Chapter III

I have gone a long way about and brought up with a conclusion that on its own showing should be as valid for modernism as for humanism. That, indeed, is my own sense of it--that here is the organic economy of thought in whatever field. And in fact, as I have intimated, its application is likely to be most obvious in the sciences, which we come upon after the mind is in some measure formed. Each science has a special articulation and nomenclature outside our normal experience, without which we can think but meagrely and vaguely in that area. The part they play there is evident. To these articulate particles it gives precise definition, at once for the sake of accuracy of calculation and for the sake of mutual understanding and wide co-operation among those who pursue it. Incidentally by its technology it escapes the loose corruptions with which lay usage always threatens a vernacular. The extraordinary results of the discipline which establishes these articulations, these precisions, and these communities need no bush.

It is perhaps less obvious that discipline is even more imperative in that other area which the casual, voluble experience of living begins to articulate before we are aware, laying the premisses of that common mind which we tend to take for granted as a native gift. Though it is not a native gift, no man feels deficient in it, as Descartes pointed out. What it yields him is life as he knows it; it is his apprehension of reality. In one sense this trust is his intellectual virtue. It marks his faith in the judgments of reason--the best reason he knows. He may be aware of his ignorance in this or that field of knowledge--know that he knows nothing of astronomy, of Homer, of plumbing, of torts. But no one knows everything; these ignorances are comparable to those of other men; by turning his mind to them he could master them.

By turning his mind! This contrast between _mind_, on the one hand, and on the other hand specific knowledge to which a _mind_ may be turned, is the very heart of the conflict between humanist and modernist. To the modernist, justifiably proud of his special methods, that mind which comes to him unaware is a casual and amateur affair. As a process of reason it is the way fools think, and asses, and the cohorts of stupidity. Well, it is.

To the humanist, however, this liability is precisely its momentous importance. Here is mind itself by which man becomes human out of brute, mind in symmetry as it develops by confronting life and carrying on the adventure. According to its competence it apprehends the scene, the play, and the players, conceives the significance of the plot, exercises its judgment, lays its guiding principles, and conducts its affairs in wisdom or unwisdom, justice or injustice, harmony or inharmony. That it may be the mind of a fool is always its tragic possibility.

In shifting the basic common discipline from humane letters to natural science, then, modernism has, in so far, _abandoned the mind_. I say this in conscious enjoyment of hyperbole. There remains just so much of mind as develops in casual experience--that corrupting casual experience which science so sedulously avoids in its technology. But the point at issue is one of discipline, the conscious extension of mental competence beyond the limits of casual experience. Plainly the discipline of natural science neglects much of the mind as irrelevant.

For natural science is an attempt to picture and understand the material universe as it still would be if the knower were not in it--things and their relations to each other. The virtue sought by the man of science is the ability to ignore what he, by the accident of his conscious existence, thrusts into the situation. Obviously this discipline will articulate the consciousness for thought only here within this field of knowledge--among things and their relations, to the rigid exclusion of the knower and his affairs.

Humane letters, on the other hand, make no such exclusion. They too deal with things and their relations. But they include what natural science ignores--the knower and his responsive evaluation of what he knows. Literature looks out from the common centre at which the experience of life itself places us. It is an imaginative, reflective extension of that experience. And it does directly what experience itself does only indirectly if at all, for being articulate or nothing--symbol and meaning forever hand in glove--it specifically articulates the reader’s mind, enriching and clarifying the premisses of consciousness with which in turn that mind thinks in the field of common human responsibility. Here is the telling difference between the literate and the empiric mind--not in intelligence, not in specific knowledge, but in the substance and quality of the premisses of thought.

Literature uses the unprecise vernacular, it is true; but that is its virtue. For the vernacular, in contrast with any and all technologies, is the idiom of the mind itself, its fundamental humanising tradition. It is the essential historic feat of any civilisation, not so much perhaps to have conceived its guiding ideas--ideas change--as, in conceiving them, to have slowly evolved the articulate elements by which its heritors may conceive their own. Nature cares nothing for them or for what is made of them. They are none of hers. We come by them only through familiar contact with the tradition which has shaped and accumulated them.

Here, then, is the great human task--now for the first time in the history of the West abandoned to the mercies of casual experience. Man is a social being in more than his habits and his institutions. His humanity itself hangs on his sociability. Deprive him of his social legacy of articulations and he is once again the sub-human animal. It was the essence of humanism as a discipline that it attempted, not to inculcate a doctrine, but to carry on and on this ultimate humanising process. And in this it served three ends, distinct but interdependent--mind, community, and the tradition on which both mind and community depend.