Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 23

It is thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous little tails of the German postilion's coat show of themselves how they came to dwindle to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman's bands no longer so convey their history to the eye, and look unaccountable enough till one has seen the intermediate stages through which they came down from the more serviceable wide collars, such as Milton wears in his portrait, and which gave their name to the "band-box" they used to be kept in. In fact, the books of costume showing how one garment grew or shrank by gradual stages and pa.s.sed into another, ill.u.s.trate with much force and clearness the nature of the change and growth, revival and decay, which go on from year to year in more important matters of life. In books, again, we see each writer not for and by himself, but occupying his proper place in history; we look through each philosopher, mathematician, chemist, poet, into the background of his education--through Leibnitz into Descartes, through Dalton into Priestly, through Milton into Homer.[1]

[Footnote 1: Tylor, Edward B.: _Primitive Culture_, vol. I. pp. 17 ff.]

Besides understanding the present better in terms of its history, there is much in the heritage of the past, especially of its finished products, that the citizen of contemporary civilization will wish preserved for its own sake. The works of art, of music, and of literature which are handed down to us are "possessions forever." Whatever be the limitations of our social inheritance, as instruments for the solution of our difficulties, those finished products which const.i.tute the "best that has been known and thought" in the world are beyond cavil. They may not solve our problems, but they immensely enrich and broaden our lives. They are enjoyed because they are intrinsically beautiful, but also because they widen men's sympathies and broaden the scope of contemporary purposes and ideals.

The culture that this transmission of racial experience makes possible, can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and, indeed, may be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. And who is the true man of culture, if not he in whom fine scholarship and fastidious rejection... develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real spirit, as it is the real fruit of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity; and having learned the best that is known and thought in the world, lives--it is not fanciful to say so--among the Immortals.[1]

[Footnote 1: Oscar Wilde: _Intentions_, pp. 192-93.]

The student of Greek life knows that the Greeks in their view of Nature and of morals, in their conception of the way life should be lived, in their discrimination of the beautiful, have still much to teach us. He knows, however much we may have outlived the hierarchy of obedience which const.i.tutes mediaeval social and political life, we should do well to recover the humility in living, the craftsmanship in industry, and precision in thinking which const.i.tuted so conspicuous features of mediaeval civilization. He knows that progress is not altogether measured by flying machines and wireless telegraphy. He is aware that speed and quant.i.ty, the key values in an industrial civilization, are not the only values that ever have been, or ever should be cherished by mankind.

LIMITATIONS OF THE PAST. Along with a sensitive appreciation of the achievements and values of the past, goes, in the impartial critic, an acknowledgment of its limitations.

We can appreciate the distinctive contributions of Greek culture without setting up Greek life as an ultimate ideal. We know that with all the beauty attained and expressed in their art and, to a certain extent, in their civilization, the Athenians yet sacrificed the majority to a life of slavery in order that the minority might lead a life of the spirit, that their religion had its notable crudities and cruelties, that their science was trivial, and their control of Nature negligible.

In the words of one of their most thoroughgoing admirers:

The harmony of the Greeks contained in itself the factors of its own destruction. And in spite of the fascination which constantly fixes our gaze on that fairest and happiest halting place in the secular march of man, it was not there, any more than here, that he was destined to find an ultimate reconciliation and repose.[1]

[Footnote 1: G. Lowes d.i.c.kinson: _Greek View of Life_, p. 248.]

Again, we know the many beautiful features of mediaeval life through its painting and poetry and religion. We know Saint Francis and are familiar with the heroic records of saintliness and renunciation. We know, the great cathedrals, the pageantry and splendor, the exquisite handicraft, the tapestries and illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, the vast learning and the incomparable dialectic. We know also the social injustices, the misery and squalor the ignorance in which the ma.s.s of the people lived.

We can stop, therefore, neither in perpetual adoration of nor perpetual caviling at the past. Each age had its special excellences and its special defects, both from the point of view of the ideals then current, and those current in our own day.

In so far as the past is dead and over with, we cannot legitimately criticize it with standards of our own day. We cannot blame the Greeks for sanctioning slavery, nor criticize James I because he was not a thoroughgoing democrat. But in so far as the past still lives, it is open to critical examination and revision. Traditions, customs, ideas, and inst.i.tutions inherited from the past, which still control us, are subject to modification. We are justified in welcoming changes and modifications which, after careful inquiry, seem clearly to promise betterment in the life of the group. Thus to welcome changes which upon experimental evidence show clearly the benefits that will accrue to the group, is not radicalism. Nor is opposition to changes on the ground that upon critical examination they give promise of harmful consequences, conservatism.

Verdicts for or against change reached on such a basis reflect the spirit and technique of experimental science.

They reflect the desire to settle a course of action on the basis of its results in practice rather than on any preconceived prejudices in favor either of stability or change. To the critical mind, neither stability nor change is an end in itself.

There is no hypnotism about "things as they are"; no lure about things as they have not yet been. The problem is shifted to a detailed and thoroughgoing inquiry into the consequences of specific changes in social habits, ideas and inst.i.tutions, education, business, and industry. Whether changes should or should not win critical approval depends on the kind of ideals or purposes we set ourselves and, secondly, on the practicability of the proposed changes. Change may thus be opposed or approved, in a given case, on the grounds of desirability or feasibility. Whether a change is or is not desirable depends on the ideals of the individual or the group.

Whether it is or is not feasible is a matter open increasingly to scientific determination. Thus a city may hire experts to discover what kind of transportation or educational system will best serve the city's needs. But whether it will or will not spend the money necessary depends on the social interests current.

EDUCATION AS THE TRANSMITTER OF THE PAST. Education is the process by which society undertakes the transmission of its social heritage. Indeed the main function of education in static societies is the initiation of the young into already established customs and traditions. It is the method used to hand down those social habits which the influential and articulate cla.s.ses in a society regard as important enough to have early fixed in its young members. The past is simply transmitted, handed down _en ma.s.se_. It is a set of patterns to be imitated, of ideals to be continued, of mechanisms for attaining the fixed purposes which are current in the group.

In progressive societies education may be used not simply to hand down habits of doing, feeling, and thinking, from the older generation to the younger, but to make habitual in the young reflective consideration of the ends which must be attained, and reflective inquiry into the means for attaining them. The past will not be handed down in indiscriminate completeness. The present and its problems are regarded as the standard of importance, and the past is considered as an incomparable reservoir of materials and methods which may contribute to the ends sought in the present. But there is so much material and so little time, that selection must be made.

Many things in the past, interesting on their own merits, must be omitted in favor of those habits, traditions, and recorded files of knowledge which are most fruitful and enlightening in the attainment of contemporary purposes. What those purposes are depends, of course, on ideals of the group in control of the process of education. But these purposes of ideals may be derived from present situations and not taken merely because they have long been current in the group. Thus, in a predominantly industrial civilization, it may be found more advisable and important to transmit the scientific and technical methods of control which men have acquired in recent generations than the traditional liberal arts. Science may be found more important than the humanities, medicine than moral theory. Even such education that tends to call itself "liberal" or "cultural" is effective and genuine education just in so far as it does illuminate the world in which we live.

The religion and art, the literature and life of the past broaden the meaning and the background of our lives. They are valuable just because they do enrich the lives of those who are exposed to their influence. If studying the great literature and the art of the past did not clarify the mind and emanc.i.p.ate the spirit, enabling men to live more richly in the present, they would hardly be as studiously cherished and transmitted as they are. We are, after all, living in the present.

The culture of the past either does or does not illuminate it.

If it does not it is a competing environment, a shadow world in which we may play truant from actuality, but which brings neither "sweetness nor light" to the actual world in which we live.

PART II

THE CAREER OF REASON

The foregoing a.n.a.lysis of human behavior might thus be briefly summarized. We found that man is born a creature with certain tendencies to act in certain definite ways, tendencies which he largely possesses in common with the lower animals.

We found also that man could learn by trial and error, that his original instinctive equipment could be modified.

Thus far in his mental life man is indistinguishable from the beasts. But man's peculiar capacity, it appeared, lay in his ability to think, to control his actions in the light of a future, to choose one response rather than another because of its consequences, which he could foresee and prefer. This capacity for reflection, for formulating a purpose and being able to obtain it, we found to be practical in its origins, but persisting on its own account in the disinterested inquiry of philosophy and science and the free imaginative construction of art. And in all man's behavior, whether on the plane of instinct, habit, or reflection, we found action to be accompanied by emotion, by love and hate, anger and awe, which might at once impede action by confusing it, or sustain it by giving it a vivid and compelling motive.

The second part of the book was devoted to an a.n.a.lysis of the various specific traits which human beings display and the consequences that these have in men's relations with one another. Under certain conditions, one or another of these may become predominant; in particular historical conditions, one or another of them may have a high social value or the reverse. These traits vary in different individuals; in any of them, a man may be totally defective or abnormally developed.

But taken in general, they const.i.tute the changeless pattern of human nature, and fix the conditions and the limits of action.

But while these universal traits determine what man may do, and fix definitively the boundaries of human possibility, within these limits the race has a wide choice of ideals and attainments. The standards of what man will and should do, within the boundaries of the nature which is his inheritance, are to be found not in his original impulses, but in his mind and imagination. The human being is gifted with the ability to imagine a future more desirable than the present, and to contrive ingeniously in behalf of antic.i.p.ated or imagined goods.

These antic.i.p.ated goods we call ideals, and these ideals arise, in the last a.n.a.lysis, out of the initial and inborn hungers and cravings of men. "Intellect is of the same flesh and blood with all the instincts, a brother whose superiority lies in his power to appreciate, harmonize, and save them all." The function of reason is not to set itself over against men's original desires, but to envisage ideals and devise instruments whereby they may all, so far as nature allows, be fulfilled.

Man's reason, then, which has its roots in his instincts, is the means of their harmonious fulfillment. It attempts, in the various fields of experience, to effect an adjustment between man's competing desires, and between man and his environment. If instincts were left each to its own free course, they would all be frustrated; if man did not learn reflectively to control his environment, and to make it subserve his own ends, he would be a helpless pygmy soon obliterated by the incomparably more powerful forces of Nature.

These various attempts of man to effect an adjustment of his pa.s.sions with one another, and his life to his environment, may be described as the "Career of Reason." In this career man has formulated many ideals, not a small number of which have led him into error, disillusion, and unhappiness.

Sometimes they have misled him by promising him fulfillments that were in the nature of things unattainable. They have added to the real evils of life a longing after impossible goods, goods which an informed intelligence would early have dismissed as unattainable. Man has disappointed himself by counting on joys which, had he been less incorrigibly addicted to imaginative illusions, he should never have expected.

Sometimes he has framed ideals which could be fulfilled, but only at the expense of a large proportion of natural and irrepressible human desires. Such, for example, have been the one-sided ascetic ideals of Stoicism or Puritanism, which in their attempt to give order and form to life, crush and distort a considerable portion of it. The same is true of mysticism which seeks frequently to attain life by altogether denying its instinctive animal basis. Yet though reason has led men astray, it is the only and ultimate hope of man's happiness.

It is responsible for whatever success man has had in mastering the turmoil of his own pa.s.sions and the obstacles of an environment "which was not made for him but in which he grew." It has given point and justice to Swinburne's exultant boast:

"Glory to man in the highest! For man is the master of things!"

This Career of Reason has taken various parallel fulfillments, and in each of them man has in varying degrees attained mastery. Religion arose as one of the earliest ways by which man attempted to win for himself a secure place in the cosmic order. Science, in its earliest forms hardly distinguishable from religion, is man's persistent attempt to discover the nature of things, and to exploit that discovery for his own good. Art is again an instance of man's march toward mastery.

Beginning, in the broadest sense, in the industrial arts, in agriculture and handicrafts, it pa.s.ses, as it were by accident, from the necessary to the beautiful. Having in his needful business fortuitously created beautiful objects, man comes to create them intentionally, both for their own sake and for the sheer pleasure of creation.

Finally in morals men have endeavored to construct for themselves codes of conduct, ideals of life, in which no possible good should be needlessly or recklessly sacrificed, and in which men might live together as happily as is permitted by the nature which is at once their life and their habitation. The Career of Reason in these various fields we shall briefly trace and describe. We must expect to find, as in any career, however successful, failures along with the triumphs, and, as in any notable career still unfinished, possibility and great promise. Man's reason and imagination have a long past; they have also an indefinite future. Man has in the name of reason made many errors; but to reason he owes his chief success, and with increasing experience he may be expected to attain continually to a more certain and effective wisdom.

With these provisos, let us address ourselves to the Career of Reason, beginning with religion.

CHAPTER XII

RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Since human nature remains constant in its essential traits, despite the variations it exhibits among different individuals, it is to be expected that certain experiences should be fairly common and recurrent among all human beings. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, jubilance and despair, disillusion and rapture, triumph and frustration, these occur often, and to every man. They are, as it were, the sparks generated by the friction of human desires with the natural world in which they must, if anywhere, find fulfillment.

Just such a normal, inevitable consequence of human nature in a natural world is the religious experience. It is common in more or less intense degree to almost all men, and may be studied objectively just as may any of the other universal experiences of mankind.

There are, however, certain peculiar difficulties in the study of the religious experience. Most men are by training emotionally committed to one particular religious creed which it is very difficult for them impartially to examine or to compare with others. In the second place, there is a confusion in the minds of most people between the personal religious experience, and the formal and external inst.i.tution we commonly have in mind when we speak of "religion." When we ordinarily use the term, we imply a set of dogmas, an inst.i.tution, a reasoned theology, a ritual, a priesthood, all the apparatus and earmarks of inst.i.tutionalized religion. We think of Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, the whole welter of churches and creeds that have appeared in the history of mankind. But these are rather the outward vehicles and vestments of the religious experience than the experience itself. They are the social expressions and external instruments of the inner spiritual occurrence. But the latter is primary. If man had not _first been religious_, these would never have arisen. In the words of William James:

In one sense at least, the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches when once established live at second hand upon tradition, but the _founders_ of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who esteem it incomplete.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 30.]

Before we examine the social inst.i.tutions and fixed apparatus of ritual and of reasoned theology in which the religious experience has become variously embodied, we must pause to a.n.a.lyze the experience itself. To be religious, as a personal experience, is, like being philosophical, to take a total att.i.tude toward the universe. But the religious att.i.tude is one of a somewhat specific kind. It is, one may arbitrarily but also somewhat fairly say, to sense or comprehend one's relation to the divine, however the divine be conceived. It is to have this sense and comprehension not only deeply, as one might in a poetic or a philosophical mood, but to have it suffused with reverence. We shall presently see that the objects of veneration have had a different meaning for different individuals, groups, and generations. But whatever be the conception of the divine object, the religious att.i.tude seems to have this stable feature. It is always an awed awareness on the part of the individual of his relation to that "something not himself,"

and larger than himself, with whom the destinies of the universe seem to rest. This somehow sensed relation to the divine appears throughout all the varieties of religion that have appeared in the world, and among many individuals not popularly accounted religious.

It is just such an experience, for example, that Wordsworth expresses when he says in the "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey":

"... And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."

It is the same sense that comes over so-called worldly people when oppressed suddenly by a great sorrow, or uplifted by a sudden great joy, an awareness of a divine power that moves masterfully and mysteriously through the events of life, provoking on the part of finite creatures a strange and compelling reverence. This "divinity that shapes our ends"

may be variously conceived. It may be an intimately realized personal G.o.d, "Our Father which art in Heaven." It may be such an abstract conception as the Laws of Nature or Scientific Law, such a religion as is expounded by the Transcendentalists, in particular by Emerson:

These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of s.p.a.ce, and not subject to circ.u.mstance: thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.... If a man is at heart just, then, in so far is he G.o.d; the safety of G.o.d, the immortality of G.o.d, the majesty of G.o.d, do enter into that man with justice.... For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently named, love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several sh.o.r.es which it washes.... The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world.

It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beat.i.tude of man. It makes him illimitable.[1]