The Well of Discipline SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS

The lapidary precedes the historian, and the sound of the mallet is heard in the land chipping Hic Jacet on the monuments which humanism has erected, with an epitaph which runs blithely thus:

“Humanism enjoyed four hundred years of prosperity in the later world and then gave way to Modernism. From Mid-Fifteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century, Humanism traced the patterns of the Occident. Then, with a dramatic flourish comparable to that of the Renaissance, a new pattern was superimposed on the palimpsest of the West, based on the concepts and methods of Natural Science.”

Meantime, while the historian waits for a deeper perspective, I am writing in the belief that there is more vitality in humanism than the lapidaries have given it credit for. Humanity, at all events, is perennial, and men are not likely to forget for long that science is not ineluctable nature itself, but only human knowledge, and that all knowledge, even knowledge of nature, is pursued at will for whatever it is worth to them in their own esteem—that behind the pursuit of natural science lies the authority of the evaluating mind.

The human worth of the sciences, I ardently echo, is beyond compare. They have, it is true, played a sardonic trick on their pursuers, and have seemed for the moment honestly to nullify any significant worth in human existence. But men may still recollect that it is they themselves who have made the nullifying discovery. They are worth at least what that discovery implies—an intelligence, a power to think and judge, and an impulse to act selectively on the basis of a sense of values—or why have they pursued the sciences at all? With these resources to start with, and science in their scrip, they may also have the humour to see that there remains to them, as of old, the eternal task of making the best of it—the very task to which science itself is a contribution. When this perception shall have grown lively enough, humanism will again come into its own.

Granted a will to return to humanism, however, the return itself will not be simple. Something, we shall find, has been lost in the meantime. Value and significance are not handed to us on a platter; they are themselves products of thought. If life, then, has seemed to be emptied of them by the findings of natural science, it is equally possible to suppose that this bathos is due to a diluted capacity for thought in precisely the field of thought where value and significance are conceived.

This is the possibility that I have set out to examine. The broad hint of it lies on the surface. If discipline of the mind has any virtue—and modernism itself with its austere regimen is its current champion—that virtue has been lifted from the field of thought where human values are explicitly involved, to a field of thought from which they are explicitly banned. By every calculation, therefore, the minds thus affected should have lost something of their capacity to think in the undisciplined area, and should have lost something of their powers to conceive or discover the values that, under happier auspices, give life its significance.

I

In imagination we dramatise the Renaissance as a sweeping revolution. Whether humanists or modernists, we look upon it as a beginning, or a resumption, at all events as the turning-point from which we are the continuators in a straight line. Historians of philosophy, of letters, of politics, of science all concur. More impressively still the men of the Renaissance themselves were quite conscious of the change—Bessarion, Aldus, Erasmus, da Vinci, Galileo, Bruno, to take names at random. The shift of curiosity from the divine to the secular, and the responsive shift of discipline from scholasticism to humanism opened out new vistas to the voyaging mind. It would be hard to exaggerate the almost theatric reversals which the times witnessed and welcomed.

Sweeping as it was, however, the revolution of the Renaissance was less radical than that of the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the latter the changes wrought by the Renaissance were on the level of explicit ideas. The essential stuff of thought was unchanged. New ideas were astir, but the elements of which they were built were the old elements. Theology gave way to humanism; God as the centre gave way to man as the centre. But after all, God had been conceived as a father and man as a child of God, and, God or man, their psychology was the same. The very literature which had laid the premisses of mediæval thought—the Bible—permeated the consciousness of the humanistic period yet more deeply.

The shift of discipline from sacred to profane letters, as a consequence, made no profound break in the consciousness itself. The major impulses of the two periods blended easily and naturally. The religious impulse of the Middle Ages lent itself triumphantly to literary expression; there was the Divine Comedy. The literary impulse of the Renaissance lent itself no less triumphantly to religious themes; there was Paradise Lost. Natural science, indeed, began its modern course under the impulse of the Renaissance. Still, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the common discipline of the West was humanistic, natural science did not profoundly alter the minds of men. It was an incident, a special play of curiosity and thought on the part of men whose minds were formed and informed in the medium of humane letters. Even Doctor Johnson had his chemical apparatus.

Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century did the common discipline of letters begin to give way. Up to that time, therefore, there had been a basic continuity in the cultivated consciousness of the West, not only from the Middle Ages but from high antiquity itself. For the Renaissance was avowedly a resumption of the broken threads of ancient thought. And its humanism, however loosely it spliced the break, was evidence that here too the essential elements of its reason were the same. What so intoxicated the Renaissance mind was the very spontaneity of its grasp of ancient ideas. And this affinity has been the mark of humanism ever since.

Now continuity is not necessarily a virtue. Nothing, alas, is so persistent as error and evil. One aspect of the shift to modernism, however, seems to me itself an evil, promising persistence—a rupture at the basis of reason. Modernism, indeed, also had its dramatic confrontations, its moments of intense self-consciousness. New conceptions came into tragic conflict with old, yielding many a Robert Elsmere, and many a family cleavage like that between the elder and the younger Gosse. Such conflicts are disconcerting and painful, and for a generation or two terribly impressive. It is not to such overt changes, however, that I refer. They belong to the normal life of the mind. It is the very function of intellect to incur and mediate them. One is inclined to bid the intellect be a man and face the frank hazards of the life of reason. I refer rather to a change, not in ideas, but prior to ideas, among the ultimate premisses of thought, in the discipline by which the powers of the mind and the fortunes of ideas are themselves in a large measure disposed. And this change, it seems to me, has proved a scotching of the goose that lays the golden egg.

II

Where is the bottom of the well into which discipline—vaunted so highly by both humanist and modernist—is poured? Discipline, as distinguished from any guise of propaganda, is a delicate affair. Its concern is not for the specific ideas with which perforce it must do its deed, and which it pours into the depths in an unremitting stream. Its subtle task is to enrich and enhance the powers of thought and yet leave them free—free to think, and free to judge even the ideas by which they are enriched.

The bottom lies deeper, therefore, than the level at which the Huxleys, the Spencers, the Eliots placed the controversy—the relative merits of two sorts of knowledge, of Homer and Sophocles, of Plato’s Ideas and Cæsar’s battles, of Jerusalem Recovered and Paradise Lost, as against the constitution of matter and the laws of nature. These relative merits are themselves matters of judgment, as the controversy witnesses. And it is precisely the quality of such judgment that is momentously at stake.

Of course the Hellenist must know his Greek and the astronomer his physics. They are specialists, and the question is not of them. It is a question of that common humanity of which Hellenist and astronomer, poet and chemist, man of leisure and man of affairs are alike responsible members. As between humanist and modernist a sort of official decision has already been rendered, and the common discipline, together with the faith that animates it, has gone over to the sciences. Is it ill-humoured to point out that the decision itself has been arrived at and progressively confirmed in that field of judgment from which discipline has been progressively withdrawn? At all events, it is toward that deeper level that I am delving, to get at the roots of that common humanity.

The Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man is a biological way of dealing with a reflection old in the tradition of humanism. From Plato down, curiosity has toyed with theories of the origin of language. Language is patently artificial, a device, a product of human ingenuity. That a child is born without speech might mean nothing, since there are instincts that emerge only in the course of development. But language differs from language; every term in every language is arbitrary; the child, whatever his blood, picks up the speech of his community; individuals differ in the extent and character of their deliberate acquisition. All these considerations point to its artificiality. One speaks, indeed, before one’s mind is mature enough to reflect upon the accomplishment. But that is the very point, as will appear in a moment.

Whatever the theory, the origin of speech implies ancestors before speech. And those ancestors—is it fantastic to identify them, in a slightly modified version of our evolutionary history, with the prehuman race of the Darwinian rendering? We should not, I think, have called them men. For bound up with language is all that we think of as human—the power of communication, the fixation and tradition of thought, the comparison and criticism of ideas, co-operation on the basis of common principles, all history and philosophy, all literature and science, the very process of reason itself prior to its expression.

I say reason, not intelligence. Intelligence itself—a primary mystery—is scarcely the monopoly of men. The cat here on the hearth has a share of it, and the mouse of which she is apparently dreaming. It is not intelligence that distinguishes the human species sweepingly from the brute, but a particular deployment of it, a way of using it or managing it, that we call reason.

To linger in imagination over this moment of evolution is to linger over a transition from the dumb fluidity of animal consciousness to its articulation by the use of language. Sheer animal consciousness may alight, perhaps, upon any imaginable concept. Its rational defect is its inability to return after departure to the same spot. Who by taking pains could return again to precisely the number 91 but for the articulating, identifying, stabilising symbol? The rational use of the native intelligence thus hangs upon an ability to identify particles of consciousness arbitrarily shaped, to quit them, and then to return. And speech serves this end; so far as it is carried it precipitates fluid consciousness into stable, negotiable blocks for the architectural structures of thought.

Now it is true that what is original, what is new, what is invented or discovered by the thinking mind itself emerges, not in the articulate particles—they are perforce old stuff—but in the perception by the intelligence of relations between them. This spontaneous perception of relationships is the play of reason; thought is a sort of creative miracle.

On the other hand—and this is the point I am driving at—just because thought is the perception of relationships between particles of old stuff, the particles themselves condition these perceptions. I see only such relationships as hold between the particles I happen to possess; certainly I can see none between such as I do not possess. And those I have are none of my own creation. They are handed down to me. In this sense the power of thought the “faculty” of reason, is a tradition.

In fancy I may picture a Romulus—abandoned on a hillside and suckled by a wolf—inventing for himself a system of symbols with which to articulate his own fluid consciousness, conning them into spontaneity, and building them into thought. But in reality he would not—he could not. The actual articulations with which one thinks are not native to the consciousness. Who of us can count more than a stray one or two of his own invention, even with the hint and model of a whole armory of them already in possession? They are, on the contrary, a heritage. And what one can think is conditioned by that heritage—such items of it as through hap or care one has previously acquired.

All that I, for instance, can think in the field of chemistry is sharply limited to what I can construe with the articulate particles in that area of my consciousness. In my actual experience that area has been poorly endowed. All that I can think there I could say in a bad quarter of an hour. And what I can think there is cabined and cribbed by the special particles I happen to possess.

This analysis, so obviously valid in any special field of thought in which one is aware of one’s ignorance, holds no less, it seems to me, for that universal ignorance in which all of us are born. If it does hold there, it may stand as one version of the hypothesis of human evolution—rational mind out of animal consciousness, man out of brute. The change that effected this evolution was not accomplished, however, once for all in some remote past. The outer device was transmissible, and hence became a racial characteristic. But the change itself must still be re-enacted in every growing child. Something of it is re-enacted in the emergence of every idea in the rational mind. How far it is carried and how complete the evolution depends upon deliberate cultivation.

Intelligence is pure gift, the prior condition and animating agent of all thought. Whether intelligence itself may be increased by exercise is a matter of faith or doubt, as one chooses. In face of a primary mystery one can only be humble and dumb. But of that ingenious artifice, the arbitrary articulation of the consciousness into stable particles, there can be no doubt. It is a human invention in human hands. What can be done with these particles by way of thought depends in a given mind upon their range, the richness of their substance, their stability, and their clarity. And they can, with care, be extended, enriched, stabilised, clarified.

That there are larger units, whole structures of thought, with which discipline may be occupied goes without saying. Not all the heritage of the civilised mind is deposited in these particles. But the larger units are themselves built of the smaller, and what any mind makes of them hangs on its prior possession of the elements of which they are built, and the quality of those elements. In childhood one may have read, say, Gulliver, or Through the Looking Glass, with delight, and in maturity may still read them with delight. The outer symbols are the same now as then, but the responsive thoughts are not. In response to each symbol now there rises richer substance than the mind then possessed, grounds for relationships which then escaped detection.

The two, indeed—particle and structure—are inseparable in practice. It is in use that the particles have accumulated their substance and quality; it is by finding them in use that the mind identifies and enriches and clarifies them for itself. But it is they, I think—the ultimate premisses of all thought and the basis of all understanding—that lie at the bottom of the well into which discipline is poured.

For in the first place they lie at the deepest level to which discipline can go. That is something. But by a happy fortuity there, at the very node between animal consciousness and rational thought, they occupy a strategic position. Through them the fluid streams of consciousness, rising from below, are articulated for thought—and one thinks what he can with the shapes thus formed. And through these same shapes come the chief enrichments of the consciousness from above. For in reality what I apprehend of the thoughts of others is not their thoughts but my own. It is what I build in my own mind with the particles of my own consciousness called up by the symbols they have used. They are the determinants, coming and going, and a discipline that thickens and deepens and clarifies them enhances at one stroke both the give and the take of the mind, its power to think and its power to learn.

They lie at a strategic point, moreover, in another and no less momentous transaction. They not only articulate the individual mind for thinking; coming from a common tradition they tend, in the measure in which that tradition is mastered, to articulate disparate minds alike. Only so can two minds think the same thought. It is here that mind comes together with mind—or forever fails to come together. And situated between two realms of freedom—the wild realm of animal consciousness and the cultivated realm of reason—they alone are amenable to coercion. Arbitrary agreements, sheer conventions, subsequent to all native idiosyncrasies and prior to all conflict of prejudice or opinion, they are open to utter community. And since in relation to all thinking they are the ultimate premisses, they afford the unquestioned common grounds imperative for mutual understanding and community of idea.

Discipline can thus bring its pressures to bear upon them with a clear conscience, assured that here it can do its essential task without violating its own principles—cultivate the individual judgment without infringing upon its freedom, and bring mind into community with mind without the weakness of assumption or the affront of dogmatism. Assured, too, that in a sort of beneficent circle community itself breeds both mind and further community. For given a broad community in these particles, the common legacy comes the purer to its inheritors; recurrence of each particle confirms and enriches and clarifies it in the experience of each mind. In a community without community, on the other hand, occurrence and recurrence tend rather to lead it astray and confuse it; and though men talk in common symbols, they build them into tacit obliquities of mutual incomprehension.

Is it too much to suggest, in passing, that the phenomenon of the brilliant period, the curious clustering of great names in the bead-roll of history, may be explained as a moment when by a community of mind with mind, here at the basis of all thought, a fine individual clarity and a lively spontaneity of mutual understanding have lifted the current of ideas to a high level? At all events, by such community the capacity of the mind both to think and to learn is heightened and the ardour of thought is stimulated, expression meeting comprehension, and comprehension quickening the impulse to think.

III

I have gone a long way about and brought up with a conclusion that on its own showing should be as valid for modernism as for humanism. That, indeed, is my own sense of it—that here is the organic economy of thought in whatever field. And in fact, as I have intimated, its application is likely to be most obvious in the sciences, which we come upon after the mind is in some measure formed. Each science has a special articulation and nomenclature outside our normal experience, without which we can think but meagrely and vaguely in that area. The part they play there is evident. To these articulate particles it gives precise definition, at once for the sake of accuracy of calculation and for the sake of mutual understanding and wide co-operation among those who pursue it. Incidentally by its technology it escapes the loose corruptions with which lay usage always threatens a vernacular. The extraordinary results of the discipline which establishes these articulations, these precisions, and these communities need no bush.

It is perhaps less obvious that discipline is even more imperative in that other area which the casual, voluble experience of living begins to articulate before we are aware, laying the premisses of that common mind which we tend to take for granted as a native gift. Though it is not a native gift, no man feels deficient in it, as Descartes pointed out. What it yields him is life as he knows it; it is his apprehension of reality. In one sense this trust is his intellectual virtue. It marks his faith in the judgments of reason—the best reason he knows. He may be aware of his ignorance in this or that field of knowledge—know that he knows nothing of astronomy, of Homer, of plumbing, of torts. But no one knows everything; these ignorances are comparable to those of other men; by turning his mind to them he could master them.

By turning his mind! This contrast between mind, on the one hand, and on the other hand specific knowledge to which a mind may be turned, is the very heart of the conflict between humanist and modernist. To the modernist, justifiably proud of his special methods, that mind which comes to him unaware is a casual and amateur affair. As a process of reason it is the way fools think, and asses, and the cohorts of stupidity. Well, it is.

To the humanist, however, this liability is precisely its momentous importance. Here is mind itself by which man becomes human out of brute, mind in symmetry as it develops by confronting life and carrying on the adventure. According to its competence it apprehends the scene, the play, and the players, conceives the significance of the plot, exercises its judgment, lays its guiding principles, and conducts its affairs in wisdom or unwisdom, justice or injustice, harmony or inharmony. That it may be the mind of a fool is always its tragic possibility.

In shifting the basic common discipline from humane letters to natural science, then, modernism has, in so far, abandoned the mind. I say this in conscious enjoyment of hyperbole. There remains just so much of mind as develops in casual experience—that corrupting casual experience which science so sedulously avoids in its technology. But the point at issue is one of discipline, the conscious extension of mental competence beyond the limits of casual experience. Plainly the discipline of natural science neglects much of the mind as irrelevant.

For natural science is an attempt to picture and understand the material universe as it still would be if the knower were not in it—things and their relations to each other. The virtue sought by the man of science is the ability to ignore what he, by the accident of his conscious existence, thrusts into the situation. Obviously this discipline will articulate the consciousness for thought only here within this field of knowledge—among things and their relations, to the rigid exclusion of the knower and his affairs.

Humane letters, on the other hand, make no such exclusion. They too deal with things and their relations. But they include what natural science ignores—the knower and his responsive evaluation of what he knows. Literature looks out from the common centre at which the experience of life itself places us. It is an imaginative, reflective extension of that experience. And it does directly what experience itself does only indirectly if at all, for being articulate or nothing—symbol and meaning forever hand in glove—it specifically articulates the reader’s mind, enriching and clarifying the premisses of consciousness with which in turn that mind thinks in the field of common human responsibility. Here is the telling difference between the literate and the empiric mind—not in intelligence, not in specific knowledge, but in the substance and quality of the premisses of thought.

Literature uses the unprecise vernacular, it is true; but that is its virtue. For the vernacular, in contrast with any and all technologies, is the idiom of the mind itself, its fundamental humanising tradition. It is the essential historic feat of any civilisation, not so much perhaps to have conceived its guiding ideas—ideas change—as, in conceiving them, to have slowly evolved the articulate elements by which its heritors may conceive their own. Nature cares nothing for them or for what is made of them. They are none of hers. We come by them only through familiar contact with the tradition which has shaped and accumulated them.

Here, then, is the great human task—now for the first time in the history of the West abandoned to the mercies of casual experience. Man is a social being in more than his habits and his institutions. His humanity itself hangs on his sociability. Deprive him of his social legacy of articulations and he is once again the sub-human animal. It was the essence of humanism as a discipline that it attempted, not to inculcate a doctrine, but to carry on and on this ultimate humanising process. And in this it served three ends, distinct but interdependent—mind, community, and the tradition on which both mind and community depend.

IV

From Plato to Irving Babbitt humanists have been occupied with the idea of leadership, since men are social beings, unhappy and self-destructive in mutual hostility, happiest and greatest when co-operating in community in the wisest available ideas. Whose ideas? Plato proposed the leadership of philosophers. But he himself did all that a philosopher can do. He was of the greatest; in one of the high masterpieces of human thought he proposed a scheme for the salvation of Greece—and while he wrote and Athens read, Greek civilisation declined. Something had departed that but an age before had made of Athens the supreme exemplar of what human existence may come to at its best, in zest of life and ardour of co-operation, in brilliance and profundity of thought, something that had created a society more lovely than any other in recorded history, and produced a literature and a full free current of ideas that are still the model and despair of all our aspirations.

May this loss have been loss of disciplined community at the basis of all thought? Each man thinks not what he will but what he can with the articulate particles of his consciousness. Only by community here can one mind think the same thoughts as another. In such community minds will hold their common ideas with heightened ardour, as in friendship a common thought rises to new vitality by being shared in utter comprehension. It was not an accident that friendship played so profound a part in Greek life, not an accident that thought and letters so flourished. For expression had met understanding, and understanding had enriched the common premisses of thought. One among them, at all events, made the association.

“Not long afterwards,” says Thucydides, “nearly the whole Hellenic world was in commotion. When trouble had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further.... The meanings of words had no longer the same relations to things....” And he goes on to detail wherein the confused meanings of terms unsettled the mutual comprehension upon which the harmony of civilised life depends.

As for us, we are in something of a like predicament. The most striking aspect of contemporary life is the contrast between the fruitfulness of the scientific world, its vitality, its harmony, its world-wide co-operation, and our frankly acknowledged moral bankruptcy—vigour and fecundity in the area to which discipline has been shifted, and futility and chaos in the area from which discipline has been withdrawn. It is not that men have ceased to be concerned with moral choice. So long as they pursue on reflection what seems to be good, so long are they exercising their moral nature. Never, I dare say, has there been a wilder play of reflection on what seems to be good.

If we are suffering a moral chaos it is not from the abandonment of morals but from a helpless discrepancy, an incapacity to think the same thoughts. Given another Plato, our only chance of accord under his leadership would be such community with him and with each other in the articulate elements of his utterance as would evoke the same living thoughts in our various minds.

The task of creating such community is a subtle one, immeasurably more difficult than the corresponding task of modernism. The particles of consciousness with which we think here are quick with feeling—with sentiment, impulse, passion, and desire, drawn in each individual from his own native depths. They are neither such sheer conventions as the units of measure that make up the syntax of scientific thought, nor objective and tangible like the data of nature with which science deals. They are the dynamic forces of life itself, spontaneous and imperious, and they impel us whether or no. Whether they are to drive us in anarchy or in harmony, however, depends upon our ability so to channelise them, so to articulate and identify them for thought, as to bring us into mutual understanding of those ideas in which they play a part. The first service of the humanistic discipline was that it put the individual mind into intimate contact with the tradition of humane letters in which were embodied and shaped the articulate elements of such ideas. It was the second and no less significant service of this discipline that in clinging sedulously to the great tradition of that literature it tended to give to all minds thus imbued the same elements filled with the same substance, and so put mind into community with mind. In abandoning the common discipline of this area of the consciousness modernism has not only done something to dilute our powers of thought there, but has left us, mind and mind, out of community and in a moral confusion that lies, not in the open conflict of ideas, but in tacit disparities of idea that never meet.

Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in a knowledge of nature. But nature has no need of our knowledge. It is we who need it, for our own ends. In the measure in which, for the conception of those ends, we lose our powers of thought, so precariously wrought in the long travail of the past, and so dependent upon unremitting reconquest, we shall in fact have killed the goose that lays the golden egg.