Chapter II

Where is the bottom of the well into which discipline--vaunted so highly by both humanist and modernist--is poured? Discipline, as distinguished from any guise of propaganda, is a delicate affair. Its concern is not for the specific ideas with which perforce it must do its deed, and which it pours into the depths in an unremitting stream. Its subtle task is to enrich and enhance the powers of thought and yet leave them free--free to think, and free to judge even the ideas by which they are enriched.

The bottom lies deeper, therefore, than the level at which the Huxleys, the Spencers, the Eliots placed the controversy--the relative merits of two sorts of knowledge, of Homer and Sophocles, of Plato’s Ideas and Cæsar’s battles, of _Jerusalem Recovered_ and _Paradise Lost_, as against the constitution of matter and the laws of nature. These relative merits are themselves matters of judgment, as the controversy witnesses. And it is precisely the quality of such judgment that is momentously at stake.

Of course the Hellenist must know his Greek and the astronomer his physics. They are specialists, and the question is not of them. It is a question of that common humanity of which Hellenist and astronomer, poet and chemist, man of leisure and man of affairs are alike responsible members. As between humanist and modernist a sort of official decision has already been rendered, and the common discipline, together with the faith that animates it, has gone over to the sciences. Is it ill-humoured to point out that the decision itself has been arrived at and progressively confirmed in that field of judgment from which discipline has been progressively withdrawn? At all events, it is toward that deeper level that I am delving, to get at the roots of that common humanity.

The Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man is a biological way of dealing with a reflection old in the tradition of humanism. From Plato down, curiosity has toyed with theories of the origin of language. Language is patently artificial, a device, a product of human ingenuity. That a child is born without speech might mean nothing, since there are instincts that emerge only in the course of development. But language differs from language; every term in every language is arbitrary; the child, whatever his blood, picks up the speech of his community; individuals differ in the extent and character of their deliberate acquisition. All these considerations point to its artificiality. One speaks, indeed, before one’s mind is mature enough to reflect upon the accomplishment. But that is the very point, as will appear in a moment.

Whatever the theory, the origin of speech implies ancestors before speech. And those ancestors--is it fantastic to identify them, in a slightly modified version of our evolutionary history, with the prehuman race of the Darwinian rendering? We should not, I think, have called them men. For bound up with language is all that we think of as human--the power of communication, the fixation and tradition of thought, the comparison and criticism of ideas, co-operation on the basis of common principles, all history and philosophy, all literature and science, the very process of reason itself prior to its expression.

I say reason, not intelligence. Intelligence itself--a primary mystery--is scarcely the monopoly of men. The cat here on the hearth has a share of it, and the mouse of which she is apparently dreaming. It is not intelligence that distinguishes the human species sweepingly from the brute, but a particular deployment of it, a way of using it or managing it, that we call _reason_.

To linger in imagination over this moment of evolution is to linger over a transition from the dumb fluidity of animal consciousness to its articulation by the use of language. Sheer animal consciousness may alight, perhaps, upon any imaginable concept. Its rational defect is its inability to return after departure to the same spot. Who by taking pains could return again to precisely the number 91 but for the articulating, identifying, stabilising symbol? The rational use of the native intelligence thus hangs upon an ability to identify particles of consciousness arbitrarily shaped, to quit them, and then to return. And speech serves this end; so far as it is carried it precipitates fluid consciousness into stable, negotiable blocks for the architectural structures of thought.

Now it is true that what is original, what is new, what is invented or discovered by the thinking mind itself emerges, not in the articulate particles--they are perforce old stuff--but in the perception by the intelligence of relations between them. This spontaneous perception of relationships is the play of reason; thought is a sort of creative miracle.

On the other hand--and this is the point I am driving at--just because thought is the perception of relationships between particles of old stuff, the particles themselves condition these perceptions. I see only such relationships as hold between the particles I happen to possess; certainly I can see none between such as I do not possess. And those I have are none of my own creation. They are handed down to me. In this sense the power of thought the “faculty” of reason, is a _tradition_.

In fancy I may picture a Romulus--abandoned on a hillside and suckled by a wolf--inventing for himself a system of symbols with which to articulate his own fluid consciousness, conning them into spontaneity, and building them into thought. But in reality he would not--he could not. The actual articulations with which one thinks are not native to the consciousness. Who of us can count more than a stray one or two of his own invention, even with the hint and model of a whole armory of them already in possession? They are, on the contrary, a heritage. And what one can think is conditioned by that heritage--such items of it as through hap or care one has previously acquired.

All that I, for instance, can think in the field of chemistry is sharply limited to what I can construe with the articulate particles in that area of my consciousness. In my actual experience that area has been poorly endowed. All that I can think there I could say in a bad quarter of an hour. And what I can think there is cabined and cribbed by the special particles I happen to possess.

This analysis, so obviously valid in any special field of thought in which one is aware of one’s ignorance, holds no less, it seems to me, for that universal ignorance in which all of us are born. If it does hold there, it may stand as one version of the hypothesis of human evolution--rational mind out of animal consciousness, man out of brute. The change that effected this evolution was not accomplished, however, once for all in some remote past. The outer device was transmissible, and hence became a racial characteristic. But the change itself must still be re-enacted in every growing child. Something of it is re-enacted in the emergence of every idea in the rational mind. How far it is carried and how complete the evolution depends upon deliberate cultivation.

Intelligence is pure gift, the prior condition and animating agent of all thought. Whether intelligence itself may be increased by exercise is a matter of faith or doubt, as one chooses. In face of a primary mystery one can only be humble and dumb. But of that ingenious artifice, the arbitrary articulation of the consciousness into stable particles, there can be no doubt. It is a human invention in human hands. What can be done with these particles by way of thought depends in a given mind upon their range, the richness of their substance, their stability, and their clarity. And they can, with care, be extended, enriched, stabilised, clarified.

That there are larger units, whole structures of thought, with which discipline may be occupied goes without saying. Not all the heritage of the civilised mind is deposited in these particles. But the larger units are themselves built of the smaller, and what any mind makes of them hangs on its prior possession of the elements of which they are built, and the quality of those elements. In childhood one may have read, say, _Gulliver_, or _Through the Looking Glass_, with delight, and in maturity may still read them with delight. The outer symbols are the same now as then, but the responsive thoughts are not. In response to each symbol now there rises richer substance than the mind then possessed, grounds for relationships which then escaped detection.

The two, indeed--particle and structure--are inseparable in practice. It is in use that the particles have accumulated their substance and quality; it is by finding them in use that the mind identifies and enriches and clarifies them for itself. But it is they, I think--the ultimate premisses of all thought and the basis of all understanding--that lie at the bottom of the well into which discipline is poured.

For in the first place they lie at the deepest level to which discipline can go. That is something. But by a happy fortuity there, at the very node between animal consciousness and rational thought, they occupy a strategic position. Through them the fluid streams of consciousness, rising from below, are articulated for thought--and one thinks what he can with the shapes thus formed. And through these same shapes come the chief enrichments of the consciousness from above. For in reality what I apprehend of the thoughts of others is not their thoughts but my own. It is what I build in my own mind with the particles of my own consciousness called up by the symbols they have used. They are the determinants, coming and going, and a discipline that thickens and deepens and clarifies them enhances at one stroke both the give and the take of the mind, its power to think and its power to learn.

They lie at a strategic point, moreover, in another and no less momentous transaction. They not only articulate the individual mind for thinking; coming from a common tradition they tend, in the measure in which that tradition is mastered, to articulate disparate minds alike. Only so can two minds think the same thought. It is here that mind comes together with mind--or forever fails to come together. And situated between two realms of freedom--the wild realm of animal consciousness and the cultivated realm of reason--they alone are amenable to coercion. Arbitrary agreements, sheer conventions, subsequent to all native idiosyncrasies and prior to all conflict of prejudice or opinion, they are open to utter community. And since in relation to all thinking they are the ultimate premisses, they afford the unquestioned common grounds imperative for mutual understanding and community of idea.

Discipline can thus bring its pressures to bear upon them with a clear conscience, assured that here it can do its essential task without violating its own principles--cultivate the individual judgment without infringing upon its freedom, and bring mind into community with mind without the weakness of assumption or the affront of dogmatism. Assured, too, that in a sort of beneficent circle community itself breeds both mind and further community. For given a broad community in these particles, the common legacy comes the purer to its inheritors; recurrence of each particle confirms and enriches and clarifies it in the experience of each mind. In a community without community, on the other hand, occurrence and recurrence tend rather to lead it astray and confuse it; and though men talk in common symbols, they build them into tacit obliquities of mutual incomprehension.

Is it too much to suggest, in passing, that the phenomenon of the brilliant period, the curious clustering of great names in the bead-roll of history, may be explained as a moment when by a community of mind with mind, here at the basis of all thought, a fine individual clarity and a lively spontaneity of mutual understanding have lifted the current of ideas to a high level? At all events, by such community the capacity of the mind both to think and to learn is heightened and the ardour of thought is stimulated, expression meeting comprehension, and comprehension quickening the impulse to think.