Chapter X: Part 10

It is plain that America has yet to reach that state, and that furthermore a great deal of work by all minds will be necessary to bring her there. No one would argue otherwise. But the sense of urgency one would expect is not noticeably present. We do not seem to realize that we must accelerate our pace of work. There is, so to speak, plenty of slack on the tether of our culture, and we are not running it out with any admirable rapidity. Else, so I think, we would be welcoming the contribution of the Humanists with eagerness and not with resentment.

As it is, we lag and flounder. We are, to take a common instance from literature, prone to make late importations of European tendencies which have already been fully worked out abroad. Consider the vogue of the Dreiserian novel: it is written in America several decades after the Zolaesque novel has been thoroughly studied in France. We import the method of naturalistic fiction--late; we do not import simultaneously the criticism of the method, but go blundering on as if nothing had been previously learned from the experiment. The New Humanists ask us not to be so tardy in a detail like this but to learn more quickly of the past, that is, to _consciously_ create the field of our present out of the best available past. In my opinion, the Humanists can more quickly release us from a multitude of opinions now holding us back than any other American school of thought current. They should enable us to get to the end of our tether that much sooner.

It was clear some time before this point that I do not regard American Humanism as a final resting place. So far as I champion the New Humanists, it is because they can enormously further reaching the end of our present phase. Let us put that end very high. Let us say it is a state of culture as high as that ascribed by Arnold to the Germany of Goethe, or perhaps better, say it is the equal of eighteenth century culture in England, the century Arnold underestimated. Observe I do not say identical with, but equal to, in quality. This achievement for me represents the end of the rope. Because then we shall have thoroughly digested all the ideas of the Western mind from the Greeks to Bertrand Russell: we will be familiar with them all, be able brilliantly to reshuffle them and deal out clever new hands for ourselves. But the game will be always the same--always a preliminary game. For the reason that there is not now current in the Western world _a single new seminiferous principle for human culture_. There may be one accessible, but if so, it is certainly not current. We know or shall know all the existing ideas and there is not a comprehensive regenerating idea in the ensemble. In our present phase we are limited to old ideas and our understanding or misunderstanding of old ideas. We cannot expect a revolutionary change--how can we?--when we have nothing to change ourselves with.

Furthermore, we are not at all ripe for that inward transformation, the only right way to an outward social transformation, the business for us and for our age--according to Arnold. The sense of need for it has not even been born. We have to reach by intense activity the end of the situation in which we are cast before a new situation can begin with its fresh group of possibilities. We have to need something before we can acquire it. The birth of a new need--that alone will profoundly alter the present drift and provide an unexpected future tense for things.

I return to the metaphor of the end of the tether. Most people know now and then the state that it expresses--a compound of well-being, distress and the greatest alertness. Well-being, because one has utilized every resource, put forth every ounce of effort, thought of every possible scheme, done the very best one could to cope with the circumstances. Distress, because the best one has is insufficient for the emergency, because one is at one’s wits’ end, because one needs more power within or help from without to forestall disaster. The greatest alertness, because in one’s desperation one overlooks nothing, one is willing to try anything, one racks oneself for a new plan. In that state one is most realistic, most clear about means and ends, most determined, most dissatisfied, straining at the leash of one’s limitations.

The condition of being at the end of the tether, torn between despair and the highest hopes, preternaturally awake to any means promising deliverance, marks for me the highest point a Western culture can now attain. It is both the one truly fertile state and a pure cry for deliverance from iron restrictions. It goes without saying that American culture is distant from it. Who will say we experience now the need born of such a state for whole orders of ideas that appear in a time of Renascence, when we have not exhausted our present orders of thought? We are from all appearances so comfortable and optimistic--shall I add slothful?--that even American Humanism is too strong a potion at the present time. We have the illusion of being free while we are in fact tethered at a comparatively short range. Our progress must consist in finding out the length of our tether, and for that Humanism is one of the most available means. The Great Revolt will be the revolt against the limits of Humanism as new vistas of action, thought and being become discernible beyond the end of the tether. But just now our energies appear to be all engaged in the lesser warfare between Naturalism and Humanism.

It is nevertheless certain that what has here been named the dilemma of the liberated will emerge more and more strikingly as time goes on, for the pressures of the situation itself will steadily extrude it. Their own experience and reflection will compel a larger and larger vanguard of Americans to see at the one extremity the pitfalls of romantic heterodoxy and at the other the major defects of classical orthodoxy. Painting psychological serfdom in alluring colors will not seduce their judgment, nor will they be convinced that the full secret for making freemen has been entrusted to the New Humanists. Of the organized religions they will ask, not solace which might be given, but a hammer to smite man’s shackles, and the hammer will not be forthcoming.

But disagreeable as such a dilemma is, it is a great awakener. It is a challenge to find a means of circumvention. To circumvent it, however, we shall assuredly have to reach the end of our present resources. It can not be resolved on any terms less exacting.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I had thought to append a selected bibliography of books bearing on American Humanism, but there seems little point in duplicating here--with certain subtractions and a few additions--the bibliography at the back of _Humanism and America_. That now historic symposium--and I am greatly indebted to the publishers, Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., for their permission to make excerpts from it--will probably aid the reader hitherto unread in the New Humanism to become acquainted in the quickest fashion with the leading personalities among the New Humanists and the extensive ramification of their views. Such a reader should, however, if he is the man to hoe a long row, press on to the complete works of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Houghton Mifflin and Co. have kindly allowed me to quote from several of Babbitt’s books and from the later volumes of More’s _Shelburne Essays_, as well as from _Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres_ by Henry Adams. I wish to acknowledge with thanks other favors of the like kind received from the following:

For permission to quote extracts from _The Thing_, _Orthodoxy_, and _Heretics_ by G. K. Chesterton--Dodd, Mead and Co.; for permission to use a passage from Julien Benda’s _The Treason of the Intellectuals_--William Morrow and Co.; for permission to make brief quotations from A. N. Whitehead’s _Science and the Modern World_, A. S. Eddington’s _Science and the Unseen World_, Walter Lippmann’s _A Preface to Morals_, John Dewey’s _Democracy and Education_, and from the works of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater--the Macmillan Co.; for permission to use passages from Stuart P. Sherman’s _On Contemporary Literature_--Henry Holt and Co.; for permission to extract matter from Stuart P. Sherman’s _Shaping Men and Women_, T. S. Eliot’s _For Lancelot Andrews_, H. G. Wells’s _Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, and Hilaire Belloc’s preface to Ruth Pitter’s _First and Second Poems_--Doubleday, Doran and Co.; for permission to quote relevant passages from Margaret Naumburg’s _The Child and the World_ and Herbert Read’s _The Sense of Glory_--Harcourt, Brace and Co. Similar courtesies were extended to me by Charles Scribner and Sons in the case of excerpts from Jacques Maritain’s _Three Reformers_, the Yale University Press in the case of Robert Shafer’s _Progress and Science_, the Princeton University Press in the case of L. T. More’s _The Dogma of Evolution_, the University of North Carolina Press in the case of Norman Foerster’s _The American Scholar_, Horace Liveright, Inc., in the case of Charles Fort’s _The Book of the Damned_, and, lastly, the Viking Press in the case of Sorel’s _Reflections on Violence_. To all I am grateful.

I may add that the American reader who enjoys following the progress of a literary controversy as the French appear to enjoy their polemical outbreaks will find the pages of the _Bookman_ from month to month alive with the debating points of the New Humanists. For further information on the Douglas Proposals spoken of rather hopefully in the chapter on Humanism and economics, see _Unemployment or War_ by Maurice Colbourne, published by Coward-McCann, Inc.

Finally, I will name a very few books that have been of great service to me in forming my own point of view as distinct from the humanistic viewpoint. They are, in metaphysics, _The Three Conventions_ by Denis Saurat, published by the Dial Press; in psychology, _Beyond Behaviorism_ by Robert Courtney, brought out by Grant Publications, Inc.; in literature, _Readers and Writers_ and _The Art of Reading_, both by A. R. Orage, the former published by Knopf, and the latter by Farrar and Rinehart, Inc.

G. M.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Born in 1865 at Dayton, Ohio, graduated from Harvard in 1889, member of the Harvard faculty since 1894.

[2] For a full appreciation of Norton, the reader should see the essay on Norton in the eleventh series of the _Shelburne Essays_ by P. E. More.

[3] In view of what Benda goes on to say, read Humanism here for humanitarianism.

[4] That is, Humanism.

[5] In a very interesting paper written shortly before his death G. Stanley Hall recounted his experiences among phrenologists, anthropologists, “character analysts,” psycho-analysts and intelligence testers for real light on the nature of “I.” The results were so meagre that at the end of his life he could still say: “I want to strip before analyzers who can diagnose not only my abilities, but my character, disposition, merits, and defects, and tell me, even at the eleventh hour, _who and what I really am_.” (My italics.)

[6] More, I believe, has more intellectualized his conception of the inner check than has Babbitt. I myself prefer the hints of Babbitt on this topic to the explanations of More which seem to me to harden the conception too much. The two men appear also to differ on the will, Babbitt regarding it in the Oriental way as anterior and superior to the reason and the flux of personality, whereas More seems to follow Christian tradition which usually makes the will a mode of activity belonging to the flux. I follow Babbitt in the discussion of will later in my chapter. The reader, however, is advised to consult the _Definitions of Dualism_ which More appended to the Eighth Series of the _Shelburne Essays_ for full light on these differences and especially for the most ambitious attempt to put the doctrine and discipline of Humanism into a precise philosophic-psychological framework.

[7] It is fair to say that removed from its context this statement sounds harsher than it really is.

[8] In the special supplement of the _New Republic_ for July 16, 1930, which was devoted to homage to Herbert Croly, the psychological conclusions Croly reached were touched obliquely, lightly or haltingly by some of the contributors, totally ignored by the rest.

[9] It may interest some readers to know that this is why consistently throughout my writing career I have refused to classify myself as a New Humanist despite my manifestly strong sympathy for the school.