Part 24

Even in a footnote I mention Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn with some reluctance, and only because there are so few critics among us who have any interest in trying to plot a direction for the future. Pauline Christianity (grossly libelled by him as akin to the degenerate puritanism of our day) must be destroyed, he preaches. Salvation lies in a fusion of Hellenism (Science) and Judaism (which he interprets selectively and sentimentally). He is a suggestive writer: he is also a prig, a special pleader, and embarrassing in his frequent intervals of self-pity and in his intrusions of hearth-side intimacies (proper for telling only to his closest friends) into the public medium of print. One cannot take this muddled romanticist seriously.

In Style and Form in American Prose (1929).

Behaviour and Continuity

BERNARD BANDLER II

Until humanism and psychology are more suitably defined than they are at present the task of establishing their relations is hazardous. Psychology is still in a primitive state: its basic problems and principles are disputed, its relation to the other sciences is undetermined, and its method is loose and unsystematic. That it may be a science, however, is indubitable. The constitution of human nature is open to analysis: human behaviour no less than the stars and plants may be observed and hypothesis may be employed to order its seeming irregularities. But the common scientific ground of purpose which underlies the differences of psychological theories does not unite the humanists, and the problem of stating the nature and scope of humanism is correspondingly difficult. The absence of a common scientific ground, of an accepted subject matter and a technique, enables any man interested in human activities to call himself a humanist and to maintain his contention, whereas no man, unless technically trained, will consider himself a psychologist. He may observe society and deliver himself of apothegms and epigrams that characterise people truly--like the French moralists, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Joubert. He may trace the influence of ideas on conduct, as Mr. Babbitt has done. But that is ethics and philosophy, not psychology. Psychology limits itself to studying how human beings behave and to reducing their most complex actions to primitive elements. Ethics evaluates their activities and judges them. So, however confusing the positions of contemporary psychologists and humanists, if we keep in mind the formal aspects of psychology and ethics, a study of the relations of the two may be instructive.

Upon psychology as a science, as upon physics and chemistry, humanism can have nothing to say. It may examine the logic of psychology and criticise its presuppositions, although that is properly the task of the cosmologist, like Mr. Whitehead. But towards the conclusion of psychology, the “laws” it may formulate, humanism’s only possible attitude is one of interested acceptance. An ethics should not prescribe the limits of science, nor dictate the nature of its results. And if the science deals successfully with human actions, ethics, instead of criticising, should respect its results, that ideals may not be founded on ignorance and fancy but rather on knowledge.

Unfortunately, the amount of psychology which is scientific and relevant to human nature is small. Much of it reduces to physiology. The chemistry of the glands and blood, the nature of sensation, feeling, emotion, and of the thinking processes, and those predispositions of the body which we call instincts are ultimately problems of physiology and await the development of that science for their solution. What distinguishes psychology from physiology is the study of behaviour in society: the transmutation of the instincts and temperament into habits and sentiments. Of psychology proper we have, so far, elaborate programmes, a bewildering variety of theories,--part epistemology, part logic, part metaphysics, and part mythology,--a vast accumulation of data, some classifications, and hardly any science. Yet the studies of “types,” “personality,” “culture forms,” and particularly the researches of psychiatrists contain many accurate descriptions of human behaviour. Their endeavour to explain the most sublimated actions, by reference to the constitution of the organism and to the determining factors of its environment, approaches sound science.

But “behaviour in society” and “the determining factors of environment” are vague phrases. If there is to be a science of behaviour and society two conditions are necessary: first, that the organisms in spite of individual variations should be essentially the same; and second, that the environment to which they react should be stable and limited. For if each organism were essentially unique there would be no basis for the science of psychology, and if the environment were constantly changing there would be no conditions and no control for studying the organism. But human environment, the totality of forces which affect us and help satisfy our needs, is not stable and limited. It is plastic and relative. Tradition and convention are added to the forces composing an animal’s environment. These multiply the possibilities of behaviour indefinitely. In proportion as a man frees himself from a blind adherence to custom, the more personal his environment will be. To know such a man’s environment is to become acquainted with a unique world. It is to know not only his ancestry, his history, his habits, his occupation, and his social milieu, but also his purposes, the ends which he consciously seeks and which are the meaning of his actions to him. It is to know his mind. But a mind, being unique, can never be absolutely known. Even if it were completely revealed in behaviour, conversation, and writing, and if all the occasions that have served to form it were discovered, one could never be certain to capture a man’s understanding of his words, or his interpretation of his attitude and actions.

Behaviourists are therefore right in excluding consciousness, purpose, and mind from psychology. These are inaccessible to science: first, because they can never be precisely seized; and second, because they introduce an indefinite number of objects which preclude a limited and stable environment. Mind can reflect upon all objects of experience, and these in turn can become objectives of action. So soon as this happens the exact control which experimental science demands is prevented and the progress of psychology is blocked. It thus seems impossible for psychology to deal with the most interesting aspect of human behaviour, those where action is guided and dominated by thought and is not blindly reflexive. To avoid this limitation of psychology certain behaviourists, in the name of what they conceive to be mechanism, have denied the efficacy of purpose and mind altogether. According to the argument, consciousness, purpose, and mind are waste products, attendant upon natural processes, like sparks from a locomotive. Or they are like the decorations on illuminated manuscripts, illustrating the text, and quite superfluous. Otherwise they would be forces, inexplicably interfering with natural processes. These arguments fail by misconstruing the notion of purpose, which is not a force but an end. Purpose does not direct action but is the direction which action takes. It is the rational explication of the objects of our desires and wishes. The end has no initial power, but, once thought has discerned it as the true object of our desires and they have attached themselves to it, as a lover to his mistress, so that satisfaction cannot be found elsewhere, then the end acquires a deputed power which it may never surrender. Since purpose defines the objects of desire which thereby become objectives of action, it is a determining factor of human behaviour, and the so-called mechanistic arguments against it are invalid. Yet, since science deals with material and efficient causes only, psychologists are compelled to disregard formal and final causes, purposes, and ends.

The goal of ethics, on the other hand, is to discover the most organised system of ends, of goods, which a rational life can realise. This goal of ethics can never be fully achieved, for so long as man acts and reflects he may pursue and conceive novel ends. But though the most elaborate system of ethics is in origin an expression of personal preferences, it is not therefore arbitrary and unjustifiable by reason. My values have their roots in my nature. I can exhibit them, demonstrate that they are mutually consistent and do not defeat the interests which underlie them. Furthermore I can declare that if any one honestly questioned his heart he might find that my values represented it. It is not to psychology, then, that one must turn for knowledge of human goods. For psychology, although it may analyse the efficient causes of desire, cannot estimate the value of its objects, of the ideal form of a rational life. If psychologists talk of a normal organism, they mean one whose desires are adjusted to its environment, the one most likely to survive. If they speak of superior organisms and civilisation, they mean increased ability for adjustment to a more complex environment. Thus though psychologists speak of normal and civilised they are unable either to define or to evaluate them.

Knowledge of human goods is furnished by philosophers, when they are frank and speak for themselves; by the founders of religions, the saints, and the mystics; by the poets, and chiefly, as Socrates knew, by knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge, though it may first look back upon the behaviour studied by psychology, moves in the opposite direction toward the objects sought. These it endeavours to comprehend, to purge of contradictions, to regard intently sub specie mortalitatis. From the vantage point of death one becomes a spectator of human life. Thought acquires the prestige of impersonality, without the sacrifice of its warm interest in life. The point of view of death differs from seeing things sub specie æternitatis both in essence and in purpose. It does not abolish time or elevate mind to the contemplation of a necessary order, which is the function of seeing things sub specie æternitatis, although consideration of death (as in the Phædo) may do this. It enables one to regard life in its totality and, without projecting it against the background of nature, to estimate each partial aim in the perspective of all others, and thus to distinguish the objects one truly desires.

The effort to detach oneself from the present and to incorporate it with the past and future in a satisfactory whole, which psychology does not attempt, is what makes action ethical. In the unique self the past exists in memory, which is one’s personal tradition. Thus memory, besides being the mother of the muses, is the mother of ethics and of rational action. It enables us to confront our present condition, its projects, hopes, and fears, with the past, and by comparison to evaluate the present action. It enables us to utilise the whole of our experience in the active organisation of our life and thus to attain a continuity of being. Consequently a succession of full moments does not, as Pater thought, constitute a full life. For each of those separate selves which a past moment represented and which the subsequent one renounced lives in memory to advance its claim to existence against the present; and only similar circumstances are needed, a chance odour, or gesture, or phrase, to revive it, and make one feel the desolation of its loss. These intermittances of the heart, as Proust calls them, are dependent on the infinite passive occasions of sensation, and since they never represented an ideal actively striven for, no analysis is able to penetrate to an underlying unity. On the other hand the consequence of dispossessing oneself of the past in order to live in the moment is a reduction of the personality to indecision and apathy. Besides, the past preserved in memory and the future that we anticipate enrich the present and give it its fulness of being, as a musical phrase has more significance in a symphony than when played in isolation.

As one interrogates the present, with its What shall I do? What shall I be? it expands to absorb the relevant testimony that relates it to the past and to the future. Ordinarily the present includes a fairly definite content, some concrete situation and prospect, often trivial, as a dinner to be ordered. Choice when it is not automatic can easily review the relevant factors; one’s favourite dishes, the season of the year; possible illness on the morrow. At other times the relevant relations are endless, particularly when an irrevocable choice forces us to discriminate among all the elements of our being: love, honour, country, and religion each claiming our allegiance. The infinite variety of situations that may arise and the impossibility of relating them to a definite past and a definite future are responsible for the differences of ethical systems. A philosopher’s conception of the typical situation will define his problems and dictate the general terms of his solution. Buddha saw sorrow and suffering as the main portion of human existence. His endeavour, therefore, was to emancipate mankind from them. Aristotle started with man’s desire for happiness. Therefore he analysed the actions of men, the pursuit of wealth, of honour, and of knowledge to see which conformed most with the essential nature of man. Amiel’s situation was intensely personal, but he stated his problem in universal terms. Amiel recognised from his youth the necessity of an organising purpose and a continuous effort. His culture and sympathies, however, extended to all human actions; to limit his life to one of the manifold beings he felt contained within himself seemed a violation of the ideal.

Now what is the context, the appropriate situation and problem, from which ethics should start? Is it some general aspect of life common to all people, like sorrow or suffering, or the generic nature of man, or the attempt to discover an organising purpose? Or is it our immediate context, the world to which our traditions, conduct, desires, and ambitions have engaged us? It is this world that confronts us daily. Our actions in it are the theme of the novel, the drama, and the epic, which are an almost inexhaustible field for ethical study. Each work is a representation of an action, and in proportion as the writer concentrates his imagination on the situation before him, on his donnée, and reveals its possibilities, the action will illustrate some ideal. Literature always retains the concrete immediacy of life, the movement of an action never being from a situation to a principle. But all the comprehensiveness of a principle, the innumerable unsuspected relations which it opens when once intuition has leapt the gap between a formula and the fact it covers is implied by an action at its close. The characters are still flesh and blood, but as they finally define themselves their situation includes all their relevant past and all that is significant in their future, so that they become transparent, and the whole moral world which they represent shines clearly through them. Hence it is possible that a profound ethics and a great work of art may introduce us to the same moral world, so that the orientation of our being, emotional and intellectual, after reading the Ethics of Spinoza and The Wings of the Dove say, will be identical.

If ethics is to be persuasive and reasonable it must be founded on the most complete experience possible. The context from which it arises, as in life and literature, should be rich and concrete. The defect of most ethical systems is that they quit life too abruptly. Instead of studying the complex conditions which underlie any achieved good, as psychology is contented to do, philosophers ignore them, except in their generality, and so attain a factitious unity. Consequently rationalistic philosophers invert the proper procedure of thought. They start from the typical, the general, and the rational, whereas these are the ultimate fruits of reflection. When an ethics, however, repudiates the purpose of rationalism as well as its method, it severs itself from all connection with the good. If it speaks of goods and ideals, it speaks of them only provisionally and instrumentally. Its excessive preoccupation with the conditions marks the return of ethics to that immersion in the present from which it initially arose.

Humanism differs from other ethical systems by its data and by its method. Its data are each individual in his context; his inherited values, his body, his capabilities, and the relations formed by them. It is the task of each individual to preserve himself in the world, and to establish a continuity of being. The essence of humanism is the refusal to allow any sudden break of development, any shift of basis that arbitrarily repudiates one’s past, such as breaking one’s word. Its method is to survey life in the light of death. By this means one’s personal situation can be enlarged by history, and by the contemplation of the ideals which men pursue. The more vivid the conception of an ideal society and a rational life within it, so long as it does not weaken one’s personal reality, the more likely is life to yield happiness.

Psychology and ethics deal with the same subject matter, human behaviour, but they regard it from opposite points of view. Psychology regards it externally as a physical phenomenon having already taken place in time. Like any other science psychology tries to correlate its diverse data and to reduce them to the simplest elements possible. But since psychology requires that the organisms which it studies should be essentially the same and that the environment to which they react should be stable and limited, it cannot deal with the behaviour dominated by mind. For mind is unique and its possible objects are infinite. Its language is that of meaning, purpose, end. The effort of a moral individual is to know what he wants, to know his mind. Hence ethics regards human behaviour internally and as directed towards the future. The goal of ethics is the satisfactory synthesis of the unique perspectives of different minds. It approximates this synthesis by studying the dialectic of desire, the logical implications of each purpose in relation to all other objects. In this way ethics will describe ideally how an individual may harmonise with himself and with society, which psychology can never do, and thus point the way to happiness.

The Well of Discipline

SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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