Chapter VII: This Unbelieving World (1)

1. DORSEY

We have now to consider some of our minor misbehaviorists, and may as well begin with George A. Dorsey, Ph.D., former Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and author of “Why We Behave Like Human Beings.”

I would hate to be asked to analyze this book or to reduce its contents to an understandable outline. No matter what philosophy I attributed to it, I could be flatly contradicted by quotations from the book itself. Thus in one place he says, “Biologically, rape and the theft of a loaf of bread are natural behavior; celibacy and asceticism are crimes against nature.” And in another place he describes the courtship habits of various mammalia, showing that rape at least is by no means biologically natural even among the lower animals. The author is an eclectic, wandering freely through the pages of Darwin, Bergson, Dr. Watson and many others, picking and choosing what for the moment pleases his fancy, untroubled by the clashing of the various views which his staccato style records.

Dorsey, though he says nothing new, constructs a curious puzzle of inconsistencies, but Dr. Watson, I think, is the key. He even says that Dr. Watson read the last two chapters prior to their publication, which sounds like a claim that the great behaviorist approved of them. It would seem that he did not read them very carefully. Nevertheless, though marked by the bar-sinister, “Why We Behave Like Human Beings” is clearly a Watsonian child.

It begins, as do so many of our “thoughtful” books, with anatomy, physiology, biology, a long history of the lower forms of life, of the protozoa and the amœba and their kin, of the physical details of the human body, in embryo and out of it. The public thirst for facts of this sort is too great not to be taken advantage of by all who have psychological or philosophical axes to grind.

And having posed his facts, and duly mixed them with alleged facts, he proceeds in the time-honored manner to attribute to his own inferences the authority due only to the facts themselves. He also makes large use of the custom of speaking of alleged “mechanisms” in metaphorical terms, personifying them and thus making them “go” with an energy which they are not supposed to possess. Thus he lends a vividness as of life to what is in reality a picture of death. And having denied God in substance, he does not forget now and then to fling Him a kind word.

Man, we have been told, cannot by taking thought add a single cubit to his stature. Other creatures seem to be more fortunate, for we learn on page 66 that “some Primates experimented in fingers.” And on this same page “a lemur lost his second finger.” No, he did not advertise. He lost it on purpose, the way Freud lost the book his wife gave him when he was vexed at her. But in this case the object was to “give the thumb more grasping space.” And “some tried claws instead of nails.”

Thus are evolutionary processes given aims and wills of their own. As a mode of literary expression it would, of course, be proper enough did it not serve to smuggle into the argument a multitude of those vital things which the makers of such arguments are forever pretending to exclude. Could primates really “experiment” with their fingers the way a Curie can experiment with pitchblend, choosing, rejecting, moulding the very substance of themselves in accordance with some “purpose,” Darwin need not have troubled himself trying to discover how species originated. We would all know.

What Dorsey really feels behind his smoke-screen of rhetoric can be seen on page XIII of his Preface, where he says:

“As philosophy was moonshine before it began to investigate the elementary properties of matter and energy, so, I suspect, religion will be subject to quackery and hypocrisy until humanity itself becomes more human than human nature and religion itself ceases worrying about heaven and hell and devotes its energies to making this earth a paradise.”

That is, when religion ceases to deal with the supernatural it will cease to be subject to quackery and hypocrisy. Very likely. It would be difficult for either hypocrisy or quackery to attach itself to anything which had ceased to exist. How, then, is this earthly paradise to be brought about? Dorsey does not tell us in so many words. But he says that we may soon hope for the discovery of a method whereby the several hundred ova of the human female may be removed and fertilized outside of the body.

This method is already employed with fish in the modern hatchery. Its advantages are obvious. In the first place, we could almost do away with the necessity of raising males, or at least could let the surgeon see to it that few of them remained males. This would solve a great many social problems and release a lot of energy for industrial employment. As it is, millions of spermatozoa go to waste in every man. Also, the females, having furnished the ova, would no longer be females in any troublesome sense of the word. More saving. Nor should it be difficult to induce the Eugenics Society to superintend the whole business. Of course some will object that this is not a picture of a terrestrial paradise, that it looks more like some particularly repulsive corner of Hell which Dante forgot or forbore to describe. But such malcontents can be dealt with by removing their germ-plasm from the stream of our national life and refusing it a place in the government hatcheries. Progress of this sort need not be suffered to halt on account of the existence of a few persons not socially minded.

But how about philosophy? It was moonshine until it began to investigate the elementary properties of matter and energy, and elementary properties are ultimate properties. And religion will be subject to quackery and hypocrisy until it ceases worrying about ultimate properties and busies itself with making earth a paradise. So moonshine mixed with quackery and hypocrisy is the substance of those movements having other than a narrow, earthly aim. No coins are liable to be counterfeited save those which are honored at some bank outside of our humdrum sphere. And as science is supposed to be matter of fact and practical, quack scientists become unthinkable.

When, however, was it that philosophy left off being moonshine? It must have been some time ago, for even the ancient Greeks--to say nothing of the Hindus and Chinese--were eager to investigate the elementary properties of matter and energy. As they were in the habit of keeping their science a secret from the common man, we do not know how much science they had. But it is evident from their philosophy that they were always thinking about matter and energy. Their conclusions may sound quaint--though not quite so quaint today as a half-century ago--but it is certain that moonshine was largely mixed with observation until modern metaphysics, predominantly German, took the field. I cannot stop to prove this, but I refer Mr. Dorsey to any Story of Philosophy, even Will Durant’s. I also recommend that he read some good history of science, for he says on page 86: “Science knows nothing of the ultimate origin of the source of energy; it only accepts both facts [what facts?] and goes on with its business of trying to find out what matter is and what energy can do. In other words, the problem of the origin of life is locked up in the origin of matter and of energy.”

One often hears this allegation--that science goes on with its own business, leaving the problem of ultimate origin aside. Yet every major hypothesis which science has ever constructed is an attempt to account for this very ultimate origin--or primal origin, if you prefer. It could not be otherwise. How could science try “to find out what matter is” without at the same time trying to find out how matter originated? Neither matter nor energy is a fact, isolated and handed out on a plate for human use. Science must needs attempt to discover the nature of that with which it works. And the only way to explain a fact, let alone acquiring the power of producing phenomena at will, is by discovering a preceding or accompanying fact.

If we find the dead body of a man in the kitchen, and then find a knife sticking into his heart, the knife helps to explain the dead body. A bloody finger-print of the cook’s thumb helps further. If we then learn that the dead man had been the cook’s lover and that he had been flirting with the second-parlor maid, we have taken another step. But if we want to know how to prevent such incidents (or to bring them about, if that be our aim) we must go on and learn “Why We Behave Like Human Beings.” The very title of Mr. Dorsey’s book shows it to be a search for the ultimate. Does he wish us to understand that it is therefore unscientific moonshine?

But let him proceed with his personifications. “Nature,” he says,[146] “can mean anything.” Whether he is referring to the word “nature” or to the sum of things commonly called “nature” I do not know. When we were talking of primates, the thing nature appeared to mean a great deal, since it could experiment with fingers and weigh nails in the balance against claws. Or was the primate an independent experimenter, and not a part of nature? Dorsey goes on by speaking of a certain development as being “an amazing tribute to the persistence of nature,” and of a time when “nature” began to branch out on “new lines.” Clearly nature here is something with will, force and purpose.

He writes also of “the vertebrate idea,” as if it were an idea possessed by some backbone--in the days, too, when the only backbone in the world was a thread-like notochord, such as that of the amphioxus. So the idea was originally the notochord’s!

But through all this verbal debris something seems to shine like a skeleton through the dark, which it is not difficult to recognize as the _élan vital_ of Bergson--that God which nothing developed out of nothing, which _inheres_ in things of an origin as tenuous as its own and is determined to go somewhere but is by no means certain where--nor can the imagination of man picture how.

The motion pictures have accustomed us to demand a continuous stream of action, of facts or of what look like facts. Nothing but motion seems any longer to interest us. Probably we have fallen into the habit of ignoring all comment which may be made upon it. The danger is that the comment nevertheless may impress us, reaching our minds when our intelligence is off its guard, so that we end by mistaking comment for something else. We remember that we came upon it in company with facts; and are not conclusions, like men, to be judged by the company they keep?

Unfortunately, facts cannot choose their company, and may be mustered in to screen the nakedness of any theory whatsoever. To discover the _non-sequitur_, the disharmony between the facts and their evil companions, requires mental effort--and against mental effort, also, the movie has somewhat prejudiced us.

However, it does not require much mental effort to sift fact from fancy in Dorsey. “The drive for a mate,” he assures us,[147] “is backed by a sensori-motor mechanism which functions till the mate is secured.” But everybody knows that the mechanism in question does not continue to function until a mate is secured; lacking a mate (to say nothing of the possibility of sublimation), its force will eventually be drained away through other channels. He himself admits this a few lines later on. But first he must say (on this same page) that “the mate-impulse is driven by an unconscious mechanism, and not by any desire of offspring.”

Let it be granted that sex will function without desire of offspring--even in the face of a deadly dread of offspring. If it were not so, contraceptive methods would hardly have been invented to sterilize the sexual act. But how about this precious “mechanism” being unconscious? Does he mean that the mechanism itself is unconscious? Or that it acts without our being conscious of it? He leaves us in the dark, and we are driven to seek such light as our own experience may supply. And why does he leave us in the dark? Because, regarding us as mechanisms, he sees no difference between unconsciousness in ourselves and unconsciousness in the sex-glands and their accompanying organs!

So he leaves us with the biologically natural raper who is unconscious of his rapacity, or whose body is ignorant of its biological naturalness. We may take our choice of interpretations. To say that the knife is ignorant of the murder committed with it, and to say that the murderer is ignorant of the murder he commits with the knife, is therefore saying one and the same thing. Both knife and murderer are mechanisms. And so, it is to be hoped, is the murdered one. Unconsciousness on his part would certainly help murder to fall unnoticed into the procession of the biologically natural.

And now we turn to page 434 and learn that “as one calls the roll of the men who have rendered useful social service, one is impressed by the notion that most of them have succeeded not because but in spite of their training.” Here is the behaviorist, who calls in Dr. Watson to read his manuscript, delivering us suddenly hand and foot over to the hereditarians, to the eugenists--whom on other pages he professes to abhor. For it is utterly impossible to suppose that Dorsey means that the great succeed in spite of all circumstances through exercise of individual will inherited from nobody, and all their own.

Then, two pages further on, we come to the eternal question of woman’s sphere. “Freedom of movement is soon limited for girls. Some learn to skip the rope and play jackstones only under parental frowns.... And as for climbing trees, playing marbles, going off swimming, who ever heard of such a thing!”

I turn at once to the date line at the end of the preface, and learn with astonishment that it reads, “New York City, June 1, 1925.” So New York parents are frowning--at least some of them are--when their girls skip the rope or play jackstones. Or were in 1925. What changes must recently have taken place, or how the newspapers of the world must have lied about New York! But anyway, this looks like a whole-souled endorsement of the more modern way of bringing up girls and a condemnation of the ultra-conservatism of New York--unless Dorsey was thinking of the girls of Thibet and forgot to mention it.

He is still modern on page 439, where he says: “It is psychologically significant that children of both sexes are born with erogenous zones.... The sex-mechanism is inherently perfect at birth. The [interior] impulse for a mate appears later, at puberty. But the mechanism itself is so built into our structure that inaction is biologically abnormal. Yet we speak of ‘control’; and dose youth with endless formulæ.”

Let us, then, cease to speak of control--at least long enough to enquire into the meaning of these Dorsey adjectives. Here we have “psychologically” significant, and “biologically” abnormal, with the adverb “inherently” attached to the word perfect. (I also note, on page 103, that, “biologically,” immortality is a figure of speech.)

Does he mean that the erogenous zones are insignificant when viewed, say, from a social rather than a psychological standpoint? Does he mean to admit that their inaction is normal if we could once get away from whatever is implied by this ubiquitous biology of his? And who is to guess what is meant by a perfection which inheres in anything at birth?

To inhere, I believe, means to be fixed or to exist in something else; to be an essential part of; to be innate. At least my dictionary says it does. Now what is a perfection which inheres in a just-born erogenous zone? Does it mean that the zone is born ready to perform all its functions? But this is contrary to notorious fact. Or is the zone born imperfect, and permitted to use its inherent perfection only later? But we have just been told that inaction is biologically abnormal. If any meaning is to be supposed to inhere in words, Dorsey must here be trying to tell us that between the time of birth and the time of puberty, the erogenous zones should not be subjected to the biologically abnormal condition of inactivity.

And yet, on this same page, he continues: “What happens to the sex-response mechanism between birth and marriageable age? Biologically nothing; nothing is expected of it.” That is to say, biologically speaking, nothing is expected of the erogenous zones before puberty except that they shall endure the biologically abnormal condition of inaction. But perhaps “biologically nothing” means just nothing, and perhaps just nothing is the meaning of the whole passage. Let us hope so.

“Raise the standard of man’s morality!” he next admonishes us--we are now at pages 443 and 444. “But not by talk. Work will do it. Many a boy is so hard at work he has no further energy left. His sex-impulse is expended in life impulse activities.” Admirable! This is evidently biologically abnormal and in complete contradiction with what has gone before, but it is nevertheless good sense and capital ethics.

“Girls begin to find outlets for their energy in action, in sports and games, and in the broader affairs of life interests.” Admirable again. But what has become of the frowns of their jackstone-hating parents? And the next line reads: “All-night dances can dissipate a lot of energy for both sexes.” Readers who doubt the existence of this line are referred to the book, page 444. The all-night dance has at last found its place among the means recommended for curbing sexual precocity.

We skip a dozen pages, and read: “Until recently it was a woman-made world we lived in. The wife-mother was the center of the home.” This is refreshing. We have heard it so often said that until recently, when universal suffrage came to the rescue, this was a man-made world. Dorsey lays the blame on women, which is at least a change. But how came woman to make the world when it was the home and not the world which she was the center of? Be that as it may, “it was her interest to make [the home] a real center. It became a hive of industry and a swarm of children.” It certainly did. And we are back boosting the good old times again. Nor are they quite over yet, for “women generally married for love, as they do now if their mate-hunger is unimpaired.”

That flicker of partiality for sports and games for girls seems to have died out. Dorsey returns to conservatism. And the argument proceeds: “Now women have their ‘rights.’ In obtaining ‘rights’ she abdicated a throne: she no longer rules by divine right. The children that ‘bless the home’ are turned over to the nurse while mother presides at bridge.... All this, of course makes for ‘progress.’ But in our social progress we have acquired special schools where boys may learn to be pimps and girls to be prostitutes.”

This seems to me a little severe. But at least we are sure of Dorsey now. Girls used to be restrained, and he favors restraint. “Social conditions are changing, but the average American girl still approaches her majority fitted for no economically independent career. Brought up as a social parasite, it is her belief and the all-around understanding that marriage is her career.”

What does this mean? That marriage was a girl’s career was the all-around understanding in the days when the wife-mother was the center of a home that was a hive of industry and a swarm of children. And now we are asked to believe that girls still brought up with such ideas are social parasites. Was woman a parasite when she occupied the throne which some now have abdicated? This argument has gone insane. Girls must be brought up as social parasites or sent to schools for prostitutes. Are we in a woman-made world now, or in a man-made world? I confess that I do not know where we are. But I read on: “Many a mother nearly ‘dies of shame’ when Mamie bobs her hair and marches off in the garb of a girl scout. ‘Girls didn’t do such outlandish things in my day!’ They did not.” The jackstone-hating mother thus comes once more to the fore, and she believes that her girls are going to the devil in boy scout’s clothes with bobbed hair to the old swimming-hole. I hope those schools for prostitutes are not hard by.

The girls, too, come in for their meed of shame. For after saying harsh things of Freud, Dorsey first writes, “It is natural for the boy to pattern his reactions towards his mother after his father; for the girl to prefer her father,”--which seems to have been taken from The Complete Freudian--and then clenches the matter by adding: “These innocent tendencies may be shamed into permanent attachments, making it difficult for the boy or girl later to make perfect substitutions.”

Did Dr. Watson really read this chapter (it is the last in the book) and pass without remark the statement that a seeking-motion reflex like the foregoing may have a substituted stimulus built into it by _shame_? Or do he and Dorsey consider shame a pleasant emotion? No; we are here plainly in the presence of mother and father fixations, of the Œdipus complex--an innocent thing made dangerous and eternal by being driven into the unconscious mind by shame. And Dorsey believes in no unconscious mind, or in any other sort of mind. Usually he encloses the hateful word in quotation marks. But he says (on page 11), “We do not use the brains we have.” Is that the solution?

These are deep waters, so let us get back to our girl scouts. “For we have to learn anew what our stone-ax ancestors knew. Girls can be as ‘outlandish’ as boys! The girls themselves are just beginning to discover it.” Are they? Bless their hearts! Everybody else has always known it. What follows, however, is news. “Marriage behavior is in for further conditioning. The sex-complex may become simple again.”[148]

Dorsey’s attitude towards the woman question at last becomes clear. It is a return to the stone-age to which he hopefully looks forward--the stone age and the simple, unconditioned reflex of the erogenous zone stimulated by exterior contacts, with no inner-born, nonsensical, complex sentiments to render it biologically abnormal. We have finally re-established harmonious relations with the gut-reactions so much admired by Dr. Watson.

Dorsey says that he does not see how the Darwinian theory of evolution by means of the accumulation of minor variations through natural selection can have worked unless the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters be taken for a fact. Nevertheless he informs us[149] that “our ancestral primate was a small, warm-blooded, primitive mammal with forty-four teeth, four short legs, all alike, and feet with five toes armed with claws.” This forbear “lived on insects, fruit and nuts. Who was _its_ ancestor? Where did it get its mammæ?” he then asks. And he answers himself: “Circumstantial evidence points to a dog-toothed, low-browed, Tirassic reptile, called Cynodont.”

No, Dorsey has not become a convert to the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters. He does not much believe in heredity. Upon undivulged circumstantial evidence, however, he settles the moot question of human descent. And he calls his book a bit of “propaganda for _critical_ judgments.”

He settles also the problem of will.

“As for will, it is as free as air. And much more difficult to catch.”[150] The meaning here is itself a little difficult to catch. Nor is the following quite clear: “Our psychology is human, but our behavior is individual.” When did our psychology become human? It is welcome news. Our behavior has always been individual, of course. But Dorsey, as a behaviorist, should have said that it was the collectivity of our reaction-mass--which certainly cannot be either free, individual or human unless it is controlled by some psychic power.

“We do not use the brains we have”]

“Psychic power?” Dorsey exclaims. “I know what power is; I know what psyche is; I also know that knowledge may be power. But I can discover only one way to get knowledge into my head: through my sense perceptions. And only one way to get any power out of that knowledge: by inference, by reason.... When I want magic I go see Houdini.”

Good! But why, if reason can turn knowledge into power, go to Houdini for magic? Turning knowledge into power is real magic, glorious, white and true. It happens every day. Even Dorsey can lead us to the eternal verities, it seems. But he will not permit us long to remain even in their neighborhood. “We learn to think logically,” he declares, “just as we learn to speak correctly or to behave decently. I may think well, I may shave well ... who shall say? My way of thinking and my way of shaving are my own ways.... I may change both tomorrow; someone is always inventing new ways of adjustment, new ways of exciting human protoplasm to change its shaving soap. New thought also. Why not? We have new books, new scandals, new elements, new diseases, new razors, new glands, new logic.”[151]

“The point is that there is no thought without muscular or glandular activity. This is true whether the stomach thinks hunger, the dreamer thinks air-castles, the prisoner thinks freedom, or the maiden thinks of her lover. Thinking is a bodily act as coughing or scratching one’s head. During thinking energy is consumed, mechanism is involved.”[152]

Do you comprehend? The man who scratches his head has always been supposed to be thinking. Now we know that the scratching is the thinking--thinking is a bodily act. The rumbling of the bowels is thinking. The stomach thinks. Everything thinks but ourselves.

No wonder we have new thoughts when so many new thinkers come forward. New logic. My stomach may think that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to twenty-three right angles, or that a bite of mince pie is bigger than the whole pie. It is _my_ stomach. What it thinks is nobody’s business. And by tomorrow my stomach’s protoplasm may become so excited that it will think some other way.

I can see how we have new scandals at the same time that we have new books. But I don’t see how we are going to get back merely to the stone age by our new ways of thinking. They will certainly take us back much further than that. And I wonder what our physicians will say to the suggestion that our glands are new? They have been offered to us as new discoveries, but this Dorsey seems to hint that they may be new inventions. I “think” we might better have gone to see Houdini after all. For “rational conduct is a dream” on page 470, and on page 455 it is the only way of converting knowledge into power. Over this mystery I scratch my head in vain.

Then there is the Church.

“As a projector of unsocial behavior,” says Dorsey, “the so-called Christian Church, with its endless squabbles over forms, creeds and rituals, and its eternal betrayal of humanity, is not far behind.”[153] Not far behind what? Good form. For “good form is in the saddle; it is ruthless, it is mighty, and it does prevail. It is not founded on intelligence.”

I am glad that the Church has at least good form to keep it company. But I confess that I do not know what church is the “so-called Christian” one; whether it is Protestant or Catholic; nor what the real, honest-to-goodness Christian Church, if any, calls itself in Dorsey’s mind.

“Socially useful behavior is not more prevalent, because sociably fashionable behavior has a better lobby.”[154] Our Dorsey is now turning radical, for he goes on: “By Fashion I do not mean the, or a Four Hundred; I mean those in power of money and of government, our bosses; the people who are trying to make us buy their wares, join their club, vote their ticket, think their thoughts, and help them kill or cripple their enemies.” Radical and pacifist. But I had not heard that force was being used by anybody to make people join their clubs.

“What,” the now thoroughly aroused former professor of anthropology demands--page 473--“can be of less consequence to you than whether I _believe_ in this or that kind of a God, Savior, government or society? What is of consequence to you, to society, and to me, is what I do.”

Very true, Mr. Dorsey. And I for one apologize. But we were under the impression--seemingly mistaken--that your beliefs might, at times, influence your conduct, or even enable us to guess what, under given circumstances, you were likely to do before you actually did it and it was too late.

I hope I have not given the impression that Dorsey is unimportant. He--like the one who is to follow--is immensely important. He has a large and enthusiastic public. I have never seen the rationality of his argument seriously questioned in any periodical of general circulation. And that fact, perhaps, is the most important one of all.

2. THE BRAZEN BOUGH

Lewis Browne’s “This Believing World,” which ran through four large printings within the first four months of its existence, is an interesting example of the sort of reasoning that passes with a generation devoted to materialism, mechanism, humanism, monism and the newer psychologies, and yet is not quite ready to pay the consequences of its position or to abandon altogether the banner of the cause which it has deserted.

Browne is what may be termed an “admirer” of Jesus Christ. He treats him always with the utmost kindness, speaking of him[155] as “a gentle, loving, helpless youth ... the very incarnation of perfection,”--a perfection with which an “insistent pacifism” is soon included. “The spirit of Jesus,” it also appears, “was innately Jewish and puritanical.”[156] Moreover, “Jesus, one must remember ... like every other great Jewish prophet ... preached only ethics.”[157]

Thus the great fame of the Nazarene, which rests upon the idea not that He was the incarnation of perfection but the Incarnation of God, is sought to be preserved and appropriated by an eclectic modernism which denies the very basis of His title to supreme distinction. Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Paine are thought to have been a little crude in some of their anti-religious tirades. But they addressed a people that was at least familiar with its Bible. They never presupposed such childish ignorance of history and scripture as is everywhere taken for granted in “This Believing World.”

Browne, who naturally has small use for the Church of Rome, is sympathetic towards such leaders of the Reformation as Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. But not even Protestantism wins his unqualified approval. He says[158] that “Protestantism includes every type of religious thought,” and “only slowly, and with many pangs” is “shaking off the religion about Christ. Only slowly, very slowly, is it beating its way back to the religion of Jesus.”

This seems like a fairly clear thesis, uttered by one who has never read either the New Testament or the Old, and who consequently is able to look upon Christianity, or “the religion of Jesus” (i.e., the religion which he thinks was taught by Jesus), as an excellent system of human morality of which he has heard good report, and holds that it should not be confused with supernaturalism, or “the religion about Christ,” of which he has heard bad and understands has been invented somehow without historical warrant.

Were this all, I might pass him unmentioned. One cannot stop to complain of every popular author who speaks without information. But the total depravity of the Browne method of thinking, of argument, of logic--to employ such words in his connection; the illimitable naïveté with which he propounds mutually exclusive and antagonistic assumptions in that agreeable and easy-flowing style of his, positively cries out for remark. How he “gets by with it,” is more than I can understand. “This Believing World” is logical only in two particulars. It follows the same author’s short history of the Jews, entitled, “Stranger than Fiction”; and it is dedicated to H. G. Wells. Such substance as it has marks it as a less aureate branch sprung from Fraser’s “The Golden Bough.”

“In the beginning,” it begins, after certain preliminaries--we are now in fact on page 27,--“In the beginning was fear; and fear was in the heart of man.... Boulders toppled and broke his bones; diseases ate his flesh; death seemed ever ready to lay him low. And he, poor gibbering half-ape nursing his wound in some draughty cave, could only tremble.”

Is it necessary to remark that there is no evidence whatever pointing to this as the early state of man? That it is merely an assumption assumed to help along one particular theory of evolution, and is contradicted by those modern researches tending to show that savages, when actually degraded, are degenerate rather than primitive? Yet Browne illustrates his text with an original pen-and-ink sketch of this Missing Link. The drawing is extremely good and spirited. One only wishes it were a photograph. And he continues: “Since blows could not subdue the hostile rocks or streams [the rocks were hostile, evidently, because they supplied caves, and the streams because they supplied fish], our ancestor tried to subdue them with magic.... Self-preservation must have forced them to [the] certainty [that spells would work], for without it self-preservation would have been impossible. Man had to have faith in himself or die--and he would not die. So he had faith [in himself, you will note] and developed religion.”[159]

This is so vivid that it sounds like the description of an eye-witness. And he goes on in a no less certain tone: “By the word faith we mean that indispensable--and therefore imperishable--illusion in the heart of man that, though he may seem a mere worm on the earth, he nevertheless can make himself the lord of the universe. By the word religion, however, we mean one special technique by which man seeks to realize that illusion. It was by no means the first such technique to be invented by man; and it may not be the last, either. Long before man thought of religion, he tried to control the ‘powers’ of the universe by [this] magic.”[160]

Very well. Man, once half ape, has become, in seeming at least, a mere worm; but he entertains an indispensable and “therefore” imperishable illusion that he can make himself lord of the universe--certainly a strange conviction for either a worm or an ape to entertain. To support this illusion, he first invents magic, which is an attempt to coerce the “powers,” and then invents religion--which Browne later explains as an attempt to “cajole” the powers. Religion and magic are merely two different kinds of technic, each designed to fool the technician until by dint of fooling illusion becomes reality. The “powers” are not fooled because they are always enclosed in quotation marks, which I understand to indicate that they do not exist. What next?

“He [‘dawn man’] saw on every side of him the fell and bewildering ‘powers,’ and illogically but naturally his first concern was not how they worked but how they could be avoided.”[161]

We thus make our acquaintance with the Browne idea of “logic.” A logical dawn man would have waited to be devoured by the fell powers, imaginary or not, before trying to avoid them. Logic would have compelled him to understand before doing anything else. Fortunately for us, dawn man was illogical. He escaped extinction.

And so we read on, up to the beginning of the fifty-ninth page, becoming better and better acquainted with our ancestor all the while. The conviction grows that Browne was there. Then, suddenly, he tells us that, though he is aware that his narrative has made it seem “as though the writer knew for certain just what had happened ... actually he knows nothing of the sort. All he knows is what many learned anthropologists after much painstaking research, have _surmised_.” The italics are his own. “Of course,” thus begins page 60, “they may have surmised quite badly. Their underlying theory may be entirely wrong, and religion, instead of having been originally created to elude or conquer fear, may have arisen quite independently of it. Religion may be an altogether primal instinct in the human race--something just as old and fundamental and innate as fear itself. Who knows?”

As candor, this is flawless. But it is disturbing. If learned anthropologists, after much painstaking research, can be entirely wrong (and indeed a great many other learned anthropologists, after equally painstaking research, have time and time again declared these particular learned anthropologists to be wrong altogether) why cannot the learned anthropologists and biologists who furnished the data for the spirited pen-and-ink sketch of our gibbering, half-ape _aïeul_ be wrong as well? What if this surmising about monkeys and worms be as badly done as may be this surmising about religion? And what is the use of going on with all this if it be just a guess?

Shall we continue because it is stranger than fiction? But it is not in itself as interesting as is fiction. We were lured into reading by the idea that it was being presented as truth. And now we are haunted by the fear that it may be a blasphemous invention--that religion rather than this anthropology may have some truth in it.

So we skip “What Happened in India,” “What Happened in China,” “What Happened in Persia,” and “What Happened in Israel,” since, after all, it may never have happened; and turn to part seven, “What Happened in Europe.” Here, as near home as this, we ought to be on safe ground, with dependable historians instead of surmising anthropologists to act as guides. This is the portion of the book which deals with the Christian religion, in itself of more interest to most than are the Shebatum taboos, Taoism, or the heliotropisms of Zoroaster. What, then, did happen in Europe in the days when Christianity was born?

“The prologue of the story of that new religion opens in Galilee. Almost two thousand years ago there was born in the Galilean village of Nazareth, a Jewish child to whom was given the name of Joshua, or Jesus. We do not know for certain how the early years of this child [Browne adheres to the lower cases in all emergencies] were spent. The Gospels recount many legends concerning his conception, birth, and youth, but they are no more to be relied upon than the suspiciously similar legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster.”[162]

The anthropologists were only possibly wrong; but the Gospels recount legends, and Browne here does not say maybe. Neither does he say where he gets his information concerning the birthplace of Christ. Had he ever read even the first Gospel he would have learned that Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judæa. Perhaps our author referred himself only to his own stranger-than-fiction history of the Jews.

Anyway, he goes on to declare that this Child “cherished many of the primitive notions of the simple folk to whom he belonged, believing that disease and sometimes even death were caused by the presence of foul demons, and could be removed by prayer. He knew little if any Greek, and could never have even heard of Greek science or philosophy. All he knew was the Bible, and probably the text of that had been taught him only by rote.... Above all he must have been taught to prize as dearer than life the old obsession of his people that someday they would be miraculously freed by the Messiah. Indeed, so well was that last drilled into him that, as he matured, the hunger for the realization of the hope became his all consuming passion.”[163]

We now have One “who preached only ethics,” and yet cherished an all-consuming passion for the realization of the obsessive hope of His people that someday they would be miraculously freed by a Messiah.

If Browne will turn to another book with which he seems to be as unfamiliar as he is with the Bible, the dictionary, to wit, he will find ethics defined in some such manner as follows: “Ethics, the science that treats of the principles of human morality and duty; moral philosophy; morals.” An obsessive belief in miracles is something quite beyond ethics, either of a puritanically Jewish or any other variety. Nor do the cherished primitive notions of simple folk to the effect that diseases may be cured by prayer savor much of ethics. I do not of course mean that Christ had no ethics; but Browne has introduced Him to us as one who preached ethics only. Did He, then, keep his one “all consuming passion” out of his preaching?

This attempt to distinguish between “the religion _of_ Jesus” and the “religion _about_ Jesus,” is as old as modern ignorance of the subject. But Browne, given all the ignorance in the world, seems unable to state it without letting it sting itself to death with its own tail. And he goes on, still further to murder the dead body of his own philosophy: “Now ... there was in the land an evangelist ... called John the Baptizer.... Jesus was for a time a follower of John, one of a multitude of young Jews and Jewesses who believed in the mission of the wild prophet. His gospel was much like that of his teacher. ‘The time is fulfilled,’ he cried, ‘and the Kingdom of God is at hand.’”[164] That is, the new gospel was the messianic gospel of a wild prophet--and the “follower” who preached it preached only ethics!

And--“when the stories of that young preacher’s wandering [the reference is to Christ, not to John] were gathered together in later years and set down in writing, it was said that he performed all manner of miracles as he went about the land. Perhaps there is a fragment of truth in that tradition, for if people will only believe with sufficient faith, miracles become not at all impossible.... And Jesus could quite command implicit faith. He himself believed; with all his heart and soul he believed that soon would come the Great Release.... He spoke without the slightest flourish, using plain words and homely parables. He indulged in no philosophy or theology, for, after all, he was an untutored toiler who knew nothing of such vanities. Nor, seemingly, did he preach any inordinate heresies.”[165]

How does Browne know how He spoke? Surely he cannot be depending upon the “stories of that young preacher’s wanderings” that were “gathered together in later years and set down in writing,” for he has already told us that “they are no more to be relied on than the suspiciously similar legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster.” Again it seems to be suggested that Browne was there.

But this at least seems clear: Browne holds that Jesus preached “The Kingdom of God is at hand”; that it is not at all impossible that He performed miracles, though only of the faith-cure sort (I have insufficient space for the discussion of miracles as distinguished from faith-cures); and that He did not preach “any inordinate heresies” from the Jewish standpoint. “He was not a heretic in the sense that Ikhanaton or Zoroaster were heretics. Outwardly he was distinctly a conforming Jew.”[166]

“Yet [on the same page] for all his conformity ... Jesus was definitely a rebel.... His whole gospel was intended but to comfort the disinherited, for it declared that no matter how unlettered they might be they could nevertheless be taken into the Kingdom of God when it came.... Now such a gospel was literally saturated with heresy.”

Saturated with heresy, but not with inordinate heresy--is that it?

Stranger than fiction]

“Because it [Christ’s gospel] denounced the rich and commanded them to divest themselves of all their possessions, it attacked the whole sacrificial cult.... A people without possessions could never possibly afford fat bullocks to burn or skins of oil to pour away.... Moreover, because this gospel minimized the importance of learning, and commanded men to keep merely the spirit of the law, it attacked the whole Rabbinical cult.”[167]

Again I wonder where Browne obtained these details without having recourse to “legends.” And so he goes on down to the bottom of the page, by which time this same gospel has become “charged with quite devastating heresy.” Devastating, but not inordinate!

If Browne’s mind works in this way, so presumably do the minds of his readers. Religion aside, not a few results may be expected from a “modern temper” of this sort--from the fact that there are in this Republic a large number of people incapable of being troubled by equivocations, by the glaring inconsistencies of flatly contradictory statements living at seeming peace in the midst of the same argument, or people incapable of remembering or too careless to remember more than one statement at a time.

This “modern temper” makes it possible for men and women who do not accept the supernatural character of Christ to beg His authority for their own notions, no matter how opposed those notions may be to what is said in the New Testament records. In interpreting a statute one is compelled by a rule of law to consider all its parts together. In interpreting the Bible one indulges in the habit of selecting here a jot and there a tittle. Those selected become authority. Those rejected become legendary by the very act of rejection even at the hand of caprice or lack of information.

Browne speaks, on page 268, of “the stupid and silly and gross extravagances,” the “pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that clog and confuse the Gospel accounts.” But the method for distinguishing the false from the true seems to be very simple. If a line of Scripture fits in with your preconceptions, it is wise and genuine. If not, it is either a forgery or the author was wrong. The principle of “the economy of hypotheses” is thus conserved.

It will be objected that this is what we do with any book, and that one who does not attribute divine authority either to the Bible or to the Church which promulgated it as canonical scripture, is guilty of no intellectual malpractice in using individual judgment.

But no ordinary book is treated in this way. An author whose good faith is impugned in one particular becomes a doubtful author. If he is convicted of one inaccuracy, his reputation for accuracy suffers to that extent. If his proofs have been carelessly read, one ceases to put much credence in individual words which possibly may be misprints. And if the book is suspected of being actually fraudulent in essential particulars, it ceases altogether to be of any documentary value except in so far as it be confirmed by other sources of information regarded as more trustworthy.

But our Brownes call the Gospels stupid, silly, grossly extravagant legends piously embellished with patent falsehoods--and then proceed to quote them (though it may be at second hand) as conclusive evidence where such quotation suits their purpose. Where quotation does not suit their purpose, they use paraphrase. If that won’t do, they rewrite entire passages as they claim they should have been written, creating doctrines out of whole cloth, which, whatever may be the nature of the weave, certainly bear no evidence of having come from a scriptural loom. Everywhere the gospel according to Browne claims to be the Gospel of Jesus. It seeks protection beneath the shadow of the Cross. Why?

It would seem that many who deny Christ’s divinity still regard Him with a sort of reverence, even a sort of fear. They would find it uncomfortable to think that they were not following His precepts. So they meet the admonitions of theologians with the allegation that said theologians have corrupted the intent of the sayings of this Great Teacher. These “individualists” are afraid to stand alone. They have ceased to follow the so-called “higher criticism.” It is apt to get too high. It has even been known to give aid and comfort to the theologians. The lower criticism, the no-criticism, is much easier.

Thus we have come to have a public which buys the books of the Brownes--men and women who have habituated their minds to a scorn of those rational processes which would tell them that certain assumptions entail certain consequences. They want to hunt with the hounds, and also to run with the hares. Browne’s masterpiece of dual allegiance, however, relates, as we shall see, not so much to the Carpenter as to the Apostle to the Gentiles. But he is not yet ready for that bit of double-dealing. He first must say:[168] “What really marked Jesus as one unlike any preacher who had come before him was not so much what he said, as the particular authority on which he said it.” (The particular authority of a preacher of ethics?) “Every other prophet had uttered his heresies in the name of God.... But this carpenter from Nazareth, for all his meekness and humility, spoke only in his own name. ‘Take _my_ yoke upon ye,’ he said. So did he speak, not as the mouthpiece of God, but as one vested with an almost divine authority of his own.... Such a tone would have sounded blasphemous ... even in a prince or a learned man.... But it ... created and sustained the impression that he was a transcendent person, and bestowed upon him the power to take cringing serfs and make them over into towering men. Only because he believed in himself so firmly ... could he make others accept his words. His tone was not that of a mere prophet, but almost that of God Himself.

“It was not merely that he could perform what were thought to be miracles.... It was more that he could carry himself with the divine assurance of an ‘Anointed One.’”[169]

Strange conduct, surely, for One who preached merely ethics; who went about crying, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” and meant only that the Kingdom of Good Moral Conduct was at hand. Why not say that He meant “The Kingdom of Eugenics is at hand!” and be done with it? And what can Browne mean by an “almost” divine authority, or a tone “almost” that of God Himself? It would seem that Christ was the Son of God, or was not; that He claimed to be the Messiah, or did not claim to be the Messiah. Browne, ignoring the law of the excluded middle term, attempts to insert a middle term by means of the word “almost.” And he adds: “Whether Jesus himself was convinced he was the Messiah is a problem still unsolved.... Charlatans and madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, had time and again been hailed by the hysterical mob as the Awaited One. Is it any wonder therefore that an exalted person like this young carpenter, Jesus, should have been hailed likewise?”[170]

But that is not the question. We are not concerned with what hysterical mobs may have thought about charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, but with what Jesus thought about Himself. We are also concerned with what Jesus did when He was hailed as the Awaited One. It would seem that an exalted person, not self-convinced of his Messiahship, would have been constrained by his own exalted character to enter a disclaimer in such a case.

Of course, if one could quote the Gospels without fear of setting Mr. Browne to thinking of “all the stupid and silly and gross extravagances, all the pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that clog and confuse the Gospel accounts,” one could prove even to him that Jesus actually claimed to be the Messiah. For in the Gospel According to St. John it is written,[171] “Jesus said unto him [Thomas], I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” And, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

Doubtless Browne considers these and similar passages as suspiciously similar to certain legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster. But in any case his own argument should force him to conclude that Jesus was the Messiah; or was self-deluded; or was a charlatan. Or does Browne consider it possible to be a charlatan and an exalted person at one and the same time? Out of charity we must conclude that he decides in favor of the delusion hypothesis. Of the other alternatives, his text forbids one and his presumable sanity forbids the other. So it was the victim of a delusion which we are not even certain that he entertained who took cringing serfs and made them over into towering men.