Chapter VI: Part 6

The New Humanist not only associates Will with effort, but--what is a great advance over his opponents’ muddled notions about Will--with a particular type of effort: work on oneself, a work that takes the form of knowing oneself, harmonizing oneself, disciplining oneself. And in this lies the secret of the devotees of Humanism. It is, however, an open secret, older than Aristotle and still advertised today. It is that happiness comes not from psychological inertia but from psychological work. Once again I shall quote from Babbitt: “this sluggishness and slackness of spirit, this mere drifting and abdication of will, may, as Chaucer’s parson suggests, be the crime against the Holy Ghost itself.” The agreement is with Aristotle who conceived “of happiness in terms of work. All types of temperamentalists are from the human point of view passive. The happiness that they crave is a passive happiness. A man may pursue power with the energy of a Napoleon and yet remain ethically passive. He may expand his sympathies until, like Schiller, he is ready to ‘bestow a kiss upon the whole world,’ and yet remain ethically passive. A man ceases to be ethically passive only when he begins to work in the Aristotelian sense, that is when he begins to put the brake on temperament and impulse, and in the same degree he tends to become ethically efficient.”

And now let one of the ancients, “the subtlest of the Athenians,” the hero of the Platonic Dialogues, have the final word. “The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he _is_ perfecting himself.”

The reader may think it strange that such a doctrine and discipline as we have been sketching should arouse the violent and oftentimes abusive antagonism that flared up in the winter and spring of 1930. Whatever its ultimate deficiencies may be, the New Humanism wears commonsense on its face, and its thought is both broad and elevated. Nevertheless it provoked a storm.

It is explicable. In the first place, much random opposition to American Humanism springs up because of the specific attitudes Humanists take in respect to art, literature, science, education, politics, and so forth. Stemming from the parent attitude of responsibility toward the natural self are a variety of consequential attitudes when the Humanist looks out upon the world around him. And it is these consequential (or possibly only contingent) attitudes which have caused some individuals to hurl their thunderbolts. An admirer of the cumbersome novels of Theodore Dreiser, let us say, reads some detached article by a New Humanist in which his hero is held up as an exemplar of “romanticism going on all fours”: he inquires no further into the basis of American Humanism but immediately rushes to the defence of Dreiser and current American literature. And so with the advocate of Professor John Dewey’s educational ideas. A criticism by a Humanist of these ideas is sufficient to incur the hostility of the disciple of Dewey: the system of the attacker on Dewey is of no moment, for his ideas on education are objectionable and so must be his whole outlook. There have been many such quarrels over specific opinions, which have naturally led to a condemnation without examination of Humanism itself. The New Humanists work out their critique of modern life on many fronts. They advance a new-old program on the same number of fronts. It is easy to see then how, being comprehensive, they manage to stir up so many enemies. In the next three chapters I shall examine the Humanist attitude toward modern science, educational impressionism, and politics, and no doubt the reader will then easily comprehend why the New Humanism has provoked so much heated debate.

But in the second place there is a far more important reason why the reception of Humanism has been acrimonious beyond any precedent in American literary history. _It is because American Humanism dares to question the unconscious assumptions of our age._ It is well known that if you touch a man in his pocketbook, you frequently get a sudden dramatic agitated revelation of his psychology. Or touch a person in his sex life, and again there is the parting of the customary veils over his behavior: you see vividly the flashing of the person’s psychological forces. There is a third way: instead of asking for a loan of money, or tossing a rabelaisian joke at an acquaintance, toss an idea at him that goes beneath his customary thoughts to strike at his latent assumptions, the thoughts he was unaware of, upon which, nevertheless, all his opinions come to rest. _Then_ he will become active: he jumps as if a hypodermic needle had been applied to his mind: he bristles with defences against this idea that has irritated his mind at its very base.

You are attacking the context of things he did not know he believed, but instinctively he knows now that if they are threatened, all his opinions are threatened. For it is _through_ these unconscious assumptions that he has seen everything else. No wonder he rallies to their defence! No wonder he strikes back! It is the very quick of his mind you have touched.

American Humanism is a concerted assault not so much on what our age has assumed knowingly but on what it has unconsciously assumed. That is why it has been and will be violently opposed, fought with every weapon, shouted at and shouted down, if possible. The outcome may be within a decade the complete submergence of the Humanist movement. In that event so much the worse for an age that cannot be brought to criticize its unknown postulates once the light has been let in on them.

VIII

SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN

_“Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false claims
are now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name,
and it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to
expose.”_--Louis Trenchard More in _Humanism and America_.

Do you wish a vivid proof that American Humanism probes through the crystallized portions of the modern mentality and wounds its quick nervous base? Then consider the intense annoyance created among so many modernists by the temperate criticism the classical party makes of the current prestige of science. The New Humanist attempts only to moderate the very great esteem of our time for science. Yet pained outcries on every hand greet this effort at moderation, and this extreme sensitivity of many holding no stake in the matter to a criticism of the large claims made in the name of modern science surely calls for investigation. This conclusion cannot be escaped:--the men of our age are nowhere near so emancipated from Authority as they like to fancy.

It is true we no longer acknowledge Authority in the theological quarter. To accept on faith the cosmology of the Bible is to be mediæval. But are we the self-conscious rebels we picture ourselves? In revolting from the theological fold, have we not rebelled on command of another Authority? However we came to revolt, now the situation is plain. We have merely transferred the seat of Authority, planting it today in the scientific quarter. Ye have conquered, O Galileans! To be modernistic is to be as subservient to the oracular opinions of scientific savants as the ordinary mediæval man was to the interpretations of his theologians. The boastful modernists are, in fact, still looking up to something far above: they are still on their knees before Authority as the bulk of mankind has always knelt.

What we take on authority is by definition what we cannot scrutinize or have not troubled to scrutinize, and of course we must be uncritical about the uninspected. Here, in the region of the authoritative, is where _aberglaube_, extra-belief, has a chance to enter; here is where we become superstitious. The New Humanist has never attacked exact science in itself, and in some respects his critique of what seem to him the mistaken pretensions of science is very mild. But he does pierce the _aberglaube_ that in the nineteenth century attached itself to modern science. He is the foe of those who are gullible about science, who take it altogether on faith, who are, in short, superstitious. The language is not too strong.

There is a very quick way to test the tenacious hold that scientific authority exerts on us. (To repeat myself, I mean to test the existence of what to us are pure assumptions which have been implanted in us almost without our knowledge by contemporary science.) The quick way is to read two extraordinary and weird books of recent years, _The Book of the Damned_ and _New Lands_, both by an investigator of phenomena which have been excluded by orthodox science, Charles Fort. The author of these strange documents is acutely aware of the very human tendency of scientific system-makers to achieve a harmony of knowledge by excluding the inharmonious data. He has therefore turned his attention to the “disregards” of the scientists (geographers, geologists, astronomers, physicists, etc.), and comes forward as the champion of the damned data--and some of the data is horrendous. A daring writer, for he is obliged to challenge the correctness of many elementary things we learned in grammar and secondary schools. He adduces evidence, that is to say, totally at variance with what we were taught in school, when we were most submissive, and which we have _never_ questioned. The result is that in reading Fort we experience a most peculiar sense of strain. We find that we _hate_ to have any one argue with a show of good reasons that interstellar distances are rather small when we have always been told and believed, most of us without any detailed proof, that they were inconceivably immense. There are certain things--many items in fact--about the world which we want to regard as having been settled and learned once for all. The idea of new learning is attractive, but the idea of re-learning in fields where we have assumed certain things to have been thoroughly proven is most repugnant.

Among his provisional theories or “acceptances” as he calls them, Fort holds “that we do not really think at all; that we correlate around super-magnets that I call Dominants--a Spiritual Dominant in one age, and responsively to it up spring monasteries, and the stake and the cross are its symbols: a Materialist Dominant, and up spring laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are its ikons--that we’re nothing but iron filings relatively to a succession of magnets that displace preceding magnets.”

To use Fort’s terminology, the New Humanist recognizes that science is the Dominant of our civilization, and that most people, impressed by its marvels in the field of mechanical inventions, simply correlate around it. He invites us therefore to _think_ about this super-magnet, to mark out its true sphere of influence, and to be conscious of our relation to it. He urges us, in brief, to be as critical of its magnetism as we are now able to be of the theological Dominant of former ages.

The first step is to discriminate between real science and what the French call _petite science_ and we call popular science. The latter is often out-of-date, frequently over-simplified, and usually boastful. Yet it is what the average man, and many literary men with him, browses upon. In contrast, the scientific leaders are as a rule models of caution and modesty. The next step is to perceive that there is a hierarchy of sciences. It is to see with A. S. Eddington “that physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also fail to come up to his standard of methodology.” But it is notorious that the prestige rightly won by the most perfected sciences diffuses itself, in the eyes of the layman, over the newer and half-baked sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and various schools of psychology, precisely those branches of science or pseudo-science which the literary are most attracted by the while they shirk the hard labor involved in getting a real acquaintance with physics. Thus the New Humanist turns out to be actually in accord with the strictest scientific attitude in his refusal to attend with the same degree of seriousness to, let us say, a “science of history” as that with which he attends to the science of chemistry.

There is a third step, and once it is really accomplished, one is released from either sentimentality or superstition about the scientist. Ridiculously simple, yet it is hard to make. It consists in realizing the subjectivity of men of science. Just as in a complex way, the style is the man, so in a complicated way science is also the man. The scientist has elaborated a method and perfected his instruments to eliminate the “personal equation,” but it is nevertheless still present to haunt everything he does, to color his interpretations, to set the patterns for his theories. Science is not the voice of God but a distinctly human product with human limitations. Science may today be on a higher imaginative level, as A. N. Whitehead believes, but mark that Whitehead says this is “not because we have finer imagination, but because we have better instruments.”

After a sincere effort to understand sympathetically the anti-Humanist viewpoint, it is still hard to see why such violent objection by intelligent liberals should be taken to the general position adopted by Humanism toward modern science. To sum up that position:--the New Humanists differentiate between true science and _petite science_, they draw attention to the differing degrees of development and stability in the various sciences, they dwell on the imperfection of the man who is using perfect instruments and a perfect method. It can only be that the modernists are in no mood whatever for skepticism when it is exercised toward their Authority.

* * * * *

We would expect, however, American Humanists to touch modern science far more closely than the foregoing sketch of a general attitude necessitates, and in fact they do. They take up particular attitudes: they debate details of the scientific dogmas: they subscribe or tend to subscribe to a given theory of the world. In their detailed criticism of science, they suggest a number of questions that so far as I know have not heretofore been raised about the New Humanism. The New Humanism, we have seen, is a philosophy of conduct. The New Humanists--note that I am discriminating between the philosophy of conduct and the persons who enunciate it--adopt a theory of the world. In the first place, is the theory of the world usually held by the New Humanist the direct and necessary outcome of his philosophy of conduct? Granting the truth of his theory of psychology, does that theory require a cosmology to go with it, and is the cosmology of the majority of the New Humanists in strict correspondence? We have examined the picture of himself which the New Humanist declares is fundamental to the “good life.” But is the picture of the world he holds before him also fundamental? What I wish to determine is whether the series of attitudes toward himself, the world, and the affairs of the world which we attribute to the New Humanist is seamless or whether we can with a sharp critical knife shear the attitudes apart where they join each other and say of any one of the specific attitudes, this is not essential or an alternative attitude would be just as logical in place of this one. Can we have Newtonian Humanists and Einsteinian Humanists?

Basically, the New Humanist endeavors to be an artist of life. He strives to become acquainted with his medium, the shifting texture and stuffs of daily experience. He wishes like every other artist to dominate his material, which means, in the chaotic field he has had the noble audacity to choose, self-conquest. It is necessary for him to dramatize his work as the struggle of two selves, the ordinary self being the recalcitrant material and the human self being the artist. Finally, like other artists he requires a technique for moulding his subject matter, and he advocates as the technique the employment of mediation. All this is practical psychology, and stands secure against any theoretical psychology now before the general public. For the New Humanist can say that whatever the ultimate mystery of human nature is, however the two selves may be attached to each other and reconciled, whatever the secret unification of man may be, you cannot get around the fact that he is dualistic in practice. He can develop himself on one assumption, and one only, and that is the assumption of dualism. This is a hard stubborn fact of experience against which the Humanist makes his mind collide, just as Dr. Johnson kicked another hard stubborn fact of experience, a stone, to terminate a discussion of Berkeley’s idealism. _Why_ this should be so, _why_ man should indubitably be in essence a struggle, the Humanist cannot say, but no more can he doubt that it is so whenever he makes the attempt to win moral freedom. There it is, in the path of his wish for freedom, and he must accept it as being _practically_ true.

Undeniably--though it is seldom commented upon--the dualistic picture of man has great emotive power. Our emotions are swayed by images, a truism as old as ancient India, as new as Christian Science and Coué. It is not the whole story, but in a large measure emotions do respond to pictures. The time-worn illustration is the coil of rope in the road which one takes to be a snake. One’s emotions form themselves accordingly, but on discovery that the supposed snake is only a coiled rope they change at once. So a person with a Rousseauistic image of man feels according to that image: his emotions drag against any effort to rouse himself from Arcadian dreams. The Humanist with his picture of a best self conferring style and order on an impressionistic protean self rallies his emotions to give their impulsion and sanction to the end in view: the achievement of normality. A creative conception of man calls forth creative emotions.

Now is there incorporated in American Humanism a clear-cut creative conception of the world? Is the world condensed into an image that is as powerful in its effects as the image of the two selves, as irrefutable on the practical plane, as inspiring to human effort? I do not find one, and this I take to be a serious shortcoming in American Humanism as a philosophy of conduct. But in my judgment the defect can with relative ease be remedied, and remedied in a manner most congenial to a philosopher of conduct so Greek as the American Humanist in his self-attitude. The reader ought to remember what was said in the chapter, _A Portrait of Our Age_, about the various life-pictures, the “æsthetic,” the “puritan,” the “serious,” et cetera, current among us, and to recall the unlucky G. R. who had his imagination of life altered from the “Victorian” to the “scientific” imagination. None of those attitudes mentioned will do for the American Humanist, but why should he not find, being gymnastic in his relations with his ordinary self, aiming as he does to develop strength of character by exercises in mediation and selection, that the external world is best figured as a gymnasium? A vast enlargement of the ancient Lyceum which existed for the exercise of the mind as well as the body? Why should not the present-day Humanist revive this Greek symbol as he revives the Greek law of measure? Let us utilize again the practical psychologist whom we quoted in the earlier discussion of world-attitudes.

“There can be little doubt that for most of us, in the present epoch, the image of life as a gymnasium is a greatly needed tonic. Compare the difference in your attitude (emotional response) on entering a gymnasium and on entering, let us say, a cabaret or a Y.M.C.A. lecture-hall or a house of mourning. Try to realize what and how you actually feel. You are braced up, you have the intention of strengthening yourself, you delight in the difficulties,--provided you choose them yourself. In short, you feel at your strongest and getting stronger.

“The classic Greek conception of life was just that; and everybody knows that the gymnasium was the most popular institution of Pythagorean Greece. What is not so well known is that the gymnasium was for the Greeks a symbol or image of life itself. Their God ran this planet as a gymnasium for the exercise of men, and all experiences were to be taken as movements, turns, stretches, exercises, in wrestling, running, lifting, and so on. Moderns will find what the ancient Greeks found in the image of life,--the evocation of a creative emotion.

“It is difficult to see in what other direction we moderns can look for a new image and therefore attitude towards life. We have no longer the possibility of religion in the traditional sense. Ordinary goodness--in the sense of doing what others call good--has no intelligent appeal. And, after the still recent Great War, the belief in world progress is superstition. But the clean, strong idea of life as a field of exercise for the development of all our muscles--physical, emotional and intellectual--has still the unspoiled beauty of manly and womanly idealism. And life lived in that attitude would certainly be interesting as well as profitable.”

The above seems eminently fitted to be the humanistic attitude toward the world. It involves no theology, no metaphysics, no science, being a matter of personal psychology alone. It presupposes, of course, that man can act as well as be acted upon, the first contention of the Humanist, and it reinforces his wish to act. It definitely humanizes the external world, making it a field for human beings to follow their end of self-perfecting, but it does not sentimentalize or minimize the world. It is, in fine, a tenable world-picture coöperating with the main aim of Humanism. But it is not a theory of the world. That is still to seek.

It is not far off. The theory of the world that has been joined on to the humanistic theory of the self is Cartesian: at least so far as one can determine from the commitments of the majority of the New Humanists, it is Cartesian. They are not, as a rule, any more precise than other literary men in what they say about their beliefs concerning the nature of the physical world, but any one can hear that they sing in chorus against the “New Physics.” They resist the thought of A. N. Whitehead, A. S. Eddington, Albert Einstein, and re-affirm their confidence in something like the following:--“Unless it can be indisputably proved that man, with his infinite variety of thoughts and emotions, is but an aggregation of mechanical atoms held together and moved by physical forces--an hypothesis for which there is not the slightest proof--there seems to be no necessity to deny the existence of a spiritual world not subject to the laws of mechanical energy or circumscribed by the space limitations of material or electrical substances.” This means that on the one side they as a practically united body reject deterministic psychology (Behaviorism, for example) and on the other side they hand over the inorganic world to science, concentrating on the faith that there are in the living organism elements not analyzable or accountable by science. The quotation was from _The Dogma of Evolution_ by Louis Trenchard More, the brother of Paul Elmer More, and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Cincinnati. Here is another from the same source to which the New Humanists would subscribe.

“It is no casual separation of our ideas into the physical, biological, and psychological realms. The physical world is a combination of substances acting according to a certain set of laws of force and energy, the biological world is composed of the same substances, but the laws of action are not the same. They have, however, this great principle in common; they, both, are limited by time and space. Then, somehow to the biological world an added principle is given that we can call consciousness which is not material but is associated with matter and which is not limited by time and space. To the present time, at least, these three realms are to us incommensurable and we have made no progress in measuring or explaining one by the other.”

Louis T. More is the scientist among the New Humanists, a thorny fact to those who are trying to create the legend that the New Humanists are anti-scientific. The legend is punctured by this physicist, who has read and thought widely outside his subject; especially he has browsed in the subject of philosophy, which is generally eschewed by the rank-and-file scientists. The result of this wandering is that L. T. More has equipped himself to disassociate scientific evidence from the faith that twines so tightly around it: he is an able, diligent critic, for example, of evolution as science and as faith. Considering him therefore as the most conscious author among the New Humanists when it comes to formulating a world-theory, let us look at his essay, _The Pretensions of Science_ in the symposium, _Humanism and America_. You will find him very restrictive. To begin with, “science has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the phenomena of the objective world and attempting to find law and order in the flux of events.” But there are two classes of false claims made for science, one by “those men of science who are not content to work in their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created a fictitious world of the imagination made out of ethers, electrons, and mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and others’ minds with the sensible world of brute fact,” and the other by “those who are claiming that the phenomena of the subjective world also lie in the field of science and have imposed on the age the pseudosciences of psychology and sociology.” This is nakedly Cartesian, for as Whitehead shows so clearly, the principles of Descartes “lead straight to the materialistic, mechanistic nature surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close of the seventeenth century, science took charge of the materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating minds.”

Let us pursue along these two lines and learn what further L. T. More has to say of the objective world and the “cogitating mind.” On the first track, we read that “the cosmogony of Descartes has long since crumbled to dust, but the gap he made between the subjective and objective worlds has never been closed in spite of incessant later attempts ... we have more and more regarded the universe as a machine, a combination of inert matter and moving forces, acting not as we may desire, but according to invariable laws which we have personified as Nature. Man was left, by the physicists, as a unique outsider who could interpret this machine in terms of his sensations and mind, but could neither alter nor avoid its fateful operation ... the scientific method is limited to experimental observation and the formulation of laws ... the inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable machine ... exact science is first of all based on the naïve belief in an objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly and prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will ... the mechanistic world can, at best, only picture an objective world as it seems to us, and not as it is.”

Now following the second track, we read of “the two equally valid methods of learning by objective experimentation and by personal experience.... In a general way, we may say that the scientist should follow in his investigations the phenomena of the objective world only until their special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous system. It is the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of the subjective world after these stimuli have been translated into emotion and thought ... the false pretensions of science must be wholly abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by a wise judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for a sane and humanistic philosophy.”

Here we can stop with some assurance that the main position toward which the New Humanists gravitate has been disclosed. Generally speaking, it is unfair to set forward any Humanist as an “official spokesman” and perhaps I should not have assigned L. T. More to that rôle. But his brother, P. E. More, and Robert Shafer have, I believe, been fertilized by his reflections on science, and I cannot detect in the writings of the other New Humanists any radical divergence from the Cartesian scheme. The question is, is the Cartesian world-picture integral to American Humanism or is it simply one of the possible views that might be adopted by American Humanists and held by them in common with members of various other schools of thought? Also, it is evident there are a number of difficulties which L. T. More’s statements immediately raise, and which no doubt the reader feels should be dealt with. In the next section I shall put forward these difficulties myself and at the same time try to formulate what I think the modern man’s attitude should be toward scientific world-building.

* * * * *

It seems to me that the truly modern man will first of all strive to free himself from the great spell cast by science in our epoch. He will try to overcome his own suggestibility upon which propagandists for science from Huxley and Spencer to the present have played, so that he may answer himself frankly when he wonders if our hopes in science have not deceived us. Furthermore, as was earlier suggested, he will try to arrive at some conception of the external world which is not irrational, not violable by the teachings of science, and is at the same time dynamic and humanizing in its influence. This demand the world symbolized as a gymnasium, an immense Academy or Lyceum or Institute of Crotona, appears to meet perfectly. It makes no difference whether one adheres to a materialist or an organic or an idealistic philosophy: the world as a gymnasium for the strengthening of human fiber is a valid imagination under any of the three types of philosophy named. The question then becomes: picturing life as a gymnasium for the development of men, what values can be extracted from science by the man who does not propose to train himself to be a professional scientist?

Such a man, aiming at a general coördinated culture, must come to regard science in the same way he regards art and philosophy--with respect, but not sentimentally or superstitiously. No divinity surrounds any of the three: each subject is man-made and therefore fallible. But each is primarily to be enjoyed for its own sake. We accept this principle in art, not so fully in philosophy, and still less in science. Yet science provides a manipulation and stretching of mental muscles that is highly enjoyable for the sake of exercise alone. It provides adventures and perils of thought of a kind differing from philosophy and art. A case should in fact be made out for science as a humane discipline, though I think of no one in America who is a shining example of such a discipline. I mean that we do not seem to produce men of the type of J. W. N. Sullivan in England, who are exquisitely cultivated both in the arts and sciences, who are supple-minded, adventurous in thought, thoroughly skeptical, at home with Einstein as with Beethoven or Dostoyevsky or Plato. We need cryingly more gifted amateurs among our laymen who study science and fewer intolerant “gospellers” of the type of Harry Elmer Barnes. I am reminded of some sagacious things about the _use_ of philosophy for human beings which T. S. Eliot has recently written, because they apply equally well to the _use_ of science.

“When we study philosophy as a humane discipline we do not do so merely in order to pick out one which we shall adopt as ‘true,’ or either to confect a philosophy of our own out of all philosophies. We do so largely for the exercise in assumption or entertaining ideas; for the enlargement and exercise of mind we get by trying to penetrate a man’s thought and think it after him, and then passing out of that experience to another. Only by the exercise of understanding without believing, so far as that is possible, can we come in full consciousness to some point where we believe _and_ understand.” Eliot adds, “Similarly with the experience of poetry,” and I would add, similarly with the experience of science.

The blunt truth is that the grounds of the attack on the New Humanists’ statements about science have been mistaken. They were accused of hostility to the workings of science. But they should have been accused of lukewarmness toward science as a humane discipline. Excepting L. T. More, P. E. More and Robert Shafer, the New Humanists may be said to lack zeal for that kind of development of their minds which science is most able to confer. Mildness of interest in a subject and active hostility to it are so different that not even blind partizanship would seem to be a sufficient excuse for identifying them.

But let not this argument for science as a humane discipline by which one flexes and enlarges the mind be construed as advocacy of dilettantism in the current debased sense of that word. The end in view is to become an alert critic of world-theories. And here I will say that I believe there is no essential connection between Humanism as a philosophy of conduct and the Cartesian materialistic theory of the universe. They are joined in the minds of the New Humanists, but that I think is a fortuitous juncture. Nor can I see that Humanism depends in any way soever upon a defence of Newtonian physics against later modifications and developments. The Christian cosmogony and cosmology constitute to most of us a mythology. The mythology may be profoundly true, more true than modern science, but we are in the position of not being able to verify its statements by an exact procedure. The means of individual verification may once have existed, but where are they now? We may assent to the Christian mythology, but it is assent based on faith, a very different thing from the _faith based on reason_ of the great doctors of the Middle Ages. Add to this the fact that the materialistic, mechanistic world-view has been shaken by the tremendous blows of mathematical physicists like A. N. Whitehead. It has got into the epicyclic state which presages a breakdown. Alternative world-schemes, imposing, daring, almost sublimely intuitive, are now being put forward. In other words, the problem of a world-theory has been reopened on a scale not dreamed of for centuries.

“The eighteenth century,” observes Whitehead, “opened with the quiet confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid of. Today we are at the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.”

Now it appears to me that the New Humanists, by and large, retain something of the eighteenth century attitude in the face of the new physical problem. But a problem of this kind calls for the suspension of belief, for all the skepticism one can summon, for the complete willingness to run down any turning of thought, for the surprise attack, for an attitude best described as adventurous. The law for thing and the law for man, as they work out in human experience, do not depend on Cartesianism. At the present time, in fact, the law for man may be said to dictate the extrication of one’s self from grooves of thought about the world: it lays an obligation upon one to be provisional in one’s acceptances of world-theories: it requires that the problem be recognized and faced in the spirit appropriate to a mystery. Not to be a farranging agile critic of theories of the world is, in the twentieth century, not to be in key with one of its major trends in thought.

To illustrate the point, compare your feelings while traversing the familiar way home and while threading your route out of a labyrinth. The difference is like the difference between our take-it-for-granted psychology in handling a solved problem and our active searching psychology in moving about in a new problem. We are the same person but the intellectual environment has altered. It seems to me that most of the New Humanists have yet to adapt their psychology to the labyrinth of modern physics. Note, however, that I do not urge upon them any recommended way out: I do not ask them to adopt Eddington’s world-theory but to tackle it in a different spirit.

For it may well be that this intense critical search for a tenable conscious world-view will not meet with complete success in our century. But not to make the search is not, in my judgment, to be humanistic, since the problem is the problem of any one who aspires toward completeness. The final personal reward of a maximum use of our critical powers on classical physics and the new physics is that we at least shall know with the utmost clarity what we believe and understand, and what we do not believe and find insoluble. That is, we shall be as conscious as we can possibly be of the nature of the external world, even if that consciousness consists but of alternative possibilities, doubts, queries and speculations, and perhaps a few certitudes.

There is another large fact to be grasped, toward which our psychology must make adjustment. It is that modern science is stranded on a “plateau” and its giants are making their greatest efforts to raise it, to initiate a new curve of development. The analogy is with those curious graphs of learning processes, which show that one learns rapidly at first, then comes to a period of little or no progress (“a plateau”), then mounts again, arriving later at another “plateau,” and so on. To get off a “plateau” a special effort, produced either by some external incentive such as the offer of a reward or by a renewed determination, is required. Now it has for some time been recognized by advanced minds that modern science was in just such a condition of arrest. It was able to refine upon what it had already done, but not able to initiate any great rising movement. There is material for novel reflections in the description Whitehead gives of the state of science at the end of the nineteenth century. “Almost suddenly, a pause occurred; and in its last twenty years the century closed with one of the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade. It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient, dull and half-hearted.” The cause? We may venture to say that it was because, as Whitehead elsewhere notes, science for two centuries had been running on the accumulated capital of ideas of the seventeenth century, “the century of genius.” A pause, a blocking, was bound to come. And today science, as Whitehead and Eddington recognize, is at a crucial turning point. It seeks to discover the elements that will make for another period of development, and discovery of the necessary elements Whitehead tells us requires more genius than to exploit them when found.

Who can fail to be stirred by this tremendous drama of the human mind? And yet it appears that many are unmoved, anti-Humanists as well as Humanists. The scientist, going about his business, discovers that his personal limitations, the usual habits of scientists, are retarding the progress of science itself. Science properly is concerned with the what-ness of things. From the why-ness of things (philosophy) and the æsthetic and other emotional imports of things (values) it has resolutely cut itself off. It has, every one knows, discounted the intuitive, discounted other forms of knowledge. But now see: the scientist is discovering that his exclusive interest in _what_ and his impatience with _why_ and with value is ultimately stultifying. He feels the basic need to fertilize himself by considering other reports on reality than his own, he struggles to escape the bondage of his traditional habits. It is a situation that should call forth the full interest and sympathy of the humanistically inclined.

For what it emphasizes is the desperate need for a coördination of all our knowledges. A knowledge of “porous atoms” does not destroy our practical knowledge of a table, nor take away the table’s æsthetic properties. The world exists as a source of ideas, of emotions, of actions; it is simultaneously a field of practical affairs, an object of feeling, an intellectual feast. Reality is threefold, but our reports upon reality seldom harmonize. The rationalist underrated two of these reports and trusted fully to one only. The scientist now shows a disposition to admit the validity of all three and to bring about a _rapprochement_ of the practical, emotional and mental worlds. A very faint glimmer still comes across the centuries, elusive witness to the grandeur of the Pythagorean synthesis. Who knows but what the twentieth century, treasuring the glimmer, may not succeed eventually in reflecting it back with an unexpected glory?

“Know thyself,” said Pythagoras, and the recollection of that injunction points to our greatest stumbling-block. To me it is a little Canute-like of L. T. More to forbid to science the subjective world. And I say this with full awareness of the inadequacy and faultiness of introspection as a method. But if introspection is of little use to psychology as a science, it is equally of little use to Humanism. Is it impossible, however, that a better method cannot be devised, is it impossible to put self-study on a scientific basis? The rise of Behaviorism is too impressive for any fiats to be delivered now against the further endeavors to found psychology on a really substantial basis. The Behaviorist has cleared the ground, he has come to the threshold, but it is a question of the key to the subjective world. I do not think the New Humanist need dread the search for the key.

IX

EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP

_“Tradition is the experience of society. It is stored up for use
by what may be called the objective memory. The chief function of
education is to transfer the wealth of a selective tradition from
society to the individual.”_--Paul Elmer More in _The Drift of
Romanticism: Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series_.

Insufficient attention has been paid by intelligent unacademic people to the educational ideas and constructive suggestions for academic reform offered by the New Humanists. Only one commentator in the flurry of debate that ensued on the issuance of _Humanism and America_ wrote with gratitude of the salutary effect on literary scholarship produced by the unremitting efforts of American Humanists, and he was Henry Seidel Canby, who has known at first hand the _literae inhumaniores_ that flourish rankly in our universities. Nowhere better, it seems to me, than in their dissertations on the teaching of the humanities--nowhere better than in such books as Babbitt’s _Literature and the American College_ and Foerster’s _The American Scholar_--can we witness the law of measure being applied to current problems. Moreover, if anything calls for the most tactful mediatory treatment, it is the tendencies and objectives of our colleges and universities.

It is right, I think, to regard American Humanism, when one refers to the _movement_ rather than the doctrine and discipline, as being primarily an educational force. Many of its adherents are actively engaged in teaching and therefore the problems of education possess a personal urgency for them. They do not dream at present of marching on the literary citadels of the country and subduing their garrisons to standards they have foresworn, but the teacher-classicists definitely do propose to wrest education from the control of humanitarians. There, in the field of education, the New Humanist affirms “the battle that is to determine the fate of American civilization will be fought out first of all.” For this reason I am giving a chapter to the members of the movement as educators rather than as literary critics. As literary critics, they consider the prevalent impressionism to be a low form of criticism and seek to restore criticism to its former acknowledged business, judgment by humane standards. But I feel no regret in neglecting in this book the numerous important ideas for contemporary literary critics which stud the works of Babbitt and More. With such writers as T. S. Eliot and F. McEachran in England, Robert Shafer and Seward Collins in America lifting them up and weighing them, they are certain of a distinguished attention. So my conscience does not trouble me because in the present interpretation only incidentally do I visit the purely literary front of the New Humanist campaign. The most serious fighting is on the educational front, and the enemy is educational impressionism.

We can divide the educational front into three sectors,--the lower schools, the college, and the university with its graduate schools. On the first the New Humanists are not very active, on the second they take a very determined stand. If they can hold the college to its function, as they conceive it, they are willing to make concessions in the graduate schools. The leading ideas they put at stake in each sector are very easy to state. In the lower schools, where it is granted that the humanitarian tinge is not undesirable, the pupil should be acquisitive and receptive. In college the student should be assimilative and reflective. In the university the scholar may be productive, investigatory, original on the basis of his humane discipline in the college. Reception when young, assimilation in college years, productive research in graduate school--these are the functions that should underlie our educational system. But the college is being ground out between the encroachments of preparatory schools and the invasion of university ideals of research. And there is where the situation is most tense and critical. We shall begin, however, with the lower schools and the theory of John Dewey, arch-foe of American Humanism in education as well as in philosophy.

* * * * *

No one can be insensible to the value of Dewey’s correction of certain evils in our public school system. He has perceived the dangers of too much abstractness in its curriculum, and the need for more education by doing. It is largely through his influence that the Project Method, as it is now called, the method of teaching by correlating school subjects around some social activity of the children, around weaving, for example, has been given its present vogue. But it is the leading ideas of Dewey that are at issue, and not any desirable modification of the elementary school curriculum.

We live in a democratic society: therefore, say the disciples of Dewey, education should adapt itself to the needs and the condition of the many children, not of the few exceptional ones. We live in an industrial society: therefore education should be closely connected with the major actualities of an industrial society. Going to school is not “a preparation for life.” It is experience as much as any other phase of life. The gap between life in school and life in the family and on the playground should be decreased as much as possible. In a sentence, education should be socialized. It should be thoroughly democratic. It should develop the virtue of coöperation to the highest degree.

To these guiding ideas every one must in some measure give assent, but many people feel that their limited assent must be combined with a great deal of criticism. Robert Shafer, for one, looking over the records of educational experiments along the lines mapped out by Dewey, has repeated the old proverb: one swallow does not make a summer. The experiments have been made with picked children and picked teachers. But, Shafer asks, can conclusions be drawn that will be valid for the educational system as a whole, since in the whole system the children are unpicked, the coöperation of the majority of parents cannot be secured, and the quality of the teachers must inevitably sink far below the standard of the experimental school enthusiasts. Waiving every other consideration, are the new lower-school ideas feasible for a wide application? But presupposing practicality, those other waived considerations become the very important ones, and the New Humanist cannot satisfy his strong doubts of the ideals of the Dewey reform. Others, besides New Humanists, have come to experience like doubts, and some of these are persons who at one time were wholly convinced or almost convinced of the soundness of Dewey’s proposals. One of them is a woman who, to my belief, is the most brilliant of all the contemporary pioneering spirits in the “new education.” I mean Margaret Naumburg, the founder and for eight years (1914-1922) the director of the Walden School in New York city. In 1928 a book from her pen appeared, _The Child and the World_, a series of dialogues on modern education, in which she summed up the results of her thinking and experience in her special field. In spite of the author’s reputation, the book was not, as a rule, thoroughly reviewed. One surmises that this was in part due to Miss Naumburg’s having abandoned and criticized the positions so many other new educators were still clinging to. However it happened, the central point of the book was overlooked: very little attention was paid to the clash she staged between Dewey’s program for socialized education and Whitehead’s views on education which stress the encouragement of individual development.

Our immediate interest lies, of course, not in Miss Naumburg’s partial advocacy of Whitehead, but in her critique of Dewey. Naturally, as who would not, she speaks of Rousseau as the common ancestor of the new school movement in America, approving of his praise of learning by doing; to Rousseau she links Dewey as the immediate parent of present-day experiments. But Rousseau’s general influence on the new school movement, she emphasizes, has had very unfortunate consequences. This is due to establishing so many experiments on “Rousseau’s romantic hope that maladjusted human functions could right themselves by a return to the simple life of nature ... the belief that we can right ourselves by simply removing certain limiting trammels of civilization.” Miss Naumburg, her book makes clear, has shed all her illusions about so naïve a belief. Her counts against Dewey are four: (1) he underestimates emotional culture in his educational plans, (2) he has framed these plans too closely in accord with his own bias as a psychological type, being particularly unfair to the possibilities of the training of intuition, (3) he is too chary of the inner, the subjective life, and (4) his socialized education completely neglects individual psychology.

She holds up for close scrutiny a quotation from Dewey’s _Democracy and Education_ which the New Humanist would certainly agree is an amazing piece of sophistry. It is the concentration of all the arguments for socialized education. “From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone--an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.”

On this strange argument Miss Naumburg’s comment is: “Much of the present social philosophy that wishes to sacrifice the individual to the good of the group is nothing but instinctive herd psychology, translated into modern terms.... I’m sure the world now needs more complete individuals so that group life can become integrated on a higher plane. Dewey places emphasis on the individual’s living for the group rather than for himself and suggests that his failure to do so is the cause of much of the world’s suffering. But to me it seems that the failure of the individual to know himself remains the cause of his ineffectual adaptation to a positive and adequate social existence.”