The Humility of Common Sense[18] PAUL ELMER MORE

The Humility of Common Sense[18] PAUL ELMER MORE

I

It is a nice question to ask whether belief in the absolute irresponsibility of the artistic temperament has engendered the modern ideal of absolute art, or the contrary. Which is first, the complacency of conceit or of theory? For myself I am willing to leave the solution of such a problem to the Demon himself, who alone knoweth his own mind; but from the Æsthetic⁠[19] of Signor Croce, the most epoptic hierophant of the demonic mysteries in these days, I can see how nearly the two absolutes are related, and can get some glimpse of the procedure of the metaphysical mind at its highest point of activity.

Now Signor Croce, though really himself a child of Hegel, makes good sport of the theoretical æstheticians in the train of Kant and Hegel who define art as pure hedonism, or pure moralism, or pure conceptualism; and so far he does well. You might suppose he was taking the ordinary and sensible point of view, viz., that art must of course give pleasure, and must be psychologically moral (not pedantically so), and must contain ideas, but that it is a false sort of simplification to define art itself therefore as pleasure, or as morals, or as ideas. If such were the motive behind Croce’s antipathy to the Teutonic æsthetics of the last century, he would seem, as I say, to be pleading for the liberty of common sense against the absolutism of the Demon; but he too quickly dispels any such illusion. “Art,” he declares, “which depends on morals or pleasure or philosophy is morals or pleasure or philosophy, and not art at all.” Now what kind of logic is this that argues: Because art is not pure pleasure, therefore pure art is absolved from the need of giving pleasure; because art is not pure morals, therefore pure art is absolved from any concern with morals? One might as well say, e.g., that cookery which is relished for the pleasure it gives is pleasure, and not cookery at all; therefore cookery has nothing to do with pleasure. It is the old story of Luther’s drunken man on horseback: prop him up on one side and over he flops on the other. Because one absolute is not true, therefore the contrary absolute must be true; because art which gives pleasure is not definable simply as pleasure, therefore art is a hieratic abstraction entirely independent of pleasure.

But if such a theory of art would seem to be buzzing in a metaphysical vacuum, it is not without its very practical aspect, whether as cause or effect. “The artist,” says Signor Croce, coming down abruptly to earth, “is always above blame morally and above censure philosophically.” There you have it, the claim to irresponsibility, so dear to our militant gentlemen of the press, vested in the authority of an awesome name. I do not suppose many of our emancipated writers are deeply versed in the thin dialectic of æsthetics, but they understand pretty well what is meant when they are told that in their work as creative artists they need not concern themselves with the ethical laws supposed to govern life or with the dull maxims of truth.

It may be a question, as I have said, whether the great Neapolitan has risen from the popular lust of irresponsibility to his theory of independent art or has condescended to the lower level from the heights of abstract reasoning. In either case the next step, from a definition by negation to a definition by affirmation, carries him into an altitude beyond the reach of any earthly telescope. Art, he has shown, is absolutely not pleasure or morals or philosophy; it just absolutely is—but is what? In the answer to this question I seem to hear no human voice but the very diction of the Demon. Otherwise I cannot understand whence the avowed foe of Kantian and Hegelian abstractions has derived his positive definition of art, which of all abstractions is the most abstract and of all absolutes the most absolute. “Art is intuition,” he says, that and nothing else; not the vision of something, mind you, but pure vision. Or, if you desire more words in your definition, you may have it thus: “An aspiration inclosed in the circle of a representation, that is art; and in it the aspiration exists solely by the representation, and the representation solely by the aspiration.” Which words, if they mean anything, signify, I suppose, that art is of the spirit of pure creativeness, a reaching out towards a goal which is non-existent until visualised by the very act of reaching out. Such a definition may engage the attention of metaphysicians; in my common-place mind, frankly, it draws blank. I do not comprehend what is meant by aspiring towards that which is non-existent until we visualise it by aspiring.

Croce is the pope of the new school, and as such ought to be immune from the questioning of the lay intelligence. For a more accessible exposition of the ideas stirring the young modernists, I turn to the distinguished critic and philosopher of Spain, José Ortega y Gasset, and in particular to his essay published under the significant title of The Dehumanization of Art.⁠[20] Unless I mistake his language, Señor Ortega finds little satisfaction æsthetically in the extreme products of the movement he describes. But he believes that it is not the function of a critic to value works of art in accordance with his own taste or distaste. And especially to-day, when more than ever before it is a characteristic of art to divide mankind sharply into those who comprehend and those who do not, the business of criticism should be to enter into the intention of the artist, and not to judge his work from some alien point of view, least of all to condemn. Well, Señor Ortega in a sense comprehends; he states the various theories adopted by the jóvenes to justify their adventurous ways with admirable perspicuity and precision—and with that final confusion at the back of his mind which enables him to speak as one who belongs intellectually to the movement, however practically his taste may lag a little behind its utmost advance.

The central thesis of Señor Ortega’s book, which at once justifies his title and summarises the most advanced attitude towards art, is exactly this: “To rejoice or suffer with the human lot which a work of art may incidentally suggest or present to us, is a very different thing from the true artistic pleasure. More than that: this occupation with the human element of the work is essentially incompatible with pure æsthetic fruition.”⁠[21]

That clearly is the voice of the Demon once more, appealing to the same lust for an irresponsible absolute as inspires the Crocean æsthetics. And now art is to be not only independent of morals but in its essence divided altogether from human nature; and if it still aims to please, its pleasure is of a kind peculiar to itself and unrelated to the coarse fodder of life. Suppose, to take the illustration given by Señor Ortega, a notable man is lying at the point of death. His wife will be standing by his bed, a physician will be counting his pulse, while elsewhere in the house a reporter awaits the news and a painter is engaged to depict the scene. All four persons—wife, physician, reporter, painter—are intent upon the same fact, but with varying degrees of intimacy and with different kinds of interest. To the wife the event is an occasion of grief and anxiety; she is, as it were, a part of it; whereas to the artist, at the other extreme, the situation is entirely divested of human sympathy or sentiment: “his mind is set solely on the exterior, on certain lights and shadows, certain chromatic values.” And so it happens that if the natural emotions felt on such an occasion by the wife, the physician, and even to a lesser degree by the news-reporter, are what the ordinary man (the “philistine” or “bourgeois” of the older romantic jargon) regards as the real stuff of life, then art to the ordinary man is removed to a sphere of incomprehensible unreality. “An artistic object,” says Señor Ortega, “is artistic only in the measure in which it ceases to be real.” Hence, in the scene just described, the actual death-bed and the artist’s picture of it are two things “absolutely different (completamente distintos).” We may interest ourselves in one or the other; in one case we live with, or in, the event, in the other case we “contemplate” an object of art as such, with æsthetic pleasure perhaps, but with no human emotions. Just in so far as the picture shows any feeling for, or awakens in the beholder any response to, the significance of death, it falls below the high function of art. The tragedy of loss, the frustration of ambition, the humility of surrender, the consolations of hope, the victory of love, the sanctities of religion,—any shadow of these resting upon the canvas will detract from the purity of æsthetic pleasure. The artist and the connoisseur in the presence of death find only an occasion for certain lines and colours. And further, as our power of contemplation becomes more refined, we cease to discern (or, if we are artists, to paint) even the unreal representation of a real event; a picture will cease to depend on, or suggest, any subject whatsoever. For art is like a window through which we look out upon a garden. The ordinary man sees only the flowers and leaves beyond, and is so absorbed in these as to be quite unaware of the pane of glass, the more so as the glass is purer and clearer. But with effort we can make ourselves conscious of the medium through which we are looking; and as our vision is thus concentrated on the glass, the garden fades into a confused blotch of colours or even passes out of conscious perception altogether.

That is Señor Ortega’s vivid metaphor for the Crocean theory of art as pure intuition—which he professes to reach, however, by no theorising of his own but from study of the actual practice of certain of the jóvenes. For those who believe in the divine mission of art the elevation of society might seem to lie in obeying the command of Mr. Skionar in Peacock’s Crotchet Castle: “Build sacella for transcendental oracles to teach the world how to see through a glass darkly.” It all sounds rather funny to me. But I hope I am not laughing at an unfair caricature. What else in fact is the meaning of those sapient critics, who might join me in repudiating the language of metaphysics, yet insist that in judging a picture we shall pay no heed to the subject represented but consider it as pure representation, or who say that the value of a work of art depends not at all on the character of the human experience put into it but only on the sincerity of self-expression?—as if there were some mystical virtue in self-expression even when the self has no experience worthy to be expressed. It is, in fact, pedantic talk of this sort in the mouths of respected critics that indicates how far the depredations of the Demon have extended into the realm of common sense.

As for the creators, so called, there may be a young votary of art here and there who is trying honestly to put these abstractions into practice; and for him, I should suppose, the goal of dehumanisation and derealisation will have been attained when his pictures are simplified to a cunning design of line and colour with no suggestion of a definite subject, or still further to a spread of pure colour with no design at all; his music to a pure tone without melody or even variation; his poems to a succession of beautiful words unsullied by sense. That would seem to be the nearest practical equivalent to seeing a pure pane of glass. One wonders why the pilgrim of vacuity should be so slow and hesitant in his progress towards so easy a mark. Perhaps he foresees that absolute art, so reached, will cease to be art at all. Perhaps he has a foreboding that the prize if obtained would not be very valuable. It is hard to imagine the pleasure or profit to be derived from concentrating one’s attention upon a pane of transparent glass until one sees nothing through it; most of us would prefer to retain our impure perception of the flowers in the garden beyond. Despite the majestic logic of youth we persist in thinking that such a picture as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is a truer work of art than the deftest whirl of colours ever painted; that the Æneid is richer in poetical joy than Kubla Khan (not to mention the latest lyric from the American colony in Paris); that Bach’s Mass in B Minor is still a miracle and a rapture of sound. Yet all these—the painting and the epic and the mass—are brimming with human emotion and with a brooding sense of the eternal values of life. They are great for various reasons, no doubt; but certainly among those reasons is the fact that they are not art at all as the modernists would have us believe.

The simple truth is that the effort to create pure art is nothing more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract reason—unless you prefer to ticket it as empty conceit—and could never engage the practical interest of any but a few witless cranks. There is a profound confusion in Señor Ortega’s interpretation of what is happening among the mass of the younger artists, as indeed there is often in their own statement of what they are endeavouring to do. They may be seeking an absolute, but it is not an absolute of purity in any sense of the word.

Now I grant at once that there is a difference between art and life, that the attitude of the painter, to return to the old illustration, is not identical with that of the wife in the house of mourning. There is in art a change, a transmutation, a something taken away and a something added. “Art,” said Goethe, “is art only because it is not nature.” And Aristotle, perhaps, had the same truth in mind in his famous theory of the purgation of the human passions. In that sense we can accept a maxim that comes from Japan: “Art lies in the shadowy frontiers between reality and unreality.”⁠[22] The point I would make is the falseness and futility of the logical deduction that art can therefore dispense with the stuff of humanity or nature, or can weigh anchor and sail off into a shoreless sea of unreality. What has actually happened is this. Always the great creators have taken the substance of life, and, not by denying it or attempting to evade its laws, but by looking more intently below its surface, have found meanings and values that transmute it into something at once the same and different. The passions that distract the individual man with the despair of isolated impotence they have invested with a universal significance fraught with the destinies of humanity; the scenery of the material world they have infused with suggestions of an indwelling otherworld. And so by a species of symbolism, or whatever you choose to call it, they have lifted mortal life and its theatre to a higher reality which only to the contented or dust-choked dwellers in things as they are may appear as unreal. That, for instance, is precisely what Perugino has achieved in his picture of a death-scene entitled the Mystic Crucifixion, where pain and grief and the fear that clutches the individual heart in its hand of ice have been transmuted into a drama of divine redemption through suffering, while the tender burgeoning of spring thrown up against the far-off juncture of earth and sky gives hints of a mode of existence in joyous and infinite freedom. Even the lesser creators, those who in innocence of spirit have undertaken merely to reproduce what they see, may have done so with a clarity and largeness of vision capable of working a magic alchemy of which they themselves perhaps never dreamed.

That was the tradition of agelong practice; it is what we mean, or ought to mean, by classical. And then, after the devastating materialism of late eighteenth-century philosophy there came a change of ideals. The veritable feeling for the otherworld and for spiritual values was lost, while at the same time the new school, stirred with vague aspirations, was not satisfied with a simple and, in its way, wholesome naturalism. Above all these prophets of the romantic movement, as we designate it, revolted from the restrictive rules of an art which was neither classical nor innocently naturalistic, but pseudo-classical, and which had developed from one side of the Renaissance. They too perceived that no great art was possible without escape from the levelling tyranny of natural law, and, being unable to transcend nature, seeing indeed no higher reality into which nature could be raised, they sought freedom by sinking below nature. In painting, as Mr. Mather has shown with fulness of knowledge and admirable acumen, this process of escape meant “a successive elimination of academic authority, imagination, memory, fidelity to nature, and nature itself. It would seem as if the last sacrifice had been made; but no. In all these rejections and in the most grotesque experiments the painter had retained his seriousness and self-respect. This too went by the board in a brief moment after the War, when the Dadaists bade the artist create in a mood of joyous bluff, meanwhile mocking himself and his world. The oft-repeated demonstration is complete once more—the latter end of expansive Romantic individualism is Romantic disillusionment and Romantic irony.”⁠[23] And the same history might be given of modern music and literature, though in the case of the latter the disinvolution, by reason of the medium employed, is more complicated. For instance the liberation of art from the moral obligations of life, so vaunted by Mr. Cabell and others of the left wing in America as a new achievement, is really contemporaneous with the romantic movement. At least as far back as 1837 we find George Sand declaring that by almost universal consent the arts have become accomplices in this strange tendency towards “amoralism.” Now conscientious theorists may hold that amoralism is a step in the direction of freedom; in practice it became commonly a mere euphemism for immorality, not to say vulgar indecency. The climax of the movement in that direction was reached in the realism of Zola and others who, quite frankly and systematically and “scientifically,” made human nature coterminous with the bestial in man. Art may have been emancipated from one set of bonds, but it was wrapt and enfolded and constricted in a bondage tenfold straiter. It may have been dehumanised in the sense that it had repudiated the government of reason which to the older humanists was the distinguishing trait of man as man; it certainly was not purged of its attempt to evoke passions which on a lower plane are menschlich allzu menschlich.

As a matter of fact the radical writers of to-day who are accomplishing anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school of realism. But a few restless souls, those in particular whom Señor Ortega has in mind, driven on by the despotic Demon of the Absolute, have not been content to abide in this halfway house. They see clearly enough that art has not been purified by such realism, but mixed and muddied by deliberate opposition to the ethical interpretation of life; they will detach art from even that poor remnant of deliberation which made a selection among the elements of composite human nature with a certain regard, though an inverted regard, for moral values. They hold deliberation to be the foe of liberation. Hence the later theory, exemplified in English by James Joyce, that art shall not reproduce a picture of life as the humanist sees it, or even from the inverted point of view of the realist, but for its subject matter shall descend to what they call the pure “stream of consciousness.” The hero of fiction shall have no will, no purpose, no inhibition, no power of choice whether for good or evil, but shall be merely a medium through which passes an endless, unchecked, meaningless flux of sensations and memories and emotions and impulses.

And so the limit of elimination has been reached—at least the practical limit, since below the stream of consciousness there would seem to remain nothing to represent save bottomless inanity. But this fact is to be noted: though the process of evolution may seem to have been carried on in the name of absolute art, the actual goal attained is an absolute of quite another order; there has been no true liberation, but a progressive descent in slavery. As, successively, one after another of the higher elements of our composite nature has been suppressed, a lower instinct has taken its place. The submergence of the humanistic conception of man as a responsible creature of free will has been accompanied by an emergence of the romantic glorification of uncontrollable temperament; this has been supplanted by a realistic theory of subjection to the bestial passions, and this, at the last, by an attempt to represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in practice, however it be in literature, means confinement in a mad-house. The practitioners of the newest art call themselves surréalistes, super-realists; they flatter themselves, they are sub-realists. Art may be dehumanised, but only in the sense that, having passed beyond the representation of men as undifferentiated from animals, it undertakes to portray them as complete imbeciles. To speak of the works produced by the boastful modern school as pure art is, from any point of view, mere bluff. By their fruits you shall know them. Turn the pages of the little magazine published in Paris under the title of transition, wherein Mr. Joyce and a group of denationalised Americans and Americanised Frenchmen collaborate to their own mutual satisfaction: you will there find what the Simon-pure article is in theory and practice. For instance a certain M. Louis Aragon,—described by his admiring introducer as “an intellectual on a lifelong holiday, a twentieth-century pilgrim with a pack of words on his back,” etc.,—expounds the theory thus:

Reason, reason, o abstract day-phantom, I have already driven you from my dreams. And now I am at the point where they are ready to blend with the realities of appearance. There is no longer room only for me. In vain reason denounces the dictatorship of sensuality. In vain it puts me on guard against error. Error is here the queen. Come in, Madame, this is my body, this is your throne. I pat my delirium as I would a beautiful horse.... Nothing can assure me of reality. Nothing, neither the exactness of logic nor the strength of a sensation, can assure me that I do not base it on the delirium of interpretation.

And so M. Aragon, concluding “that only the syllables of reality are artistically usable,” exemplifies the new style:

Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, “the Freudian period,” as the addicts of the stream of consciousness call it, “to the realistic misconception.” Their title, I have said, is a pretty mistake for sub-realism; but they are not mistaken in their claim to have reached a kind of absolute. At least I cannot imagine what lower level of imbecility may still be honoured with the name of art.

(If any votary of “pure art” chances to read this essay, he will say: So Keats and Milton were treated by critics of their age.)

II

One of the hardest things for a student to learn, which yet, if he could but know it at the beginning, would save him from endless perplexities and perhaps from final despair, is just the simple fact that brain-power is no guarantee for rightness of thinking, that on the contrary a restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the humility of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into bogs of duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity, that, to repeat the phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the intellectus sibi permissus is the easiest of all dupes for the Demon of the Absolute. There has been no more powerful intellect for the past hundred years than Kant’s; I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with more confusion of thought or clouded the truth with a thicker dust of obscurity. And it is in this spirit of distrust, not incompatible with a kind of admiration, that I criticise the works of one who to-day has reached the pinnacle of fame as a thinker.

Professor Whitehead’s philosophy spans the double field of religion and science; and in each of these, I presume to say, he has come by the circuitous ways of abstract reasoning to conclusions that in a lesser man would be regarded as preposterous. If such a statement shocks you or sounds disrespectful, take yourself the argument of his Religion in the Making and strip it to the bones. You will find that it proceeds from the definition of religion as “the longing for justification,” and is directed by the fact that “to-day there is but one religious dogma in debate: What do you mean by ‘God’?” Upon this basis, then, Mr. Whitehead undertakes to find such a meaning for the word “God” as will satisfy man’s “longing for justification.” Such a simplification of the religious problem will strike some inquirers as high-handed, but I let that pass; it has at least whatever merits appertain to simplicity. And I admit ungrudgingly that in the course of his lectures Mr. Whitehead makes many shrewd observations on the deeper mysteries of human life. Memorable passages might be quoted, for instance such sentences as these, that touch the Crocean metaphysic on the quick: “To be an actual thing is to be limited,” “Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality,” “Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.”

But in the end how does Mr. Whitehead reply to his own question: “What do you mean by ‘God’?” For convenience’ sake I quote this summary of his answer from a eulogistic article in the Hibbert Journal for July 1927:

All being does this [i.e., “comes to a focus in each thing”] because it is its nature so to do. This inherent nature of all being is God. All being does this because it is organised according to the principle of concretion. All being does this because of a certain order or character which pervades it. That order pervading the universe that makes it concrete is God. God is not himself concrete, says Whitehead, but he is the principle which constitutes the concreteness of things.

That is to say, in still simpler language: An individual object is not cut off from the universe, but stands in some relation to all other objects and owes its character to this relationship; this is so because it is the nature of things to be so; such is the law of “concretion,” and the “principle of concretion” is God.

Now, apart from the final clause, a plain man might suggest that the argument, so relieved of the obscurantism of metaphysical jargon, is more true than original—true to the point of insipidity. As for the conclusion, no doubt, so left in its native jargon, it comes with the shock of originality; but has it sense? Will any man admit that the God whom he worships and to whom he prays—and without worship and prayer the use of the word “God” is a pure solecism—is no more than the “principle of concretion” in the universe? Has such a definition any bearing on religion as the “longing for justification”? Is it anything more than a phantom of abstract science surreptitiously substituted for the object of faith? The fact is that between the last clause of the argument and what precedes there is a sheer hiatus. It is the age-old fallacy of metaphysics: you take a word used in ordinary speech (“God”) with a perfectly clear connotation; you define the word in a manner to suit your convenience (“the principle of concretion”); you prove that there is something in the nature of things corresponding to your definition, and then casually assume that your proof holds good of the word in its popular sense. It is the oft-repeated adventure of the Absolute: you wrap a common-place up in abstract terminology, and then in that fog of language you find yourself precipitated into an abyss of nonsense (that the “longing for justification” is satisfied by belief in “the inherent nature of all being”).⁠[24]

But this is by the way. Our present topic is rather Mr. Whitehead’s philosophy of science, which is his real concern, and in which the terms “God” and “religion” are manifestly unwarranted intrusions. Here, again, to the student of contemporary thought Mr. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World must be in many ways a welcome book. His comments on the connexion between the poets and the physical theories of their day are illuminating and bring to the subject a knowledge not often found in the literary critic. And I for one am much beholden to him for his treatment of the ghastly relic of materialism bequeathed to us by our fathers—I would almost say his indecent burial of it, were the epithet indecent applicable to the disposal of a corpse which has remained too long above ground. And very cleverly he directs his attack to the two points where the mechanistic philosophy is most vulnerable—its apparent simplicity and its presumptive regard of facts.

There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity about the theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It is so easy to say that the world is nothing but a machine nicely constructed of atoms, running smoothly and undeviatingly under the mechanical laws of motion; to deny that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to disarrange the regularity demanded by science; to dispose of the passions and appetites and the very consciousness of man as mere products of atomical reaction. It was the kind of simplification that promised to solve for us all the annoying problems of life, exactly the kind of bait that the Demon of the Absolute loves to dangle before a mind unprotected by the humility of common sense. Certainly if ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in their pockets, it was this particular group of mid-Victorians who married the atheistical philosophy of the eighteenth century to the physical discoveries of the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of simplification has led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to keep the machine going that long ago the plain man, if he dared, would have scouted the whole conception as a fantastic dream. And here Mr. Whitehead, by virtue of his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an authority for which the plain man must be very grateful. “The physical doctrine of the atom,” he says, “has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.” In all conscience, is it not true that to accept the more recent developments of scientific mechanism requires about the same sort of credulity as was demanded of the theologian in the Middle Ages when asked to debate the number of angels who could stand together on the point of a needle?

And as the mechanistic theory, when used to explain the inner workings of matter, instead of simplifying science, breaks down under a weight of infinite complications, so, when applied to the nature of man, it shatters itself on what Mr. Whitehead rightly calls certain “stubborn and irreducible facts”—the most stubborn and irreducible of these facts being, as every unperverted mind knows, that we are not pure machines, and that any argument which would subject the human will and consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void because based on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of Darwinian materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics of which still circulate in the backwaters of the biological laboratory), as against all forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or scientific, “Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages: ‘My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be mistaken.’”

It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of history to discover a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the Absolute than that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the period now closing. And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense must be thankful to Mr. Whitehead for lending his authority as a scientist to the unlocking of these shackles. But then, why should so masterly an intellect, again like Luther’s drunken man, topple over on the other side into a contrary but equally impossible absolutism? Why? “The only way of mitigating mechanism,” he says, “is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.” And so, instead of admitting humbly that mechanism is mechanism while beside it there exists something of a totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus between these two fields of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must demonstrate mechanism out of the world altogether. In his philosophy there will be no more solid obstinate material things such as go to the making of machines, but only “events.” Time and space, which used to be regarded as modes of perception, become internal components of things; value, which used to be a name for our conscious estimation of what we could do with things or for their effect on our spiritual life, now proves to be “the intrinsic reality of an event.” There is, you see, an entire reversal of the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that the human soul obeys the same laws as a stone; now we are to believe that a stone is of the same nature as the soul. In either case we avoid the discomfort of a paradoxical dualism and reduce the world to a monism which may plausibly call itself science, though as a matter of fact Mr. Whitehead’s theory, if carried out, would simply abolish science.

And it is clear enough that the new monism is open to precisely the same criticism as was that of the mechanists which it looks to supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify, it really renders the nature of things incomprehensibly complex. Promising to release us from the known paradox of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of things, it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox upon us in its definition of inanimate objects. To define a stone as an event consisting of a bundle of time, space, value, and relationships, does not seem to me to be moving in the direction of lucid simplicity. “What is the sense,” Mr. Whitehead asks, “of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?” And the question is entirely pertinent, if by the word “mechanics” we mean slyly to imply something more than the observed actions and reactions of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead therefore discards the “traditional scientific materialism” for an “alternative doctrine of organism,” that is, for a “theory of organic mechanism.” Well and good. But is it unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical explanation when you do not know what you mean by “organism,” or to hint that no very clear idea will be evoked by joining together two unknown quantities, “organism” and “mechanism,” and calling the world an “organic mechanism”?

And again, what of the “stubborn and irreducible facts,” in whose name Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and their predecessors of the eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their imposing structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason that, after all is said, we still know that the human mind (or soul, if you please) is something other than a stone, shall we swallow the contrary theory, which has not even the virtue of logic, and which transfers human qualities to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and sufficient distinction long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws and a man forms habits: you may throw a stone into the air a thousand times and it will continue to do the same thing, whereas a man learns by experience. But alas for those “stubborn and irreducible facts”! How bravely we all summon them to our aid! How desperately we run from them when they appear!

But if this merging together of the animate and the inanimate in a new naturalism makes a travesty of the inorganic world, its real menace is that, equally with the older naturalism, it reacts to deprive humanity of what is distinctly human. The solid objects of “our naïve experience” have been made organic by a kind of relaxation into fluid composites of time and space and value and relationships; they have evaporated into a semblance of psychical events (the very term “events” indeed is little more than an awkward translation of Berkeley’s “ideas in the mind”), and the peculiar note of an event is its transitoriness: “one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the character of what is real, is the transition of things, the passage one to another.” Thus it happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow together in an indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by association into a complex of relationships, loses that central permanence of entity which used to be held to mark the dignity of man. Nor, if we look beyond, is there anywhere “an ultimate reality” to which we can appeal “for the removal of perplexity,” but only an endless concurrence of events. “In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover [itself a conception, one might suppose, far enough removed from ‘our naïve experience’ into the abyss of abstraction], we require God as the Principle of Concretion”—not a person, not an entity of any sort, nor even a law apparently, but a mere name for the fact that concrete groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and reforming in the infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might distinguish between the old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its place by saying that under the régime of the former true science might flourish but no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism of Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true science nor humanism and religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he appears as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal flux of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the Destroyer.

The curious thing in all this farrago of insight and error is the superstitious hold of the word science on a mind otherwise so awakened. Mr. Whitehead perceives that one scientific hypothesis swallows up another—as indeed he could not fail to see that his own hypothesis turns its predecessor upside down; he admits with engaging candour that one and all they rest on a “naïve faith” which cannot be verified and is “indifferent to refutation”; yet he clings fanatically to the scientific attitude as possessing a monopoly of truth and honesty. “When,” he says, “Darwin or Einstein proclaim[s] theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.”

I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen here from the ambiguity of a word—as has happened immemorially with metaphysicians better and worse than Mr. Whitehead. Science as an accumulation and classification and utilisation of observed facts may go on from victory to victory; but science as a name for such hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion and life, as those broached by the Darwinians of the nineteenth century, or the Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is not a progress in insight but a lapse from one naïve assumption to another in a vicious circle of self-contradicting monisms. It really is not easy to understand the state of mind of one, cognisant of the history of thought, who urges us to seek relief from the present débâcle—Mr. Whitehead himself places our intellectual and spiritual level lower than it has ever been since the Dark Ages—by introducing the hypothetical method of science into religion. This is his analysis of the present condition of the popular mind: “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.” My reading of history is different. I should assert that our vacillating half-heartedness is the inevitable outcome of the endeavour, persistent since the naturalistic invasion of the Renaissance, to flee from the paradox of life to some philosophy which will merge, no matter how, the mechanical and the human together. I should assert that the only escape from our muddle is to overthrow this idol of Unity, this Demon of the Absolute, this abortion sprung from the union of science and metaphysics, and to submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible fact that a stone and the human soul cannot be brought under the same definition.

For legitimate science one may have the deepest respect. But to scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly and truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your gallipots!

FOOTNOTES