Chapter I: Part 1

THE DILEMMA OF THE
LIBERATED

_An Interpretation of Twentieth Century Humanism_

By GORHAM MUNSON

_“It is a commonplace of the schools
that man is a little world, in which
we may discern a body mingled
of earthly elements, and ethereal
breath, and the vegetable life of
plants, and the senses of lower animals,
and reason, and the intelligence
of angels, and a likeness to God.”_

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA.

PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
_Coward-McCann, Inc._
IN THE YEAR 1930

Copyright, 1930, by
Coward-McCann, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Printed in the U. S. A.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION vii

I. THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM 3

II. A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE 19

III. THE MAN OF POISE 39

IV. THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 53

V. THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL ABROAD 79

VI. A CREATIVE CONCEPTION OF MAN 107

VII. THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMANISM 130

VIII. SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN 167

IX. EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP 190

X. HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS 208

XI. THE DILEMMA OF THE LIBERATED 252

XII. THE END OF THE TETHER 284

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 302

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

A LETTER OF DEDICATION TO SEWARD B. COLLINS, ESQ’RE.

My dear Seward:

For two years I have cherished the wish to offer you, out of gratitude and friendship, some product of my pen. But I did not dream two years ago, or even one year ago, that I should write a book on a subject so near your heart as American Humanism. Lately, however, there has been a great acceleration of events in our country’s intellectual life; unexpectedly soon the moment has ripened for a full-length study of the creative possibilities of the New Humanism. Now it is doubly appropriate to dedicate this study to you: I gratify a private desire, and I give a public recognition of the large part you yourself, as editor of the _Bookman_, have performed in bringing the ideas of P. E. More and Irving Babbitt and their colleagues before the eyes of the general reading public.

This work of yours I say is a very important service to American literature in its present condition. At no time myself an orthodox Humanist, I nonetheless felt six or seven years ago, when I first read the _Shelburne Essays_ and Professor Babbitt’s massive works, that here was criticism our literary world could not ignore without grave loss, and I set myself to do what I could to bring this criticism out of the academic shadows to which it had been consigned by the main romantic movement of post-war America and to advance it to the very center of our literary stage. In this effort I was of course merely a symptom of a change in temper and direction and ideals that was gradually taking place in many young Americans who came to feel that there was something disastrously ill-informed and disappointingly shallow in the revolt-literature of the ’Twenties. At any rate, there has finally occurred in literary criticism a reaction toward “style and order,” not alone in letters but in life, and we can now say that the doctrine of the New Humanists is decidedly under scrutiny by every one who professes to be seriously interested in the welfare of our literature.

Let the literary battles over Humanism go on and may they wax hotter! Strength of opposition is good for all parties concerned, and the development in our literary world of a strong orthodox classical party like the New Humanists is sure to call forth from our naturalistic thinkers and artists greater efforts, and efforts on a more difficult level of thought, than those they have felt inclined to make in the last fifteen years. But--as you tell your readers in the _Bookman_--American Humanism is not essentially or solely a literary school. It offers a comprehensive critique of modern civilization: it has studied our problems of education, politics, manners, morals, and science, as well as literary tendencies: it is preëminently concerned with the question, _how to live_, and it believes that it has the commencement of a sound program for the intelligent conduct of life.

How to live? That undying question has always given rise to hornèd problems. Walter Lippmann, not long ago, showed ably how the traditional controls of our lives have been abolished or appear to have been abolished; with the same ability he outlined the quandaries of the modern man who has been born into the Kingdom of Whirl after the joy of breaking images has gone out of the land and no new goal for existence has shiningly presented itself. “What is there in the back of our heads,” Lippmann asked, “which keeps telling us that life as we find it is not what it ought to be?” This is his reply: “It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all inquiry into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether man can achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he must first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” There you have what may be termed the dilemma of the emancipated man. The intelligent modern man feels liberated from petty social conventions, narrow theological views, discredited authorities, the grosser popular superstitions, but liberated for what? Only, it seems, to face a darkened problem of choices, with many strong reasons for distrusting every alternative offered. Shall he follow some most recent form of naturalism such as D. H. Lawrence preached? He is impressed by its passionateness, but it also has a fanatic sound to him; it appears to delimit man, to deny too much in man’s constitution that seems to promise more abundant life to him who develops it. Shall he, on the other hand, seek out some surviving moral discipline or some new asceticism? But which one and how well founded on science and commonsense are these preserved or refurbished disciplines?

Well, the New Humanism has much to say on such a dilemma as this, much to say on the great central moral question, how to live as a being bearing the proud-sounding name of Man ought to live; and for this reason it is proper to call contemporary Humanism a modern morality and to say that it commends itself to persons who, besides reading for pleasure or information, read to live.

It is such persons, men and women of the world who resort to books with the real intention of clarifying their lives by reading, that I wish to address. They are free from that malady to which the “literary person” so frequently succumbs, namely, living for reading and writing. This person’s mind then becomes merely a great heap of literary associations, all very useful, if only he had obtained a few central ideas, if only he had kept a grip on life as the foremost thing and resolutely kept his reading in its proper place as “the great stimulus to life.” The man of the world, on the other hand, has other faults, but he is sensible in what he demands of books. He wants the essentials of a doctrine and he wants them purged of special terminology: he wants to see the doctrine’s practical implications lighted up: he wants to see the cardinal teachings properly groomed to appear before the bar of commonsense. That is why in the following pages I have avoided as much as possible the debates and wrangles of scholarship and have tried for compactness, clearness, simplicity, and practicality in the exposition of the master-ideas of Babbitt and More.

Truly, they are pregnant ideas. My first aim in this book has been to show their remarkable specific gravity and how they sink to the bottom of one’s mind. There, it seems to me, they give birth to questions of the utmost importance to the individual. They raise questions relating to his world-view, to his psychology, and to his aspirations in character. The mind is agitated in a new way and so led to take new approaches to old problems: the experience of past mankind and our contemporary experience operate on each other with profit in the way of self-understanding and the understanding of modern society. Many of the questions thus aroused are of a religious character, and my second object has been to discuss them and in so doing naturally to pass from the field of morals to the field of religion. Religion, “that deepest voice of human experience,” according to Matthew Arnold--what has it to say of the ideals of the New Humanism and the humanistic way of life? What has religion even now to say to the skeptical modern man disposed to give ear to new moral doctrines?

In what we would reply here, my respected dedicatee, I foresee a wide divergence in our future paths. Possibly not however. But on that part of the journey which we have traveled together I wish to say I have known no other companion so gay in mind, so unswerving and unafraid in practice, so ardent in understanding of the tenets of American Humanism as you to whom this book is tendered.

In the language beloved by the Humanists of the Renascence,

_Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus_,

Gorham Munson.

_March 17, 1930,
New York, N.Y._

I

THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM

_“As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the
Italy of the fifteenth century, and later in other European
countries, to the type of scholar who was not only proficient in
Greek and Latin, but who at the same time inclined to prefer the
humanity of the great classical writers to what seemed to him the
excess of divinity in the mediævals. This contrast between humanity
and divinity was often conceived very superficially. However, the
best of the humanists were not content with opposing a somewhat
external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian elegance to the
scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught a glimpse
of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best. They
were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their
faculties in this world rather than at an otherworldly felicity.
Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure
without one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic
or that of the specialist.”_--Irving Babbitt in _Humanism and
America_.

It requires an unusual effort for us to admit that there was something mysterious operating in the deeps of the Middle Ages, and again that well below the surface of the Renascence there seem to have been strange forces. We look with wonderment at the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe--at that uncompleted Cathedral of the Intellect designed by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the ordering and altitude of emotion in Dante, at that philosophy of action called Chivalry; but few of us can refrain from ready interpretations. Very few can sit in the Cathedral of Chartres and sincerely arrive at the conclusion which Henry Adams reached after long saturation beneath its influences. That conclusion, highly remarkable as coming from a modern man and therefore worthy of italic print, was given by Adams all the advantages of emphatic position. It was couched in the surprising final clause of a lengthy sentence at the end of one of his chapters in _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, his elaborate homage to the splendor of mediæval times. I shall let Adams lead up to it.

“Sitting here any Sunday afternoon, while the voices of the children of the maîtrise are chanting in the choir,--your mind held in the grasp of the strong lines and shadows of the architecture; your eyes flooded with the autumn tones of the glass; your ears drowned with the purity of the voices; one sense reacting upon another until sensation reaches the limit of its range,--you, or any other lost soul, could, if you cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible, and would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depths of feeling which she shows here,--in lines, vaults, chapels, colours, legends, chants,--more eloquent than the prayer-book, and more beautiful than the autumn sunlight; and any one willing to try could feel it like the child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a hundred times; _but what is still more convincing, he could, at will, in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive of his own_.”

But, as though in obedience to some undivined law, the marvellous unity of the Middle Ages, sustained in Adams’s judgment by motives so foreign and incomprehensible to us, began to crumble. The spirit began to withdraw and the forms to change into formalism. There was less inwardness. Corruption and decline set in, and then fairly suddenly the disintegration of culture was arrested and a new growth took place to make resplendent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renascence was in part a great revolt against _decayed_ scholasticism and the views of man and the world it upheld, and in part the fulfilment of fresh impulses generated by the apostles of the New Learning, the study of classical literature. This period too baffles us: we meet with so many enigmatic figures! To take a famous instance, who has ever made a plausible business of explaining the character of Francis Bacon? Enigma he was and enigma he remains, a man whose range of motivation outspans our most inspired conjectures.

But this strangeness is not all that defies our efforts at understanding. We need to suspend judgment, but the difficulties of remaining in suspended judgment are magnified in a way that has been set forth by an English amateur of philosophy, the late T. E. Hulme, whose reputation in America incidentally has never matched his deserts. Authentically, Hulme was a young intellectual giant, and his death in the Great War was a grievous casualty for contemporary philosophy. But fragmentary as his writings are, one essay in his posthumous book, _Speculations_, is said to have done more to clarify the mind of his generation in England than any other essay in recent years. This influential paper is called _Humanism and the Religious Attitude_, and some of its striking ideas are very much to our present purpose. Hulme opened by boldly declaring that the modern emancipated and instructed man shrinks from the idea of discontinuities. Such a man, he said, is wedded to the theory of evolution and the doctrine of progress, two sisters, and so he abhors the notion of a gap, a real chasm, existing in the scheme of life. In fine, the modern man takes a principle of continuity to be, not just a convenience in certain fields of thought, but an absolute fact. He therefore very frequently denies a discontinuity between Nature and Man and invariably between Man and the Absolute.

But the Middle Ages believed in a discontinuity between Man and absolute values in religion and ethics. They believed, that is to say, in Original Sin and in placing perfection far above the human plane. That is what makes those ages so hard for us to comprehend. But in the Renascence, according to Hulme, this discontinuity was denied: man was declared not radically bad, but worthy, and things perfect were brought down and mingled with things on the human plane. Where there had been the mediæval religious spirit, now appeared the modern humanistic temper--and the two were utterly different! In its later manifestations we can understand the latter, but in the Renascence, in men like Manuel Chrysoloras, Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo da Vinci, we are haunted by the enigmatic.

What secrets they had, we cannot probe after now, even if we had fresh clues. What is incontrovertible is that we inherit that part of the Renascence which was a revolt against mediævalism. The fifteenth century founders of Humanism gave the Western World nothing less than a new _weltanschauung_. What that world-view is and what the Romantic world-conception is which has sprung up in the last one hundred and fifty years to challenge it, I shall try to expose in the following pages. Then in the concluding chapters, after discussing Romanticism and Humanism, I wish to return to Religion and to consider the radical difference Hulme alleged to exist between the humanistic temper and the religious spirit.

* * * * *

When we have a single name to cover related but highly variegated phenomena, we tend after a time to think of the phenomena as being uniform because the one name covers them all. So today when an editorial writer mentions the Humanists of the Renascence, he often sounds as if he considered all of them to have been turned out on very much the same pattern. There is some excuse then for a brief collection of data showing that such was not the case any more than a rigid uniformity characterizes the Humanists of the twentieth century. Humanism now and formerly is essentially broad and flexible, and the reader must divest himself of narrow preconceptions if he hopes to encompass the subject. For dispelling a contemporary prejudice in favor of uniformity, a mere glance at the variety of fifteenth and sixteenth century Humanism will be enough, even though we take in only the best known facts.

The earliest Humanists appeared in Italy, and principally in Florence under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. Scholars like Manuel Chrysoloras and Poggio Bracciolini had delved into the treasures of ancient Greece and Rome and had risen ecstatically. In 1453 the fall of Constantinople released the old manuscripts in greater profusion: the new springs of life welled up gloriously. Men in the most powerful places like Pope Nicholas V became supporters of the new cult of _literae humaniores_. But as the New Learning spread, its secular spirit became more evident, and the Church found itself assaulted by some Humanists, Lorenzo Valla, for example, who stood boldly for paganism and asserted the chief good to be pleasure. Others--the most celebrated is Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)--sought to blend Christianity with Platonism. Generally speaking, Italian Humanism had a pronounced æsthetic character, but we must not therefore think of these seminal figures in the dreamy fashion of Walter Pater. His languid essay on Pico is the least fitted thing to do justice to this man’s power of inspiring others to love the New Learning. You would never guess from Pater that Pico della Mirandola was reputed to have had such a powerful mind and memory that he retained perfectly on a single reading the entire language and meaning of any text he read. Pico was only thirty-one when he died on the day the French king, Charles the Eighth, entered Florence, but he had done the work of a giant. Enthusiasts had carried his influence throughout Europe: he had fertilized an age.

In every country where it took root, Humanism assumed national characteristics and applied itself to differing tasks. In Spain, in France, in England and in Germany each movement was _sui generis_--a point to remember today when we observe the classical revivals going on in France, England and the United States. The Action Française, the work of Belloc and Chesterton, American Humanism have all, in spite of many important differences, a family resemblance which will concern us later. But now glancing back at Spain in the Renascence, it is Cardinal Ximenes (1436?-1517) whom most readers will recall and his establishment of the University of Alcalá, that university from which in 1514 was to come the first Greek text of the New Testament ever printed. A little afterwards came the renowned Polyglot Bible, made under the direction of the Cardinal and published at his personal expense.

In France from the beginning Humanism was tinged with Catholic heresy. There was Jacques Lefevre of Etaples (1455-1537), whose _Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul_ in 1512 is regarded as a distinct enunciation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. There was Guillaume Budé (1467-1540), whose studies were almost entirely secular; he was excelled by no one in his time for scholarship in Greek and Latin. There was finally François Rabelais (1495?-1555?), the colossal laughing incarnation of the French humanistic spirit.

In Germany and England the Humanists appear to have struck graver notes and to have been more concerned with social reform. American Humanism today bears at least this external resemblance to the Humanism of William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and Sir Thomas More: namely, it is greatly concerned with public education. Perhaps the most typical English Humanist was John Colet (1467?-1519) who founded St. Paul’s School in London. And American Humanism has an external resemblance to the Renascence form of Humanism in Germany in that the contemporary form is likewise primarily a movement inside the universities. The famous names in Germany are Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), Ulrich Von Hutten (1488-1523), and the artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Reuchlin, around whom, provoked by his defence of the Jews, a storm broke that swept him for trial to Rome itself, is especially noteworthy, for he indicates by his study of Hebrew and the _Kabbalah_ (a wonderful text to Pico, too) the variety of the sources of inspiration the Humanists discovered. Ulrich Von Hutten, militant pamphleteer, sided with the Protestant Reformation, whereas as is well known many Humanists liked Calvin no better than they liked obscurantist monks.

With that fact let us close what is clearly not intended to be a comprehensive survey of Renascence Humanism or an evaluation of it, but only the presentment of enough data to recall the great complexity of the early Humanists. All that is designed is to direct attention to their heterogeneity, to remember that some were against Aristotle and others favored him, some were for paganism, others for Catholicism, and others for the Reformation, some were of singular purity, others were gay worldlings in personal morals. National traits altered the colors of Humanism, and the places of emphasis, as we have seen, shifted from country to country, here being found in the arts, there in education, and there in religious reform. It is a warning to us--this complexity in historical Humanism--not to expect a sameness, or an exceedingly close approximation to each other, in the manifestations of contemporary Humanists. Historically, the humanistic temper was broad: we shall come to see the wide latitude of a similar temper today.

And yet historians are right in applying one name to all these diverse men from Petrarch in Italy to Luis Vives in Spain, for all felt powerfully the attraction of one leading idea. That idea the modern world has agreed to call “the dignity of man,” and it is customary to go to the _Oration on the Dignity of Man_ composed by Pico della Mirandola for the most eloquent phrasing of it. “Then the Supreme Being decreed that unto Man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should belong in common whatsoever had been given to His other creatures. Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and having placed him in the center of the world, spake to him thus: ‘Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift peculiar to thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that what abode, what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose, may be thine to have and to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within laws appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow bonds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatever is in the world. Nor have we made thee, either heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or brute creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher, or divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.’ Thus to Man, at his birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form of life.”

Closely observed, this passage yields the following statements. Man is a being of extraordinary elasticity, for he subsumes the various kingdoms of nature, animal, vegetable and inorganic. Man is not _given_ stability or a center within himself, but he may acquire them. He can do so because he has will and potentialities to develop. His dignity consists in the fact that whereas other creatures must obey their destiny, he can have an active part in forming his. His way lies between the brute and the divine: he can sink into the former or he can be reborn into the latter. To be human is to be midmost. Pico has thus written--it may be noted here--an epigraph for the New Humanism.

In passing, however, some questions should be raised. Do the New Humanists, who proclaim afresh the dignity of man, distribute the weight of their thought and emotion quite as evenly as did Pico? On the idea of rebirth, for instance, and all that it implies of revolution in personal psychology, do they not walk lightly or step carefully away from it? “The higher, or divine”--did it not tend to drop out of Renascence Humanism in its later stages, and today does it not fail to attract the best thought or the most passionate endeavors of our Humanists? Yet all, new and old, stand for man’s dignity and would agree that Pico della Mirandola has given the _poetic_ formulation of their faith.

How would their faith be phrased intellectually? Happily, we may resort to T. E. Hulme for that. “It seems as if,” he says, “no sooner had Copernicus shown that man was not the center of the universe, than the philosophers commenced for the first time to prove that he was. You get expressed explicitly, for the first time (in Pico della Mirandola for example), this idea of the sufficiency of natural man, and it has generally been assumed by all philosophers since. It may be expressed in very different languages and with very different degrees of profundity, but even Hegel and Condorcet are one from this point of view.” The self-sufficiency of the natural man--there is a key idea we must grasp. I object to a precise equating of Hulme’s phrase with Pico’s eloquence on the dignity of man, but, leaving out the references to divine order and rebirth, the phrase is fairly close to an intellectual equivalent. Self-sufficiency is the central idea _we_ have inherited from the Renascence, and for millions of men it has effaced the mediæval idea of the insufficiency of the natural man and the need for Grace to visit him as a basically bad creature. The dignity of man understood as the self-sufficiency of the natural man, _and by natural man is meant one not reborn_, is the foundation idea for all modern Humanism.

In the foregoing sketch I did not mention the man who is inevitably associated by every one with Renascence Humanism--Desiderius Erasmus. That was because I wish the reader to observe him now in a particular connection. Let us look briefly at the crisis in Christendom produced by the emotional revolt of Martin Luther. Up to 1521 when Luther shouted, “I should go to Worms were there as many devils there as tiles upon the roofs,” Erasmus had held a commanding position in Europe. Europe was then, intellectually and morally, a single community. Latin was the common language binding together all intellectual contributions and there was one Church for all the peoples. Erasmus had risen from his illegitimate birth in Rotterdam, his convent education, and his straitness of means, to be a friendly counsellor of King and Pope, a master of Latin style, an illuminated traveler throughout Europe to exchange light with its best minds. As every one knows, he addressed himself to the emancipation of the individual, expecting that from the increase of enlightened individuals would eventually issue religious as well as social reform. The evil of the time he ascribed to ignorance: he combated it with genial raillery and suave satire, making always an appeal for truth, temperate procedure, and tolerance.

Now think of the man who was described by Erasmus in a letter “as a necessary evil in the corruption of the Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would follow.” Martin Luther’s career is familiar to every one; how he was severely beaten at home and at school during his childhood, how he sang for alms at the University of Erfurt, how his friend was slain at his side by lightning and the young student’s subsequent terrified flight into an Augustine monastery, how there he was distinguished by zeal, how he was disenchanted in his pilgrimage to Rome, how afterwards he was made a professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, how finally he opposed Tetzel on the latter’s mission of selling indulgences and dispensations and wrote out against such practices the famous ninety-five propositions which led eventually to excommunication; all these circumstances have been rehearsed hundreds of times in tones of admiration or detestation for the man who experienced them. Certainly in contrast to Erasmus’s, Luther’s life seems lurid. And undoubtedly the conventional Protestant account of the Reformer can stand much correction, but we need only note what unmistakably stands out in the characters of the Reformer and the great Humanist.

Carlyle had excellent reason to call Luther the Christian Odin, the right Thor: the man is impressive by his power in action, by his great and often harsh energy, by the force and sometimes violence of his feelings. He is _not_ impressive because of his mind. Let us hear Luther himself denounce the reason which he grants is indeed of utility in practical affairs but refuses to call good beyond that realm. “Reason,” he thundered in his last sermon at Wittenberg near the close of his life, “is the devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the devil’s appointed whore; a whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom.” And on another occasion he said: “Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.” This clearly is not the accent of the Renascence Humanist who objected to pseudo-intellectualism but never to the idea that there is a right employment of reason in the highest matters. Nor did the Humanist throw his weight so vehemently upon the emotions and in particular upon faith as did Luther. “We can say,” remarks Jacques Maritain, one of the best Catholic philosophers today, “that Luther is the first great Romantic”--and despite Luther’s strong religious disposition, Maritain makes this remark seem plausible.

Erasmus is the antithesis to Luther. He was an active practical man, but we never think of him as an exponent of energetics; he was mature and full in his feelings, but not violent or overflowing in turbulence; he was an able reasoner but not gone mad on metaphysical refinements. What strikes us about Erasmus is not the greatness or intensity of any one of his faculties, but the fair degree of harmony in the development and operations of all of them. He is the typical Humanist because of his proportionateness. He had the supreme humanist virtue, and that is mellow commonsense.

The crisis came, and a large part of Europe followed the impassioned Luther into the Reformation. Erasmus, observing the defects of Luther, his lack of balance, his lack of reason in the best sense, could not join his forces, nor could he fight blindly and hotly on the Catholic side. Neither was the way of mellow commonsense, and he who had been the prince of the European mind retired helplessly to Basle while the struggle worked up its violence. He had his major defect too. Not a weakling in feeling, he yet had not the tremendous force of emotion required to play an effective part in the great proceedings of history. He was even able to say in a letter to Archbishop Warham: “As for me, I have no inclination to risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I shall keep on the safe side.” But no place was safe for a champion of moderation. “Every goose,” he wrote from Basle, “now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned, once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.”

Did Europe take the wrong turning when it ignored the pleas of Erasmus,--then past sixty, suffering with the stone, grieving over the execution of his friends, More and Fisher, a beclouded luminary,--and plunged recklessly into the work of breaking up its moral and intellectual unity? In retrospective wisdom Goethe thought so. Goethe regretted that Erasmus and men like him could not have retained the direction of the mind of Europe: he thought that Luther had thrown back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries by appealing to the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which ought to have been left to the learned. That question we do not have to debate here. Luther for worse or better is one of the makers of our modern world, and our pressing question is, what is the rôle of mellow commonsense, the great humanistic virtue, amid the confusions of our age? Should we, the heirs of those who went with Luther, now turn for light and example to Erasmus?

Fixing in our minds the several considerations dwelt on in this opening up of our subject--the absolute distinction between Religion and Humanism, the intricacy of historical Humanism, the conception of man as self-sufficient for the unifying of himself, and ripened commonsense as the prime virtue of Humanism--let us now leap to the present and examine what sort of society we belong to and how we conceive of the world and of ourselves.

II

A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE

_“A highly unified age may offer examples of highly unified
personalities; but there is likely to exist in the individual of
today the same confused conflict of tendencies that we see in the
larger world.”_--Irving Babbitt in _Literature and the American
College_.

Some Humanist yet to be, inspired by the model of Erasmus’s _In Praise of Folly_, will write successfully a rival piece on our follies for the delectation of later ages. The future Erasmus will likely call his genial dissolvent _In Praise of Modernity_: in it he will conjure up the Spirit of Progress and constrain her to deliver a panegyric of all our modern excesses. But the loquacious Spirit of Progress could never accomplish that task in less space than a book, and a single chapter is our limit for a broad sketch of our age. It is not for us then to be indirect and ironical, but to find without loss of time some simple clear mirror for the reflection of the plain facts of our period. Where shall such a mirror be found? Nowhere better, it seems to me, than in the outlook on life of the typical general reader, in the outlook of such a person as G. R., whom I shall briefly describe.

G. R. in his forties is a respected and successful lawyer. In his college days he wrote verse: in fact, he was Class Poet at Commencement, but soon afterwards he lost interest in his courtship of the Muse. He continued, however, to read rather widely and with the object of keeping abreast of new developments in thought and art. You will find his name among the subscribers to the Theatre Guild and on the mailing lists of our best liberal weeklies.

As I have indicated, G. R. is successful. His comfortable duplex apartment in the east Seventies of New York city bears witness to his rise in the world, and out on Long Island he has acquired a remodelled farmhouse for weekends and summertime. His three sons attend a private school inspired by the educational ideas of John Dewey. Their father to a casual acquaintance is not very different from some tens of thousands of other substantial well-educated American men. Like them he gets a little bored by the baiting tactics of H. L. Mencken: like them he enjoys driving a car and playing golf regularly. He still awaits being put into American fiction with the same distinctness that certain types he despises, such as the George F. Babbitts, have been limned.

G. R., now that much of his youthful idealism has been found inappropriate to the facts of his existence, has the strong impression that we are all floundering about in the present era. And this impression of his is certainly a generally diffused opinion. In a time of floundering our first consideration must be to get at the plain realities of our condition, and that is why I have recourse to G. R., on whose mind and feelings they seem most clearly imprinted. He is susceptible to the main currents of modern life, but not being unduly specialized, he does not show traces of these currents that are highly peculiar to himself.

Singularity is the fault of many explanations that are being offered of why we are floundering and how we may take arms against our sea of troubles. These explanations come from economists, sociologists, psychiatrists, political students and other specialists. They often apply correctly to aspects of our confusion, but, coming from specialists, they necessarily tend to be recondite. And what they seek to explain and remedy, namely the easily recognized and very widespread state of mind and feeling which G. R. epitomizes, is not recondite at all. Why not then, as I have suggested, make a direct report, involving no detailed knowledge of economics or social theory, of what G. R. and the rest of us can all be aware of in terms of daily personal experience? Surely it seems best when we are floundering to imitate the Socratic example, to turn to the common mind, to trust in sound sense, before we repeat as our own the views of some specialized pleader.

What gives us all, G. R. has often inquired, this persistent feeling of blindly living along without a compass? The first part of the reply is easy. Involuntarily, we have looked to Society for a compass and it is patent that Society offers none. It has moulded us, directed us, tossed us about in its channels: that we know, and we continue to feel its multitudinous pressures every day. But Society does not show us, nor has it shown us, any central ideal for its collective self and for its individual members. Ideals there are in abundance, the ideals of professions and institutions, but a master ideal ruling over them there is not. There is competition of ideals, but no sovereign aim subordinating all other aims in life to itself. “Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus”--we need not wonder that this has become for us a meaningful quotation.

If you are a lawyer like G. R., you live up to a code of legal ethics; if you are a physician, you encounter a standard of good medical practice; if you are a scientist, you know what the scientific ideal is: yet you do not in those professions or in other occupations or in the churches find an intelligent standard of living for all men to which common assent is given. That implies a great deal more than most people realize. It is saying that there is no central significance in the lives we are living. Society tells us of none, and there is only conflict and confusion on our most important concerns as human beings. Let G. R. ask of Society: what is the meaning of my existence? what is the true aim of my existence? Society can only reply: I am not at present organized about any answers to these questions. You must fulfil obligations to me, but I acknowledge no obligation to you as an individual in the matter of spiritual guidance. That, my dear sir, is your personal outlook. Take your choice, if you like, among a variety of conflicting opinions, but none of them have my ultimate sanction.

Of course, as G. R. often fails to remember, such a state of affairs has not always been. It was not so in ancient Palestine, not so in ancient Egypt, not so in the Middle Ages in Europe. Many times in history has Society returned to its members a full coherent reply, right or wrong, to the prime question of the individual, what is the significance and aim of my existence? It has, first of all, defined the social duties of the individual, but afterwards it has admitted that it in turn existed to further the primary aim of the individual. Not today.

This, the complete failure of contemporary Society to declare Truth and found itself on it, is clearly the first cause of our sense of confusion. It is not that we are out of harmony with Society’s declaration of Truth: it is that we know that Society is rather helplessly established on Pilate’s question and certainly it washes its hands of the business. Whether it is possible or desirable for Society now to give a single answer to the question, why are we alive, is an entirely different consideration. In bringing out the fact that our Society does not hold up a standard of Truth, I would not wish to be understood as meaning that Tibet is superior to America because it is unified in a religious way we are not. Far from that! What is being driven at now is simply the ineluctable fact that American Society does not promote an authoritative conception of spiritual life, and the result of this, be it good or bad, is competition and confusion of ideals.

Bad it may be, for if man cannot have the real thing, it is notorious he will take substitutes. We are held together not by a grand ideal which is both social and individualistic, but by a number of pseudo-ideals winning mass-acceptance. What are they? Study our national behavior, and because it is obviously standardized you will have no trouble discerning what our brazen images are.

G. R.’s mind, for example, is typical of most of us in that it is soaked in the dogma of social progress. A very compact statement of this dogma was once given in the process of criticizing it by Robert Shafer, one of the New Humanists. “Social progress has become,” he said, “a species of popular religion of which the chief articles of belief are: that earthly life is in and for itself a good thing, that terrestrial happiness is possible for all men, that applied science and industry have given us the means for abundant enjoyment, and that it is now the task of social science and government so to order our common life that toil shall not rest heavily upon any of us and that the means of enjoyment shall be equally open to all. It is, moreover, generally believed not only that terrestrial happiness is possible for all men, but that it is infallibly coming to pass--that is, that social science and government are bound to succeed in their task.”

That this is really our credo, our actions as well as our words testify. We say nowadays that we “accept life.” Why we accepted it and for what we accept it, we do not clearly know; so we say that life in itself is good. Our actions furthermore make us all out to be believers in the attainment of widespread terrestrial happiness. Our forefathers may have dreamed about laying up treasure in heaven, but not we. For we can point with great faith to a means for abundant enjoyment here and now: we point to applied science and industry. They are to reduce toil for us, toil, we are quite sure, being a main cause of unhappiness. With more leisure we shall be happier, for then we shall be able to amuse ourselves, as we say, and to enjoy comfort.

But how external all this is! Precisely. For some reason we feel that the way to improve man is to improve the environment by means of applied science and the better organization of industry. This, we think, will increase the sum of happiness. It does not matter whether we are captains of industry or social rebels: we are both thinking in terms of changing the environment, and neither of us has even a faint perception of a simultaneous need to improve man directly by an inward transformation. That is why I call the doctrine of social progress, whether it is framed by a member of the Republican party or of the Socialist, a pseudo-ideal, for it promises only more leisure, not a use of leisure conducive to human happiness. It does not implant a new motive in us but inspires the belief that our old motives will receive fuller scope for action, and by so receiving this larger scope, we shall be made happy.

So the environment is the focus of our energies. We aim to complete our conquest of Nature, as we say. But in the process of subduing the natural world, we have, many people believe, got ourselves organized into an intolerable plutocracy. This scheme of social organization must be revised or transformed to give better opportunities for material enjoyment to all members of society. Then, and only then, so the meliorists of environment and society assure us, will it be possible for the individual to work directly at self-improvement.

It is worth repeating the question of the individual under any and all conditions of human existence. I will do so in the words of the late Stuart P. Sherman, who as a thoughtful young man went to Society and books with the question that comes to all thoughtful young men, “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” He found, as we all have found, no grandly framed answer by Society to this question, no consensus of all intelligent men today, no reply that appealed at the same time powerfully to the mind and the heart and was furthermore associated with a practical way of life. Sherman then gave up the question and, as if under hypnotic suggestion, put forth another, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?” Under hypnotic suggestion, I said, for in truth our relation as individuals to Society should not be described as a reasonable one but as that of subject to hypnotist. An answer to the first question, is life worth living, and for what purpose, is not to be plucked down from our social atmosphere, but our air swarms with the assumptions that life _is_ worth living, that it is good in and for itself, that terrestrial happiness is possible. We have not to question the basis of life but only to discover durable satisfactions.

But Society as hypnotist rules us in this search too. We all become members, it appears, of the cult of distractions and comfort. No? Look again at what we actually do, observe our national behavior. Sherman did just this: he said, in pursuit of his second question, let us see what Americans spend their money for, since we spend for what we believe in, since our expenditure is an act of faith. Well, he found that we as a nation spend heavily for plumbing, for bodily health, for university education, for automobiles, for organized athletics, and for advertising and publicity purposes. He put, it is true, an optimistic and sentimental interpretation on these facts. What his list shows, however, is that our center of gravity is in the practical life, and that we are addicts to the pursuit of comfort and pastimes. “I can’t think,” said Sherman, referring to college sports stadia-building, “of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral building of the Middle Ages”--nor can I, but I am thinking of the differences in purpose, worship and appeal. We idolize baseball players and boxers, not saints and artists and sages.

Are not these pithy words of Frank Jewett Mather true? “What is in America our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of ‘knockers’)? I fear it would come to these few articles of faith:--to make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the ‘art-artist,’ to quote a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And it naturally gets the art it feeds--the immaculate bank clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in the classy car--the art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also finds its authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence.”

Thus far our search for the plain facts of our present floundering condition has led us to a paradox: we lack any standard of a good, a noble life, yet we are amazingly standardized in our lives. Finding no common vision of what life ought to be conducted for, we fall prey to exceedingly powerful social suggestions. We behave, first of all, as if the machinery of existence, the getting of a living, were an all-important end in itself. And on the margin left free by practical affairs we look for a good time, we try to be neighborly, we increase our comfort.

G. R. is entangled in this paradox: at the same time he falls into the conventional modes of American behavior, he protests against them: he decries the lack of a common luminous standard for life and yet does not set himself to search for one. He continues to flounder unhappily.

* * * * *

Some of G. R.’s psychological biography is now relevant. At one time a large part of his mind was under the control of a certain view of the world which I shall personify as “the Sunday School boy.” Later “the Sunday School pupil” at the back of his brain was supplanted by “the village atheist,” the personification of the world-view G. R. now holds. Both these characters in his brain are elusive, capable of many disguises, and below the surface. One must go stealthily to capture them.

Every human being, even the least philosophic man, is compounded of two attitudes, an attitude toward the world and an attitude toward himself. The latter seems more native, less educable, than the former. Of our picture of ourselves we are almost never aware, and even when in rare instances we come to realize what the picture is, it seems impossible to change it. We can only sometimes correct its influence on our actions and feelings, but we go on habitually conceiving of ourselves as before. Our attitude toward the world, on the other hand, seems to derive from education and to be susceptible of change. A world-view of some sort we must have, but the particular one we receive, often unconsciously, is, as people say, “wished on us,” usually when we were children. G. R. illustrates a change in world-conceptions, passing as he did from the dominance of “the Sunday School pupil” planted early in his mind to the later dominance of “the village atheist,” installed there in his twenties. But let us ask some general questions first.

What attitudes toward the world are characteristic of ourselves and our contemporaries? That is, what are our chief emotional states in regard to that immense given object, the world? What are our imaginations of life? An interesting enumeration of some of them was given a few years ago by a practical psychologist. “There is,” he said, “the ‘Puritan’ picture which represents life as a hard and narrow school. This evokes the attitude of the nervous schoolboy in the constant presence of the stern dominie. There is the ‘Pagan’ picture of life as an orgy of Greek gods inviting men to drink and feast with them. There is the ‘Serious’ view of life which imagines ‘God’ to be struggling against almost hopeless odds for the redemption of matter. The emotion or attitude evoked is one of ‘helping poor father.’ There is the ‘Scientific’ view that sees life as an orderly insignificance, all dressed up but with nowhere to go. There is the ‘Æsthetic’ view in which life is an artist making and exhibiting works of art, with man as the appreciative witness. And so on.”