, has too often been the history of American intellectuals. The institutional structure that might sustain them and keep them on the main track of the humanistic tradition has been too fragile and too slight. The university and college life, the educational institutions, even the discipline of scholarship, as other essays in this volume show us, have been of very little assistance. Even the church has provoked recalcitrance rather than any real reorientation of religious viewpoint, and our atheists--recall Ingersoll--have ordinarily been quite conventional in their intellectual outlook. With educated Englishmen, for example, whatever their religious, economic, or political views, there has been a certain common tradition or point of departure and understanding, i.e., the classics. Mr. Balfour can speak the same language as Mr. Bertrand Russell, even when he is a member of a government that puts Mr. Russell in gaol for his political opposition to the late war. But it really is a strain on the imagination to picture Mr. Denby quoting Hume to refute Mr. Weeks, or Vice-President Coolidge engaging in an epistemological controversy with Postmaster-General Hays. There is no intellectual background common to President Harding and Convict Debs or to any one person and possibly as many as a hundred others--there are only common social or geographical backgrounds, in which the absence of a real community of interests is pathetically emphasized by grotesque emphasis upon fraternal solidarity, as when Mr. Harding discovered that he and his chauffeur belonged to the same lodge, regarding this purely fortuitous fact as a symbol of the healing power of the Fathers and of American Democracy!

In such an atmosphere of shadowy spiritual relationships, where the thinness of contact of mind with mind is childishly disguised under the banner of good fellowship, it might be expected that the intellectual life must be led not only with that degree of individualistic isolation which is naturally necessary for its existence, but likewise in a hostile and unintelligent environment of almost enforced “difference” from the general social type. Such an atmosphere will become as infested with cranks, fanatics, mushroom religious enthusiasts, moral prigs with new schemes of perfectability, inventors of perpetual motion, illiterate novelists, and oratorical cretins, as a swamp with mosquitoes. They seem to breed almost overnight; we have no standard to which the wise and the foolish may equally repair, no criterion by which spontaneously to appraise them and thus, by robbing them of the breath of their life, recognition, reduce their numbers. On the contrary, we welcome them all with a kind of Jamesian gusto, as if every fool, like every citizen, must have his right to vote. It is a kind of intellectual enfranchisement that produces the same sort of leadership which, in the political field of complete suffrage, we suffer under from Washington and our various State capitals. Our intellectual life, when we judge it objectively on the side of vigour and diversity, too often seems like a democracy of mountebanks.

Yet when we turn from the more naïve and popular experiments for finding expression for the baulked disposition to think, the more sophisticated _jeunesse dorée_ of our cultural life are equally crippled and sterile. They suffer not so much from being thought and being “queer”--in fact, inwardly deeply uncomfortable at not being successful business men, they are scrupulously conventional in manner and appearance--but from what Professor Santayana has called, with his usual felicity, “the genteel tradition.” It is a blight that falls on the just and the unjust; like George Bernard Shaw, they are tolerant before the caprices of the mind, and intolerant before the caprices of the body. They acquire their disability from the essentially American (and essentially feminine) timorousness before life itself; they seem to want to confine, as do all good husbands and providers, adventure to mental adventure and tragedy to an error in ratiocination. They will discant generously about liberty of opinion--although, strictly speaking, _opinion_ is always free; all that is restricted is the right to put it into words--yet seem singularly silent concerning liberty of action. If this were a mere temperamental defect, it would of course have no importance. But it cuts much deeper. Thought, like mist, arises from the earth, and to it must eventually return, if it is not to be dissipated into the ether. The genteel tradition, which has stolen from the intellectual life its own proper possessions, gaiety and laughter, has left it sour and _déraciné_. It has lost its earthy roots, its sensuous fulness, its bodily _mise-en-scène_. One has the feeling, when one talks to our correct intellectuals, that they are somehow brittle and might be cracked with a pun, a low story, or an animal grotesquerie as an eggshell might be cracked. Yet whatever else thought may be in itself, surely we know that it has a biological history and an animal setting; it can reach its own proper dignity and effectiveness only when it functions in some kind of rational relationship with the more clamorous instincts of the body. The adjustment must be one of harmony and welcome; real thinkers do not make this ascetic divorce between the passions and the intellect, the emotions and the reason, which is the central characteristic of the genteel tradition. Thought is nourished by the soil it feeds on, and in America to-day that soil is choked with the feckless weeds of correctness. Our sanitary perfection, our material organization of goods, our muffling of emotion, our deprecation of curiosity, our fear of idle adventure, our horror of disease and death, our denial of suffering--what kind of soil of life is that?

Surely not an over-gracious or thrilling one; small wonder that our intellectual plants wither in this carefully aseptic sunlight.

Nevertheless, though I was tempted to give the sub-title “A Study in Sterility” to this essay, I do not believe that our soil is wholly sterile. Beneath the surface barrenness stirs a germinal energy that may yet push its way through the weeds and the tin-cans of those who are afraid of life. If the genteel tradition did not succumb to the broad challenge of Whitman, his invitations have not been wholly rejected by the second generation following him. The most hopeful thing of intellectual promise in America to-day is the contempt of the younger people for their elders; they are restless, uneasy, disaffected. It is not a disciplined contempt; it is not yet kindled by any real love of intellectual values--how could it be? Yet it is a genuine and moving attempt to create a way of life free from the bondage of an authority that has lost all meaning, even to those who wield it. Some it drives in futile and pathetic expatriotism from the country; others it makes headstrong and reckless; many it forces underground, where, much as in Russia before the revolution of 1905, the _intelligentsia_ meet their own kind and share the difficulties of their common struggle against an environment that is out to destroy them. But whatever its crudeness and headiness, it is a yeast composed always of those who _will not_ conform. The more the pressure of standardization is applied to them the sharper and keener--if often the wilder--becomes their rebellion against it. Just now these non-conformists constitute a spiritual fellowship which is disorganized and with few points of contact. It may be ground out of existence, for history is merciless and every humanistic interlude resembles a perilous equipoise of barbaric forces. Only arrogance and self-complacency give warrant for assuming that we may not be facing a new kind of dark age. On the other hand, if the more amiable and civilized of the generation now growing up can somehow consolidate their scattered powers, what may they not accomplish? For we have a vitality and nervous alertness which, properly channelled and directed, might cut through the rocks of stupidity with the precision and spaciousness with which our mechanical inventions have seized on our natural resources and turned them into material goods. Our cup of life is full to the brim.

I like to think that this cup will not all be poured upon the sandy deltas of industrialism ... we have so much to spare! Climb to the top of the Palisades and watch the great city in the deepening dusk as light after light, and rows of lights after rows, topped by towers of radiance at the end of the island, shine through the shadows across the river. Think, then, of the miles of rolling plains, fertile and dotted with cities, stretching behind one to that other ocean which washes a civilization that was old before we were born and yet to-day gratefully accepts our pitiful doles to keep it from starvation, of the millions of human aspirations and hopes and youthful eagernesses contained in the great sprawling, uneasy entity we call our country--must all the hidden beauty and magic and laughter we know is ours be quenched because we lack the courage to make it proud and defiant? Or walk down the Avenue some late October morning when the sun sparkles in a clear and electric air such as can be found nowhere else in the world. The flashing beauty of form, the rising step of confident animalism, the quick smile of fertile minds--must all these things, too, be reduced to a drab uniformity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hidden under a fog of ugliness by those who never really loved it, who never knew our natural gaiety and high spirits and eagerness for knowledge? They have the upper hand now--but who would dare to prophesy that they can keep it?

Perhaps this is only a day-dream, but surely one can hope that the America of our natural affections rather than the present one of enforced dull standardization may some day snap the shackles of those who to-day keep it a spiritual prison. And as surely will it be the rebellious and disaffected who accomplish the miracle, if it is ever accomplished. Because at bottom their revolt, unlike the aggressions of the standardizers, is founded not on hate of what they cannot understand, but on love of what they wish all to share.

HAROLD E. STEARNS

SCIENCE

The scientific work of our countrymen has probably evoked less scepticism on the part of foreign judges than their achievements in other departments of cultural activity. There is one obvious reason for this difference. When our letters, our art, our music are criticized with disdainfully faint commendation, it is because they have failed to attain the higher reaches of creative effort. Supreme accomplishment in art certainly presupposes a graduated series of lesser strivings, yet from what might be called the consumer’s angle, mediocrity is worthless and incapable of giving inspiration to genius. But in science it is otherwise. Here every bit of sound work--however commonplace--counts as a contribution to the stock of knowledge; and, what is more, on labours of this lesser order the superior mind is frequently dependent for its own syntheses. A combination of intelligence, technical efficiency, and application may not by itself suffice to read the riddles of the universe; but, to change the metaphor, it may well provide the foundation for the epoch-makers’ structure. So while it is derogatory to American literature to be considered a mere reflection of English letters, it is no reflection on American scientists that they have gone to Europe to acquire that craftsmanship which is an indispensable prerequisite to fruitful research. And when we find Alexander von Humboldt praising in conversation with Silliman the geographical results of Maury and Frémont, there is no reason to suspect him of perfunctory politeness to a transatlantic visitor; the veteran scholar might well rejoice in the ever widening application of methods he had himself aided in perfecting.

Thus even seventy years ago and more the United States had by honest, painstaking labour made worthwhile additions to human knowledge and these contributions have naturally multiplied a hundredfold with the lapse of years. Yet it would be quite misleading to make it appear as if the total represented merely a vast accumulation of uninspired routine jobs. Some years ago, to be sure, an American writer rather sensationally voiced his discontent with the paucity of celebrated _savants_ among our countrymen. But he forgot that in science fame is a very inadequate index of merit. The precise contribution made by one man’s individual ability is one of the most tantalizingly difficult things to determine--so much so that scholars are still debating in what measure Galileo’s predecessors paved the way for his discoveries in dynamics. For a layman, then, to appraise the relative significance of this or that intellectual worthy on the basis of current gossip is rather absurd. Certainly the lack of a popular reputation is a poor reason for denying greatness to a contemporary or even near-contemporary scientific thinker. Two remarkable instances at once come to mind of Americans who have won the highest distinction abroad yet remain unknown by name to many of their most cultivated compatriots. Who has ever heard of Willard Gibbs? Yet he was the recipient of the Copley medal, British learning’s highest honour, and his phase rule is said to mark an epoch in the progress of physical chemistry. Again, prior to the Nobel prize award, who outside academic bowers had ever heard of the crucial experiment by which a Chicago physicist showed, to quote Poincaré, “that the physical procedures are powerless to put in evidence absolute motion”? Michelson’s name is linked with all the recent speculations on relativity, and he shares with Einstein the fate of finding himself famous one fine morning through the force of purely external circumstances.

In even the briefest and most random enumeration of towering native sons it is impossible to ignore the name of William James. Here for once the suffrage of town and gown, of domestic and alien judges, is unanimous. Naturally James can never mean quite the same to the European world that he means to us, because in the United States he is far more than a great psychologist, philosopher, or literary man. Owing to our peculiar spiritual history, he occupies in our milieu an altogether unique position. His is the solitary example of an American pre-eminent in a branch of science who at the same time succeeded in deeply affecting the cultural life of a whole generation. Further, he is probably the only one of our genuinely original men to be thoroughly saturated with the essense of old world civilization. On the other side of the Atlantic, of course, neither of these characteristics would confer a patent of distinction. Foreign judgment of James’s psychological achievement was consequently not coloured by external considerations, and it is all the more remarkable that the “Principles of Psychology” was so widely and by such competent critics acclaimed as a synthesis of the first order.

Without attempting to exhaust the roster of great names, I must mention Simon Newcomb and his fellow-astronomer, George W. Hill, both Copley medallists. Newcomb, in particular, stood out as the foremost representative of his science in this country, honoured here and abroad alike for his abstruse original researches into the motion of the moon and the planetary system and for his effective popularization. Henry Augustus Rowland, the physicist, was another of our outstanding men--one, incidentally, whose measure was taken in Europe long before his greatness dawned upon his colleagues at home. He is celebrated, among other things, for perfecting an instrument of precision and for a new and more accurate determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat. Among geologists Grove Karl Gilbert, famous for his exploration of Lake Bonneville--the major forerunner of Great Salt Lake--and his investigations of mountain structure, stands forth as one of our pre-eminent savants. Even those who, like the present writer, enjoyed merely casual contact with that grand old man could not fail to gain the impression that now they knew what a great scientist looked like in the flesh and to feel that such a one would be a fit member of any intellectual galaxy anywhere.

If from single individuals we turn to consider currents of scientific thought, the United States again stands the trial with flying colours. It can hardly be denied that in a number of branches our countrymen are marching in the vanguard. “Experimental biology,” said a German zoologist some time before the War, “is pre-eminently an American science.” Certainly one need merely glance at German or British manuals to learn how deeply interpretations of basic evolutionary phenomena have been affected by the work of Professor T. H. Morgan and his followers. In psychology it is true that no one wears the mantle of William James, but there is effective advancement along a number of distinct lines. Thorndike’s tests marked an era in the annals of animal psychology, supplanting with a saner technique the slovenly work of earlier investigators. Experimental investigation of mental phenomena generally, of individual variability and behaviour in particular, flourishes in a number of academic centres. In anthropology the writings of Lewis H. Morgan have proved a tremendous stimulus to sociological speculation the world over and still retain their hold on many European thinkers. They were not, in my opinion, the product of a great intellect and the scheme of evolution traced by Morgan is doomed to abandonment. Yet his theories have suggested a vast amount of thought and to his lasting credit it must be said that he opened up an entirely new and fruitful field of recondite research through his painstaking accumulation and discussion of primitive kinship terminologies.

More recently the anthropological school headed by Professor Boas has led to a transvaluation of theoretical values in the study of cultural development, supplanting with a sounder historical insight the cruder evolutionary speculation of the past. Above all, its founder has succeeded in perfecting the methodology of every division of the vast subject, and remains probably the only anthropologist in the world who has both directly and indirectly furthered ethnological, linguistic, somatological and archæological investigation. Finally, the active part played by pathologists like Dr. Simon Flexner in the experimental study of disease is too well known to require more than brief mention.

Either in its individual or collective results, American research is thus very far from being a negligible factor in the scientific life of the world. Nevertheless, the medal has a reverse side, and he would be a bold optimist who should sincerely voice complete contentment either with the status of science in the cultural polity of the nation or with the work achieved by the average American investigator. Let us, then, try to face the less flattering facts in the case.

The fundamental difficulty can be briefly summarized by applying the sociologist’s concept of maladjustment. American science, notwithstanding its notable achievements, is not an organic product of our soil; it is an epiphenomenon, a hothouse growth. It is still the prerogative of a caste, not a treasure in which the nation glories. We have at best only a nascent class of cultivated laymen who relish scientific books requiring concentrated thought or supplying large bodies of fact. This is shown most clearly by the rarity of articles of this type even in our serious magazines. Our physicians, lawyers, clergymen and journalists--in short, our educated classes--do not encourage the publication of reading-matter which is issued in Europe as a profitable business venture. It is hard to conceive of a book like Mach’s “Analyse der Empfindungen” running through eight editions in the United States. Conversely, it is not strange that hardly any of our first-rate men find it an alluring task to seek an understanding with a larger audience. Newcomb and James are of course remarkable exceptions, but they _are_ exceptions. Here again the contrast with European conditions is glaring. Not to mention the classic popularizers of the past, England, e.g., can boast even to-day of such men as Pearson, Soddy, Joly, Hinks--all of them competent or even distinguished in their professional work yet at the same time skilful interpreters of their field to a wider public. But for a healthy cultural life a rapport of this sort between creator and appreciator is an indispensable prerequisite, and it is not a whit less important in science than in music or poetry.

The estrangement of science from its social environment has produced anomalies almost inconceivable in the riper civilizations of the Old World. Either the scientist loses contact with his surroundings or in the struggle for survival he adapts himself by a surrender of his individuality, that is, by more or less disingenuously parading as a lowbrow and representing himself as a dispenser of worldly goods. It is quite true that, historically, empirical knowledge linked with practical needs is earlier than rational science; it is also true that applied and pure science can be and have been mutual benefactors. This lesson is an important one and in a country with a scholastic tradition like Germany it was one that men like Mach and Ostwald did well to emphasize. But in an age and country where philosophers pique themselves on ignoring philosophical problems and psychologists have become experts in advertising technique, the emphasis ought surely to be in quite the opposite direction, and that, even if one inclines in general to a utilitarian point of view. For nothing is more certain than that a penny-wise Gradgrind policy is a pound-foolish one. A friend teaching in one of our engineering colleges tells me that owing to the “practical” training received there the graduates are indeed able to apply formulæ by rote but flounder helplessly when confronted by a new situation, which drives them to seek counsel with the despised and underpaid “theoretical” professor. The plea for pure science offered by Rowland in 1883 is not yet altogether antiquated in 1921: “To have the applications of a science, the science itself must exist ... we have taken the science of the Old World, and applied it to all our uses, accepting it like the rain of heaven, without asking whence it came, or even acknowledging the debt of gratitude we owe to the great and unselfish workers who have given it to us.... To a civilized nation of the present day, the applications of science are a necessity, and our country has hitherto succeeded in this line, only for the reason that there are certain countries in the world where pure science has been and is cultivated, and where the study of nature is considered a noble pursuit.”

The Bœotian disdain for research as a desirable pursuit is naturally reflected in the mediocre encouragement doled out to investigators, who are obliged to do their work by hook or by crook and to raise funds by the undignified cajolery of wealthy patrons and a disingenuous _argumentum ad hominem_. Heaven forbid that money be appropriated to attack a problem which, in the opinion of the best experts, calls for solution; effort must rather be diverted to please an ignorant benefactor bent on establishing a pet theory or fired with the zeal to astound the world by a sensational discovery.

Another aspect of scientific life in the United States that reflects the general cultural conditions is the stress placed on organization and administration as opposed to individual effort. It is quite true that for the prosecution of elaborate investigations careful allotment of individual tasks contributory to the general end is important and sometimes even indispensable. But some of the greatest work in the history of science has been achieved without regard for the principles of business efficiency; and whatever advantage may accrue in the future from administrative devices is negligible in comparison with the creative thought of scientific men. These, and only these, can lend value to the machinery of organization, which independently of them must remain a soulless instrument. The overweighting of efficiency schemes as compared to creative personalities is only a symptom of a general maladjustment. Intimately related with this feature is that cynical flouting of intellectual values that appears in the customary attitude of trustees and university presidents towards those who shed lustre on our academic life. The professional pre-eminence of a scientist may be admitted by the administrative officials but it is regarded as irrelevant since the standard of values accepted by them is only remotely, if at all, connected with originality or learning.

There are, of course, scientists to whom deference is paid even by trustees, nay, by the wives of trustees; but it will be usually found that they are men of independent means or social prestige. It is, in other words, their wealth and position, not their creative work, that raises them above their fellows. One of the most lamentable results of this contempt for higher values is the failure to provide for ample leisure that might be devoted to research. The majority of our scientists, like those abroad, gain a livelihood by teaching, but few foreign observers fail to be shocked by the way the energies of their American colleagues are frittered away on administrative routine and elementary instruction till neither time nor strength remains for the advancement of knowledge. But even this does not tell the whole story, for we must remember that the younger scientists are as a rule miserably underpaid and are obliged to eke out a living by popular writing or lecturing, so that research becomes a sheer impossibility. If Ostwald and Cattell are right in associating the highest productivity with the earlier years of maturity, the tragic effects of such conditions as I have just described are manifest.

In justice, however, mention must be made of a number of institutions permitting scientific work without imposing any obligation to teach or onerous administrative duties. The U. S. Geological Survey, the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Institute may serve as examples. We must likewise remember that different individuals react quite differently to the necessity for teaching. Some of the most noted investigators--Rowland, for instance--find a moderate amount of lecturing positively stimulating. In a utopian republic of learning such individual variations would be carefully considered in the allotment of tasks. The association of the Lick Observatory with the University of California seems to approximate to ideal conditions, inasmuch as its highly trained astronomers are relieved of all academic duties but enjoy the privilege of lecturing to the students when the spirit moves them.

To return to the main question, the maladjustment between the specific scientific phase of our civilization and the general cultural life produces certain effects even more serious than those due to penury, administrative tyranny, and popular indifference, for they are less potent and do not so readily evoke defence-mechanisms on the victims’ part. There is, first of all, a curtailment of potential scientific achievement through the general deficiencies of the cultural environment.

Much has been said by both propagandists and detractors of German scholarship about the effects of intensive specialization. But an important feature commonly ignored in this connection is that in the country of its origin specialization is a concomitant and successor of a liberal education. Whatever strictures may be levelled at the traditional form of this preparatory training--and I have seen it criticized as severely by German writers as by any--the fact remains that the German university student has a broad cultural background such as his American counterpart too frequently lacks; and what is true of Germany holds with minor qualifications for other European countries.

A trivial example will serve to illustrate the possible advantages of a cultural foundation for very specialized research. Music is notoriously one of the salient features of German culture, not merely because Germany has produced great composers but because of the wide appreciation and quite general study of music. Artistically the knowledge of the piano or violin acquired by the average child in the typical German home may count for naught, yet in at least two branches of inquiry it may assume importance. The psychological aspect of acoustics is likely to attract and to be fruitfully cultivated by those conversant with musical technique, and they alone will be capable of grappling with the comparative problems presented by the study of primitive music--problems that would never occur to the average Anglo-Saxon field ethnologist, yet to which the German would apply his knowledge as spontaneously as he applies the multiplication table to a practical matter of everyday purchase.

As a matter of fact, all the phenomena of the universe are interrelated and, accordingly, the most important advances may be expected from a revelation of the less patent connections. For this purpose a diversity of interests with corresponding variety of information may be not only a favourable condition but a prerequisite. Helmholtz may have made an indifferent physician; but because he combined a medical practitioner’s knowledge with that of a physicist he was enabled to devise the ophthalmoscope. So it may be that not one out of ten thousand men who might apply themselves to higher mathematics would ever be able to advance mathematical theory, but it is certainly true that the manipulatory skill acquired would stand them in good stead not only in the exact sciences but in biology, psychology, and anthropometry, in all of which the theory of probability can be effectively applied to the phenomenon of variability.

I do not mean to assert that the average European student is an Admirable Crichton utilizing with multidexterity the most diverse methods of research and groups of fact. But I am convinced that many European workers produce more valuable work than equally able Americans for the sole reason that the European’s social heritage provides him with agencies ready-made for detecting correlations that must inevitably elude a vision narrower because deprived of the same artificial aid. The remedy lies in enriching the cultural atmosphere and in insisting on a broad educational training over and above that devoted to the specialist’s craftsmanship.

Important, however, as variety of information and interests doubtless are, one factor must take precedence in the scientist’s equipment--the spirit in which he approaches his scientific work as a whole. In this respect the point that would probably strike most European or, at all events, Continental scientists is the rarity in America of philosophical inquiries into the foundations of one’s scientific position. The contrast with German culture is of course sharp, and in many Teutonic works the national bent for epistemological discussion is undoubtedly carried to a point where it ceases to be palatable to those not to the manner born. Yet this tendency has a salutary effect in stimulating that contempt for mere authority which is indispensable for scientific progress. What our average American student should acquire above all is a stout faith in the virtues of _reasoned nonconformism_, and in this phrase adjective and noun are equally significant. On one hand, we must condemn the blind deference with which too many of our investigators accept the judgments of acknowledged greatness. What can be more ridiculous, e.g., than to make dogmas of the _obiter dicta_ of a man like William James, the chief lesson of whose life is a resentment of academic traditionalism? Or, what shall we think of a celebrated biologist who decides the problem of Lamarckianism by a careful weighing not of arguments but of authorities? No one can approve of the grim ferocity, reminiscent of the literary feuds of Alexander Pope, with which German savants sometimes debate problems of theoretic interest. Yet even such billingsgate as Dührring levelled at Helmholtz is preferable to obsequious discipleship. It testifies, at all events, to the glorious belief that in the republic of learning fame and position count for naught, that the most illustrious scientist shall not be free from the criticism of the meanest _Privatdozent_, But the nonconformism should be rational. It is infantile to cling to leading-strings but it is no less childish to thrust out one’s tongue at doctrines that happen to disagree with those of one’s own clique. Indeed, frequently both forms of puerility are combined: it is easy to sneer with James at Wundt or to assault the selectionists under cover of De Vries’s mutationism. A mature thinker will forego the short and easy but misleading road. Following Fechner, he will be cautious in his belief but equally cautious in his disbelief.

It is only such spiritual freedom that makes the insistence on academic freedom a matter worth fighting for. After all, what is the use of a man’s teaching what he pleases, if he quite sincerely retails the current folk-lore? In one of the most remarkable chapters of the “Mechanik” Ernst Mach points out that the detriment to natural philosophy due to the political power of the Church is easily exaggerated. Science was retarded primarily not because scientists were driven by outward compulsion to spread such and such views but because they uncritically swallowed the cud of folk-belief. _Voilà l’ennemi!_ In the insidious influence of group opinions, whether countenanced by Church, State or a scientific hierarchy, lies the basic peril. The philosophic habit of unremitting criticism of one’s basic assumptions is naturally repugnant to a young and naïve culture, and it cannot be expected to spring up spontaneously and flower luxuriantly in science while other departments of life fail to yield it nurture. Every phase of our civilization must be saturated with that spirit of positive scepticism which Goethe and Huxley taught before science can reap a full harvest in her own field. But her votaries, looking back upon the history of science, may well be emboldened to lead in the battle, and if the pioneers in the movement should fail they may well console themselves with Milton’s hero: “... and that strife was not inglorious, though the event was dire!”

ROBERT H. LOWIE

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is at once a product of civilization and a stimulus to its development. It is the solvent in which the inarticulate and conflicting aspirations of a people become clarified and from which they derive directing force. Since, however, philosophers are likely to clothe their thoughts in highly technical language, there is need of a class of middle-men-interpreters through whom philosophy penetrates the masses. By American tradition, the philosophers have been professors; the interpreters, clergymen. Professors are likely to be deflected by the ideas embodied in the institutions with which they associate themselves. The American college, in its foundations, was designated a protector of orthodoxy and still echoes what Santayana has so aptly called the “genteel tradition,” the tradition that the teacher must defend the faith. Some of the most liberal New England colleges even now demand attendance at daily chapel and Sunday church. Less than a quarter of a century ago, one could still find, among major non-sectarian institutions, the clergyman-president, himself a teacher, crowning the curriculum with a senior requirement, Christian Evidences, in support of the Faith.

The nineteenth century organized a vigorous war against this genteel tradition. Not only were the attacks of rationalism on dogma reinforced by the ever-mounting tide of scientific discovery within our institutions of learning, but also the news of these scientific discoveries began to stir the imagination of the public, and to carry the conflict of science and theology beyond the control of the church-college. The greatest leaven was Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” of which two American editions were announced as early as 1860, one year after its publication in England. The dogma of science came publicly to confront the dogma of theology. Howsoever conservative the college, it had to yield to the new intellectual temper and the capitulation was facilitated by the army of young professors whom cheapened transportation and the rumour of great achievements led to the universities of Germany.

From the point of view of popular interest, the immediate effects of these pilgrimages were not wholly advantageous to philosophy. In losing something of their American provincialism, these pilgrims also lost their hold on American interests. The problems that they brought back were rooted in a foreign soil and tradition. To students they appeared artificial and barren displays of technical skill. Thus an academic philosophy of professordom arose, the more lonely through the loss of the ecclesiastical mediators of the earlier tradition. But here and there American vitality showed through its foreign clothes and gradually an assimilation took place, the more easily, perhaps, since German idealism naturally sustains the genteel tradition and thrives amid the modes of thought that Emerson had developed independently and for which his literary gifts had obtained a following.

Wherever New England has constituted the skeletal muscles of philosophic culture, its temper has remained unchanged. Calvinism was brought to America because it suited this temper, and the history of idealism in America is the history of its preservation by adaptation to a changing environment of ideas. Its marks are a sense of the presence of the Divine in experience and a no less strong sense of inevitable evil. Jonathan Edwards writes, “When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold His awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, with the lowering thunder-clouds, in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains.” Emerson’s version is: “Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws.... She arms and equips an animal to find it place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence.... Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. Every moment instructs and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form.” And Royce’s: “When they told us in childhood that we could not see God just _because_ he was everywhere, just because his omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegorical fashion.... The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the unknown source of experience, that already, in the very least of daily experiences, you unconsciously know him as something present.”

In its darker aspect this temper gives us Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” whose choices we may not fathom. But Emerson is not far behind: “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.... At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. Etc.... Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.” For Royce, “the worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us--the tragedy of the diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of whatever is significant.”

Emersonian philosophy fails in two respects to satisfy the demands of the puritanical temperament upon contemporary thought. In building altars to the “Beautiful Necessity,” it neglects to assimilate the discoveries of science, and it detaches itself from the Christian tradition within which alone this spirit feels at home. Both of these defects are met by the greatest of American idealists, Professor Royce.

In character and thought Royce is the great reconciler of contradictions. Irrational in his affections, and at his best in the society of children, he stands for the absolute authority of reason; filled with indignation at wrong and injustice, he explains the presence of evil as an essential condition for the good; keenly critical and not optimistic as to the concrete characters of men, he presents man as the image of God, a part of the self-representative system through which the Divine nature unfolds itself. Never was there a better illustration of Pascal’s dictum that we use our reasons to support what we already believe, not to attain conclusions. And never was there greater self-deception as to the presence of this process.

What man not already convinced of an Absolute could find in error the proof of a deeper self that knows in unity all truth? Who else could accept the dilemma “_either_ ... your real world yonder is through and through a world of ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less comprehending through your experience, _or else_, in so far as it is real and outer, it is unknowable, an inscrutable X, an absolute mystery”? Without the congeniality of belief, where is the thrill in assimilating self-consciousness as infinite to a greater Infinite, as the infinite systems of even numbers, or of odd numbers, or an infinity of other infinite series can be assimilated to the greater infinity of the whole number series as proper parts? Yet Royce has been able to clothe these doctrines with vast erudition and flashes of quaint humour, helped out by a prolix and somewhat desultory memory, and give them life.

By virtue of the obscurantist logic inherent in this as in other transcendental idealisms, there is a genuine attachment to a certain aspect of Christianity. The identification of the Absolute with the Logos of John in his “Spirit of Modern Philosophy” and the frequent lapses into Scriptural language are not mere tricks to inspire abstractions with the breath of life. By such logic “selves” are never wholly distinct. If we make classifications, they are all _secundum quid_. Absolute ontological sundering is as mythical as the Snark. The individual is essentially a member of a community of selves that establishes duties for him under the demands of Loyalty. This is the basis of Royce’s ethics. But the fellowship in this community is also a participation in the “beloved community” within which sin, atonement, and the dogma of Pauline Christianity unfold themselves naturally in the guise of social psychology. In such treatment of the “Problem of Christianity” there is at most only a slight shifting of emphasis from the somewhat too self-conscious individualism of his earliest philosophy.

Royce used to tell a story on himself that illustrates a reaction of a part of the public to idealistic philosophy. At the close of a lecture before a certain woman’s organization, one of his auditors approached him with the words: “Oh, my dear Professor Royce, I _did_ enjoy your lectures _so_ much! Of course, I didn’t understand one word of it, but it was so evident _you_ understood it all, that it made it _very_ enjoyable!” The lady, though more frank in her confession, was probably not intellectually inferior to a considerable portion of the idealist’s public. James notes the fascination of hearing high things talked about, even if one cannot understand. But time is, alas, productive of comparative understanding, and it may be with Royce, as with Emerson before him, that growth of understanding contributes to narrowing the circle of his readers. The imported mysteries of Eucken and Bergson offer newer thrills, and a fuller sense of keeping up to date.

If Royce’s philosophy of religion has not the success that might have been anticipated among those seeking a freer religion, it is probably, as Professor Hocking suggests, because “idealism does not do the work of religious truth.” Royce has no interest in churches or sects. Christ is for him little more than a shadow. Prayer and worship find no place in his discussion. The mantle of the genteel tradition must then fall on other shoulders, probably those of Hocking himself. His “Meaning of God in Human Experience” is an effort to unite realism, mysticism, and idealism to establish Christianity as “organically rooted in passion, fact, and institutional life.” Where idealism has destroyed the fear of Hell, this new interpretation “restores the sense of infinite hazard, a wrath to come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in the process of time and by the use of our freedom”!

In this philosophy, we ask, what has religion done for humanity and how has it operated? Its effects appear in “the basis of such certainties as we have, our self-respect, our belief in human worth, our faith in the soul’s stability through all catastrophes of physical nature, and in the integrity of history.” But if we accept this “mass of actual deed, once and for all accomplished under the assurance of historic religion” and through the medium of religious dogma and practice, does this guarantee the future importance of religion? Much has been accomplished under the conception that the earth was flat, but the conception is nevertheless not valid.

It is too soon to estimate the depth of impression that this philosophy will make on American culture. Professor Hocking warns us against hastening to judge that the world is becoming irreligious. He believes that the current distaste for the language of orthodoxy may spring from the opposite reason, that man is becoming potentially more religious. If so, this fact may conspire with the American tradition of the church-college to verify Professor Cohen’s assertion that “the idealistic tradition still is and perhaps will long continue to be the prevailing basis of philosophic instruction in America.” But there are signs that point to an opposite conclusion and the means of emancipation are at hand both in a change of popular spirit and within philosophy itself.

The economic and social conditions that scattered the more adventurous of the New Englanders through the developing West, and the tides of immigration of the 19th century, have weakened the hold of the Calvinistic spirit. These events, and scientific education, are producing a generation that can look upon the beauties of nature, be moved to enjoyment, admiration, and wonder by them without, on that account, feeling themselves in the presence of a supernatural Divine principle. Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling of helplessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earthquake, it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in reinforced concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, an antitoxin, and sanitary measures. There are no longer altars built to the Beautiful Necessity.

Within philosophy, the most radical expression of this attitude appears in the New Realism, and in the instrumentalism of Dewey. In 1910, six of the younger American philosophers issued in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method_ “The Programme and First Platform of Six Realists,” followed shortly by a co-operative volume of studies to elaborate the doctrine. Their deepest bond of union is a distaste for the romantic spirit and obscurantist logic of Absolute Idealism. Hence their dominant idea is to cut at the very foundations of this system, the theory of relations in general, and the relation of idea and object in particular. Young America is not fond of the subtleties of history, hence these realists take their stand upon the “unimpeachable truth of the accredited results of science” at a time when, by the irony of history, science herself has begun to doubt.