Chapter IX: Part 9

What the humanistic temper is this book has sought to make clear. I will add now one further example and one more description of the temper. The example is the poet Robert Frost who in all probability holds no formal views on American Humanism, and perhaps is largely unacquainted with the ideas of Babbitt and More, but who nevertheless writes verse highly satisfactory by humanistic criteria. An intimate understanding of this poet’s psychology _through_ his works will give you better than reams of exposition what the actual flavor and humor and clear-cut quality of humanistic experience is like. The description of the humanistic temper is by Robert Shafer. Writing in the _Hound and Horn_, Summer Issue, 1930, Shafer said: “The true humanist has ever been a practical man of the world; avoiding those tempting chimeras metaphysical speculation and pseudo-science; suspicious of rigid abstract formulations; preferring to define his position tentatively, by the methods of critical scrutiny, in close and fruitful relation to actual but ever-changing circumstances; avoiding the self-defeating violence of revolution; preferring to work with and through existing institutions; sacrificing sudden impressiveness to steady, quiet persistence; not expectant of victory; and content even with apparent defeat in untoward times if apparent defeat is the reward of moderation, sane judgment, disciplined taste, and a comely serenity.”

As for the liberated who are religiously inclined, who have, that is, the religious temperament, they are quite easy to describe. I refer simply to intelligent civilized men and women who are accessible to ideas of a religious order, who are prepared to entertain but only to entertain religious assumptions, who experience a little thrill from the (to us) occult language of the Sacred Books. I mean no more than that: it amounts to a kind of sympathetic curiosity in religious matters.

Now, forsaking the liberated for a while, I have to consider something very unusual in contemporary experience--_the religious spirit_.

The difficulties in the way of conveying a fresh sense of this spirit are almost insuperable. I cannot begin as Norman Foerster and other Humanists do by professing respect and admiration for the great organized religious bodies in their present condition, for the thing I attach value to is the religious spirit and that has departed. I agree with Hulme and other scattered observers that the present age totally misunderstands religion. Warm ashes of the Christian Faith remain, most notably in Catholicism, but we moderns are almost hopelessly clogged with false associations, sentimentalities, stock responses to religion, and nothing very potent in us can be lit up by the feeble glow cast by the best surviving elements in the Churches. So thick is the forest of our associations about religion, so lost and wandering are we in it, that I shall scrupulously avoid citing any historic examples of the religious spirit: that would in all likelihood lead simply to tangential arguments, to treading in the mazes of our associations about figures. Whereas it is the essence itself, this spirit so foreign to our ways, that I would suggest. Without a prior common understanding, examples may in fact be pernicious.

Try then, my reader, as I have tried, to throw out of the mind all our stale notions about the spirit of the religious man. Realize as strongly as possible the nonreligious motives that have entered into modern Christian thought, making the “religious life” what Whitehead protests it should not be, a research after comfort. Put to a violent death the democratic feelings that have been allowed to corrupt the uncompromising character of religions at their source. To go on in the hortatory way,--shock your preconceptions one by one. Be prepared to admit that a genuinely religious man would seem monstrous to you.

As I conceive of the religious spirit, neither the religious inclination nor the humanistic temper approximate to it in the least degree. There is an absolute difference. They do not grow into the religious spirit, but must suffer a transformation. My emphatic judgment is that Humanism can never merge into religion by a mere extension of itself, but that there exists a chasm between the two which the New Humanist _qua_ Humanist can never leap. Religious and humanistic inclinations can make terms with each other, but between the religious spirit and the humanistic temper there is opposition forever. I point to the _early_ Christians who insisted, as Babbitt notes, that there is only a stark supernaturalism and a stark naturalism with no intermediate territory for the Humanist.

Briefly now I will essay a probably futile task, the adumbration of the man of religious spirit. Probably futile, because he is incredible to us. We cannot credit such a passion for perfection as he incarnates. To us religion is anthropomorphic: to him religion is theomorphic. In that you have the astounding reversal of our suppositions which he makes. Consequently when we read, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him,” we at once think of God as being like man: the religious spirit, however, thinks of man as being like God, an utterly revolutionary difference, for, since man in his ordinary condition is obviously anything but Godlike, this theomorphism stimulates in the religious spirit the tremendous ambition to become like God, a perfect being. Could there be anything more rash and sublime and impossible? Provided one has shed sentimental conceptions of deity. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” Every resource must be used, every power must be strained, every second of life must be taken for the impossible task. The mind is an instrument of perfection: it must accordingly be developed to the utmost. The body must be strong to undertake the enormous labors imposed on it. The emotions must be unbelievably enriched. Consciousness itself must expand! Religion is indefeasibly the study and pursuit of perfection: it requires not only that no stone but no grain and no mountain be left unturned which might furnish a clue or a stimulus to its quest. This, in its desperateness, its consuming thirst, its impossibilism, is almost as remote, I need not say, from Humanism as it is from Naturalism. To the religious spirit it is the absolute or nothing.

Absolute Truth, absolute Beauty, absolute Goodness--these are what he yearns for, and he is impatient of moderation, decency, good sense _as ends_. He cannot, as the Humanist can, seek primarily for stability of character: he seeks for perfection of character with stability coming as a by-product. Nor is there any known limit to his skepticism: the very nature of his pursuit of the unattainable enforces skepticism on him to the last degree. The religious life is a continual destruction of those elements of imperfection, illusions. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Obviously, such men as I speak of are extremely uncommon. Their mark, I have tried to suggest, is that they make their life-task the wholehearted, single-minded pursuit of a perfection whose fulness we cannot even dream of, and to which we are quite indifferent as an idea. They have in our era another mark that differentiates them from us as completely as if they belonged to another race: an agony of bafflement. In Biblical language, they have “a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.” Their zeal leads them everywhere, they stop at nothing, but the form of their life in modern times is a searching, not a finding. Zealous searchers, they are blocked by that “middle wall of partition” spoken of in the Bible which they know not how to break down. They see in their quest the need for an enlargement of their powers, but how to increase them, that they do not know. Theirs is the agony of baffled search for the means to the perfection they crave with all their being. They would seem to know in terms of the most exasperating personal experience that there does exist a radical discontinuity, as Hulme thought, between man and God or the Absolute. The Humanist we have seen dwelling on the discontinuity between man and nature. The religious spirit discovers in his efforts toward self-perfecting, toward expansion and intensification of consciousness, the discontinuity at the other border, and it is this frontier between man and the absolute that he emphasizes. Here, he says, is the all-important barrier, and we cannot rest until we have leaped it.

Thirst for divinizing oneself, agony of frustration before the “middle partition”--these are at all times the stigmata of a few men on our planet. We can _recognize_ these stigmata even though what they signify lies outside our experience, but because we have not experienced, we cannot _comprehend_. Yet if one is interested in human limits, one has to make a rude stab at description of this race of men. Have you never heard that in the original doctrine of no single great religion is it stated that man by nature has a soul? Then blame religious democracy. Man in the great religions at their source is exhorted to labor for a soul, is urged to acquire one, but religion says he begins without one. Religion begins with stark naturalism, but ends with constructing a bridge to a new life. Many are called to the work of creating the new life--in that respect religion is democratic; but few are chosen, few succeed in “crossing the stream”--an unpalatable saying to religious democrats. This brings forward an idea that pales the humanistic notion of a turning away from the natural self, just as the idea of the divinization of man pales the idea of the humanization of man. The religious spirit darkens naturalism far beyond the Humanist portrayal, and at the same time it gives the possibilities of man an effulgence that drowns with glory the modest conceptions of the Humanists. The connecting idea brought forward is rebirth by a process as definite but far more terrific than physical birth. This is an idea still present, as we noted, in Pico della Mirandola’s _Oration_, but since vanished from humanistic teaching.

The suffering of the religious spirit today, however, comes not, I venture to say, from the pangs of rebirth but from non-satisfaction. He cannot conceive a soul and therefore cannot gestate one. No wonder a modern religious spirit occasionally shatters itself in madness! The zeal of God, but not according to knowledge, is fraught with the utmost danger, for the truth of our human situation we are told is terror-inspiring, and a sudden glimpse--

We have done with the armchair mysticism prevalent in the West today. It is devoid of the desperation, the readiness to leave the library and the round of civilized comforts and take all the risks, the sheer heroism that mark the genuine religious man. It clearly has naught of the spirit of these Buddhistic verses.

Scorched, frozen, and alone,
In fearsome forest dwelling,
Naked, no fire to warm,
Bent on the quest is the Sage.

The distinction is not, please mark however, between comfortable literary mysticism and self-torturing asceticism. Great religious teachers have pointed out the fallacy of the latter as the Way. Our distinction is between the unwillingness to experiment dangerously with life and the resolute disposition of the genuinely religious to go to any lengths, if necessary.

And now we may come back to ourselves, the liberated, who have been illuminated by the steady light thrown on Naturalism by the New Humanists and have afterwards turned to examine critically Humanism itself. By the blazing light shafted on it from the religious spirit, what do we now see there? Holding Humanism up against this searching sun-like radiance, shall we find ourselves in an unexpected dilemma?

* * * * *

It is patent that a man aflame with the religious spirit would, when striking on the New Humanism in his investigations, formulate his requirements of it and the aims he wished it to satisfy in a language the contemporary Humanist does not speak. But we who call ourselves the liberated employ, so it happens, a vocabulary keyed a note above characteristic Humanist speech. The New Humanist’s favorite words are: decency, moderation, measure, commonsense, the normal and representative, the centralized, discipline, standards, humility, self-control, vital restraint, proportionateness, decorum, stability. His thoughts circulate around these words: they constitute the magnetic portion of his vocabulary. The magnetic portion of the liberated man’s vocabulary runs somewhat as follows, and you will note the higher keying at once: honesty, daring, curiosity, experiment, zeal for truth, self-knowledge, disinterestedness, harmony, the free mind, spiritual freedom, integration of experience, art of life, increased life, greater consciousness. The respective vocabularies are not mutually exclusive; there is much overlapping in actual usage. But the point is sound that the New Humanist is apt to employ the second set of terms in the second place, whereas the liberated man approaching the study of Humanism uses the Humanist’s favorite words as secondary to the magnetic words of freedom, increased consciousness, etc. This difference in emphasis gives us a clue that may conduct to an important criticism of the New Humanist’s supreme method, the rule of mediation.

In approaching any subject, it is well to formulate in advance where one stands at present, what motives impel one toward the new subject, what one expects to find, and what one wants to discover. The liberated man (common gender) has, in theory at least, been freed from dogma, either naturalistic or theological. Dogma to him is any statement offered which may be true but which is unaccompanied by a means of verifying it. He has grown clever in distinguishing between what is verifiable by himself and what is not: the latter he calls “dogma.” In theory also he is freed from hypocrisy: he strives to be completely honest with himself. His objection to most conventional modes of thought is that they have hampered him in getting at the truth about himself. Today he is discovering that truth, and it is, that he is completely self-ignorant. Hear him confess his ignorance, as he is doing in increasing numbers.

“I perceive my own ignorance on all essential matters. Why I exist I do not know. What I am I do not know. I am ignorant of any purpose in life. My friends and especially my enemies are more aware of my weaknesses than I am. My economy of life is bad--I do not make the most of it, or know how to do so. I am subject to unknown laws. Blind to the future, forgetful of my past, in the present I exist, because of my ignorance, as the plaything of chance.”

The discovery of the liberated man is that he is not a fallen Angel but a feeble son of Man. On the basis of his ignorance, however, he can and does formulate what he wishes to know and what abilities he wishes to acquire. One word sums up the first:--Self-Knowledge. “I would like to know what sort of creature I really am. What are my real wishes? Why do I live and for what end? What are the conditions of happiness? How may I live with real advantage to myself? What is the true nature of the world that impinges on me? In short, I would like to know everything about myself from my puzzling trivial habits to my relation with the universe.”

As for Ability, he would, in my view, like to be a Reynard the Fox, the “animal capable.” He wishes to be active, to become valuable and therefore valued by men, to be devoid of humbug in the use of his skill and single-minded in what he undertakes, above all to succeed wherever he is. The power to do what he wishes to do!

But not one word about character. We have a confession of ignorance followed by the recognition of a need for self-knowledge and the need for general ability. Perhaps the intuition of the liberated person tells him that character is a resultant, the product of his knowledge and his ability interacting. With his needs uppermost in his mind, he encounters the New Humanism and this system, as we have learned, puts character foremost. The juxtaposition gives us another critical clue. For the Humanist replies first to the very last questions--_the still unformulated questions_--of the liberated, and the first questions of the liberated are relegated in humanistic thought to a lesser position. Which order is correct?

Are we close to the nub at last? Several years ago in an essay on Irving Babbitt I closed by saying that the crux of the whole matter of Humanism was in the questions: “To what ends in human character does the technique of Humanism surely lead? Can it by its route attain to the victory over circumstance announced by religion or can it only ameliorate a determined scheme of things by the production of such relatively minor virtues as moderation, decency and good sense?” These questions seem to me now as then to touch the central issue. The technique of Humanism is mediation: the law of measure, Nothing Too Much, is supreme. The validity of this law I do not question. Whether it is always and everywhere to be observed, that I question. What I specifically challenge is the supremacy of the technique based on the law of measure. Is mediation the prime law of life?

My answer must be, No.[9] I cannot set aside the fact that mediation presupposes two things, the acquisition of self-knowledge and the acquisition of will. _It is a technique of control._ By trying to practice it some self-knowledge is picked up incidentally, and a call is made upon the will to awake. But mediation is primarily concerned with character, not with knowledge, not with development of will. A prior method is absolutely required if mediation is to yield any great results and that prior method is necessarily supreme. To be blunt and homely, the New Humanist has overlooked the horse which is to pull his cart: he has overlooked the working out of a trustworthy technique for learning the exact truth about the individual creature who is to be disciplined by mediation to a norm of humanity. For me then, and very possibly for many other liberated men and women, the New Humanism is too “advanced.” We stand at the beginning: we are pupils who have first to learn how to attain a better working knowledge of what some day we may hope to control. We are willing to admit the mediatory method as one of a group of allied methods, but we cannot isolate it as the leading and one essential means to self-development.

I have some hopes of making this point clear. It is not a destructive criticism. I would not myself take the trouble to write a whole book simply to overthrow something. It is, however, a criticism of incompleteness and misplaced emphasis, and by no means implies the discarding of the law of measure. The aim is to advance the contribution of American Humanism nearer to a _total_ solution of the modern problem. And I consider that an advance is made by pointing out the absence in Humanism of a technique for self-knowledge and will-development that at all compares in precision and plausibility with its technique for control.

Suppose a man is today converted to the philosophy of Rousseau. He finds his conversion need not be simply a literary one, so to speak, for associated with the philosophy there is now a psychological technique alleged to corroborate the rightness of Rousseauistic ideas. The new convert can study psycho-analysis, undergo treatment in an analyst’s office, emerge with a rather elaborate method for interpreting his own psychology. He has, along with his philosophy, an apparent means for verifying it, for living up to it. He is possessed of a technique based on Rousseauistic principles which, it is claimed, provides a continuous key to self-knowledge. It is hardly necessary for me to add, however, that psycho-analysis is a discredited technique for self-knowledge, and that there exists today no advertised, easily accessible, tested, thoroughly accredited way to carry out the Pythagorean command, Know Thyself. The illustration serves all the same to point the fact that the New Humanism is unequipped with a psychological technique for taking the first step. It has to rely on introspection which notoriously is unreliable. But it relies too on traditional knowledge, and this is to a certain degree a corrective of introspective vagaries. For ancient wisdom--in India, in Egypt, in Pythagorean Greece, in Palestine--may have been founded on realities and methods to which we have lost the clue. There are good grounds for surmising that Pythagoras, for example, was not a fanciful guesser at all. The New Humanists being in contact with the best knowledge of the past may therefore be right in their ideas, but we and they need to remember that the complete technique for validating these ideas in terms of concrete individual experience is still to find or perhaps rediscover.

Another difficulty I have always had with the New Humanism arises over the Will. In theory I concede the Humanists are right, but it is a question whether in their practice the Will becomes an accomplished fact. What is the sure test? We make effort--that we know; and furthermore effort occurs in the prescribed field of working on oneself. Will is psychological effort distinguished from physical effort. But is all psychological effort to be called Willing? Remember that psychological effort appears always to be powerfully motived: by self-interest, fear, rivalry, desire for fame, intellectual curiosity, a hundred varying motives. When the motive dies, the effort invariably dies with it. Now just as I cannot grant that a man with an empty belly who labors like a Trojan for his next meal is an example of Will, so I cannot accept the man laboring great hours to satisfy intellectual hunger as an instance of Willing. Will must occur in the absence of incentive. Will would persist in working in a given direction _after_ the motive had ceased. Will is that which overcomes indifference.

I hold that we cannot be too skeptical on this topic. Nowhere else does illusion insinuate itself so much as in regard to responsible choice and Will. How can we make sure that we are not subtly deluded?

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for oneself”--this is one of Nietzsche’s profoundest sayings. Certainly we all have a desire to be responsible for ourselves. But it is equally certain that the desire is comparatively weak, buried most of the time, intermittent in appearance, quickly exhausted when it does appear. Clearly, we do not get very far on our occasional desires for self-responsibility. Our tendencies flow the other way: we delight in irresponsibility. All the odds experience demonstrates are against any continuous effort at being responsible for oneself. My conclusion is that Will is just that continuous effort carried on against the whole weight of the organism, an effort that is finally unaided by wishes and unprovoked by external inducements--nothing less than an _independent_ activity of the psyche.

The practical conclusion I must draw from this is that men are Will-less. The conclusion that I am not warranted in drawing in the face of extraordinary past testimony is that men are devoid of the potentiality of Will. “Thou art not free yet, thou seekest freedom still”--this is Nietzsche again, and freedom must be sought in human potentialities and won by the actualization of potentials, since as we actually are, we are not free. The New Humanist has confused a potentiality, the Will, with an actuality that can be described as _conditioned_ psychological effort directed toward self-control. I attach much weight to that criticism.

It seems to me of great consequence to realize this:--it is “failure of will” we know, not acts of Will. The testimony of a therapeutist strikingly confirms what I have just said. Therapeutists often find that their patients want to get well, know what the trouble is and what they must do, and yet fail to exert the required will. In an unusually candid paper read some years ago before the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society Dr. James Carruthers Young, formerly a surgeon, now a practitioner of the Jung school of analytic psychology, made the following remarks which succeed in putting the problem of the Will on a practical basis. “Every form of occultism aims at self-development through deepening, or expanding the limits of, self-consciousness, or however you like to express it. Now it is obvious that this laudable object cannot be attained merely by embracing the ideas of a system, however rapturously. The all-important factor of the exercise and proper application of will must enter, if anything is to be achieved. If it does not, then the ideas, however beautiful and intriguing, in the end become merely ‘dope’ ... it seemed to me that ‘failure of will’ was _the bête noire_ in neuroses. Roughly, the neurotic symptom from the Freudian standpoint is the disguised expression of an affect which is too painful to be _faced_. From the Adlerian standpoint, it is an ‘incomparable arrangement,’ by which the patient avoids _facing_ a certain aspect of what we call reality. In the broadest sense in both systems, it is a question of failure to _face up_ to reality. Now it by no means follows that, when it is made clear to the patient by analysis what aspects of reality he has been unconsciously avoiding, that he will at once be able to cope with it. This is particularly evident in the case of obsessionists, as I have proved to my own satisfaction again and again. A washing obsessionist, for example, cheerfully subscribes to the theory of origin of her washing, but when called upon to make the slightest new adaptation, always falls back on her washing. In effect she says: ‘I cannot marry, or do this, that or the other, because, you see, I wash.’ To put the matter in a nutshell, analytical knowledge is not necessarily effective knowledge.

“Now I think it will be generally agreed that what I have called ‘failure of will’ is often bound up with an endocrine deficiency or dyscrasia, sometimes acquired and sometimes apparently so fundamental as to justify the term ‘primary plasmic insufficiency,’ which corresponds to Adler’s organic inferiority. Unfortunately, the science of endocrinology was not, and is not yet, so far advanced as to enable us to remedy such dyscrasias with anything approaching to certainty or precision, even granted that our powers of diagnosis may be able to divine the true nature of such complicated conditions. My problem, then, was how to overcome the difficulty of ‘failure of will’ by means of a definite psychological method.”

It seems to me no less important for the Humanists to realize that _there_ is the problem for the ordinary person as well as for the pathological, namely, how to reinforce a sound theory of the Will with a sound method for overcoming ‘failure of will.’ To vanquish the obstinate difficulties, the theory must become practical.

* * * * *

The dilemma turns out to be like this:--pursue your natural desires and you find they do not lead to that signal of well-being we call happiness but reveal instead the need for a re-education of desire, so that you may train yourself to desire the kind of happiness that is possible for men; choose Humanism as a system of re-education of desire and you must wonder if it has the strength to perform the task. One alternative deceives you by its bright appeal, the other seems inferior in its call to the imagination, to the hidden latent powers of psychology. But inferior to what? Inferior to religion at its purest. Religion says it is a superhuman task to overcome one’s naturalism. If it is a superhuman undertaking, then one may ask, what chance is there of effecting a real mastery by anything less than a science for divinizing man?

For here is man, the prey of innumerable illusions, stunted in psychological growth, spiritually inert, bewildered by himself, discordant in behavior, perhaps incurably paralyzed in will--will anything but the most tremendous means metamorphose him into a falconer of reality, an experiencer of bliss and ecstasy, a doer of deeds on the fighting edge of the cosmos? The New Humanism is a morality not untouched by dignified emotion. But I say that on the whole it is morals not sufficiently touched with poetry, not endowed with the tremendous shaking appeal to our whole being that religion has been known to exercise. Religion is more than Arnold defined it, it includes morality touched by emotion, but it includes art, science, philosophy as well. It is insatiable for perfection and so must quicken and recharge every side of our consciousness. It is, I think, properly impatient of all half-measures everywhere, impatient of such a reason as Babbitt gives, the fear of self-delusion, for choosing a more moderate attack on life’s riddles, impatient of short aims--_because it realizes the almost hopeless condition of man_. For psychological freedom everything must be risked. That is what we learn when we study the religious spirit. By its fiery light, we liberated ones perceive that we are in truth only pseudo-liberated. We have put the weight on being free from something, but the real question is, free for what? I have been writing, quite knowingly, about the dilemma of the _pseudo-liberated_. If we realize our pseudo-state, then as we approach the New Humanism, our question becomes a searching one, will it truly liberate? My suggestion has been to hold this system up against the blazing background of the religious spirit, and against that background it seems certain to me two major defects appear in Humanism: the lack of a science of self-study and a not sufficiently stringent conception of the Will.

Might we not say that twentieth century Humanism is a system of right conjectures? “Do you not perceive,” the prophetess Diotima says to Socrates in _The Banquet_, “that there is something between ignorance and wisdom?” “What is that?” asked Socrates. “To have a right opinion or conjecture. Observe, that this kind of opinion, for which no reason can be rendered, cannot be called knowledge; for how can that be called knowledge, which is without evidence or reason? Nor ignorance, on the other hand; for how can that be called ignorance which arrives at the persuasion of that which it really is? A right opinion is something between understanding and ignorance.” Humanism to me has the value, and it is a high value, of wise conjecture about the way to lead a human life. For undoubtedly it is better, in default of wisdom, to be guided by true opinions than by demonstrably false ones. But we must not lose sight of the conjectural basis of Humanism. We must throw ourselves into the task of validating to the point of indisputability the right opinions involved. The New Humanist draws upon the Sages: his business is to become a Sage, to achieve in his own person the sensation of absolute knowledge, to go beyond the intermediate stage to wisdom.

Can he do so without hitching his wagon to a more remote star? I think not. There is the effort to be superman, not to be solely identified of course with the peculiar effort of one man, Nietzsche, and this effort while failing to reach its end does leave as a by-product a growth in human-ness. But the less ambitious effort to be human--does it hit the mark? Superhumanism gives birth to the human, or humanism with the small h. It is claimed that Humanism gives birth to the human, too, but must we not qualify that somewhat in our final chapter?

XII

THE END OF THE TETHER

_“It is time for man to mark out his goal, to plant the germ
of his highest hopes. His soil is still rich enough for that
purpose.”_--Friedrich Nietzsche.

It is not only in politics that the advice to use large scale maps is excellent. If one refers daily “crises” to a big map, one is far less likely to fly into political hysteria over trifling remote events: one thinks politically in terms commensurate with the planet, not of one corner of it distant only a few inches on the small map from the other side of the world. But one requires also, and even more, a large scale map of life as a preventive of petty thoughts. We need to refer such questions as closed the preceding chapter to a map of life that will enlarge our mental activities in trying to reply to them. The main trouble with the cult of contemporaneity is that it has lost the sense of greatness and spaciousness. Its map is a crude child’s drawing--a large out-of-proportion area across which is scrawled, “Here Be the Moderns,” and outlying this are indeterminate shadowy regions peopled by lesser beings, dwarfs, and cavemen--our forerunners. History to the one-sided enthusiasts for the contemporaneous is really Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind which I sometimes think Donald Ogden Stewart has immortalized: it is a series of steps forward from ancient Egypt to the great and glorious present, a progress culminating in Darwin, Freud, Joyce and Proust, Ford and Lenin, Stravinsky and Bertrand Russell, and a host of other recently elected candidates for the New Olympus. It will not do to use so disproportioned and confined a map in measuring the work of Babbitt and More who have plotted out their intellectual campaign on a larger scale than we are accustomed to. We must relate their work to very extensive perspectives: we must find some scale for the greatness of the ages. How else can we measure the truly human and the superhuman? For the superhuman covers all that man may be the bridge to: the truly human covers the bridge, the whole transition itself. The American Humanist makes the bridge the end. But can he build it unless the struggle is to reach the other shore, to cross the discontinuity, the gulf between Man and the Absolute? The superhumanist treats the bridge as means for prospective travel. An unsuccessful traveller, he yet may go further in completing the bridge than the Humanist who thinks only of bridge-building.

The map of life I shall avail myself of was drawn by a genius at the age of twenty-eight, a genius of whom the leading New Humanists do not share my high opinion. But that discrepancy I choose to think arises from the defect of orthodoxy. To Paul Elmer More, for example, _The Birth of Tragedy_ by Friedrich Nietzsche merely makes a distinction in the classical world that “takes the form of a harsh and unreal contrast between the Dionysian principle of unrest and growth and creation for which he expresses the highest regard and the Apollonian principle of rest and renunciation and contraction for which, as Platonism, he has the deepest aversion.” But for me _The Birth of Tragedy_ is a profound and terrific document by which we may get the most vivid impression of the deterioration of modern life, classify the New Humanists as socratic or theoretical men, and learn what we must try to do with the new situation in American culture created by the advent of Humanism. The book had extravagances of judgment and a fatuous hopefulness for German music which Nietzsche corrected in _Ecce Homo_ but the central thesis he left unimpaired--and the modern world has left it uncomprehended.

The interpretation of Greek tragedy has been a field of bitter contention between romanticists and classicists. The romanticists see chiefly in Greek tragedy the violence, the melodrama, great horrors, headlong actions, titanic personages. The classicists see ethical imports, a background of order, superb control, religious values. From the standpoint of a student of Nietzsche both parties are right--and wrong; for Nietzsche divined a third interpretation, a paradox of understanding, whereby the romantic and the classicist views are held in solution, but the solution itself is a new conception of tragedy. Nietzsche saw in Greek tragedy the ever-renewed conflict and reconciliation of two principles, the Dionysian to which alone the romanticist is susceptible and the Apollonian which alone wins the classicist. The tragic view perceives the necessity for the mutual agonistic struggle: it is based on the realization that Apollo and Dionysus must war with each other, must continue forever in that strange paradox, a synthesis founded on struggle. There must ever exist, if life is to ascend, a turbulent frenzied uprush of Formability, and there must coexist a constant reduction to Form.

On the one side of the world-stage you have Dionysus with his wildest music, his ecstasy and poetry, his drunkenness, his sheer states of Being. On the other side there is Apollo, the soothsayer, the god of plastic energies, the cool and comely, olympian in his dream-states. The Formable and the Formed!

There is a suffering attached to actualization, because to actualize a potentiality is to exclude other potentialities. It is to concentrate and limit. Dionysus suffers because he must pass into limitations: his great surges of impulse must eventuate in the actual phenomenal world. He is the foe of limitation, and his enemy, Apollo, must impose limits on him. As the Dionysian spirit is strong, it breaks limits and requires new and wider ones; as the Apollonian spirit is strong, it accepts the challenge and seeks ever better forms and containers.

The tragic view of Nietzsche and according to him of the Greeks too is that this struggle must be consciously intensified. The will to surpass must grapple with the will to maintenance. Liberty battles law; love, duty; change, custom; intuition, science; and inspiration battles art. But the antithesis goes deeper than these human aspects reveal, ultimately reaching energy and matter, Dionysian pure energy and Apollonian pure form. In the æsthetics of Attic tragedy Nietzsche held that the chorus was Dionysian and the play an Apollonian projection of the dithyrambic being-states of the chorus.

But an observer of contemporary civilization in America and Europe who has had awaked in him a glimmering sense of the ancient Apollonians and Dionysians would be forced to think that the two types of men are almost extinct. How many _Moby Dicks_ have there been in the last fifty years of American literature? Where are the post-Nietzscheans? On account of the pseudo-Nietzscheans whose grossness and insincerity were so glaring, no one now dares to call himself a Nietzschean, for we have learned from the pseudo-Nietzscheans how transparent the pose is, how fraudulent one is to play Nietzsche without the Dionysian flame in very truth burning within. So there are no successors to Nietzsche, no line of initiates of Dionysus. We can appreciate Nietzsche, but we cannot be Nietzscheans. Our heritage comes from Greece, but not from the Greece of the Mysteries: we are the heirs of Greek rationalism, of Greek decadence. Euripides and Socrates have turned out to be the fathers of the future.

For speaking by and large, our art is devoid of the Æschylean mystical conception and models itself on Euripides who reasoned with the Gods, not for them. His principle, says Nietzsche, was this: “To be beautiful everything must be intelligible.” Accordingly he used the familiar for his substance, he brought the spectator on the stage, he introduced realism. “The mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits were represented now showed the painful fidelity that conscientiously reproduces even the abortive outlines of nature.... The spectator now actually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and rejoiced that he could talk so well.” The Euripidean drama, like our plays and novels today, concerned common matters of which every one feels he is a competent judge. The audience therefore never comes to be initiated but to apply without the slightest scruples its criteria of ordinary experience. This was the betrayal of the Dionysian cause which Euripides recanted at the end of his life, but the European world has not recanted, today less than ever when a minuscule Euripides like Bernard Shaw is loaded with the highest honors.

As for Socrates, although I am utterly unable to decide on the justice of Nietzsche’s portrait of the historical figure--it is the most devastating drawing of Socrates ever penned, but is it true?--that makes no matter here. Nietzsche knew to the core the long line of men descending from Socrates, and if he imagined a mythical father to fit the men he knew, we can accept the myth for its truth of portraiture of a type, if not of the individual it is named after. The Nietzschean contention is that to Socrates was denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses. He was therefore no more than Euripides _en rapport_ with the Apollonian dream-world projected from Dionysian ecstasy. He was a disintegrating force, withdrawing the Apollonian tendency into the hard shell of logical schematism as Euripides shrunk the Dionysian state into naturalistic emotion. He liked art to cling to the trunk of dialectics, to be overgrown with philosophic thought. He had the optimism of the dialectician which Nietzsche felt is fatal to the tragic spirit. And he was most of the time anti-musical. From him stream the theoretical men, the men of science in the broad sense, the men who get their enjoyment and satisfaction out of the cast-off veil rather than out of gazing with rapture at whatever still remains veiled after the unveiling. They care more for the search after truth than for truth itself. This Lessing, called by Nietzsche the most honest of theoretical men, boldly admitted. Finally, they are insensitive to mystery and attribute to knowledge and perception the power of a universal panacea, seeing evil itself in error.

_The Birth of Tragedy_ gives us a sense of grand scale by which to try contemporary literature and culture. It makes it ridiculous to advance claims for Eugene O’Neill as a Dionysian--to mention an example of the sort of correction that can immediately be made. It gives us in Euripides the norm of our literary art, the decadent Greek justification of the ways of man to God. It replaces Benda’s modest analysis of the plastic and musical sensibilities, remarked upon in an earlier chapter, with a majestic view of the highest contrasted principles in man. Among other things, it throws a piercing light on the twentieth century Humanists, revealing them to be theoretical or socratic men as remote from the inspired by Apollo as their romantic enemies are remote from the inspiration of Dionysus. We modern men do but whisper inaudibly of the old gods.

In support of my classifying the New Humanists as socratic men, I will bring forward two or three points. In the Dionysian-Apollonian opposition, things were reconciled, brought to a dynamic equilibrium, through struggle. The principle of individuation was in strife with primordial unity. The most fertile sense of possibilities clashed with the strictest sense of limitations. But the Humanist does not speak of struggle as the means of achieving stability: he endorses mediation, the tempering of liberty by law, the selection of a middle course. This I hold is the procedure of the logical man with an undeveloped sense of tragedy. Again, the New Humanist tries to rest on what may be essentially a transitional phase of man. He concedes that the highest level of life is religious, but he does not aim to reach it. The humanistic level attracts him most, but may this attraction not be translated into a love of the search for truth rather than for truth itself--the mark of the socratic type? In the last place, it is significant that several American Humanists confess to a distrust of the art of music, _the_ Dionysian art. And unlike Socrates no inner voice reminds them to their consternation, “Humanist, practice music!” There does not even linger in them as in their monumental predecessor an uneasy sense that in their philosophizing on the literary tradition they may through lack of understanding the Dionysian be sinning against a deity.

* * * * *

But we have to work with the elements of the contemporary situation. Just as it is idle to sit dreaming of great wealth when one has to work for bread and butter, so it is idle to sit thinking about becoming Dionysian or Apollonian when the immediate situation requires buckling down to the production of humble intellectual and æsthetic fare. I have totally failed if by shrinking our valuations against a grand scale of values, I seemed to suggest taking the road to despair of the modern situation. On the contrary, we want to know where we are at and how best we may spend our energies on the sound assumption that there is a zest and a satisfaction in making the most of what we have. Since I have used Nietzsche to expand our ideas about the state of modern culture, I shall also give his word of encouragement to us: “A constant struggle against uniformly unfavorable conditions is what makes a type stable and hard.” The joy of overcoming is ours to be had for work in present-day terms on the present-day condition of things: it will be our rustic fare which notoriously tastes better to those who sweat for it than to those who live in cushioned ease.

We may use conceptions of Dionysians and Apollonians for measurement, but the current actualities thus measured are socratic men (Humanists) and rebellious men (Baconians, Rousseauists--of many sub-varieties, the Baconians having a touch of socratism, the Rousseauists in their art converging toward the Euripidean standard). The demigods and satyrs do not frequent the modern stage, but there is still played across it a pseudo-Apollonian--pseudo-Dionysian warfare. _Our disaster is that the participants have lost the sense of being necessary to each other_; this vitiates all our spiritual economy.

The New Humanists are seeking to vitalize in American life the principle of concentration and stability: the New Rebels have as their task the vitalizing of the principle of expansion and flux. The changed situation brought about by the advent of American Humanism is that we now have a strong well armed party of conservation to balance and offset the reigning party of change. A true spiritual economy would require that each party should intensify its efforts, should surpass its previous productions, should grow toward greater goals by vigorous contention with the other. The rôle of the Humanist is to _contain_ the age: the rôle of the rebel is to break out of the containing forms and to demand new forms for the new enlarged more powerful spirit. But actually what do we find? The total absence of spiritual economists of the sort just mentioned. No unconscious sense of a need for passing from inchoate restlessness into major forms and no need for breaking out from these forms in turn. Or perhaps I should say scarcely any, for on a few occasions in the last decade there have been laments that in American life there was no _resistance_ offered to a school of ideas, nothing on which a new school could sharpen its mind. Criticism with us is mostly an affair of acclamation and denunciation, a false state of excitement in which ideas stagnate.

In the light of the economy sketched above, our recent literary history reads somewhat as follows. The revolt of the generation now in power, successfully carried out between 1915 and 1920, was against a _decadent conservatism_ well named “genteelness.” It savagely broke the forms of genteel prudish culture, but the forms were weak: it may be said that genteelness was no enemy at all for strong writers. Well, the now ruling Middle Generation rested on its easy laurels: there followed ten years of waxing fat and flabby for the insurgents, to be ended by the surprising challenge of a virile conservatism that had quietly grown up in the meantime. _How_ they met the challenge is a matter of recent history--the jejune thought and rhinestone wit of Carl Van Doren in the debate with Irving Babbitt at Carnegie Hall, the ignorant identification of Humanism with the decadent stupid conservatism of fifteen years ago by Theodore Dreiser, the putting to work again by H. L. Mencken of his overworked phrases like “vague and witless blather” left no doubt whatever of the middle-aged rebels’ lack of stuff to meet the new issues. Most assuredly the containing forms of the New Humanism can cope with this decadent revolt movement, and have plenty of vacant space too. It is to the younger generation of literary thinkers that one must turn in hope of a real resistance, and its performance likewise was keenly disappointing--the repetition of stale attitudes for the most part. There was a lack of curiosity, _a pronounced desire to reject and not the hunger of youth to assimilate and pass beyond if possible_, that was distinctly discouraging to observe. The New Humanists may well call out for good enemies: if I judge them correctly, they have no taste for hollow victories.

To illustrate in the particular field of literature what I have been contending: the younger generation thought that one of the important issues involved a defence of contemporary American writing. But the real issue is how may things work together for the greater glory of American literature. On that all should unite, and toward it each should make contribution. The rest is a question of judgment of contemporary production. There is a Hollywood anecdote that seems to make clear the differences in judgment involved on this point. A new motion picture had been given its first showing, and the magnate had asked his three advisers for opinions. “Stupendous,” said the first. “Colossal! Unexcelled! Unsurpassable!” the second replied. The third said in a low tone: “Excuse me, sir, but to me that picture was merely great.” The New Humanist appears to be that third man judging current American letters: to him our writing is “merely great.”

The signs of the day should tell the younger literary generation to beware of forming a new league of mediocrity to succeed the old.

The better path now for the spirit of revolt would seem to be _through_ Humanism. Revolt to be effective must be more than a mere spilling over weak barriers. You must have worthy forms and trammels to give force to your new endeavor. You must be contained before you can overflow with any meaning of importance to the future. To state it another way, the thorough assimilation of Humanism is the next step.

That there are gaps in Humanism I have pointed out. They are ways of egress to those who cannot be content within the Humanist doctrine and discipline. But as they imply in turn the assuming of a more severe discipline and form, I do not fancy an enthusiastic greeting for them from an opposition with the naïve faith in man of the present rejecters of the New Humanism. There is no way out for the addicts of milk for babes. “The feeble ask for liberty; the strong ask for rule.” Nietzsche, thou shouldst be living at this hour, when “independence, free development, and _laisser-aller_ are claimed the most vehemently precisely by those for whom no restraint _would be too severe_.”

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In somewhat mythological language I have been saying that there are certain possibilities of great development not inherent in the present state of American culture. To come within reach of other possibilities we must change to a state that holds them. Matthew Arnold noted that “in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive. And this state of things,” he added, “is the true basis for the creative power’s exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this.” This happy state Arnold had to judge was among the possibilities excluded by the condition of English culture in the nineteenth century, and there seems no ground, alas, to believe that it exists among the possibilities now open to American culture. But Arnold did consider it possible to initiate an intermediate phase in English life.

“Even,” he said, “when this (state of things described above) does not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare, but besides that it may be a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value.” Arnold proceeded then to cite an example of this second and possible state. “Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely-combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That was the poet’s weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. That was his strength.”