XI THE DILEMMA OF THE LIBERATED

“Intellectual freedom is earlier and easier than complete spiritual freedom.”—T. S. Eliot in the Hound and Horn magazine.

In the last sixty years isolated individuals of distinction have told the Western world that it was living in a state of decline. Nietzsche was probably the most tormented of these prophets and used the strongest language. Modern man to him was an instrument out of tune: mankind itself was degenerating. We in America had Henry Adams charting the change from mediæval unity to twentieth century multiplicity and theorizing about the degradation of the democratic dogma. Today Bertrand Russell is quoted as saying that the clock of Europe has been running down since the Renascence, Chesterton advises us that we are simply existing on our Catholic capital and using it up, Whitehead notes that science has lived on the accumulated capital of the ideas of the seventeenth century and that religion has been weakening for several centuries. But all these contemporaries manage nevertheless to keep a cheerful outlook, Whitehead elaborating thoughts for a new scientific and philosophic synthesis, Chesterton rejoicing in his personal rediscovery of Catholic truths, and Russell being, as a wit has expressed it, terribly at ease in hell. The man with the most complete brief is Oswald Spengler, who studies the morphology of history. In his philosophy of history synthesized from a survey of eight cultures (Indian, Mayan, Greek, Egyptian, etc.), it is held that we in the West have our spring and summer, are now in the autumn and inevitably must pass to the winter stage of our cultural cycle. Gone is any possibility of a Renascence: we have had ours, and are now in the megalopolitan “civilization” phase, committed to technology, destined for more huge wars, the uprising of untutored hordes, and the coming of dictators. The arts will perish as important influences.

Spengler has popularized the notion of the decline of the western world, but after all it remains just a notion to most people. Very few are really convinced to the marrow that European and American civilization is on a downward slope. Some say it is, but they merely say it: some think so, but merely think it. To find a man who is saturated with pessimism about our present and future state is almost as rare as to find a Rosicrucian in contemporary intellectual society. Our general tone is optimistic and conceited with only an occasional breakdown when we focus on some particular spot and admit that it is unhealthy now and likely to get worse. But we cannot grant that certain epochs in the past were greater than our own: we cannot get it out of our heads that we are an improvement on all previous generations: we cannot shed our faith in progress and see our whole civilization as a retrogression.

The chief exceptions are Paul E. More and Irving Babbitt. They differ from Spengler in being much more cautious generalizers: they talk about one culture only, and chiefly the last four hundred years of that. They do not think metaphorically about history or try to construct a science or philosophy of history. A chief point of difference is that they repudiate fatalism, admitting that we are biassed to roll down one groove of the future but not denying that other possibilities still remain open and asserting that by a great effort we may select one of these as our future. The nearest they come to writing history by analogy is to point out the similarity between Alexandrian culture and many of the phenomena of contemporary learning and to make a tentative comparison between the decadent imperialism of Rome under Tiberius or Nero and the present tendencies in the United States toward discarding standards, increasing luxury, and fomenting factional strife just as we approach the acme of power. But, generally speaking, Babbitt and More confine themselves strictly to the portrayal of psychological decay in one locality, Europe and America taken together as Western culture, during one definite span of time, the last four centuries and particularly the last two. I have remarked that they do not think metaphorically about history, yet their teaching can be concentrated in a metaphor, and perhaps without loss of subtlety gain in power of appeal.

We can go about picturing the Fall of Western Man if we adopt the Platonic truism that society is simply a man writ large, for we are then free to figure Western society as an Atlas the Endurer who rebels against being otherworldly, ceases to uphold the heavens, and turns this-worldly. At first his old habits of thinking and feeling persist: he has merely ceased to make effort to miraculously sustain his center of gravity outside himself in the “other world.” But now his center of gravity shifts to within: he no longer stands perfectly upright, strained toward the Absolute, but leans a little toward this earth. As he now thinks, the heavens did not all these centuries really need his support; he was deceived by a myth, he thinks, and it does not occur to him that he was the one who benefited by his posture and effort. As he leans toward the earth, he rejoices in his freedom to lean. This is the end of the Renascence. Well in the past now is the era of Gothic cathedral building which showed what incomparable architecture Atlas was capable of when he held up the heavens. Well past, too, are many other strangely beautiful things, among them “La Gaya Scienza” of the Provençal culture. From now on a new order of behavior, and it is at this turning-point that More and Babbitt begin closely to observe Atlas. What they see is a gradually shifting and settling of the center of gravity of his psychology.

For a time he holds himself almost upright. He cultivates sprezzatura. He is the seventeenth century gentleman and scholar who does not pride himself on anything. He fears specialization and believes that “perfected good-breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.” But he sways a little: a slight turn and he is neo-classical and becomes stiff, conventional, puristic, the center of his gravity in his mind. He has begun to totter in the direction he leans—toward the earth.

Then More and Babbitt observe how the giant makes a violent effort to right himself. It is the romantic recoil from the neo-classical aridity. It is Rousseau and his followers raving against trying to put one’s gravity-center outside oneself, or against trying to keep it established inside oneself in the mind. Slowly the center changes, then drops suddenly into the emotions. Atlas becomes fiery. He is a Jacobin. He sets up democracies wherein popular feeling may sweep more freely. He colors philosophy with subjectivism: henceforward it is not the drama of the universe but the inward drama of the psyche that he ruminates upon. He institutes rebellion in the arts, confusing them, and he chases like a madman after sensation. The phenomena of his new state—his predilection for idyllic dreams, his praise of spontaneity and idiosyncrasy, his love of delicious revery, his dislike of discipline, etc.—grow countless. Atlas is ruled by his feelings, and they are not counterweighted by his mind. Whole parts and functions of his psychology are going to rust, most disastrously of all his will. No wonder he sprawls forward on all fours. With his center of gravity in his unbridled feelings, he must fall.

But now is his center sinking again? Will Atlas, no longer the Endurer, be changed into a cunning savage? Will he become simply a creature who exploits the earth’s resources and alternates his labors in production with a complete spineless subsidence into physical comforts? Is the day of Apeneck Sweeney and Molly Bloom dawning on a culture that has known the sardonic Swift and the charm of Madame de Sévigné? Atlas who used magnificently to bear up the sky—is he to be stretched prone in comfort in the twenty-first century, no vulture tearing at his flesh as at his brother Prometheus, but a radio to lull his mind?

The signs are plentiful of another transition: we have gone from the dominance of religious values to the dominance of intellectual ones and then to the primacy of emotional values. The last stage—barbarism—will occur with the complete triumph of practical and instinctive values. Then Atlas will indeed be but an economic creature, cleverly producing what he needs by the least effort, and spending his increased leisure in the pursuit of cheap distractions from thought and serious emotion. He will truly have diminished to the ninth part of a human being.

Such, in a picture, is my reading of the critique of Western civilization so elaborately and weightily presented by Babbitt and More. They have traced the movements of our psychological center of gravity and view with foreboding the future of a society whose members will not make the almost impossible struggle to elevate its center, to resume the former standing posture of Atlas. But this simplification should be followed at once by a warning to the reader who has not consulted the whole body of works by Babbitt and More. Do not surmise they have trimmed to a thesis. They have been the patient collectors of historical evidence, and the thesis emerges from a study of all the gatherable evidence. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” is Babbitt’s working rule. Secondly, do not think that the evidence, while susceptible of simplification in the mass, is in detail simple. Man is as prolific in ideas as Nature is prolific in insects (unfortunately, most ideas are of the insect order): he is a being as full of desires as an egg is full of meat (and his shell has been broken): he is as active and restless as a monkey (and about as purposeless). Consequently, his mental, emotional and instinctive manifestations are variegated in the extreme. Variegated, but not pure chaos, not without a pattern. Babbitt and More are pattern-perceivers, not imposers of arbitrary patterns. In the third place, do not think that all value is denied to romanticism and naturalism. They have in fact many good elements, which More and Babbitt fully recognize. What is bad about these schools is their rejection of the more human elements in our psychology, what is bad is their glorification of a lowered center of gravity.

The New Humanist, as any one knows who is acquainted with his mind, does not wish to turn the clock back but to incorporate the gains of romanticism and naturalism into a broader synthesis with a more stable center.

A few people can take seriously the question of the degeneration of our civilization. If you are one of these, prepared to admit seriously the possibility that the species of mankind may over long periods fall and rise in quality, then you are likely to reflect seriously on all the questions that American Humanists find of the first rank and interest. If you approach these questions with the same intent sobriety with which they are propounded, then you will find a dilemma confronting you. At one horn there is Naturalism: at the other—Humanism. The statement signalizes a change in this book: up to now it has been an interpretation of American Humanism, from now on it will be a criticism. It is plain that I find the naturalistic horn no horn to grasp. Its disadvantages have been too forcibly presented by the writers grouped around Babbitt and More. On the other hand, we would have to thank their opponents had they revealed with equal skill and force the drawbacks and dangers attached to the alternative horn, but I cannot feel that the anti-Humanists have done their business satisfactorily to date. They have been rather living examples of the fallacies and partialities exposed by the New Humanists than the exposers of the latter’s weaknesses. The reason is that almost to a man the anti-Humanists were not seriously and fundamentally interested in the questions put in the foreground by the Humanists. They saw no dilemma, because in the absence of serious and passionate concern over the main issues, there is no dilemma.

What is there new that the young chips from the old block of rationalism can tell us? The limitations of nineteenth century rationalism have been established for some time: years ago we cashed all its cheques and its account has not been replenished. Likewise the humanitarian’s credit since the Great War has been low. He may tell us now that the problem of the will is unreal and the business of improving the environment of man will gradually solve the problem of human happiness, but we are not living in the hopeful spring of 1914. We do not see man any longer in a rosy light. It is the same with the æsthete: he too is a pre-war creature. Representatives of all these types were huddled together in the symposium, The Critique of Humanism, and there carried on the old warfare of the allied Romanticists and Naturalists against the Humanists. But that war has been fought to a finish, and it is tiresome not to have some new developments. Also it appears we have come down a long way from the days of Shelley and Coleridge, of Darwin and Spencer, of Flaubert and Zola who did indeed make Naturalism and Romanticism something to argue about. We are down now to the intellectual nursery—to the childish quarrelsomeness of a Burton Rascoe and the peevish complaints of an Edmund Wilson (whose excursion, by the way, into the criticism of Sophocles deserves a mirthful place in the memory of the cognoscenti).

We wish however to take the anti-Humanist attack at its high point, not at its feeblest, and the acclamation of reviewers nominates the piece by Lewis Mumford, Toward an Organic Humanism, as the best to be had. The essay produces a glow in the reader, as Mumford almost always succeeds in doing, but when the glow fades and the substance is coolly inspected, the keen reader is bound to feel that he has been cheated by the author’s cheerfulness. There is no originality of thought. The usual contention that the American Humanists cut themselves off from contemporary life. The usual contention that they are too negative. The usual misinterpretation of “the inner check.” The air of an enthusiastic master unveiling the secrets of “organic humanism.” And the secrets? They appear rather banal, vague, inconclusive. Life is a “multitude of functions”: we must live in a state of tension and grow and renew ourselves: we must reconcile almost everything in sight. “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” At the end the essayist generously offers a big bed wherein he assures us romanticist and classicist, Humanist and mechanist, naturalist and idealist, divested of their philosophical clothes, can lie down happily together. I am not convinced that we can progress very far by the method of obliterating intellectual distinctions which discriminating men have labored to erect. If this piece by Mumford is the best anti-Humanist criticism, it looks as though there was nothing to do but to set out from here to plough a fresh furrow. Let me hope it will not be a lonely furrow as well.

It is, from my viewpoint, necessary to make an almost clean discard of all the current adverse criticism of the New Humanists recently committed by American writers. I would myself give away all of it to the needy poor in intellectual circles for the few lines written years ago by A. R. Orage on Paul Elmer More’s The Drift of Romanticism. “Mr. More,” he said, “has also, it appears to me, the defect of orthodoxy—he fails to realize the inevitability of heterodoxy and the consequent necessity of paradoxy. The classic is for him, as it is for me, the perfect literary form: all form, in fact, is classic. But the romantic should be recognized, when it arises, as a challenge to form, as an impulse demanding severer forms to contain it.” This, praise be given, does take a step towards a new criticism of orthodox classicism. It does not rest on mere dissatisfaction with the emotional side of American Humanism, a dissatisfaction that is so widespread there must be something to it, but it actually points out the defect. What is more, it suggests a way to overcome the defect, and that not by denying the distinctions involved but by incorporating them into a paradoxy. It challenges the student to make an entirely new approach to an old controversy.

Orage, it should be noted, has always been profoundly interested in such questions as the American Humanists now raise anew: the quality of modern society and the quality of the modern individual, the art of life and a technique for practicing it, the nature of man and his need for regeneration, moral responsibility and how to attain it, the contraction of men into specialists and the way unto Renascence fulness of experience. Without profound interest in questions of this nature, there is no dilemma to be produced, and no need for a paradoxical attitude to face it.

With that recognized, let us now press forward to grips with the New Humanism.

Twentieth century Humanism undeniably has an appeal for the liberated man or woman. Of course, I do not mean liberated in any absolute sense, but use the word in its present conversational meaning to signify those who have freed themselves of popular delusions. I mean just that civilized minority that do not need the offices of H. L. Mencken to open their eyes to current cant. They are, to be brief, total disbelievers in the so-called “American Credo.” It is not easy to shock them about sex. They have learned to view many of the facts of life realistically. They are of a questioning turn of mind. They prefer sophistication to godliness. Generalizing, we can say they have shed two classes of superstitions, the superstitions that have usurped the place of ancient religion and the superstitions that flourish in the neighborhood of modern science. They do not believe, that is, that either the churches or the scientists “can fix everything up.” Emancipated from the official Christianity of our day, disillusioned about the day’s science, they experiment and drift in a middle region, an amorphous group, curious about the possibilities of life but skeptical of finding a pansophy.

In the last decade and a half in America they veered toward naturalism and now know what awaits them in that quarter. Romantic disillusionment—disheartened optimism—the modern distemper so eloquently confessed for our generation by Joseph Wood Krutch. Now apparently a vanguard is veering toward Humanism. And so far one can distinguish two main types among this advance guard—those who have the humanistic temper by nature and those who are naturally of a religious inclination.

What the humanistic temper is this book has sought to make clear. I will add now one further example and one more description of the temper. The example is the poet Robert Frost who in all probability holds no formal views on American Humanism, and perhaps is largely unacquainted with the ideas of Babbitt and More, but who nevertheless writes verse highly satisfactory by humanistic criteria. An intimate understanding of this poet’s psychology through his works will give you better than reams of exposition what the actual flavor and humor and clear-cut quality of humanistic experience is like. The description of the humanistic temper is by Robert Shafer. Writing in the Hound and Horn, Summer Issue, 1930, Shafer said: “The true humanist has ever been a practical man of the world; avoiding those tempting chimeras metaphysical speculation and pseudo-science; suspicious of rigid abstract formulations; preferring to define his position tentatively, by the methods of critical scrutiny, in close and fruitful relation to actual but ever-changing circumstances; avoiding the self-defeating violence of revolution; preferring to work with and through existing institutions; sacrificing sudden impressiveness to steady, quiet persistence; not expectant of victory; and content even with apparent defeat in untoward times if apparent defeat is the reward of moderation, sane judgment, disciplined taste, and a comely serenity.”

As for the liberated who are religiously inclined, who have, that is, the religious temperament, they are quite easy to describe. I refer simply to intelligent civilized men and women who are accessible to ideas of a religious order, who are prepared to entertain but only to entertain religious assumptions, who experience a little thrill from the (to us) occult language of the Sacred Books. I mean no more than that: it amounts to a kind of sympathetic curiosity in religious matters.

Now, forsaking the liberated for a while, I have to consider something very unusual in contemporary experience—the religious spirit.

The difficulties in the way of conveying a fresh sense of this spirit are almost insuperable. I cannot begin as Norman Foerster and other Humanists do by professing respect and admiration for the great organized religious bodies in their present condition, for the thing I attach value to is the religious spirit and that has departed. I agree with Hulme and other scattered observers that the present age totally misunderstands religion. Warm ashes of the Christian Faith remain, most notably in Catholicism, but we moderns are almost hopelessly clogged with false associations, sentimentalities, stock responses to religion, and nothing very potent in us can be lit up by the feeble glow cast by the best surviving elements in the Churches. So thick is the forest of our associations about religion, so lost and wandering are we in it, that I shall scrupulously avoid citing any historic examples of the religious spirit: that would in all likelihood lead simply to tangential arguments, to treading in the mazes of our associations about figures. Whereas it is the essence itself, this spirit so foreign to our ways, that I would suggest. Without a prior common understanding, examples may in fact be pernicious.

Try then, my reader, as I have tried, to throw out of the mind all our stale notions about the spirit of the religious man. Realize as strongly as possible the nonreligious motives that have entered into modern Christian thought, making the “religious life” what Whitehead protests it should not be, a research after comfort. Put to a violent death the democratic feelings that have been allowed to corrupt the uncompromising character of religions at their source. To go on in the hortatory way,—shock your preconceptions one by one. Be prepared to admit that a genuinely religious man would seem monstrous to you.

As I conceive of the religious spirit, neither the religious inclination nor the humanistic temper approximate to it in the least degree. There is an absolute difference. They do not grow into the religious spirit, but must suffer a transformation. My emphatic judgment is that Humanism can never merge into religion by a mere extension of itself, but that there exists a chasm between the two which the New Humanist qua Humanist can never leap. Religious and humanistic inclinations can make terms with each other, but between the religious spirit and the humanistic temper there is opposition forever. I point to the early Christians who insisted, as Babbitt notes, that there is only a stark supernaturalism and a stark naturalism with no intermediate territory for the Humanist.

Briefly now I will essay a probably futile task, the adumbration of the man of religious spirit. Probably futile, because he is incredible to us. We cannot credit such a passion for perfection as he incarnates. To us religion is anthropomorphic: to him religion is theomorphic. In that you have the astounding reversal of our suppositions which he makes. Consequently when we read, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him,” we at once think of God as being like man: the religious spirit, however, thinks of man as being like God, an utterly revolutionary difference, for, since man in his ordinary condition is obviously anything but Godlike, this theomorphism stimulates in the religious spirit the tremendous ambition to become like God, a perfect being. Could there be anything more rash and sublime and impossible? Provided one has shed sentimental conceptions of deity. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” Every resource must be used, every power must be strained, every second of life must be taken for the impossible task. The mind is an instrument of perfection: it must accordingly be developed to the utmost. The body must be strong to undertake the enormous labors imposed on it. The emotions must be unbelievably enriched. Consciousness itself must expand! Religion is indefeasibly the study and pursuit of perfection: it requires not only that no stone but no grain and no mountain be left unturned which might furnish a clue or a stimulus to its quest. This, in its desperateness, its consuming thirst, its impossibilism, is almost as remote, I need not say, from Humanism as it is from Naturalism. To the religious spirit it is the absolute or nothing.

Absolute Truth, absolute Beauty, absolute Goodness—these are what he yearns for, and he is impatient of moderation, decency, good sense as ends. He cannot, as the Humanist can, seek primarily for stability of character: he seeks for perfection of character with stability coming as a by-product. Nor is there any known limit to his skepticism: the very nature of his pursuit of the unattainable enforces skepticism on him to the last degree. The religious life is a continual destruction of those elements of imperfection, illusions. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Obviously, such men as I speak of are extremely uncommon. Their mark, I have tried to suggest, is that they make their life-task the wholehearted, single-minded pursuit of a perfection whose fulness we cannot even dream of, and to which we are quite indifferent as an idea. They have in our era another mark that differentiates them from us as completely as if they belonged to another race: an agony of bafflement. In Biblical language, they have “a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.” Their zeal leads them everywhere, they stop at nothing, but the form of their life in modern times is a searching, not a finding. Zealous searchers, they are blocked by that “middle wall of partition” spoken of in the Bible which they know not how to break down. They see in their quest the need for an enlargement of their powers, but how to increase them, that they do not know. Theirs is the agony of baffled search for the means to the perfection they crave with all their being. They would seem to know in terms of the most exasperating personal experience that there does exist a radical discontinuity, as Hulme thought, between man and God or the Absolute. The Humanist we have seen dwelling on the discontinuity between man and nature. The religious spirit discovers in his efforts toward self-perfecting, toward expansion and intensification of consciousness, the discontinuity at the other border, and it is this frontier between man and the absolute that he emphasizes. Here, he says, is the all-important barrier, and we cannot rest until we have leaped it.

Thirst for divinizing oneself, agony of frustration before the “middle partition”—these are at all times the stigmata of a few men on our planet. We can recognize these stigmata even though what they signify lies outside our experience, but because we have not experienced, we cannot comprehend. Yet if one is interested in human limits, one has to make a rude stab at description of this race of men. Have you never heard that in the original doctrine of no single great religion is it stated that man by nature has a soul? Then blame religious democracy. Man in the great religions at their source is exhorted to labor for a soul, is urged to acquire one, but religion says he begins without one. Religion begins with stark naturalism, but ends with constructing a bridge to a new life. Many are called to the work of creating the new life—in that respect religion is democratic; but few are chosen, few succeed in “crossing the stream”—an unpalatable saying to religious democrats. This brings forward an idea that pales the humanistic notion of a turning away from the natural self, just as the idea of the divinization of man pales the idea of the humanization of man. The religious spirit darkens naturalism far beyond the Humanist portrayal, and at the same time it gives the possibilities of man an effulgence that drowns with glory the modest conceptions of the Humanists. The connecting idea brought forward is rebirth by a process as definite but far more terrific than physical birth. This is an idea still present, as we noted, in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration, but since vanished from humanistic teaching.

The suffering of the religious spirit today, however, comes not, I venture to say, from the pangs of rebirth but from non-satisfaction. He cannot conceive a soul and therefore cannot gestate one. No wonder a modern religious spirit occasionally shatters itself in madness! The zeal of God, but not according to knowledge, is fraught with the utmost danger, for the truth of our human situation we are told is terror-inspiring, and a sudden glimpse—

We have done with the armchair mysticism prevalent in the West today. It is devoid of the desperation, the readiness to leave the library and the round of civilized comforts and take all the risks, the sheer heroism that mark the genuine religious man. It clearly has naught of the spirit of these Buddhistic verses.

The distinction is not, please mark however, between comfortable literary mysticism and self-torturing asceticism. Great religious teachers have pointed out the fallacy of the latter as the Way. Our distinction is between the unwillingness to experiment dangerously with life and the resolute disposition of the genuinely religious to go to any lengths, if necessary.

And now we may come back to ourselves, the liberated, who have been illuminated by the steady light thrown on Naturalism by the New Humanists and have afterwards turned to examine critically Humanism itself. By the blazing light shafted on it from the religious spirit, what do we now see there? Holding Humanism up against this searching sun-like radiance, shall we find ourselves in an unexpected dilemma?

It is patent that a man aflame with the religious spirit would, when striking on the New Humanism in his investigations, formulate his requirements of it and the aims he wished it to satisfy in a language the contemporary Humanist does not speak. But we who call ourselves the liberated employ, so it happens, a vocabulary keyed a note above characteristic Humanist speech. The New Humanist’s favorite words are: decency, moderation, measure, commonsense, the normal and representative, the centralized, discipline, standards, humility, self-control, vital restraint, proportionateness, decorum, stability. His thoughts circulate around these words: they constitute the magnetic portion of his vocabulary. The magnetic portion of the liberated man’s vocabulary runs somewhat as follows, and you will note the higher keying at once: honesty, daring, curiosity, experiment, zeal for truth, self-knowledge, disinterestedness, harmony, the free mind, spiritual freedom, integration of experience, art of life, increased life, greater consciousness. The respective vocabularies are not mutually exclusive; there is much overlapping in actual usage. But the point is sound that the New Humanist is apt to employ the second set of terms in the second place, whereas the liberated man approaching the study of Humanism uses the Humanist’s favorite words as secondary to the magnetic words of freedom, increased consciousness, etc. This difference in emphasis gives us a clue that may conduct to an important criticism of the New Humanist’s supreme method, the rule of mediation.

In approaching any subject, it is well to formulate in advance where one stands at present, what motives impel one toward the new subject, what one expects to find, and what one wants to discover. The liberated man (common gender) has, in theory at least, been freed from dogma, either naturalistic or theological. Dogma to him is any statement offered which may be true but which is unaccompanied by a means of verifying it. He has grown clever in distinguishing between what is verifiable by himself and what is not: the latter he calls “dogma.” In theory also he is freed from hypocrisy: he strives to be completely honest with himself. His objection to most conventional modes of thought is that they have hampered him in getting at the truth about himself. Today he is discovering that truth, and it is, that he is completely self-ignorant. Hear him confess his ignorance, as he is doing in increasing numbers.

“I perceive my own ignorance on all essential matters. Why I exist I do not know. What I am I do not know. I am ignorant of any purpose in life. My friends and especially my enemies are more aware of my weaknesses than I am. My economy of life is bad—I do not make the most of it, or know how to do so. I am subject to unknown laws. Blind to the future, forgetful of my past, in the present I exist, because of my ignorance, as the plaything of chance.”

The discovery of the liberated man is that he is not a fallen Angel but a feeble son of Man. On the basis of his ignorance, however, he can and does formulate what he wishes to know and what abilities he wishes to acquire. One word sums up the first:—Self-Knowledge. “I would like to know what sort of creature I really am. What are my real wishes? Why do I live and for what end? What are the conditions of happiness? How may I live with real advantage to myself? What is the true nature of the world that impinges on me? In short, I would like to know everything about myself from my puzzling trivial habits to my relation with the universe.”

As for Ability, he would, in my view, like to be a Reynard the Fox, the “animal capable.” He wishes to be active, to become valuable and therefore valued by men, to be devoid of humbug in the use of his skill and single-minded in what he undertakes, above all to succeed wherever he is. The power to do what he wishes to do!

But not one word about character. We have a confession of ignorance followed by the recognition of a need for self-knowledge and the need for general ability. Perhaps the intuition of the liberated person tells him that character is a resultant, the product of his knowledge and his ability interacting. With his needs uppermost in his mind, he encounters the New Humanism and this system, as we have learned, puts character foremost. The juxtaposition gives us another critical clue. For the Humanist replies first to the very last questions—the still unformulated questions—of the liberated, and the first questions of the liberated are relegated in humanistic thought to a lesser position. Which order is correct?

Are we close to the nub at last? Several years ago in an essay on Irving Babbitt I closed by saying that the crux of the whole matter of Humanism was in the questions: “To what ends in human character does the technique of Humanism surely lead? Can it by its route attain to the victory over circumstance announced by religion or can it only ameliorate a determined scheme of things by the production of such relatively minor virtues as moderation, decency and good sense?” These questions seem to me now as then to touch the central issue. The technique of Humanism is mediation: the law of measure, Nothing Too Much, is supreme. The validity of this law I do not question. Whether it is always and everywhere to be observed, that I question. What I specifically challenge is the supremacy of the technique based on the law of measure. Is mediation the prime law of life?

My answer must be, No.⁠[9] I cannot set aside the fact that mediation presupposes two things, the acquisition of self-knowledge and the acquisition of will. It is a technique of control. By trying to practice it some self-knowledge is picked up incidentally, and a call is made upon the will to awake. But mediation is primarily concerned with character, not with knowledge, not with development of will. A prior method is absolutely required if mediation is to yield any great results and that prior method is necessarily supreme. To be blunt and homely, the New Humanist has overlooked the horse which is to pull his cart: he has overlooked the working out of a trustworthy technique for learning the exact truth about the individual creature who is to be disciplined by mediation to a norm of humanity. For me then, and very possibly for many other liberated men and women, the New Humanism is too “advanced.” We stand at the beginning: we are pupils who have first to learn how to attain a better working knowledge of what some day we may hope to control. We are willing to admit the mediatory method as one of a group of allied methods, but we cannot isolate it as the leading and one essential means to self-development.

I have some hopes of making this point clear. It is not a destructive criticism. I would not myself take the trouble to write a whole book simply to overthrow something. It is, however, a criticism of incompleteness and misplaced emphasis, and by no means implies the discarding of the law of measure. The aim is to advance the contribution of American Humanism nearer to a total solution of the modern problem. And I consider that an advance is made by pointing out the absence in Humanism of a technique for self-knowledge and will-development that at all compares in precision and plausibility with its technique for control.

Suppose a man is today converted to the philosophy of Rousseau. He finds his conversion need not be simply a literary one, so to speak, for associated with the philosophy there is now a psychological technique alleged to corroborate the rightness of Rousseauistic ideas. The new convert can study psycho-analysis, undergo treatment in an analyst’s office, emerge with a rather elaborate method for interpreting his own psychology. He has, along with his philosophy, an apparent means for verifying it, for living up to it. He is possessed of a technique based on Rousseauistic principles which, it is claimed, provides a continuous key to self-knowledge. It is hardly necessary for me to add, however, that psycho-analysis is a discredited technique for self-knowledge, and that there exists today no advertised, easily accessible, tested, thoroughly accredited way to carry out the Pythagorean command, Know Thyself. The illustration serves all the same to point the fact that the New Humanism is unequipped with a psychological technique for taking the first step. It has to rely on introspection which notoriously is unreliable. But it relies too on traditional knowledge, and this is to a certain degree a corrective of introspective vagaries. For ancient wisdom—in India, in Egypt, in Pythagorean Greece, in Palestine—may have been founded on realities and methods to which we have lost the clue. There are good grounds for surmising that Pythagoras, for example, was not a fanciful guesser at all. The New Humanists being in contact with the best knowledge of the past may therefore be right in their ideas, but we and they need to remember that the complete technique for validating these ideas in terms of concrete individual experience is still to find or perhaps rediscover.

Another difficulty I have always had with the New Humanism arises over the Will. In theory I concede the Humanists are right, but it is a question whether in their practice the Will becomes an accomplished fact. What is the sure test? We make effort—that we know; and furthermore effort occurs in the prescribed field of working on oneself. Will is psychological effort distinguished from physical effort. But is all psychological effort to be called Willing? Remember that psychological effort appears always to be powerfully motived: by self-interest, fear, rivalry, desire for fame, intellectual curiosity, a hundred varying motives. When the motive dies, the effort invariably dies with it. Now just as I cannot grant that a man with an empty belly who labors like a Trojan for his next meal is an example of Will, so I cannot accept the man laboring great hours to satisfy intellectual hunger as an instance of Willing. Will must occur in the absence of incentive. Will would persist in working in a given direction after the motive had ceased. Will is that which overcomes indifference.

I hold that we cannot be too skeptical on this topic. Nowhere else does illusion insinuate itself so much as in regard to responsible choice and Will. How can we make sure that we are not subtly deluded?

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for oneself”—this is one of Nietzsche’s profoundest sayings. Certainly we all have a desire to be responsible for ourselves. But it is equally certain that the desire is comparatively weak, buried most of the time, intermittent in appearance, quickly exhausted when it does appear. Clearly, we do not get very far on our occasional desires for self-responsibility. Our tendencies flow the other way: we delight in irresponsibility. All the odds experience demonstrates are against any continuous effort at being responsible for oneself. My conclusion is that Will is just that continuous effort carried on against the whole weight of the organism, an effort that is finally unaided by wishes and unprovoked by external inducements—nothing less than an independent activity of the psyche.

The practical conclusion I must draw from this is that men are Will-less. The conclusion that I am not warranted in drawing in the face of extraordinary past testimony is that men are devoid of the potentiality of Will. “Thou art not free yet, thou seekest freedom still”—this is Nietzsche again, and freedom must be sought in human potentialities and won by the actualization of potentials, since as we actually are, we are not free. The New Humanist has confused a potentiality, the Will, with an actuality that can be described as conditioned psychological effort directed toward self-control. I attach much weight to that criticism.

It seems to me of great consequence to realize this:—it is “failure of will” we know, not acts of Will. The testimony of a therapeutist strikingly confirms what I have just said. Therapeutists often find that their patients want to get well, know what the trouble is and what they must do, and yet fail to exert the required will. In an unusually candid paper read some years ago before the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society Dr. James Carruthers Young, formerly a surgeon, now a practitioner of the Jung school of analytic psychology, made the following remarks which succeed in putting the problem of the Will on a practical basis. “Every form of occultism aims at self-development through deepening, or expanding the limits of, self-consciousness, or however you like to express it. Now it is obvious that this laudable object cannot be attained merely by embracing the ideas of a system, however rapturously. The all-important factor of the exercise and proper application of will must enter, if anything is to be achieved. If it does not, then the ideas, however beautiful and intriguing, in the end become merely ‘dope’ ... it seemed to me that ‘failure of will’ was the bête noire in neuroses. Roughly, the neurotic symptom from the Freudian standpoint is the disguised expression of an affect which is too painful to be faced. From the Adlerian standpoint, it is an ‘incomparable arrangement,’ by which the patient avoids facing a certain aspect of what we call reality. In the broadest sense in both systems, it is a question of failure to face up to reality. Now it by no means follows that, when it is made clear to the patient by analysis what aspects of reality he has been unconsciously avoiding, that he will at once be able to cope with it. This is particularly evident in the case of obsessionists, as I have proved to my own satisfaction again and again. A washing obsessionist, for example, cheerfully subscribes to the theory of origin of her washing, but when called upon to make the slightest new adaptation, always falls back on her washing. In effect she says: ‘I cannot marry, or do this, that or the other, because, you see, I wash.’ To put the matter in a nutshell, analytical knowledge is not necessarily effective knowledge.

“Now I think it will be generally agreed that what I have called ‘failure of will’ is often bound up with an endocrine deficiency or dyscrasia, sometimes acquired and sometimes apparently so fundamental as to justify the term ‘primary plasmic insufficiency,’ which corresponds to Adler’s organic inferiority. Unfortunately, the science of endocrinology was not, and is not yet, so far advanced as to enable us to remedy such dyscrasias with anything approaching to certainty or precision, even granted that our powers of diagnosis may be able to divine the true nature of such complicated conditions. My problem, then, was how to overcome the difficulty of ‘failure of will’ by means of a definite psychological method.”

It seems to me no less important for the Humanists to realize that there is the problem for the ordinary person as well as for the pathological, namely, how to reinforce a sound theory of the Will with a sound method for overcoming ‘failure of will.’ To vanquish the obstinate difficulties, the theory must become practical.

The dilemma turns out to be like this:—pursue your natural desires and you find they do not lead to that signal of well-being we call happiness but reveal instead the need for a re-education of desire, so that you may train yourself to desire the kind of happiness that is possible for men; choose Humanism as a system of re-education of desire and you must wonder if it has the strength to perform the task. One alternative deceives you by its bright appeal, the other seems inferior in its call to the imagination, to the hidden latent powers of psychology. But inferior to what? Inferior to religion at its purest. Religion says it is a superhuman task to overcome one’s naturalism. If it is a superhuman undertaking, then one may ask, what chance is there of effecting a real mastery by anything less than a science for divinizing man?

For here is man, the prey of innumerable illusions, stunted in psychological growth, spiritually inert, bewildered by himself, discordant in behavior, perhaps incurably paralyzed in will—will anything but the most tremendous means metamorphose him into a falconer of reality, an experiencer of bliss and ecstasy, a doer of deeds on the fighting edge of the cosmos? The New Humanism is a morality not untouched by dignified emotion. But I say that on the whole it is morals not sufficiently touched with poetry, not endowed with the tremendous shaking appeal to our whole being that religion has been known to exercise. Religion is more than Arnold defined it, it includes morality touched by emotion, but it includes art, science, philosophy as well. It is insatiable for perfection and so must quicken and recharge every side of our consciousness. It is, I think, properly impatient of all half-measures everywhere, impatient of such a reason as Babbitt gives, the fear of self-delusion, for choosing a more moderate attack on life’s riddles, impatient of short aims—because it realizes the almost hopeless condition of man. For psychological freedom everything must be risked. That is what we learn when we study the religious spirit. By its fiery light, we liberated ones perceive that we are in truth only pseudo-liberated. We have put the weight on being free from something, but the real question is, free for what? I have been writing, quite knowingly, about the dilemma of the pseudo-liberated. If we realize our pseudo-state, then as we approach the New Humanism, our question becomes a searching one, will it truly liberate? My suggestion has been to hold this system up against the blazing background of the religious spirit, and against that background it seems certain to me two major defects appear in Humanism: the lack of a science of self-study and a not sufficiently stringent conception of the Will.

Might we not say that twentieth century Humanism is a system of right conjectures? “Do you not perceive,” the prophetess Diotima says to Socrates in The Banquet, “that there is something between ignorance and wisdom?” “What is that?” asked Socrates. “To have a right opinion or conjecture. Observe, that this kind of opinion, for which no reason can be rendered, cannot be called knowledge; for how can that be called knowledge, which is without evidence or reason? Nor ignorance, on the other hand; for how can that be called ignorance which arrives at the persuasion of that which it really is? A right opinion is something between understanding and ignorance.” Humanism to me has the value, and it is a high value, of wise conjecture about the way to lead a human life. For undoubtedly it is better, in default of wisdom, to be guided by true opinions than by demonstrably false ones. But we must not lose sight of the conjectural basis of Humanism. We must throw ourselves into the task of validating to the point of indisputability the right opinions involved. The New Humanist draws upon the Sages: his business is to become a Sage, to achieve in his own person the sensation of absolute knowledge, to go beyond the intermediate stage to wisdom.

Can he do so without hitching his wagon to a more remote star? I think not. There is the effort to be superman, not to be solely identified of course with the peculiar effort of one man, Nietzsche, and this effort while failing to reach its end does leave as a by-product a growth in human-ness. But the less ambitious effort to be human—does it hit the mark? Superhumanism gives birth to the human, or humanism with the small h. It is claimed that Humanism gives birth to the human, too, but must we not qualify that somewhat in our final chapter?