VIII SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN

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

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

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

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

There is a very quick way to test the tenacious hold that scientific authority exerts on us. (To repeat myself, I mean to test the existence of what to us are pure assumptions which have been implanted in us almost without our knowledge by contemporary science.) The quick way is to read two extraordinary and weird books of recent years, The Book of the Damned and New Lands, both by an investigator of phenomena which have been excluded by orthodox science, Charles Fort. The author of these strange documents is acutely aware of the very human tendency of scientific system-makers to achieve a harmony of knowledge by excluding the inharmonious data. He has therefore turned his attention to the “disregards” of the scientists (geographers, geologists, astronomers, physicists, etc.), and comes forward as the champion of the damned data—and some of the data is horrendous. A daring writer, for he is obliged to challenge the correctness of many elementary things we learned in grammar and secondary schools. He adduces evidence, that is to say, totally at variance with what we were taught in school, when we were most submissive, and which we have never questioned. The result is that in reading Fort we experience a most peculiar sense of strain. We find that we hate to have any one argue with a show of good reasons that interstellar distances are rather small when we have always been told and believed, most of us without any detailed proof, that they were inconceivably immense. There are certain things—many items in fact—about the world which we want to regard as having been settled and learned once for all. The idea of new learning is attractive, but the idea of re-learning in fields where we have assumed certain things to have been thoroughly proven is most repugnant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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