Chapter V: Part 5

Here again we have to combat psychological obtuseness. To repeat: a logical understanding of a text is one thing, and quite another is a living warm apprehension, a psychological understanding, of the same text. The first is an affair of words: the second is more real, related to feelings and conduct as well as to the formulating intellect. Now it so happens that it is a peculiarity of our age to be blank-minded whenever there is question of a psychological method to realize in practice the ideas and ideals we adopt. We think that the mere entertaining of the ideas and ideals we are attracted by is sufficient, we think that we shall naturally grow to embody them completely without the need of any special discipline or “way of life.” In short, never do we inquire into “ways of life” at all, never do we exercise the kind of thought Arnold employed when he sought in the Biblical texts for the _method_ and _secret_ of Jesus. In dealing with the New Humanism in its aspect of a technique for living intelligently, we must therefore make a special and unusual effort to see the theory in terms of actual practice.

There is no initial difficulty in feeling the spirit of the New Humanist discipline, for though it derives from Aristotle, it is as thoroughly modern as the laboratory spirit. No one could in fact be a stauncher supporter of the modern spirit defined by Irving Babbitt as “the positive and critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take things on authority” than Babbitt himself. Only, he adds, you must be a complete positivist. He then goes on to exhort his readers to be individualists: “the man who plants himself, not on outer authority but on experience, is an individualist.” Aristotle, Babbitt takes to be the arch-type of the positive and critical Humanist, for Aristotle teaches us “how to have standards and at the same time not to be immured in dogma.” All this, as I say, is quite in the modern spirit and goes to explain the appeal Babbitt exercises on many young Americans who cannot be accused of yearning for some long-gone age and whose defection from the banners of Menckenism has puzzled some people.

At this point should be brought up the Babbittean distinguishing of three levels on which life may be experienced: the religious, the humanistic, and the naturalistic. The naturalistic we have seen exemplified by a host of Rousseauists and Baconians, of sentimentalists and utilitarians, of all those who in one way or another submerge Man into Nature. The religious level is occupied by the great systems of Buddhism and Christianity. Here the supernatural enters, here the consuming search is for the Absolute, here there is dying to this world and here there is the life more abundant that comes through rebirth into a world of greater consciousness. The _via media_ is alleged to be the humanistic life, represented in the past by Confucianism in the Orient and by Aristotelianism in the Occident. The middle way has, as outlined by Babbitt, its special methodology, its special virtues, and its special attitudes. For example, we have already noticed its hostile attitude toward Naturalism, its clash with Naturalism on first principles. On the other hand, its attitude toward those who work on the religious plane is sympathetic. Quotations bearing on this could be accumulated but a recent utterance by Irving Babbitt will do for all. “For my own part,” he said in _Humanism and America_, “I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists. Though I see no evidence that humanism is necessarily ineffective apart from dogmatic and revealed religion, there is, it seems to me, evidence that it gains immensely in effectiveness when it has a background of religious insight.”

But to the New Humanist the reasons for risking one’s life on the religious level do not, one judges, seem overwhelming. Here is one of Babbitt’s statements on that point, a statement on which I reserve comment for the present. “I have been struck,” he says cannily, “in my study of the past by the endless self-deception to which man is subject when he tries to pass too abruptly from the naturalistic to the religious level. The world, it is hard to avoid concluding, would have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting out to be superhuman; and this consideration would seem to apply with special force to a generation like the present that is wallowing in the trough of naturalism. After all to be a good humanist is merely to be moderate and sensible and decent. It is much easier for a man to deceive himself and others regarding his supernatural lights than it is regarding the degree to which he is moderate and sensible and decent.”

Though Babbitt seems to emphasize here the fear of self-deception as the main ground for preferring the humanistic plane to the religious, the New Humanist can actually make out a very strong case based on hard commonsense. A. R. Orage, the finest living English literary critic, has suggested what the sensible attitude, in the present state of our knowledge, should be toward religion. So interesting a point of view justifies a rather lengthy quotation.

“Suppose that a remote posterity, unversed in mathematics and the scientific research equipment of our age, should inherit one of our current science manuals. There they would read or, rather decipher, such statements as that light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second; that the sun is 92 million miles distant from the earth, and that the light of the nearest star takes four and a half light years to reach us. What would they make of it all? Some of them, it is probable, would hold that their forerunners must have possessed a faculty lost to themselves and in consequence would attach a mystical significance to the unverifiable dogmas; they might even repeat these dogmas as possibly magical formulas. But undoubtedly the best common sense of the day, in the absence of the means of verification, would dismiss the statements as being childish guesses or, at best, as barbarous abracadabra. Only a very few would suspect that perhaps we were not such fools as we appeared, and give us suspended credit for a method behind our madness. But our method itself and the instruments we employ would be still to seek.

“The foregoing picture may serve to illustrate what may possibly--let us say no more than possibly--be our own situation in regard to the ancient ‘science’ of religion. We have inherited a few of the textbooks once circulated among the illuminati of more or less extinct civilizations, and we find them to contain statements of equal exactitude and incredibility concerning things of which we have no verifiable knowledge, as that there is a God Who is a trinity of Persons, Who created the Universe according to Reason, and Man in his own image, and Who placed us in the world with potentialities of consciously becoming like unto Himself. Some of us today are disposed, like our imagined descendants, to take these traditional statements mystically; to repeat them as magical formulas; and to assume that a lost faculty, the so-called religious sense, was possessed by our ancestors of ancient Egypt, India, Persia and Syria. So relatively powerful, in fact, are these that their attitude towards the inherited dogmas of ancient religion is still the standard of respectability. The weight of common sense, however, is slowly but surely making itself felt; and the day is not far off when the intelligence of our civilization will explicitly decline even to be interested in grandiose statements apparently insusceptible of proof. Only a few, a very few, will continue to suspect that perhaps the Egyptians, the Buddhists, the Pythagoreans and the Gnostics were people very like ourselves in respect of faculty and unlike us only in the same respect in which we shall differ from a remote posterity without our science, namely, in the possession, not of a lost faculty, but of a lost method or technique. And for these few, too, the method or technique is still to seek--or perhaps only to recognize.”

The foregoing is more than a caution against the easy specification of what religious experience is; it also reinforces the attitude--a strictly modern one which most of the New Humanists adopt--of wariness toward the religious life. But can we find in our ordinary diurnal living anything that corresponds to the humanistic way and to the naturalistic way? Nothing is simpler than to exemplify the latter, for we all live naturalistically most of the time. Most men, Thoreau observed, lead lives of quiet desperation. Most men must work for their livelihood, and the work they are driven to do holds little or no attraction for them. (I do not speak of the increasing number of intolerable jobs an industrial society creates, but rather of the monotonous occupations of many members of the middle class.) The time spent in offices each day is for many men so much time spent in bondage, cut off from their vivid interests: they repine, but succumb to a dull routine. Their permanent mood is one of passive endurance. Like horses they uncomplainingly draw their loads and rejoice when at five o’clock they are let out to pasture. This is a usual and mild instance of merely naturalistic living. The humanistic attitude, on the other hand, is, toward the identical necessity and circumstances, an active one. A curb is put on futile repining: vain longings are disciplined: the situation is faced with the minimum useless feeling. The question for the Humanist is, granting the inescapable circumstances, how can I make the best use of them to my advantage as a human being? How may I bend them to suit my design in life, how may I gather them into focus? How may I extract from my burdens values that are not accessible to the mere beast of burden? At this point Arnold’s triumphant converting of his drab job of school inspecting to the main interests of his life springs to mind as an instance of working on the humanistic level. In other words, where it is a case of the disagreeable inevitability, the Naturalist remains under compulsion from the outside: the Humanist, in contrast, makes an effort to alter his attitude from mere negative endurance to a search for positive results in the way of personal discipline and the discovery of unsuspected values inherent in the day’s work. Is his real business in life not the cultivation of the distinctively human, and is not everything grist to that magical mill if one only tries to keep the mill in operation; that is, if one maintains an active attitude toward experience?

But, perhaps some readers are saying, you are merely balancing an act of good sense against the case of unintelligent adjustment: by what right do you label the former humanistic when many avowed Naturalists--Charles Darwin in his years of invalidism, for instance--perform feats of intelligent and heroic overcoming of difficulties? The answer is that the Naturalist often rises above his doctrine just as the Humanist often fails in his discipline, but it still remains true that it is the Humanist who assigns himself the task of organizing a life based on good sense, while the Naturalist puts his confidence in following, so far as he is permitted by events, the grain of his mechanical self. Have we not inherited the nineteenth century Romantic disparagement of good sense in favor of the imagination?

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The central maxim for practising the humanistic life is a crystallization in three words of a large part of Greek wisdom--“Nothing too much.” The New Humanists plan to do not less than to restore to its pristine attractiveness the law of measure extolled by Aristotle and called by Horace--so worthy of praise did it seem to that exquisite poet and epicurean--the Golden Mean.

About this I think there is no difficulty in understanding what the New Humanist leaders are driving at. The law of measure is not legalistic; it cannot be codified. Negatively put, it means, avoid excesses. Positively, it means the rule of temperance, but temperance manifested in the mental and emotional realms as well as in the physical. The real difficulty lies in applying measure to our deeds, our thoughts, our feelings, and it is an immense difficulty, demanding what tact and delicacy, what perceptiveness and reflection, what resolution and zeal. In essays by American Humanists we often run upon certain sayings of Pascal which not only illuminate the import of the law of measure but should serve here to enhance the reader’s sense of what I have just said about its difficulty in operation.

“Grandeur is not shown by being at one extremity, but in touching both at once, and filling the whole space between,” wrote Pascal, and there could not possibly be a better recognition of the _great scope_ for the play of human psychology allowed for by the law of measure. “When we would pursue the virtues to their extremes on either side, vices present themselves, which insinuate themselves imperceptibly there, in their insensible course towards the infinitely great, so that we lose ourselves in vices, and no longer see virtues.” The history of Romanticism (how often!) testifies to the weight of truth in this saying. The following _pensée_ might well be called the essence of the New Humanism. “Excessive or deficient mental powers are alike accused of madness. Nothing is good save mediocrity. To leave the mean is to leave humanity. The greatness of the human soul consists in knowing how to keep the mean. So little is it the case that greatness consists in leaving it, that it lies in not leaving it.” That is the reply the New Humanist can make when it is objected that his strictures on eccentric genius are too harsh. “The greatness of the human soul consists in knowing how to keep the mean.”

For a genius is often simply an exaggeration of one, and but one, of the three major aspects of a man. For we may say that man is a compound of Knowing, Being and Doing. Exaggerate his wish to know into a lust for knowledge (_libido sciendi_), depress at the same time his wish for Being and Doing, and you get the Gargantuan hungerer for knowledge, the monstrous head and the starved heart and impotent faculty for doing, you get an encyclopædist, a Diderot (whose heart was active, however) or a Herbert Spencer. Again exaggerate a man’s wish for Being, let him despise the acquisition of knowledge and the doing of deeds, and you have the lust for feeling (_libido sentiendi_): you have a genius like Rousseau or Schiller. There is also an inordinate lust for power, for doing (_libido dominandi_), which like the lusts for knowledge and for feeling is all-consuming and warps the development of character, and this time you get a monstrous man of action like Napoleon or like some great industrialists of the present era that any one can name. These incarnations of the three great lusts of human nature excite our wonder and admiration: they fascinate us by their “divine madness.” But we remind ourselves that there is also a “divine sanity,” and it seems in the character of Plato or Buddha a finer touch of divinity. Babbitt transcribes for us in his argument directed against the _libido sciendi_, the _libido sentiendi_, and the _libido dominandi_ the Buddhist proverb: “If one man conquer in battle ten thousand men and another man conquer his own self, he is the greatest of conquerors,” and to this he subjoins his own belief that “that man is most human who can check his faculty, even if it be his master-faculty, and his passion, even his ruling passion, in its mid-career, and temper it by its opposite.”

In one phrase, then, the Humanist method is mediation between extremes. It is the finding of the middle way, and I hasten to add that the middle way is never found mechanically, never by merely striking an average between two extremes. It is a strait and narrow way, obvious when it is recognized, but hard to recognize. Finding it is a call upon all of one’s experience: effort, thought, observation, a scale of values, spiritual agility, all are needed to make the discovery of the Golden Path.

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But useless is all writing about the Golden Mean if man has no power of choice, or potentiality of acquiring a power of choice. As well exhort a beggar to buy a palace! Nothing could be vainer than the formulation of a discipline based on selection, selection and again selection, if there is in man no capability for selecting. According to the Mechanists there is not. They have much truth on their side. In the sense that man is self-ignorant and therefore uncontrolled (for who can control what he does not know?), man _is_ a machine. But here is something to ponder on: there is a wide uninvestigated region of man which we may term his potential psychology. Psychology as a science--described truly by its leaders as an infant science--has not yet given us a norm for human psychology, which includes both our actualities and our latencies. An honest worker like Dr. J. B. Watson speaks frankly for all his profession when he says that we have seen no norm, and adds that in his opinion it would be infinitely desirable to find one. The New Humanist, weighing the evidence and testimony of the past, concludes that man has at least the potentialities of gaining self-knowledge and self-control. He therefore seeks to actualize them. He challenges the Mechanists and appeals to our sense of latent psychology. In his effort to build up a working system of psychology based upon potentialities (our human self) as well as upon actualities (our mechanical self), the New Humanist has been more grotesquely misunderstood than at any other point.

We approach now the meaning of the phrases he uses so often,--“a principle of restraint,” “a power of vital control,” “_frein vital_” as against “_élan vital_,” “the inner check.” I have been through the mass of writings directed against Babbitt’s theory, and these terms are harped on with so much irritation that I can only conclude the vocabulary of Babbitt is highly offensive to our age. “Now why the deuce,” peevishly writes one of the younger critics, speaking for all of them, “is virtue, with the Humanists, always made to reside exclusively in what Babbitt calls the ‘will to refrain’?” In the petulance of that question there is perhaps a clue to the psychology of our age, a psychology so extraordinarily blind that it fails to see that a principle of restraint is only another way of saying a principle of selection, as indeed in Babbitt’s writings the two expressions are interchangeable from his first book wherein he spoke of “a humane principle of selection, or what amounts to the same thing, a true principle of restraint.” But a very vocal part of our age is infuriated by the very notion of restraint, and we have to interpret this strange fact. Can it be that, as is sometimes charged, this is really an age of weaklings in the arts and philosophies? It is noticeable that men of strength are usually the very men who most feel the need of curbing themselves, that men of rich and powerful personalities are the ones who try hardest to purge themselves of the merely gratuitous and “temperamental,” that men of real passion are the first to acknowledge need of canalizing it. These men are not afraid that a little discipline will take away their precious personalities: they have so much personality that it is precisely discipline they look for. But what is this outcry on the part of so many of our formative writers against the negative admonition? What feebleness of energy and passion is it that is afraid of being strangled by a “power of vital control”? I am driven to think of the reports of sexologists who say that it is the poorly sexed man whose erotic life is one of excessive indulgence, whereas the powerfully sexed are sensible of the need for some moderation of their desires, and I wonder if many a writer in our day, determined to let nothing stop the expression of his soul (the size of an emmet, alas, in so many cases) is not comparable to the unrestrained man of poor sexual powers.

However that may be, the American intellectuals and artists as a body have totally failed to perceive what may be fairly termed the gallantry of the Humanist conception of “a will to refrain.” For if we could, as it were, put our ordinary selves under a glass and gaze coolly at them, we should see very numerous and complicated phenomena, a flux subject to endless change and relativity, which except for an infinitesimal fraction we are not aware of at all. This world of impressions, and bodily changes, and variations in feeling goes its own way, and we are, it seems, at its mercy. Have most of us any more control of our mental processes than we have of our glandular secretions? But against this imperious self the Humanist dares to assert his very deepest self. He dares to say no to its impulsions. He dares to say, though these phenomena _arise_ in me, I yet shall deal with these arisings, denying some and permitting others to run their natural course. And it is this assertion that I call gallant. The odds are all against the assertion being made good: the attraction of the ordinary self is almost irresistible; and yet man will struggle to assert his freedom of the ebb and flow of his ordinary life. In positive language, the “will to refrain” is an attempt to strike a blow for freedom.

The principle of restraint is dramatized by Babbitt when he calls it the inner check. It is less metaphorical than many terms appropriated by, let us say, psycho-analysts who speak of a “censor,” for example, but still it is only a metaphor. What does it stand for? I find it very difficult to say, for it seems to be on the outskirts of a tremendous conception, a conception that is excessively hard to put into words. Many opponents of American Humanism have thought the inner check to be merely an inhibition, or some streak of puritanism, or in one case an equivalent to what the psycho-analyst means by the censor. As if More and Babbitt were naïve men of limited experience! As if, though trained in skepticism for a lifetime, they would make an error that any fledgeling reviewer could see! No; the meaning of the inner check must be sought in a deeper way if it is to be elicited, and in plumbing for it we must first of all divest ourselves of our usual notions about inhibitions.

Both Babbitt and More have, as a matter of fact, clearly indicated that they held no ordinary conception when they spoke of the inner check.[6] The phrase is probably Babbitt’s, who derived it from Emerson in whose writings it appeared as the inward check; the inward check was referred by Emerson to Hindu scriptures where the meaning was an inward guide or control. This in itself is sufficient to put us on guard against a quick assumption that we understand what it is all about. But there is another reason, equally strong: Babbitt has several times linked up his sense of an inner check with the dæmon of Socrates, who is made to say in the _Phædrus_: “My divine monitor’s wonted sign--now it never occurs save to deter me from something or other I am intending to do.” This is why I said above that the More-Babbitt conception of the inner check appears to me to be on the fringe of a tremendous conception, for I have not the effrontery to regard Socrates as naïve in matters of his own psychology. At the same time, what was meant by the ancient idea of a deterring monitor in one’s breast and what is now meant by the Babbitt-More derivation? The difficulties of an answer are at once visible.

Something like this may be modestly ventured, however. Neither ancient nor modern had or has in mind, when speaking of a dæmon or an inner check, what we may call a sociologically formed conscience. By education we have all had instilled in us a kind of pseudo-conscience: in our childhood and youth older people told us definitely what was right and wrong, they traded on our susceptibility, and now that we have grown critical, we learn that these deeply stamped notions of wrong and right are purely relative, often silly, and in some instances downright harmful. Take anything you please--our sense of sexual shame, for one--and any intelligent person today can riddle much of it by simply showing how arbitrarily we have been conditioned. So much depends on social custom! But the inner check and the Socratic dæmon are not, I feel confident, the products of respectable training.

For, to continue with the case of sexual shame, is there not a true shame as well as a pseudo-shame? Is there not a shame so deep, so primitive, that it seems biological, owing nothing to sociology, a shame that when it is violated seems to overthrow the whole being? Pseudo-shame can be almost painlessly removed, but this organic shame, if corrupted, is corrupted only by a violent wrench to one’s whole character. It is as though something died in one, whereas when sociological shame is taken away, one feels liberated and even gay.

By my line of reasoning, the inner check conception is to be taken as the faint shadow cast down the ages by the Socratic dæmon, and this dæmon in turn I am half-guessing to be a figure of Conscience. But not conscience in our sense, the pseudo-function that Society sets going in us, but--how shall I put it?--some abiding developed sense of how it is fitting that the being Man should conduct himself in a life that may be a school of experience, but certainly reveals no easily accessible master of the school.

For fluid as is the nature of man--and few recent writers have better displayed man’s fluidity than Joseph Wood Krutch in an essay entitled _The Paradox of Humanism_--there does yet seem to be buried in the creature something, almost non-functioning, which we may agree to call a conscience, since it is independent of social conditioning, and this something, this conscience, sometimes says no in emphatic command. Who is there who, on sincere self-examination, does not find there are a few things he knows with absolute certitude he could never do? No power on earth, no conceivable circumstances, he declares to himself, would make me do thus-and-so. And yet why not do them? There may be no consequences that inspire fear, there may even be strong incentives to take the detested course of action. But something internal says Veto so powerfully that there is no possibility of committing the action. _The action would seem like a betrayal of the species one belongs to!_

The interpretation is here offered then that the inner check works in the interests of some essential humanity in us. It seeks to counteract that fluidity of our nature whereby men become beasts or go mad. It warns us when we are about to desert our adult human standards and retrogress to the puerile or infantile or sub-human.

And now I think of the life of Socrates as we have it: the simple dignity, the steadiness of his passion for self-perfection, the courage of his behavior, and all the multitude of other points of homage the world has paid him. And I see his life as a drama of the true conscience: in his illustrious example, a conscience developed, sensitized, responsive, a marvellous monitor surely directing him as to how it was fit that a member of the human species should live.

* * * * *

The technique of the New Humanism, to sum it up, is mediation under the guidance of the vestiges of true conscience still in our psychology. It is as simple as that, and, I am tempted to add, as tremendous as that. To repeat Pascal’s profound words: “To leave the mean is to leave humanity.” The inner check or as I take it the vestige of conscience in modern man warns us when we veer toward barbarous extremes. The activity of the inner check is the very heart of the method, but dependent from the principal technique are several lesser techniques which may now be taken up rapidly and schematically. The New Humanist calls them (a) the right use of illusion, (b) the imitation of nature, and (c) decorum.

(a). The Right Use of Illusion. The quotations are from Babbitt’s _Rousseau and Romanticism_. “Life does not here give an element of oneness and there an element of change. It gives a _oneness that is always changing_. The oneness and the change are inseparable. Now if what is stable and permanent is felt as real, the side of life that is always slipping over into something else or vanishing away entirely is, as every student of psychology knows, associated rather with the feeling of illusion ... The problem of the One and the Many, the ultimate problem of thought, can therefore be solved only by a right use of illusion ... failure (with the problem of the One and the Many) can be retrieved only by a deeper insight into the imagination and its all-important rôle in both literature and life.”

In the above I think we may detect the hand of Joubert who reflected deeply on _illusion et sagesse_. “Joubert,” Paul Elmer More says, “conceives it to be the rôle of the imagination, mediating as it does between sense and reason, to lend its magic and glamour to the latter, to throw as it were a veil of divine illusion over some essential truth.... The imagination must be really free and spontaneous, and the truth itself must not be too precisely formulated, if we are to arrive at that vital fusing of illusion and insight with the accompanying sense of infinitude that is found in the true symbol.”

In the ideal Humanist then the Imagination coöperates with Reason. Its rôle is not debased in order to exalt good sense as happened in the Neo-Classicism of the eighteenth century, nor is it made antagonistic to good sense as was done in the romantic recoil from Pope and other eighteenth century men. Something like the play of Imagination in behalf of Reason as we behold it in Plato is what Babbitt and More contend is the Imagination’s highest function.

(b). The Imitation of Nature. “The first point to observe,” notes Babbitt, “is that according to Aristotle one is to get his general nature not on authority or second hand, but is to disengage it directly for himself from the jungle of particulars that he has before his eyes. He is not, says Aristotle, to imitate things as they are, but as they ought to be. Thus conceived, imitation is a creative act. Through all the welter of the actual one penetrates to the real and so succeeds without ceasing to be individual in suggesting the universal.” The consideration above is not purely literary. The Humanist with his practical attitude toward the leading of “the good life” tries to form a model before his eyes of what normal representative human nature is and to imitate that. Out of human nature as it actually is he tries to make a general picture of what it ought to be, and to hold that up as a guide for his efforts to become more representative in his own person. Since many people apparently find it hard to receive much meaning from such abstract statements as the preceding, since they are not at once and vividly conscious of the vast difference between a standard of human nature and the average of human nature, I may be pardoned for urgently recommending a close study of Charles Maurras’s explicit account of how the normal (or perfect) man appears to his mind and imagination. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of such an attempt as Maurras’s. Classicism, if it is to be a life, must be more than a set of ideas and a discipline for actions: it must rally the emotions and make use of their great driving force. It happens that our emotions can be appealed to by images, and hence the desirability of forming as concrete an image as possible of what the classical man, man _par excellence_, is like. In his _Prologue to an Essay on Criticism_, Maurras has said: “Good taste is the taste of the perfect man.” He then goes on:

“There is such a thing as a perfect man. I mean that it is not difficult to conceive a man who should fulfil exactly the idea of our common condition and who could serve as a model for all of us. I hope I shall be excused for not bestowing upon this fictitious creature (fictitious but true) the nickname of _Beau Idéal_: that name crops up whenever people want to talk German or abandon a subject in favor of a vague terminology. People who argue about the ideal do not mean by that the total of the characteristics that build up and complete a being, but, as they say in their jargon, something over and above. The perfect man fulfils the definition of man, the ideal man deforms it here and there; I hasten to add that in the ideal man excesses are balanced by defects, and extravagances by omissions.

“By the perfect man I do not mean a mediocre figure in which virtues and faults are balanced. I am thinking of the limit of human power. Monsters and prodigies do not exceed that limit, as is commonly said. They are very well within it, like the mediocrities. Man conceives nothing beyond that limit, beyond which live the gods.

“In a few words, man is a reasoning animal. This old definition seems to me the only satisfactory one. Neither morality, nor sociability, nor, to be sure, feeling is peculiar to man. He is distinguished only by reason; that is what distinguishes him, without separating him, from the rest of creation. Created nature is completely represented in him. In his body which has weight, number and measure as have the metals, organization like the plants, sensibility and movement like the animals, and which thus appears as the achievement of our earth. His reason is incessantly nourished, sharpened, enlivened, illuminated by the tribute which the world pays him through these three channels. Reason, thus conditioned by the whole of nature, must develop the fulness of its energies in the exact measure in which that can work no ill to the perfect expansion of a flourishing body; reason pushed to the point of parching the animal would exhaust its own sources of being; as for the exclusive culture of the body, that would coarsen the soul and deprive it of reason. So the most subtle of the Athenians used to drain bowl after bowl of wine without confusing his brain, and would then reason like a god. His companions admired him all the more.

“To express the natural harmony of these two powers, we commonly use a very vicious figure of speech: we speak of ‘equilibrium’ as if the objects on the scale were equivalent! _Order_ is what we should call this conformity of a being to all the elements of its fate.

“What should be the critical sense of a human being composed in such a way that his instincts, his impressions, his feelings, his passions, when brought to the highest point, are guided and ruled by an intellect more powerful, itself fortified, sustained and nourished by the abundance of nature? His animal ardors will never usurp the seat of control which belongs exclusively to judgment and reason; but will reason abandon a nature which is too robust, in order to follow vain imaginations? No dessication, no flaccidity either; forms full and well-nerved; philosopher and on occasion even metaphysician, but rigorously; a sense of real and true poetry; infused with all human warmth, but firm and secure against it if need be: such is the general idea that is possible of the good taste of an accomplished man.”

I do not say I regard the above as the best depiction of the perfect man to be encountered, but Maurras indubitably proceeds along the right lines, using his imagination to catch a glimpse of the universal and at the same time not sacrificing his own individuality. He has succeeded in visualizing a model with fair claims to normality, representativeness, soundness, for his own personal imitation or emulation. Note that the logic by which Maurras has made his conception is the logic of probability, commended so often in the New Humanist books, and not simply a flight into the improbable.

(c). Decorum. What a fate has befallen this noble word! It is, in my opinion, impossible for the New Humanist to raise it from its low estate. Babbitt has exposed the way in which in the eighteenth century it came to mean etiquette: as he well says, the Neo-Classical writers made the bad mistake of confusing the language of the nobility with the nobility of language. This blunder Wordsworth recoiled from in his advocacy and use of plain diction: the Romantics hated decorum because it had become a stiff and formal and external affair. But worse degradation awaited the word, and at the present time in America it seems to mean, so far as I can judge from the writers who object to it, the “genteel” manners, the prudish code of behavior which it is the fashion to attribute to the past generation. As I think, the word is beyond rescue: it is drowned in its present debased associations. But is that an excuse for those whose profession it is to read critically to charge classical scholars like More and Babbitt with attaching merely a “genteel” significance to the term?

How could Babbitt, for instance, have made it plainer than he did in the next passage I shall quote that decorum for him does not mean empty formalism, or a mere veneer of manners, but is inward and to be understood in a large way? I resort to italics, for truly they seem necessary to combat our habitual associations with the word. “Whoever has succeeded in bridging the gap between the general percept and some particular emergency has to that extent achieved the fitting and the decorous. _Decorum is simply the law of measure in its more concrete aspects._ For every type of humanist decorum is, in Milton’s phrase, the ‘grand masterpiece to observe.’ _Actually this observation may rest on deep insight_, as it did in the case of Milton himself, or it may degenerate into empty formalism. The adjustment of which I have spoken between the variable and the permanent elements in human experience requires _spiritual_ effort and most men are spiritually indolent. For genuine adjustment they tend to substitute outer conformity so that decorum itself finally comes to seem a mere veneer, something that has no deep root in things. Moreover the notions of decent behavior to which men have conformed at any particular period have always been more or less local and relative. It is easy to take the next step and assume that they have been _only_ local and relative, an assumption subversive not merely of decorum but of humanism itself.”

But in spite of Babbitt’s care in expressing his meaning, he has been constantly defeated by his readers’ different sense of the term, and not even his using the phrase “a sense of proportion” as equivalent to decorum has enlightened most of them. Yet all that decorum means is the activity of our sense of proportion: it means the carrying out of what it is seemly for a man to do. It is not seemly for a man to whine, we say: not seemly for him to shirk the offices of the mind: not seemly to be an utter fool in practical affairs. Notions of fitting behavior vary from place to place and time to time, as Babbitt observes, but above all the varying notions there remains a permanent sense of how it is appropriate for a man to live. He should face the facts: he should put away childish things: he should deal with the difficulties of existence intelligently, courageously, forcefully: he should realize his innermost being. The indecorous is simply the inappropriate, the disproportioned, whether it occurs in art or in conduct. Bathos is indecorous: sentimentality, the gush of emotion far in excess of the fact, is indecorous: the intrusion of the purely private into public discussion is indecorous. The things named are either inappropriate or unmeasured.

To close the subject: Decorum, or a sense of proportion, is simply the law of measure in its more concrete aspects, it is the law of measure in actual operation in the shifting tangle of daily existence.

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In describing the discipline worked out by the New Humanists I have striven for extreme simplicity of statement. My aim has been to concretize as much as possible the technical formulations in Humanist literature. I was moved to do this, because I have sometimes read that the More-Babbitt doctrine and discipline are academic in the bad sense of the word. Babbitt and More advocate, it is said, notions that are narrow and have a freezing effect on the “spirit.” They are, most damning accusation, puritanical. But what, when correctly understood, is evilly academic about their conception of man and the means they advocate for true self-fulfilment? What is narrow about their ideas when they are distinguished at the source and not “interpreted” by some overworked journalist? How can the law of measure possibly freeze up the springs of personality, if one has any personality to begin with? And are they puritanical? I cite Babbitt’s critical position toward Puritanism for a sufficient reply.

“The crucial point in any case is one’s attitude toward the principle of control. Those who stand for this principle in any form or degree are dismissed by the emancipated as reactionaries or, still graver reproach, as Puritans. Mr. Mencken would have us believe that the historical Puritan was not even sincere in his moral rigorism, but was given to ‘lamentable transactions with loose women and fiery jugs.’ This may serve as a sample of the assertions, picturesquely indiscriminate, by which a writer wins immediate notoriety at the expense of his permanent reputation. The facts about the Puritan happen to be complex and need to be dealt with very Socratically. It has been affirmed that the point of view of the Puritan was Stoical rather than truly Christian, and the affirmation is not wholly false. The present discussion of the relationship between Puritanism and the rise of capitalism with its glorification of the acquisitive life also has its justification. It is likewise a fact that the Puritan was from the outset unduly concerned with reforming others as well as himself, and this trait relates him to the humanitarian meddler or ‘wowser’ of the present day, who is Mr. Mencken’s pet aversion.

“Yet it remains true that awe and reverence and humility are Christian virtues and that there was some survival of these virtues in the Puritan. For a representative Puritan like Jonathan Edwards they were inseparable from the illumination of grace, from what he terms ‘a divine and supernatural light.’ In the passage from the love and fear of God of an Edwards to the love and service of man professed by the humanitarian, something has plainly dropped out, something that is very near the center. What has tended to disappear is the inner life with the special type of control it imposes. With the decline of this inner control there has been an increasing resort to outer control. Instead of the genuine Puritan we then have the humanitarian legalist who passes innumerable laws for the control of people who refuse to control themselves. The activity of our uplifters is scarcely suggestive of any ‘divine and supernatural light.’ Here is a discrimination of the first importance that has been obscured by the muddy thinking of our half-baked intelligentsia. One is thus kept from perceiving the real problem, which is to retain the inner life, even though one refuse to accept the theological nightmare with which the Puritan associated it. More is involved in the failure to solve this problem than the Puritan tradition. It is the failure of our contemporary life in general. Yet, unless some solution is reached by a full and free exercise of the critical spirit, one remains a mere modernist and not a thoroughgoing and complete modern; for the modern spirit and the critical spirit are in their essence one.”

To me it is a jest at the expense of the last decade that while so many of us have been marching behind the drums of Menckenism, round and round the same old circle of naturalistic ideas, there has issued forth from the despised quarter of university thought the most truly modern system of all, a system far more in accord with the spirit of Goethe, who spoke, says Babbitt, not as a Puritan but as a clear-eyed man of the world, than all the humanitarian and romantic panaceas that are so solemnly discussed in our liberal weeklies. Goethe said that everything that liberates the spirit without a corresponding growth in self-mastery is pernicious.

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As a matter of fact, the New Humanist like the historical Humanist revolts against Calvinism. But he has hit upon an interesting substitution for the Christian dogma of Original Sin or Depravity. Most attempts men have made at an objective critique of the human race have wound up in the conclusion that there is something radically wrong with it, that there is a Moby Dick loose in the ocean of humanity which must be hunted down and captured before the race can achieve peace. It is as though we all existed under some curse, as though we had been cheated of some birthright. Take the opening pages of _Walden_. Thoreau is trying for an objective view of mankind. He finds fault after fault sweeping through the race. He finds it indeed a very odd race, doing penance in a thousand singular ways for existence. Why is it thus? He is led to make one master indictment of human beings:--they are torpid! The humanistic view almost coincides, it amounts to saying the main trouble with mankind is torpor. Original Indolence in place of Original Sin! The criticism is reinforced by Buddhistic teachings. For the doctrine of original depravity to Babbitt is not thoroughly acceptable: it rests on rather metaphysical grounds and seems hard to verify practically. The Buddhist doctrine of the original laziness of human nature, however, appears to come closer to the ascertainable facts. “The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yielding to the impulses of temperament (_pamāda_); the greatest virtue (_appamāda_) is the opposite of this, the awakening from the sloth and lethargy of the senses, the constant exercise of the active will.” By this stroke Babbitt once again frees his doctrine of theology, and as always makes his appeal to verifiable experience. The New Humanism, to offer still another definition, is a warfare on man’s original indolence. We may be said to be born with a “won’t”: the Humanist tries to oppose a “will” to this “won’t.”

What the New Humanism has to say about the Will is another borrowing from Eastern philosophy. The Will is regarded as anterior and superior to the Intellect: to it and not to the Intellect as in St. Thomas Aquinas is given the primacy. But you will find all this treated exhaustively in the works of Babbitt, More and their followers.

What I wish to say is that the problem of the Will is the very crux-problem of all our civilization. I am convinced that Babbitt has put the supreme question to our times, and that all debate over American Humanism is beside the main point until that question is fully faced. “Here at all events is the issue on which all other issues finally hinge; for until the question of moral freedom--the question whether man is a responsible agent or only the plaything of his impulses and impressions--is decided, nothing is decided; and to decide the question under existing circumstances calls for the keenest critical discrimination.”

But how uncritical and impractical we are about this problem! Vague and futile! If anything is plain, it is that the Will presents first a psychological problem and only after that a metaphysical question. But we argue and theorize endlessly about the Will. Hardly ever do we think of a practical self-demonstration, and if we do it is some such ineffably silly demonstration as saying, “I _will_ to open this window.” But did you will to move all the muscles that shifted when you did so, including the numerous unnecessary movements that accompanied the action? The truth is that Will can only begin where Behaviorism leaves off, but very few have digested Behaviorism. Why do we not howl with laughter when we read in William James: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”? Or take this piece of naïveté upon which my eye has fallen while writing this chapter. A young critic is telling his audience that “the philosophic implications of the quantum theory, the writings of Whitehead, Eddington, C. J. Herrick and Millikan, and the spectacle of American artists recovering from paralysis of the will, had all combined to revive a sense of free will in certain Americans.” It may be a sense of free will, but if it was arrived at by these means, by reading, we may be positive that it is an illusory sense. As if the same critic had listed a number of authors who had proved to him that he had what he was not previously sure of, a mind. We say we have minds because they demonstrate themselves to us beyond any possible doubt. If we indeed have Wills, they also will be self-demonstrating: no one need prove to us we have what we cannot doubt we possess. Where there is doubt, there is no Will. Where there is no doubt, let it be added at once there still may be no Will.

One thing we know: Will is not to be associated, as is often done, with desire. Our desires come and go and fight among themselves: we commonly act, not on _a_ desire, but on the resultant of our various contending desires. But Will, in the very nature of the case, is distinct from and independent of desire. Not in the region of desires but of efforts should we look for the roots of Will. On this the New Humanist is absolutely clear-headed.

And perhaps there we had better leave the discussion for the present. Making effort is always unmistakable to us. It has a psychological taste, if I may say so, so strong that we cannot delude ourselves into thinking we are not engaged in effort. Our desires on the other hand have quite another taste, and many times as is well known we are only dimly conscious of them. The use of Will then could never be unconscious, could never be a mere matter of believing theories. Will would make itself felt in the psychological realm as indubitably as our bodies feel kinæsthetic strain in hauling a heavy boat up on shore.

Everything in American Humanism depends ultimately upon the Will as an undeniable fact, not as an assumption. We may start with the assumption but unless we can convert it into a fact for ourselves as patent as the fingers on our hands we are playing with an illusion.

There is a practical problem of the Will: a practical approach to it: and perhaps a practical solution. The New Humanists project this key problem to the place where it belongs: in the front of all our dilemmas and puzzles as to how to lead “the good life.” Should we all try seriously to work at the key problem, there would occur in American life a revolution that would be unimaginable.

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