Chapter V · EUROPE AND ASIA

Writers of books of criticism during the neo-classical period were fond of refining on the idea of decorum; at times they developed this idea on what one may term a continental scale and contrasted the decorous or typical European with the decorous or typical Asiatic. Speculations of this kind are not as fantastic as they at first sight appear. One may not only become aware of some underlying divergence in the temper of the Asiatic as compared with that of the European, but, to some extent, formulate it. In speaking, however, of Asia it is even more important than in speaking of Europe to make clear that one has in mind primarily civilized Asia, and civilized Asia at the top of its achievement. The hordes of barbaric or semi-barbaric Asia have not only menaced or actually overrun Europe in the past (as they may very well do again in the future), but have also been from remote times the scourge of civilized Asia. In ancient Judæa the memory of these wild northern riders lingered in the legends of Gog and Magog. The great Wall of China is a sort of visible symbol of the separation between the two Asias. On the one hand is the Asia of Attila and Tamerlane and Genghis Khan; on the other, the Asia of Christ and Buddha and Confucius.

The mention of Christ and Buddha (of Confucius as a typical Asiatic I shall have more to say presently) is hardly necessary to remind us that it is the distinction of Asia as compared with Europe and other parts of the world to have been the mother of religions; so that if one were to work out a critical and experimental definition of religion (and my method requires nothing less), one might be put on the track of what is specifically Asiatic in the Asiatic attitude towards life. Of course, historical Christianity is far from being a purely Asiatic faith. It contains important elements drawn from Greek philosophy—Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoical, Neoplatonic; also a strong Roman element, especially what I have described as Roman imperialistic organization, not to speak of sacramental magic and elements drawn from the mystery cults, which are of mixed origin but still largely Greek. What elements in Christianity may be referred back to the Founder? We have Christ’s own authorization for dealing with this question experimentally (“By their fruits ye shall know them”). Now Bacon and the utilitarians have also preached a gospel of fruits, but the fruits that Christ has in mind are plainly not of the Baconian type. They are the fruits of the spirit, and what these fruits are, Saint Paul has told us once for all: “Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.” The equivalent of this list in its total emphasis will not be found in any European cult or philosophy that antedates Christianity. It is possible, however, to find the equivalent in the older religious thought of Asia. About the middle of the third century before Christ, the Buddhist ruler of India, Asoka, had a very similar list of virtues carved in stone at various points throughout his vast empire: “Compassion, liberality, truth, purity, gentleness, peace, joyousness, saintliness, self-control.”⁠[61] Thus Buddhism and Christianity, which often seem to be almost hopelessly at variance when approached from the point of view of dogma, confirm one another in this striking fashion when studied experimentally and in their fruits.

If we wish to define religion adequately, we need perhaps to take a further step and inquire which of the various fruits of the spirit enumerated by Saint Paul and Asoka is most central in the truly religious life. This central virtue seems to have been overlooked by Matthew Arnold in a definition of religion that has at least the merit of being experimental: “Religion is,” he says, “morality touched by emotion.” Though religion normally leads through morality and, at least in its earlier stages, is very much mixed up with emotion, the final emphasis, if we are to believe the great religious leaders themselves, is elsewhere. “My peace I give unto you,” said Christ on his final parting with his disciples. “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” Buddha conceives of the fulfilment of religion in very similar fashion: “His thought is quiet, quiet are his word and deed, when he has obtained freedom by true wisdom, when he has thus become a quiet man.”⁠[62] And what is the pathway to this peace? Dante has caught the inmost spirit of Christianity in his reply to this question: “In his will is our peace.” This idea that man needs to submit his ordinary self to a higher or divine will is essential not merely to Christianity, but to all genuine religion. Mohammed is at one here with Buddha and Christ. The very word Islam means submission.

In India, though the same preoccupation with the will has prevailed, the will to which man subordinates his ordinary self is often conceived, not as a divinity that transcends him, but as his own higher self. Buddha eliminates many things that are accounted essential in other faiths, including Christianity, but this opposition between man’s higher or ethical will and his natural self or expansive desires he does not eliminate. On the contrary, more than any other religious teacher, he plants himself on the naked psychological fact of this opposition; so that Buddhism, in its original form, is the most critical, or, if one prefer, the least mythological of religions.

It is important to note that much of the doctrine that has flourished in India has not been sharply dualistic like that of Buddha or any other genuine religious teacher, but has had a more or less marked pantheistic leaning. This leaning appears in a number of the Hindus who are now professing to interpret India to the outside world. For example, Rabindranath Tagore has enjoyed no small degree of credit as an interpreter of India, not merely in the Occident, but in the Orient itself. He has the merit of seeing the importance of the whole question of East versus West, and in his criticism of the West often shows on the negative side no small degree of perspicacity. The man of the West, he says, has specialized in power and mechanical efficiency and so has been enabled to make himself the bully of the planet; but it is established in the nature of things that bullies shall come to grief. This view of the Occident has not only found adherents in China and Japan, but something very similar to it is being muttered at the present time by Mohammedan mullahs from Delhi to Tangiers. The facts, it is scarcely necessary to say, are not quite so simple. The success of the English in maintaining a hold on India is not based entirely on mechanical efficiency and still less on philanthropy or a supposed eagerness to assume the white man’s burden. It has been due in part to the division among the Hindus themselves; but it is also in no small measure a triumph of character, of the sane moral realism that has made of the English the best ruling race, perhaps, that the world has yet seen.

A federation of the states of Europe, Tagore goes on to say, would, under existing circumstances, be only a federation of steam-boilers. The remedy is to get rid of the analysis that has built up this nightmare of mechanical efficiency and put in its place the principle of love.⁠[63] It is here that the affinity of Tagore appears, not with the ancient sages of his own land, as he would have us believe, but with our Rousseauistic dreamers. One may oppose to the effeminacy of a Tagore or a Bergson and to all those, in either East or West, who seek to attain “vision” at the expense of analysis, the example of Buddha who has claims to be regarded as the ultimate Oriental. For Buddha supreme “vision” coincided with a supreme act of analysis.⁠[64]⁠

I have been trying to show that at the centre of the great religious faiths of Asiatic origin is the idea of a higher will that is felt in its relation to man’s ordinary will or expansive desires as a power of vital control. The recognition of this will, however conceived—whether one say with Christ, “Thy will be done,” or with Buddha, “Self is the lord of self; who else can be the lord?”—is the source of awe and humility. The submission to this higher will is in its consummation peace.

At first sight Confucius seems very unlike other great Asiatic teachers. His interests, as I have already said, are humanistic rather than religious. The points of contact between his doctrine and that of Aristotle, the most important Occidental humanist, are numerous and striking. One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is such a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of normal human experience, this wisdom is, on the religious level, found in Buddha and Christ and, on the humanistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These teachers may be regarded both in themselves and in their influence as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual history of mankind. Not only the experience of the world since their time, but much of its previous experience may be properly associated with them.⁠[65] One may note as an interesting analogy that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas sought to combine the wisdom of Aristotle with that of Christ in his Sum of Theology, so about the same time Chu Hsi mingled Buddhist with Confucian elements in his great commentary.

Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in their doctrine of the mean, one should hasten to add that in their total attitude towards life they reveal the characteristic difference between the European and the Asiatic temper. The interests of Aristotle were far from being exclusively humanistic. He is supposed to have spent the happiest years of his life on the islands about the Ægean, observing the fish and marine life and preparing the material for the biological treatises that won the admiration of Darwin.⁠[66] It is perhaps not easy to combine such a far-ranging intellectual curiosity as that of Aristotle with the humility so emphasized by Confucius and other Oriental teachers. Aristotle has had an influence great almost beyond reckoning, not merely on Christian, but on Jewish and Mohammedan religious thought; and yet one would feel something subtly incongruous in a temple to Aristotle. One does not need to be a Confucian to feel that a temple to Confucius would not be similarly incongruous. He was not, like Aristotle, a master of them that know, but a master of them that will. He was strong at the point where every man knows in the secret of his heart that he is weak. The decorum or principle of inner control that he would impose upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of will. He is no obscurantist, yet the rôle of reason in its relation to will is, as he views it, secondary and instrumental. If we turn from Aristotle to Socrates, whose interests were, like those of Confucius, almost exclusively ethical, a similar contrast between the Oriental and Occidental temper appears. The Socratic conception of virtue encourages a primary emphasis on mind. Moreover, the Occident, having emancipated itself from the Oriental assertion of the primacy of will in its Christian form, has been devoting itself more and more since the Renaissance, not to the Socratic thesis that knowledge is virtue, but to the Baconian thesis that knowledge is power.

Few would deny that humility has decreased with the decline of traditional religion. The very word humility, as M. Faguet remarks, may in a not distant future be relegated to the dictionary of archaisms. The word, so far as it survives at all, is often used incorrectly.⁠[67] It is sometimes employed, for example, to describe the deference that the man of science should display towards the mystery and infinitude of nature, or again as a synonym for the modesty or even, it may be, meanness of spirit that a man shows in comparing himself to other men. It is well that one should not be puffed up in one’s dealings with either nature or other men, but humility belongs to another and, as Pascal insists, supernatural order. The assertion of Burke that humility thus understood is the root of all the other virtues involves first principles and so is not subject to mediation or compromise. It must either be accepted as true or rejected as false. If any one accepts the assertion as true (as I myself do), the question then arises why humility has suffered such an eclipse in the Occident. The obvious reply is that it has been associated in the past with certain doctrines, notably the doctrine of the Fall and that of divine grace, and that these doctrines have tended to be undermined by the growth of the critical spirit. The individual has refused more and more to submit to the outer authority, whether that of Revelation or of the Church, from which these doctrines derived their ultimate sanction; and his humility has declined, one is tempted to say, in almost exact ratio to his growth in self-reliance. If any one wishes to be a true modern, if he refuses in other words to submit to authority merely as such, he is confronted with a serious problem: it is plainly not easy to be at once humble and self-reliant. The very doctrine of self-reliance has, from the point of view of humility, a singularly clouded record in the Occident, and that from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day. No one would ever associate humility with the Cynics who were among the first to proclaim self-reliance (autarkeia). The Stoics again favored self-reliance. According to Pascal, they were guilty of “diabolical pride” in their first assumptions. Even though this phrase be too strong, especially as applied to certain Stoics, e.g., Marcus Aurelius, it is hardly possible to cite the Stoics in general as examples of meekness and lowliness of spirit.

If one comes to modern apostles of self-reliance, one thinks first of all perhaps of Rousseau and his defence of the doctrine in “Emile.” As to the degree of his humility, one should be sufficiently enlightened by the first page of the “Confessions.” Nor can it be maintained that Emerson, the chief American champion of self-reliance, is conspicuously humble.⁠[68]⁠

If we are to grasp the problem involved in the attempt to be at once humble and self-reliant, we need to go back to the ancient individualism that Rousseau and Emerson in some respects revive and seek to get at the causes of its final failure. The Stoic bases his optimism primarily, we soon discover, not, like Rousseau, on faith in his instincts, but on faith in reason. To know the right thing is about tantamount to doing it. Reason and will thus tend to become identical. The Stoics themselves conceived that in this matter they were simply following in the footsteps of Socrates. The whole question is, as a matter of fact, closely allied to the Platonic and Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue; and this again brings up the great point at issue between European and Asiatic as to the relation of intellect and will. The chief religious teachers of Asia have, I have already said, asserted in some form or other a higher will to which man must submit in his natural self (and in Asiatic psychology intellect belongs to the natural self), if he is to enter the pathway of peace. A comparison between Plato and Buddha might help to elucidate this contrast between East and West. Buddha like Plato sought to bring together philosophy and religion; but even so he put far less emphasis on the rôle of mind than Plato. The list of “unthinkables” he drew up is almost equivalent to a denial that life can in any deep sense of the word be known at all. It cannot be maintained that the mind (mano) of the Buddhist coincides exactly with the Platonic mind (nous). It is, nevertheless, significant that “mind” is for the Buddhist an organ of the flux, whereas Plato exalts “mind” to the first place. It is a less grievous error, according to Buddha, to look on one’s body as permanent than to harbor a similar conceit about one’s “mind.” A Buddhist might regard as the underlying error of Occidental philosophy the tendency that goes at least as far back as Parmenides to identify thought with being.⁠[69] Why should so chimerical a creature as man identify either thought or any other part of himself with being? As Pindar says, “What are we, what are we not? Man is but the dream of a shadow.” Pindar apparently feared lest he might flatter unduly man’s conceit of his own permanence if he had called him even the shadow of a dream. To suppose that one can transcend the element of impermanence, whether in oneself or the outer world, merely through reason in any sense of the word, is to forget that “illusion is an integral part of reality.” The person who confides unduly in “reason” is also prone to set up some static “absolute”; while those who seek to get rid of the absolute in favor of flux and relativity tend at the same time to get rid of standards. Both absolutists and relativists are guilty of an intellectual sophistication of the facts, inasmuch as in life as it is actually experienced, unity and multiplicity are indissolubly blended.

The Buddhist (to return to our comparison of East and West) seems at first sight to belong with the apostles of the flux. As a matter of fact, comparisons have been made between Buddha and Bergson on the ground that they are both “philosophers of becoming.” We are justified on other grounds than that of their distance in time and space in finding the collocation of these names startling. Bergson positively revels in change and naturalistic expansiveness and avows explicitly, as we have seen, that his philosophy of élan vital leads straight to imperialism. Buddha for his part is at least as much concerned as Plato with escaping from the flux and, so far from being imperialistic, is turned, to the exclusion of everything else, towards what in his own phrase makes for “tranquillity, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana.” This combination of a philosophy of the flux with religious peace and humility is unlike anything we have seen in the Occident and should be a warning that in dealing with Buddha we need to proceed with extreme circumspection. One may at least form some conjecture as to the point at which Buddha diverges from philosophers in the Western tradition. As a thoroughgoing individualist, he is forced to grapple with the problem of the One and the Many; if there is no principle of unity in things with which to measure the manifoldness and change, the individual is left without standards and so falls necessarily into an anarchical impressionism. Now Buddha like a true Asiatic discovers this unifying principle, not in intellect, but in will. Though he assigns an important rôle to intellect, since he is himself highly analytical, this rôle is after all secondary and instrumental. Any attempt to deal with life directly in terms of the intellect involves in some form the attempt to put the ocean in a cup. Life reveals its secret, he seems to say, only to the man who acts; and of all forms of action the most difficult is inner action. The first step in understanding not merely Buddha but Christ is to see that they were both primarily men of action in the sense in which the Asiatic in his great moments has understood action. Buddha is for reducing theory to a minimum. The least speculative of our Western philosophers would probably have seemed to him still far too speculative. He has succeeded in compressing the wisdom of the ages into a sentence: “To refrain from all evil, to achieve the good, to purify one’s own heart, this is the teaching of the Awakened.”⁠[70] The Buddhist commentary is interesting: When you repeat the words, they seem to mean nothing, but when you try to put them into practice, you find they mean everything.

Some of the difficulties inherent in any attempt to treat the problem of the One and the Many primarily as a problem of knowledge appear in the Platonic theory of ideas. It is a matter of positive perception that there is an element of oneness in all the particular objects that belong to some class. There is, for example, an element of oneness in all particular horses; and this oneness is in Platonic parlance the idea or heavenly archetype of the horse. Unfortunately, if one does not get beyond this stage, the oneness remains a mere abstraction and finally a mere word—and human nature craves the concrete. The attempt to deal intellectually with the relation of the unity to the manifoldness would seem to lead to difficulties of the kind Plato has himself set forth in the second part of his “Parmenides.” This problem as to how to escape from mere abstraction appears in the case of the chief idea of all—that of the good or of God which also coincides with what is most exalted in man. The word that stands for the idea of the good is the word par excellence, the logos. One can follow to some extent the process by which the Greek conception of the logos was transmitted through intermediaries like Philo Judæus to the author of the Fourth Gospel. The specifically Asiatic element in the Christian solution of the problem of the logos is the subordination, either implicit or explicit, of the divine reason to the divine will. By an act of this will, the gap between a wisdom that is abstract and general and the individual and particular is bridged over at last; the Word is made flesh. The human craving for the concrete is satisfied at the essential point. The truth of the incarnation, to put the matter on purely psychological grounds, is one that we have all experienced in a less superlative form: the final reply to all the doubts that torment the human heart is not some theory of conduct, however perfect, but the man of character. Pontius Pilate spoke as a European when he inquired, “What is truth?” On another occasion Christ gave the Asiatic reply: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In this emphasis on personality Christianity is confirmed by the most positive observation. Wherein Christianity transcends positive observation is in its tremendous projection of personality, divine and human, into the region of the infinite and the eternal.

I have of course in this whole discussion been simplifying a subject of immense difficulty and complexity at the risk of doing injustice to Plato and the other members of the Socratic group. I am not unaware of the almost inexhaustible store of wisdom in Plato. He must still be one of the chief aids of those who wish to achieve religious insight without an undue sacrifice of the critical spirit. Yet it is difficult not to have certain doubts about the Platonic and Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue. This identification is not superficial precisely—men like Plato and Socrates are never superficial. Knowledge may conceivably become so perfect that to act contrary to it would be like putting one’s hand into the fire. Moreover, when one has struggled out of any maze of error, it will always seem in the retrospect that the error was due even less to a defect of will than to ignorance. Nevertheless, the Socratic thesis runs counter in certain respects to universal experience. Not only do people do what they know to be wrong, but they often take a perverse satisfaction in doing it, as Ovid,⁠[71] anticipating the delectatio morosa of the theologians, was one of the first to point out. Our problem, let us remind ourselves, is to be at once self-reliant and humble. But it will not be found easy to preserve humility and at the same time to grant, after the fashion of Greek philosophy, the primacy to mind. All other forms of pride are as nothing compared with the pride of intellect; and the pride of intellect itself is most manifest in the attempt to know good and evil. So much psychological truth is, it would seem, to be found in the myth of the Fall.

Perhaps my meaning may be best elucidated by studying the Socratic movement in its fruits (and in this movement I include the Platonic and in no small degree the Aristotelian influence). Since Plato worked primarily on the religious level, one would have expected the fruits of religion to appear in the Platonic Academy. The Academy produced a number of distinguished intellectuals who inclined on the whole towards scepticism. It is, of course, possible to build up faith on a sceptical basis as Socrates himself seems to have done; but it can scarcely be maintained that the successors of Plato in the Academy achieved either this or any other type of faith. In any case the contrast is striking between the Academy and the Order founded by Buddha. Any one who studies the old records can acquire the conviction that this Order contained many men of faith, men who brought forth the very fruits of the spirit that have been so admirably defined by Saint Paul, and so deserve to be regarded as saints.

The truth is that the Greeks, on their emancipation from traditional standards, slipped rather rapidly into mere rationalism, and mere rationalism, whether in the Stoical or Epicurean form, showed its usual inability to control the expansive lusts of the human heart. Stoicism sought to achieve a principle of union among men that would have universal validity; it sought, in other words, to do the work of a religion. It saw this universal principle in reason, and proclaimed at the same time that to live according to reason was to live according to nature. Man’s reason, the Stoic assumed, could prevail unaided over his outer impressions and expansive desires. That important aspects, not merely of the Socratic, but of the Platonic and Aristotelian teaching, tended to be obscured in later Græco-Roman thought is beyond question. At the same time, in assuming that right will follows upon right knowledge, the Stoic, as I have already said, conceived that he was a true Socratic; if herein he missed the true Socratic spirit, one is forced to conclude that this spirit was rather easy to miss.

Stoicism was in general a paradoxical movement; it affirmed that the material order alone is real and then put supreme emphasis on a “virtue” that the material order does not give. In other words it sought to attain and to some extent actually did attain on monistic postulates the fruits that are normally associated with a genuinely dualistic philosophy. In spite of its many merits and partial successes, Stoicism was on the whole a failure; and the same must be said of the whole Greek attempt to deal critically with the problem of conduct, to work out, in other words, a sound type of individualism. This failure of Greek philosophy was due, I have suggested, to the fact that it is not quite adequate in its treatment of the closely allied problems of the imagination and the higher or ethical will. Any one who believes that “illusion is an integral part of reality,” and who also holds with the Asiatic that, if humility is to be secured, will must take precedence of mind, is forced to conclude that the danger of Greek philosophy was from the start a certain obstinate intellectualism.

Christianity supplied what was lacking in Greek philosophy. It set up doctrines that humbled reason and at the same time it created symbols that controlled man’s imagination and through the imagination his will. On the basis supplied by this Oriental faith, it was possible to reconstruct European civilization after the Græco-Roman collapse and in the midst of the havoc of the barbarian invasions. But this work of regeneration was accomplished in no small degree at the expense of the critical spirit. It resulted in the triumph of an authority “anterior, exterior, and superior” to the individual. If the Greek confidence in reason proved in some respects fallacious, there are also, it must be admitted, dangers and difficulties in the worship of will in all its forms. On the danger of will-worship in its Nietzschean form it is scarcely necessary to dilate. But even the Oriental cult of the ethical will is beset with pitfalls. The Hindu ascetic who lies on a bed of spikes or holds his arm in the air until it withers away is exercising will in the Oriental sense, but he can scarcely be said to be exercising it intelligently. When the higher will again is conceived as a divine will that has been revealed once for all in words of literal and plenary inspiration, one has the drawbacks and difficulties that are most manifest, perhaps, in Mohammedanism. The effect is to force human life into a rigid and definitive mould. It is not safe to overlook the element of flux and relativity in favor of absolute will any more than it is to overlook it in favor of absolute reason. The Mohammedan has his own way of forgetting that illusion is an integral part of reality. Moreover, when will is conceived as absolute and irresponsible and at the same time as transcendent, the individual is made humble, indeed, but he is so far from being made self-reliant that he is prone to fall into the Oriental form of fatalism.

We need to consider in the interests of our present subject not merely the difficulties of the Oriental worship of will in general, but of this worship as practised by Christians in particular—above all, the form that appears in the doctrine of grace. Saint Augustine, it is scarcely necessary to say, did more than any other one man to develop the Pauline teaching on this subject; and Saint Augustine was destined, here as elsewhere, to exercise an influence great almost beyond reckoning on mediæval and later Christianity. Now Saint Augustine is considered with some truth the Christian Plato. The supreme contrast for him as for Plato is that between fluxa et caduca, on the one hand, and, on the other, certa et æterna. A further comparison of the two men will, however, reveal a profound shifting of emphasis as regards the relative importance of intellect and will. Saint Augustine’s desire, as he tells us, is to know only two things—God and the soul. (Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? nihil omnino.) God is envisaged primarily, not as mind, but as will. The soul of man is also reduced in its essential aspect to will (nihil aliud habeo quam voluntatem). The human will is, however, hopelessly alienated from the divine will by the Fall. The gap between the two can be traversed only by a miracle of grace, a miracle that itself depends on the miracle of the redemption. Man not only needs the mediation of Christ if his will is to be brought into harmony with the divine will, but also of the Church and the Sacraments and the elaborate priestly hierarchy that is required to administer them. So far from right will following upon right knowledge, as Plato thought, fallen man delights in evil for its own sake. What was so delicious upon his tongue, says Saint Augustine in speaking of the pears that he stole when a boy, was not the flavor of the pears themselves, but of his sin. Moreover, this perversity of will sprang originally from the intellect and its pride: man wished to be as a God, knowing good and evil. The intellect was thus not only put in its proper subordinate place, but brought under positive suspicion. The way was opened for obscurantism. Man was humbled and his will regenerated, but more or less, as I have said, at the expense of the critical spirit. The historical explanation of this uncritical element in Christianity is no doubt that, more than most other doctrines, it worked its way up from the bottom of society towards the top. At all events, men were asked to believe a thing because it was absurd,⁠[72] and ignorance was declared to be the mother of devotion. The Church was enabled to carry on all the more effectively its work of regeneration, it might be argued, from the fact that men had ceased to be self-reliant and above all had ceased like the Socratic Greek to rely on the intellect. “Is righteousness, then, the daughter of ignorance?” Rousseau inquires. “Are science and virtue incompatible?” The history of the Occident, it must be confessed, raises some doubt on this point. The so-called Dark Ages, says Lord Acton with some exaggeration, were spiritually full of light.⁠[73] On the other hand, the intellectually “enlightened” eighteenth century was, as Burke complains, spiritually full of darkness.

The beginnings of “Enlightenment” in the eighteenth-century sense go back to the Middle Ages themselves—at least as far back as the thirteenth century. A significant coincidence is that between this incipient emancipation of intellect and the founding of the Inquisition. The real emancipation of intellect got fairly under way with the Renaissance. Men were becoming self-reliant again and in almost the same measure were losing humility. They were inclining once more, like the ancient Greeks, to look on life primarily as a problem of knowledge. Only the knowledge that they sought increasingly was not the ethical knowledge at which Socrates aimed, but knowledge of the natural order. Ethical knowledge seemed to have become indissolubly associated with incomprehensible dogmas. An acute conflict was inevitable, often in the heart of the same individual, between the old humility and the new spirit of intellectual inquiry. Let us consider the case of Pascal, an eminent scientific investigator and also a religious writer at once profound and poignant. He recommends a full application of the critical and experimental spirit to the natural order, but in all that transcends the natural order he would have the critical spirit abdicate before a twofold outer authority—that of Revelation and the Church.⁠[74] Spiritual truth he identifies with dogmas that are most repugnant to reason—for example, infant damnation.⁠[75] To be sure, all the nobility of man is in reason, but this nobility is not in itself of much avail, inasmuch as reason is the sport and plaything of the imagination. Here, I have already noted, is a supreme clash between Christian psychology and that of the Stoic, who holds that it is possible for reason to triumph over the imagination.

If reason is thus the plaything of the imagination, either the Stoical or any other form of self-reliance is vain. Man’s only hope is in arbitrary will in the form of divine grace. To the sudden illumination of grace Pascal gives the name “heart.” “The heart has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” Will in the form of grace is thus at odds with reason which is in turn at odds with imagination; whereas, if one is to be a sound individualist, it may be that reason and imagination need to coöperate in the service of the power in man that I have defined as the ethical will.

It is not to be inferred from what I have said that Pascal has ceased to have value for the individualist. Many of the arguments that he urges in favor of humility and against the pride of intellect are still valid for the simple reason that they are not dogmatic, but keenly psychological. Why should man be proud, seeing that he is, as Pascal shows, caught between two infinites, one of smallness and one of magnitude, and is equally unable to grasp either, so that the essence of things eludes him and must ever elude him. If at any time he thinks he has found a firm foundation on which to rear a tower that will reach even to the infinite, this foundation suddenly fails him and “the earth yawns open even to the abyss.” Lacking some such firm foundation, man has no assurance that his knowledge is real knowledge or anything more than a dream within a dream. But there is something still more humbling to man than his ignorance, and that is the inability of unaided reason to control effectively his outer impressions and expansive desires. Surely realistic observation is here on the side of Pascal rather than of the Stoics. Man’s peculiar blindness arises from the fact that he does not wish to be limited in his dominant desire, whatever that desire may be. He wishes to be free to pursue his folly, as Erasmus would say, and finally discovers the limits established in the nature of things by the somewhat painful process of colliding with them. This human proclivity is so universal, and yet the punishment visited upon it is so harsh, that one’s final impression is that of a certain treachery in life itself. Under the circumstances one does not need to be a Jansenist, or even perhaps a Christian, to see certain merits in the older plan of working out one’s salvation in fear and trembling as compared with our modern plan of “living dangerously,” or, what amounts to the same thing, of turning away from awe and humility in favor of an endless reaching out of wonder and curiosity. Man’s expansive conceit, as the Greek saw, produces insolent excess (hybris) and this begets blindness (atê) which in turn brings on Nemesis. Expansive conceit tempered by Nemesis—this is a definition of an essential aspect of human nature that finds considerable support in the facts of history. Man never rushes forward so confidently, it would sometimes seem, as when he is on the very brink of the abyss. The malady of Europe on the eve of the Great War was not so much ignorance as blindness in the Greek sense. A clear perception of the workings of Nemesis is what gives distinction to the great Greek poets, even to Euripides, the least ethical of them:

A consideration of man’s ignorance and blindness as they are revealed on a vast scale in the facts of history gives a positive basis to humility. One comes to feel that the great religious teachers may be right after all in their insistence that man needs to subordinate himself to some higher will; above all that it is needful that his intellect should recognize some such control. The peril that results from intellectual unrestraint (libido sciendi) is perhaps the most fundamental of all. “What must be the face-to-face antagonist,” asks Cardinal Newman, “by which to withstand and baffle ... the all-corroding, all-dissolving energy of the intellect?” Cardinal Newman has at all events asked the essential question, whatever one may think of his own solution of it. Unfortunately, in getting rid of the pride of intellect the Christian has often tended to get rid of the intellect itself or at least to depreciate it unduly.⁠[77] Hence the obscurantist vein that I have already noted in Christianity. To use the intellect to the utmost and at the same time to keep it in its proper subordinate place is a task that seems thus far to have been beyond the capacity of Occidental man. The warfare between a reason that presumes unduly and a faith that has got itself more or less identified with credulity may turn out to be the true disease of Western culture from the Greeks to the present day. This strife between the head and the heart has left its marks even on the forms of language. Thus, to take a few examples, to be a person of “strong mind” (esprit fort) was about equivalent in older French usage to being an atheist; to be “blessed,” on the other hand, was to be a “blockhead” (benêt, from benedictus). An “innocent,” again, is an idiot, in contradistinction, no doubt, to the person who is said to be as “bright as the devil.” The English “silly” is the same word etymologically as the German “holy” (selig).

When Rousseau said that his heart and his head did not seem to belong to the same individual, he simply introduced a new and, as I shall try to show presently, worse form of obscurantism. In its Rousseauistic form the conflict between head and heart has continued to our own day. Philosophers, who are under no suspicion of being Christians, still assume that there is a more or less complete opposition between intellect and intuition, so that to be vital in the Bergsonian sense is about the same as being anti-intellectual.⁠[78]⁠

The more significant contrast, however, still remains that between the partisan of grace and the man who, in some form or other, asserts the primacy of mind. It can be shown that the doctrine of grace was the keystone of the whole edifice of European society in its mediæval form. It is not as clear as one might wish that European civilization can survive the collapse of this doctrine. In any case the problem for the individualist who believes that it is not enough to be self-reliant, but that one should also be humble, is to discover some equivalent for grace. It is here that we may find it profitable to take into account the total experience of Asia. While no sensible person would claim for the Far East a general ethical superiority over the West, the Far East has at least enjoyed a comparative immunity from that great disease of Occidental culture—the warfare between reason and faith. Buddha and Confucius both managed to combine humility with self-reliance and a cultivation of the critical spirit. They may, therefore, be of help to those who wish to restore to their lives on modern lines the element for which Asia has stood in the past, who believe that without some such restoration the Occident is in danger of going mad with the lust of speed and power. In describing the element of peace as the Asiatic element, I do not mean to set up any geographic or other fatalism. China, for example, may under pressure from the Occident have an industrial revolution (Hankow is already taking on the aspect of an Oriental Pittsburgh) and this revolution is likely to be accompanied by a more or less rapid crumbling of her traditional ethos with the attendant danger of a lapse into sheer moral chaos. The Occident, on the other hand, may not only reaffirm the truths of the ethical will, but may reaffirm these truths in some appropriately modern way and with an emphasis distinctly different from anything that has been seen in the Orient. In dealing with this topic we can best take our point of departure from the fact that all who profess to be modern are, in some sense or other of the word, liberals. If there has been any vital omission in the passage from old to new, this omission is likely to be most visible in one’s definition of liberty. Lord Acton was planning to begin his “History of Liberty” with a hundred such definitions. It is not certain that any one of the hundred would exactly have met our present requirement, which is to secure in some thoroughly critical fashion what I have termed the centripetal element in liberty. If one fails in this task, one ceases to be a complete modern and becomes a mere modernist. The modernist is wont to assume that the really important conflict is that between liberals, on the one hand, and reactionaries, on the other; a more important conflict, however, may turn out to be that between true and false liberals.