INTRODUCTION

According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially with the relations between capital and labor. In that case, one is tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem. This book is only one of a series in which I have been trying to bring out these deeper implications of the modern movement. Though devoted to different topics, the volumes of the series are yet bound together by their common preoccupation with the naturalistic trend, which goes back in some of its main aspects at least as far as the Renaissance, but which won its decisive triumphs over tradition in the eighteenth century. Among the men of the eighteenth century who prepared the way for the world in which we are now living I have, here as elsewhere in my writing, given a preëminent place to Rousseau. It is hard for any one who has investigated the facts to deny him this preëminence, even though one should not go so far as to say with Lord Acton that “Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle, or Cicero, or Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who ever lived.”⁠[1] The great distinction of Rousseau in the history of thought, if my own analysis be correct, is that he gave the wrong answers to the right questions. It is no small distinction even to have asked the right questions.

Rousseau has at all events suggested to me the terms in which I have treated my present topic. He is easily first among the theorists of radical democracy. He is also the most eminent of those who have attacked civilization. Moreover, he has brought his advocacy of democracy and his attack on civilization into a definite relationship with one another. Herein he seems to go deeper than those who relate democracy, not to the question of civilization versus barbarism, but to the question of progress versus reaction. For why should men progress unless it can be shown that they are progressing towards civilization; or of what avail, again, is progress if barbarism is, as Rousseau affirms, more felicitous? If we thought clearly enough, we should probably dismiss as somewhat old-fashioned, as a mere survivor of the nineteenth century, the man who puts his primary emphasis on the contrast between the progressive and the reactionary, and turn our attention to the more essential contrast between the civilized man and the barbarian. The man of the nineteenth century was indeed wont to take for granted that the type of progress he sought to promote was a progress towards civilization. Some persons began to have doubts on this point even before the War, others had their doubts awakened by the War itself, and still others have been made doubtful by the peace. An age that thought it was progressing towards a “far-off divine event,” and turned out instead to be progressing towards Armageddon, suffered, one cannot help surmising, from some fundamental confusion in its notions of progress. One may be aided in detecting the nature of this confusion by the Emersonian distinction of which I have made considerable use in my previous writing—the distinction, namely, between a “law for man” and a “law for thing.” The special praise that Confucius bestowed on his favorite disciple was that he was “always progressing and never came to a standstill.” What Confucius plainly had in mind was progress according to the human law. What the man of the nineteenth century meant as a rule by the term was no less plainly material progress. He seems to have assumed, so far as he gave the subject any thought at all, that moral progress would issue almost automatically from material progress. In view of the duality of human experience, the whole question is, however, vastly more complex than the ordinary progressive has ever suspected. Progress according to the natural law must, if it is to make for civilization, be subordinated to some adequate end; and the natural law does not in itself supply this end. As a result of the neglect of this truth, we have the type of man who deems himself progressive and is yet pursuing power and speed for their own sake, the man who does not care where he is going, as some one has put it, provided only he can go there faster and faster.

If progress and civilization do not mean more than this, one might be justified in sharing Rousseau’s predilection for barbarism. The reason he gives for preferring the barbaric to the civilized state is in itself extremely weighty: the barbaric state is, he maintains, the more fraternal. The fraternal spirit is the fine flower, not merely of genuine philosophy, but of genuine religion. One should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to attain it. My endeavor has, however, been to show that Rousseau’s fraternity is only a sentimental dream. The psychic impossibility involved in this dream is obvious, one may even say, glaring. For example, Walt Whitman, one of the chief of Rousseau’s American followers, preaches universal brotherhood among men each one of whom is, like himself, to “permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy”;⁠[2] in other words, Whitman proposes to base brotherhood, a religious virtue, on expansive appetite.

I have tried here and elsewhere to show that democratic fraternity, as a Rousseau and a Whitman conceive it, and progress, as the utilitarian conceives it, are, however much they may clash at certain points, nevertheless only different aspects of the same naturalistic movement. This movement may be defined in its totality as humanitarianism. I ventured the assertion several years ago that something is omitted in this movement, and that the something may turn out to be the keystone of the arch.⁠[2] The error that results from this central omission assumes many forms. I choose almost at random a very crude form—the form in which it is finally reaching the man in the street. A writer in a widely circulated magazine, “Photoplay,” devotes several editorial paragraphs to denouncing the people who say “don’t”; they are, he complains, mere destroyers, the enemies of every generous creative impulse. Only in so far as one gets rid of the don’ts does one fulfil the saying of the Teacher, “I am come that ye shall have life, and that ye shall have it more abundantly.” Mr. Henry Ford would no doubt dismiss such utterances as part of the great Jewish plot to destroy Gentile civilization. It was not, however, a Jew, but Madame de Staël who declared that everything expansive in human nature is divine. This notion of a divine expansiveness has a long history in the Occident anterior to Madame de Staël, a history that in some of its phases goes at least as far back as the Neoplatonists.

In any case the assertion that one attains to more abundant life (in the religious sense) by getting rid of the don’ts sums up clearly, even though in an extreme form, the side of the modern movement with which I am taking issue. This book in particular is devoted to the most unpopular of all tasks—a defence of the veto power. Not the least singular feature of the singular epoch in which we are living is that the very persons who are least willing to hear about the veto power are likewise the persons who are most certain that they stand for the virtues that depend upon its exercise—for example, peace and brotherhood. As against the expansionists of every kind, I do not hesitate to affirm that what is specifically human in man and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain. The affirmation of this quality of will is nothing new: it is implied in the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members. In general, the primacy accorded to will over intellect is Oriental. The idea of humility, the idea that man needs to defer to a higher will, came into Europe with an Oriental religion, Christianity. This idea has been losing ground in almost exact ratio to the decline of Christianity. Inasmuch as the recognition of the supremacy of will seems to me imperative in any wise view of life, I side in important respects with the Christian against those who have in the Occident, whether in ancient or modern times, inclined to give the first place either to the intellect or the emotions. I differ from the Christian, however, in that my interest in the higher will and the power of veto it exercises over man’s expansive desires is humanistic rather than religious. I am concerned, in other words, less with the meditation in which true religion always culminates, than in the mediation or observance of the law of measure that should govern man in his secular relations. Moreover, I am for coming at my humanism in a positive and critical rather than in a merely traditional manner. To this extent I am with the naturalists, who have from the start been rejecting outer authority in favor of the immediate and experimental. One should have only respect for the man of science in so far as he deals in this critical fashion with the natural law—and no small part of human nature itself comes under the natural law. The error begins when an attempt is made to extend this law to cover the whole of human nature. This is to deny not merely outer authority, but something that is a matter of immediate experience, the opposition, namely, of which the individual is conscious in himself, between a law of the spirit and a law of the members. Deny or dissimulate this opposition and the inner life tends in the same measure to disappear. Carlyle’s contrast between the Rousseauism of the French Revolution and true Christianity is also the contrast between humanitarianism in general, in either its sentimental or its utilitarian form, and any doctrine that affirms the higher will. “Alas, no, M. Roux!” Carlyle exclaims. “A Gospel of Brotherhood not according to any of the four old Evangelists and calling on men to repent, and amend each his own wicked existence, that they might be saved; but a Gospel rather, as we often hint, according to a new fifth Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to amend each the whole world’s wicked existence and be saved by making the Constitution. A thing different and distant toto cœlo.”

My own objection to this substitution of social reform for self-reform is that it involves the turning away from the more immediate to the less immediate. In general I have sought in my attack on the utilitarian-sentimental movement to avoid metaphysical and theological assumptions, and to rely on psychological analysis supported by an immense and growing body of evidence. My humanism is in this sense not only positive and critical, but, what will be found to come to the same thing, individualistic. Under existing conditions, the significant struggle seems to me to be not that between the unsound individualist and the traditionalist, nor again, as is currently assumed, that between the unsound individualist and the altruist, but that between the sound and the unsound individualist. To be a sound individualist, one needs, as I take it, to retain one’s hold on the truths of the inner life, even though breaking more or less completely with the past.

It may help to a fuller understanding of my present attempt to deal in a fashion at once critical and humanistic with the problem of the will in its bearing on the political problem if I say a few words at this point about certain previous stages in my argument. In the opening chapters of “Literature and the American College” I seek to discriminate between the humanist and the humanitarians of either the utilitarian or the sentimental brand. These two sides of the movement I sometimes term the Baconian and the Rousseauistic after the names of the men who seem to me to have prefigured them most completely in their writings and personalities. The humanitarian is not, I pointed out, primarily concerned, like the humanist, with the individual and his inner life, but with the welfare and progress of mankind in the lump. His favorite word is “service.” The current tendency to regard humanism simply as an abbreviated and more convenient form for humanitarianism can only be the source of the most vicious confusions.

In “The Masters of Modern French Criticism” I attempt to carry a stage farther my defence of a critical humanism. Though the basis of the inner life is the opposition between a lower and a higher will, the higher will cannot, after all, act at random. It must have standards. Formerly the standards were supplied by tradition. The man who accepted Christian tradition, for example, was in no doubt as to the kind and degree of discipline he needed to impose on his lower nature. He thus achieved some measure of moral unity with himself and also with other men who accepted the same discipline. If the individualist, on the other hand, is to have standards, he must rely on the critical spirit in direct ratio to the completeness of his break with the traditional unifications of life. He is confronted at the outset with the most difficult of philosophical problems—that of the One and the Many. For it is obvious that standards cannot exist unless there is an element of oneness somewhere with which to measure the infinite otherwiseness of things. The special theme of “The Masters” is the problem of the One and the Many and the failure of Sainte-Beuve and other eminent French individualists to deal with it adequately and so to achieve standards in a modern fashion. The results of the critical endeavor of the past century may be summed up most completely, perhaps, in the word relativity. The failure of criticism to attain to any centre of judgment set above the shifting impressions of the individual and the flux of phenomenal nature is a defeat for civilization itself, if it be true, as I have tried to show, that civilization must ultimately depend on the maintenance of standards. In “The New Laokoon” I have sought to exhibit the anarchy that has supervened in literature and the arts with the progressive decline of standards. Superficially, this anarchy seems above all an anarchy of the emotions. On closer scrutiny, however, emotional anarchy itself turns out to be only a sign of something subtler and more dangerous—anarchy of the imagination. In “Rousseau and Romanticism,” a book that is closely connected in argument with “The New Laokoon,” the problem of the imagination receives special treatment. I come here to another distinctive feature of the type of humanism I am defending. I not only have more to say of will and less of reason than the humanist in the Græco-Roman tradition, but I also grant a most important rôle to imagination. If one does not, like Diderot, dismiss as “artificial” the conflict between a natural or expansive will and a specifically human will or will to refrain, if, on the contrary, one insists on this conflict as a primordial fact of consciousness, one will be led, I believe, to the further conclusion that the outcome of this “civil war in the cave” will be determined by the attitude of the imagination; that the imagination, in other words, holds the balance of power between the higher and the lower nature of man. In the light of history (one need not go any farther back than the Great War) man’s pretence to be governed by reason in any ordinary sense of the word seems a bad jest. The critical observer is forced to agree with Napoleon that, not reason, but “imagination governs mankind.” It does not follow that mankind need be governed, as it has been very largely during the past century, by the Napoleonic quality of imagination.

The complaint has been made that the word imagination has been used in so many senses that it has ceased to have any meaning. My own understanding of the term may perhaps be made clearer by a brief historical survey. The Latin word (imaginatio) from which our word is derived is itself a rendering of the Greek phantasy or fancy (φαντασία). Fancy means literally “what appears”; in other words, either the various impressions of sense, or else a faculty that stores up these impressions and is therefore closely related to memory. Greek philosophy gave a rather low rating to “fancy” or appearance in comparison with reality, which it inclined to identify with reason or mind. To the Stoic in particular it seemed both feasible and imperative that reason should hold sway over all the impressions that beat upon the gateway of the senses and make a severe selection among them. “How easy a thing it is,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to put away and blot out every ‘fancy’ [i.e., impression] that is disturbing or alien, and to be at once in perfect peace.” The disparagement of fancy in this sense is already found in Plato. He hopes to attain a truth that is “firm and not pulled around this way and that by our ‘fancy.’”⁠[3] A chief source of Christian humility, on the other hand, was the conviction that man is unable by his own resources to achieve any such truth, the conviction, above all, that mere reason cannot prevail over the deceits of the senses. Pascal, for example, gives to the word imagination about the same meaning that the Stoic gave either to it or its Greek equivalent, and like the Stoic he disparages imagination; only to this disparagement he adds the disparagement of reason. What he opposes to an imagination that is only a “mistress of error” and to a reason that is impotent to resist this error is the “heart,” by which he means the illumination of the higher will in the form of grace. This inner revelation has itself the support of outer revelation. Here, he holds, one may find at last a firm footing of truth and reality. He does not admit that imagination has any part either in outer revelation or in the life of the “heart.” He has this much at least in common with Plato that he believes it possible to draw a firm and fast line between imagination (or mere appearance) and reality. Strict psychology, however, scarcely warrants any such sharp discrimination between the true and the illusory. It forces one rather to conclude with Joubert that “illusion is an integral part of reality.” This conclusion, however damaging it may be to mere dogma, does not force one to forego standards. But in that case one needs to attend to another possible meaning of the word imagination, the second main meaning, one is tempted to say, that the word has actually had in Occidental thought. The word in this other meaning stands less for what one perceives, either inwardly or outwardly, than for what one conceives. Conceit, it should be remembered, was in older English usage not only a complimentary term, but one of the synonyms of imagination. The process by which the term has come to have its present unfavorable meaning of vain imagining has its adequate historical explanation into which I need not here enter. Now to “conceive” is, in an almost etymological sense, to gather things together, to see likenesses and analogies and in so far to unify what were else mere heterogeneity. The imagination, says Coleridge somewhat pedantically, is the “esemplastic” power—the power, that is, that fashions things into one. The passages in which Coleridge expounds this view of the imagination afford, perhaps, the best example in English of what I have called the second main meaning of the word. For an instance of the other main meaning we may turn to Addison’s papers on the imagination in the “Spectator.” Addison not only tends to reduce imagination to outer perception, but, encouraged by the Latin rendering of the Greek “fancy,” to narrow outer perception itself to visual perception.

If we mean by imagination not merely what we perceive, but what we conceive, it follows inevitably that the problem of the imagination is closely bound up with that of the One and the Many and therefore with the problem of standards; for it is impossible, let me repeat, to achieve standards, at least along critical lines, unless one can discover in life somewhere an abiding unity with which to measure its mere variety and change. Because “illusion is an integral part of reality,” we are not justified in assuming that every unity that the imagination may conceive must therefore be dismissed as illusory. A somewhat paradoxical person might indeed affirm that, even though one did not raise directly the question of reality at all, it would still be possible to have standards; that one might measure men accurately enough for most practical purposes simply by the quality of their illusions—and their disillusions. However, in spite of the fact that absolute unity and reality must ever elude us and that the absolute in general must be dismissed as a metaphysical dream, we may still determine on experimental grounds to what degree any particular view of life is sanctioned or repudiated by the nature of things and rate it accordingly as more or less real. God, according to Synesius, communicates with man through the imagination. Unfortunately the devil communicates with him in the same way and the test of these communications is not, strictly speaking, in the imagination itself. To determine the quality of our imaginings, we need to supplement the power in man that perceives and the power that conceives with a third power—that which discriminates. All divisions of man into powers or faculties are, I am aware, more or less arbitrary, but, though arbitrary, they are inevitable, if only as instruments of thought; and the threefold division I am here employing will, I believe, be found practically one of the most helpful.

In emphasizing the importance of the power in man that discriminates, I mean this power, working not abstractly, but on the actual material of experience. I may perhaps best sum up my whole point of view by saying that the only thing that finally counts in this world is a concentration, at once imaginative and discriminating, on the facts. Now the facts that one may perceive and on which one may concentrate are not only infinite in number, but of entirely different orders. This is one reason why material progress, so far from assuring moral progress, is, on the contrary, extremely difficult to combine with it. This progress has been won by an almost tyrannical concentration on the facts of the natural law. Man’s capacity for concentration is limited, so that the price he has paid for material progress has been an increasing inattention to facts of an entirely different order—those, namely, of the human law. The resulting spiritual blindness has been an invitation to Nemesis. One may have some inkling of the nature of this Nemesis from the Great War and other similar symptoms that have been multiplying of late in our Western societies.

It goes without saying that the partisans of “progress” have not admitted their spiritual blindness. They have accepted as valid substitutes for the traditional standards and the moral unity that these standards tended to promote certain new unifications of life that display great imagination, indeed, but an imagination that has not been sufficiently tested from the point of view of reality. These new schemes for unifying men flourished especially in connection with the so-called romantic movement. It is therefore no small matter that the leaders of this movement can be shown to have erected deliberately a cult of the creative imagination on the ruins of discrimination. Any one who takes seriously the creations of this type of imagination, an imagination that is not disciplined to either the natural or the human law, but is, in Young’s phrase, free to wander wild in its own realm of chimeras, falls into mere conceit or vain imagining. Conceit has always been the specifically human malady, but never, perhaps, more so than to-day. The outstanding trait of the men of our period may seem in retrospect to have been the facility with which they put forth untried conceits as “ideals.” We have all grown familiar with the type of person who is in his own conceit a lofty “idealist,” but when put to the test has turned out to be only a disastrous dreamer.

Though man is governed by imagination, fortunately it does not follow that he must be governed by conceit. There remains the distinction between the mere visionary and the man of vision. This distinction acquires its full importance only when related to the question of leadership. A main purpose of my present argument is to show that genuine leaders, good or bad, there will always be, and that democracy becomes a menace to civilization when it seeks to evade this truth. The notion in particular that a substitute for leadership may be found in numerical majorities that are supposed to reflect the “general will” is only a pernicious conceit. In the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision. Where there is no vision, we are told, the people perish; but where there is sham vision, they perish even faster. The worst difficulties of the present time arise, I am sometimes tempted to think, even less from lack of vision than from sham vision. Otherwise stated, what is disquieting about the time is not so much its open and avowed materialism as what it takes to be its spirituality.

Among the visionaries who have usurped the credit that belongs only to the man of vision, Rousseau seems to me to have been, at least in these recent ages of the world, the most conspicuous. The Nature to which he invites us to return is only a conceit. This conceit encourages one to substitute for the vital control, which is the true voice of man’s higher self, expansive emotion. Ideally this substitution is to be marked by a triumph of the fraternal spirit. Actually, as I have sought to prove, the outcome of yielding to a mere expansive conceit of the emotions is not fraternity, but a decadent imperialism. I have made a considerable use of the word imperialism in this work and in a somewhat broader sense than is familiar to English and American readers. My justification lies in the fact that one finds behind every other form of imperialism the imperialism or push for power of the individual. In this respect, at least, I am in accord with Bergson, who declares that “imperialism is, as it were, inherent in the vital urge. It is at the bottom of the soul of individuals as well as of the soul of peoples.”⁠[4] By his cult of élan vital Bergson is in the direct line of descent from Rousseau. One must note, however, an important divergence between master and disciple that is all to the advantage of the latter. Bergson does not hope to base on élan vital a fraternity that must be sought rather in the exercise of frein vital. On the contrary, élan vital is, he avows frankly, imperialistic. According to the new Bergsonian beatitude, not the meek in spirit, but those who have the most vigorous vital urge are to inherit the earth. It is hard to overlook the affinity between this world-famed philosophy, as interpreted by its author, and the vulgar admiration for “punch.”

My application of the epithet decadent to the type of imperialism that has been promoted by the glorification of instinct from Rousseau to Bergson calls for a word of comment. That there are various types of imperialism, even if we use the word, not in the psychological, but in the more familiar political sense, appears evident. For example, the imperialism that made the Romans masters of the world is not of the same kind as that which prevailed when they cringed beneath a Tiberius or a Nero. Yet it is possible to trace the process by which the older imperialism finally took on a decadent cast. The critical moment for Rome was the moment of triumph when the leaders of the State no longer felt the restraining influence of dangerous rivals like Carthage. At the same time they were beginning to grow individualistic in the sense that they were beginning to throw off the traditional controls. As a result of all this emancipation, “men’s desires,” in Montesquieu’s phrase, “became immense.” It has been usual to regard as the most significant symptom of this inordinateness the growth of luxury. “Luxury,” says Juvenal, “more cruel than the foeman’s arms, fell upon us, and is avenging the conquered world.” A still graver symptom, however, was the appearance of leaders who were ever more and more ruthless in the pursuit either of their personal advantage or that of some class or faction. The new spirit that was undermining the Roman constitution manifested itself even less, as Cicero notes, in acts of injustice and cruelty to the vanquished peoples than in the rage of civil strife. It can scarcely be maintained of the Romans who thus precipitated the decadence that they exercised to any serious degree their frein vital, or will to refrain. The right opponents of these anarchical individualists, one may venture to affirm, were not the mere traditionalists, but the individualists who had qualified for true leadership by setting bounds to their expansive lusts, especially the lust of domination. Rome declined because she failed to produce individualists of this type in sufficient numbers. Certain analogies may be discovered between this Roman dilemma and the dilemma with which we are now confronted in America. We, too, seem to be reaching the acme of our power and are at the same time discarding the standards of the past. This emancipation has been accompanied by an extraordinary increase in luxury and self-indulgence. Persons who postpone everything else to their “comfort” and to commercial prosperity are probably more numerous in America to-day than they were in ancient Rome. Disturbing as this symptom may be, it is less so than the increasing rôle played in our national life by “blocs” with highly unethical leaders—leaders who seek to advance the material interests of some special group at the expense of the whole community. The actual gravity of this symptom may perhaps be exaggerated; if it should prove, however, to be something more than a passing phase, it portends the end of our constitutional liberties and the rise of a decadent imperialism. The more one ponders either the modern American or the ancient Roman situation, the more surely will one be led from imperialism in the political, to imperialism in the psychological sense. In other words, one will be forced, if one wishes to get at the root of the matter, to turn from the merely peripheral manifestations of the push for power to the inner life of the individual.

My views as to the relation between the Rousseauistic movement and imperialism may perhaps be still further elucidated by a comparison with the views on the same subject of two recent European writers, the German, Oswald Spengler, and the Frenchman, Ernest Seillière. Spengler has developed in his chief work, “The Downfall of the Occident,” the thesis that the Western world, especially Western European “culture,” is now engaged in a sort of rake’s progress that starts with Rousseau and his return to nature. The goal of this decadence, as Spengler describes it, is not unlike what I have termed a decadent imperialism. Moreover, we are not only on a descending curve, but it is a fatal curve. He has actually appended to the first volume of his book a table exhibiting the degree of degeneracy that the Occident will have attained about the year 2000. The whole conception not only implies a philosophy of history, but a philosophy of history that has, in my judgment, gone mad. This conception is based in any case on an utter denial of the quality of will in man on which I myself put supreme emphasis. In spite therefore of certain superficial resemblances in our respective views, Spengler and I are at the opposite poles of human thought. My own attitude is one of extreme unfriendliness to every possible philosophy of history (in the more technical sense of the term), whether it be the older type found in a Saint Augustine or a Bossuet, which tends to make of man the puppet of God, or the newer type which tends in all its varieties to make of man the puppet of nature. “The Downfall of the Occident” seems to me a fairly complete repertory of the naturalistic fallacies of the nineteenth century; it is steeped throughout in the special brand of fatalism in which these fallacies culminate, and as a result of which the Occident is actually threatened with “downfall.” One is justified in my opinion in dismissing Spengler as a charlatan, even though one be forced to add that he is a charlatan of genius. The immense sale of his books in Germany, if it is indicative of a real influence, is a depressing symptom.

The second writer I have mentioned, M. Seillière, merits a very different judgment. In about a score of volumes he has been tracing with great psychological finesse the influence of Rousseau on the literature and life of the past century. This influence he associates with what he calls an irrational imperialism. In short, the results of his survey are on the negative side very similar to my own. On the positive or constructive side, on the other hand, M. Seillière and I diverge sharply. What he opposes to an irrational imperialism is a rational imperialism; by which he means “the social army on the march towards the conquest of power by the coördination of individual efforts.”⁠[5] In his general position, as revealed in such utterances, he seems to me to strike back through the utilitarians to Hobbes and ultimately, in some respects, to Machiavelli. The essential contrast for me is not, as for M. Seillière, that between a rational and an irrational imperialism, but between imperialism and that quality of will in man which is, in every possible sense of the word, anti-imperialistic. M. Seillière, again, seems as much bent on running together Stoical and Christian ethics as I am on separating them and insisting on their final incompatibility. Stoicism in both its ancient and modern forms I regard, at least in its total trend, as false and impossible; whereas I hold that at the heart of genuine Christianity are certain truths which have already once saved Western civilization and, judiciously employed, may save it again.

I wish also to say a few words at the outset regarding certain possible misapprehensions of my method. The most serious of these misapprehensions may arise if one looks either in this volume or in the previous volumes of the series (with the partial exception of “The Masters of Modern French Criticism”) for rounded estimates of individuals. I have not attempted such estimates. Still less have I attempted rounded estimates of historical epochs—for example, of the nineteenth century. It is even less sensible, perhaps, to indict a whole century than it is, according to Burke, to indict a whole people. I am attacking, not the nineteenth century in general, but the naturalistic nineteenth century and its prolongation into the twentieth century, along with the tendencies in the previous centuries, from the Renaissance down, that prepared the way for naturalism. My treatment of this whole naturalistic trend has seemed, even to critics who are not altogether unfriendly, to be negative, extreme, and one-sided. I hope I may be pardoned if I reply briefly to each of these three charges.

As to the charge that my treatment of naturalism is one-sided, there is a sense, it must be admitted, in which it is not only one-sided, but one-sided to the last degree. There is, however, a humanistic intention even in the one-sidedness. I dwell persistently on the aspect of human nature that the naturalists have no less persistently neglected in the hope that the way may thus be opened for a more balanced view. Moreover, what the naturalists have neglected is not something that is on the fringe or outer rim of human experience, but something, on the contrary, that is very central. The naturalistic effort during the past century or more has resulted in an immense and bewildering peripheral enrichment of life—in short, in what we are still glorifying under the name of progress. I have no quarrel with this type of progress in itself, I merely maintain that no amount of peripheral enrichment of life can atone for any lack at the centre. Furthermore, though I assail the naturalists for what seems to me a vital oversight, I have, let me repeat, at least one trait in common with them—I desire to be experimental. I seek to follow out the actual consequences of this oversight, to deal with it, not abstractly, but in its fruits. If certain readers have persisted in seeing in my books something that I myself have not sought to put there, namely, rounded estimates of individuals and historic epochs, the misapprehension has no doubt arisen from the very abundance of my concrete illustrations.

As to the charge that I am negative, I have already said that the element in man that has been overlooked by naturalistic psychology is felt in relation to his ordinary self negatively. If instead of taking the point of view of one’s ordinary self, one heeds the admonitions of the inner monitor, the result is two of the most positive of all things: character and happiness. This is the great paradox of life itself. For being negative in this sense I am not in the least apologetic. There is, however, another sense in which I may seem negative and about this I feel somewhat differently. The type of criticism that prevailed about the beginning of the nineteenth century proposed to substitute the “fruitful criticism of beauties for the barren criticism of faults.” I may be accused of reversing too sharply this maxim even by some who admit that the proper remedy for the lax appreciativeness of the modern movement is a criticism that displays a tonic astringency. I am constantly calling attention to the defects of certain eminent personalities, it may be urged, and at the same time have little or nothing to say of their virtues. My method is even in this respect, I believe, legitimate, provided that it be properly understood, though I myself cannot help regretting that it should make me appear so constantly unamiable.

The charge that I am extreme touches me even more nearly than the charge that I am negative and one-sided; for I aim to be a humanist and the essence of humanism is moderation. There is, however, much confusion on the subject of moderation. A man’s moderation is measured by his success in mediating between some sound general principle and the infinitely various and shifting circumstances of actual life. The man who is thus rightly mediatory attains to one of the most precious of virtues—urbanity; though one must add that probably no virtue has been more frequently counterfeited. When an intellectually and spiritually indolent person has to choose between two conflicting views he often decides to “split the difference” between them; but he may be splitting the difference between truth and error, or between two errors. In any case, he must dispose of the question of truth or error before he can properly begin to mediate at all. Otherwise he will run the risk of resembling the English statesman of whom it was said that he never deviated from the straight and narrow path between right and wrong. Some of the casuists whom Pascal attacked had managed to assume a moderate attitude towards murder! One may fancy oneself urbane when in reality one is in danger of being numbered with the immense multitude that Dante saw in the vestibule of Hell—the multitude of those who are equally “displeasing to God and to the enemies of God.” To be sure, it is not always easy in any particular instance to distinguish between the humanist and the mere Laodicean. Thus Luther denounced Erasmus as a Laodicean, whereas to us he seems rather to have shown real poise and urbanity in his dealings with the religious and other extremists of his time.

At all events the differences of doctrine I debate in the following pages are of a primary nature and so not subject to mediation. Between the man who puts his main emphasis on the inner life of the individual and the man who puts this emphasis on something else—for example, the progress and service of humanity—the opposition is one of first principles. The question I raise, therefore, is not whether one should be a moderate humanitarian, but whether one should be a humanitarian at all. In general I commit myself to the position that we are living in a world that in certain important respects has gone wrong on first principles; which will be found to be only another way of saying that we are living in a world that has been betrayed by its leaders. On the appearance of leaders who have recovered in some form the truths of the inner life and repudiated the errors of naturalism may depend the very survival of Western civilization. The truths of the inner life may be proclaimed in various forms, religious and humanistic, and have actually been so proclaimed in the past and justified in each case by their fruits in life and conduct. It is because I am unable to discover these truths in any form in the philosophies now fashionable that I have been led to prefer to the wisdom of the age the wisdom of the ages.