Part 2

January, 1930.

Contents

PAGE PREFACE: Norman Foerster v

THE PRETENSIONS OF SCIENCE: Louis Trenchard More 3

HUMANISM: AN ESSAY AT DEFINITION: Irving Babbitt 25

THE HUMILITY OF COMMON SENSE: Paul Elmer More 52

THE PRIDE OF MODERNITY: G. R. Elliott 75

RELIGION WITHOUT HUMANISM: T. S. Eliot 105

THE PLIGHT OF OUR ARTS: Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. 113

THE DILEMMA OF MODERN TRAGEDY: Alan Reynolds Thompson 127

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY: Robert Shafer 149

PANDORA’S BOX IN AMERICAN FICTION: Harry Hayden Clark 170

DIONYSUS IN DISMAY: Stanley P. Chase 205

OUR CRITICAL SPOKESMEN: Gorham B. Munson 231

BEHAVIOUR AND CONTINUITY: Bernard Bandler II 258

THE WELL OF DISCIPLINE: Sherlock Bronson Gass 268

COURAGE AND EDUCATION: Richard Lindley Brown 285

A LIST OF BOOKS 291

The essence of Elizabethan as of other humanisms is the understanding of man and the definition of the sphere of properly human activity. The philosophical mind of Shakespeare’s age began the work of reflection by cleaving the universe along three levels. On the lowest level is the natural world, which is the plane of instinct, appetite, animality, lust, the animal passions or affections; on this level the regulation is by necessary or natural law. On the middle level is the human world, which is regulated and, in a sense, created by the will and knowledge of man; working upon the natural world; but governed by reason, the special human faculty; and illuminated more or less from the level above. On the third level is the supernatural world, which is the plane of spiritual beings, and the home of eternal ideas.

--STUART P. SHERMAN: “ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.”

HUMANISM AND AMERICA

The Pretensions of Science

LOUIS TRENCHARD MORE

Since the time when the Whigs of England fastened the specific title of Pretender on the son and grandson of James II, the word has retained in our speech a sinister significance. For us a pretender is one who makes a false claim to a title. But in speaking of the pretensions of science, humanists do not mean precisely this. No humanist would deny that 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. Nor would he deny that it has added much to our security and power and has increased our opportunities for a richer life and character.

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. While our modern pretenders are unfortunately far greater in number than the two descendants of James, they do fall into two classes. The first includes 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 æthers, electrons, and mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and others’ minds with the sensible world of brute fact. This class does comparatively little direct harm, as it merely creates some confusion in the orderly domain of science; but, indirectly, it has given a stimulus and specious authority to the pseudo-scientists. The second class comprises 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 pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology. They would have us believe that all truth is scientific and that the conclusions of self-examination are but guess-work. By mere verbal analogies they have linked the study of man’s intellectual and spiritual nature to the physical world of mechanical matter and motion. It is the false claims of these pseudo-sciences which must be exposed and renounced in order that humanism may come again into its own as the arbiter of character.

As in the Middle Ages canting simulation of goodness, as well as honest virtue, was covered by the word religion, so to-day vague speculation, as well as accurate experimentation, is proclaimed as science. By a curious throw-back we are apparently using the word “science” in the primitive sense of “all knowledge,” as the Greeks used it. And they, in spite of their acumen, had not been able to differentiate between the two equally valid methods of learning by objective experimentation and by personal experience. We have seemingly forgotten that one of the greatest achievements of the Renaissance was to discover this difference of method and to limit “science” strictly to the investigation of objective phenomena. Even Descartes, who attempted to create a purely mechanical world, excluded the processes of thought as something foreign to the scientific method.

It was the biologists of the nineteenth century, intoxicated with the delusion that the magic word evolution was a key to unlock all the mysteries of the universe, who foisted on the world the idea that man is but a complicated physical and chemical machine, and who sought to discredit the dualistic philosophy of the Renaissance physicists. And of all the biologists, Huxley, the militant propagandist, was the one who did the most to degrade humanism into the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology. He first correctly emphasised the fact that there is but one scientific method which is best exemplified by the subject of mechanics. But--and in this lies the source of his mischief to clear thinking--he then defined science as merely organised common sense. One has only to analyse this definition to discover its speciousness and its confusion of thought. His definition has been almost universally accepted, although it undoes all the lessons taught us by the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages and the scientific experimentalists of the Renaissance; and its effect has been to drive theoretical science back into the hypothetical metaphysics of the Greeks.

It is merely a truism to say that our contact with the objective and subjective worlds is based, directly or indirectly, on our sense-perceptions; and, to be intelligibly transmitted from one person to another, such data must be common to many individuals. Also, it is an inevitable tendency of the mind to organise all facts or to link them together. Thus Huxley really classes all sound knowledge as science. But, since this sound knowledge, according to him, can be attained only by following the method of mechanics, which is the interpretation by the mind of the spatial and temporal relations between sensible bodies, his inference is clear that the phenomena of consciousness, the individual mind, and our social relations, are to be interpreted as problems of matter and motion.