Part 4

The history of physics, since the time of Maxwell, shows a record of vain efforts to reconstruct a materialistic monism. These attempts have failed because they involved a supposititious æther and atom which could no longer satisfy the growing body of experimental facts about radiant energy. After Maxwell predicted the existence of electro-magnetic radiation, an æther or atom possessing the ordinary attributes of matter became an absurdity.

But our childish, or at least youthful, reluctance to admit our limitations is so great that we proceeded to repeat the hypothetical method once more by substituting an energiastic monism. Unmindful of Pascal’s dictum that man cannot investigate the world of either the infinitely small or the infinitely large, we are replacing a material atom and æther by Planck’s hypothesis of discrete and disembodied quanta, or atoms, of energy. Already there have arisen four insuperable difficulties.

The hypothesis affirms action without specifying something to act, unless the word energy is given all the physical attributes of matter. In which case a quantum of radiant energy is merely our old friend, a corpuscle of light, masquerading under a new name. Again, it substitutes the principle of discontinuity of action for continuity, and one is puzzled to know from what the quantum originates and in what it ends. And again, it creates the dilemma that light is simultaneously corpuscular and vibrational, since without the latter quality none of the phenomena of interference is explicable. Lastly, it drifts into a pure philosophy of idealism.

My discussion would not be complete without a reference to the theory of relativity. It is significant that the earliest serious critique of Newtonian physics was made by Bishop Berkeley. With the greatest ingenuity and skill, he pointed out that objects can become known to us only by the mind and that since light, sound, and motion are interpreted by the mind as essentially different, they cannot be synthesised by any experimental and objective process. So far Berkeley’s critique is thoroughly valid. He proceeded, however, to make the non-sequitur that objects exist only in the mind. If we accept this postulate, the logic of idealism is irrefutable; few, however, will accept it. Idealism fails because it ignores brute fact, and we accept the answer of Dr. Johnson who made his objection by merely kicking a large stone in his path.

Einstein also began with a critique of Newtonian dynamics to prove that the conclusions we can draw from electrodynamics are as limited and as relative as those from mechanics. From this denial of our ability to obtain real or absolute knowledge he, like Berkeley, has proceeded to construct a positive philosophy of the absolute. Relativity, as it has now been interpreted by such disciples as Whitehead and Eddington, is merely idealism under a new guise. The objective world of sensation and experience is illusion, and truth exists only in a set of subjective mathematical formulæ of cosmic events. The relativists openly rejoice that mathematics has come into its own kingdom and is no longer to be the handmaiden of physics, no longer to be restricted by the limitations of the sense-perceptions. Euclidean geometry, which is limited to the three dimensions of tactual space, has been replaced by a geometry of hyper-space, the properties of which no one can be cognisant of. Subjective time is eliminated, and objective time is conflated with space. They, too, deny the validity of the senses, as did the mediæval schoolman, and picture a topsy-turvy world. They are labouring under the delusion that the limitations of logic can be avoided by the simple substitution of mathematical symbols for words, forgetting that mathematical symbols are as meaningless as words when they are detached from facts. They fail to see that the equation is but a form of the syllogism. One can trace all through their argument the old and familiar fallacy of the ambiguous middle. They are quite reckless, as it suits their convenience, in confusing physical space of three dimensions with mathematical space of an unlimited number; neither do they distinguish time as a subjective sequence of events from time as a measurable component of velocity. The relativists are as rash as those sociologists who see a real connection between physical energy of motion and mental energy of thought and so deceive themselves with the notion that they are scientific.

A note of uncertainty is beginning to show itself, however, for thoughtful physicists are seeing the impasse into which their unbridled hypotheses have led them. Abstruse mathematical analysis is again proving to us, what Pascal, Newton, Lagrange, and philosophy had demonstrated in a simpler way, that the mechanistic method can, at best, only picture an objective world as it seems to us, and not as it is. As a recent physicist confesses: “The physicist thus finds himself in a world from which the bottom has dropped clean out; as he penetrates deeper and deeper it eludes him and fades away by the highly unsportsmanlike device of just becoming meaningless. No refinement of measurement will avail to carry him beyond the portals of this shadowy domain which he cannot even mention without logical inconsistency. A bound is thus forever set to the curiosity of the physicist. What is more, the mere existence of this bound means that he must give up his most cherished convictions and faith. The world is not a world of reason, understandable by the intellect of man, but as we penetrate ever deeper, the very law of cause and effect, which we had thought to be a formula to which we could force God himself to subscribe, ceases to have meaning.” The answer to this naïve confession is simple enough: there never was a bottom to his hypothetical world, as he could have foreseen if he had acquainted himself with the warning of the more profound men of science, philosophers, and humanists.

The writer adds that this failure, now proved, “must forever keep the physicist humble.” But there is no cause for him to think lowly of himself for what he has accomplished and for what he may achieve. He should, rather, be modest and restrict himself to what can be done legitimately by the scientific method. I fear, however, that in spite of such occasional confessions, the physicists are neither humble nor modest, but are merely bewildered. The false pretensions of science must be wholly abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by a wise judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for a sane and humanistic philosophy.

FOOTNOTES

“The New Vision of Science,” by Professor P. W. Bridgman, Harper’s Magazine, 1929.

Humanism: An Essay at Definition

IRVING BABBITT

The art of defining is so indispensable that one needs to define the limits of definition itself. A very eminent humanist, Erasmus, showed his awareness of these limits when he complained of the attempts of the theologians of the Reformation to formulate deity that every definition was a disaster. Though the humanist does not seek to define God and is in general chary of ultimates, he is wont in more mundane matters to put the utmost emphasis on definition. This Socratic emphasis would seem especially needed at a time like the present which has probably surpassed all previous epochs in its loose and irresponsible use of general terms. Unless this tendency is corrected, the day may come when, outside of words that stand for the measurements of science or the objects of sense, communication between men will be well-nigh impossible. The exchange of ideas regarding those aspects of life that fall outside the merely quantitative and material may become as difficult as economic exchanges would be with coins that have no definite value.

This growing debasement of the intellectual coinage may be illustrated from the word humanism itself. The boundaries of a genuine humanism are broad and flexible. It is plain, however, that the word is being appropriated for points of view that cannot be brought within these boundaries, however generously extended. As a preliminary to pointing out some of the more serious of the resulting confusions it would seem desirable to build up the historical background. For what a word actually has meant should surely throw light on what it ought to mean.

As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the Italy of the fifteenth century, and later in other European countries, to the type of scholar who was not only proficient in Greek and Latin, but who at the same time inclined to prefer the humanity of the great classical writers to what seemed to him the excess of divinity in the mediævals. This contrast between humanity and divinity was often conceived very superficially. However, the best of the humanists were not content with opposing a somewhat external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian elegance to the scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught a glimpse of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best. They were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their faculties in this world rather than at an other-worldly felicity. Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure without one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic or that of the specialist. “Nothing too much” is indeed the central maxim of all genuine humanists, ancient and modern.

In a world of ever-shifting circumstance, this maxim is not always of easy application. Whoever has succeeded in bridging the gap between the general precept and some particular emergency has to that extent achieved the fitting and the decorous. Decorum is simply the law of measure in its more concrete aspects. For every type of humanist decorum is, in Milton’s phrase, the “grand masterpiece to observe.” Actually this observation may rest on deep insight, as it did in the case of Milton himself, or it may degenerate into empty formalism. The adjustment of which I have spoken between the variable and the permanent elements in human experience requires spiritual effort and most men are spiritually indolent. For genuine adjustment they tend to substitute outer conformity so that decorum itself finally comes to seem a mere veneer, something that has no deep root in the nature of things. Moreover the notions of decent behaviour to which men have conformed at any particular period have always been more or less local and relative. It is easy to take the next step and assume that they have been only local and relative, an assumption subversive not merely of decorum but of humanism itself. Humanism, one of our modernists has argued, may have done very well for other times and places, but under existing circumstances, it is at best likely to prove only a “noble anachronism.” A similar objection to humanism is that it has its source in a psychology of “escape,” that it is an attempt to take flight from the present into a past that has for the modern man become impossible. But humanism is not to be identified with this or that body of traditional precepts. The law of measure on which it depends becomes meaningless unless it can be shown to be one of the “laws unwritten in the heavens” of which Antigone had the immediate perception, laws that are “not of to-day or yesterday,” that transcend in short the temporal process. The final appeal of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition.

It does not follow that the humanist is ready to abandon history to the relativist. The main conventions that have prevailed in the past reveal important identities as well as differences. These identities cannot be explained as due to their common derivation from some previous convention. The Chinese made an independent discovery of the law of measure. An important task, indeed, that awaits some properly qualified scholar, preferably a Chinese, is a comparison of Confucian humanism with occidental humanism as it appears, for example, in the Ethics of Aristotle. The announcement was made recently in the press that a Harvard astronomer had discovered the “centre of the universe” (more strictly the centre of our galactic system). In the meanwhile the far more important question is being neglected whether human nature itself has any centre. One’s faith in the existence of such a centre increases when one finds the best commentary on Pascal’s dictum that the great man is he who combines in himself opposite virtues and occupies all the space between them, in a Confucian book the very title of which, literally rendered, means the “universal norm” or “centre.” Here and elsewhere the Confucian books reveal a deep and direct insight into the law of measure. Legge’s translation of the Chinese word for decorum (li) as “the rules of propriety” has been rightly censured as unduly prim and formalistic; though it must be admitted that a formalistic element is very marked at times even in the older Confucian writings.

Practically the assertion of a “universal centre” means the setting up of some pattern or model for imitation. The idea of imitation goes even deeper than that of decorum, but is an idea that humanism shares with religion. Humanism, however, differs from religion in putting at the basis of the pattern it sets up, not man’s divinity, but the something in his nature that sets him apart simply as man from other animals and that Cicero defines as a “sense of order and decorum and measure in deeds and words.” It dwells on the danger of any attempt to pass too abruptly to the religious level; it holds, if I may be pardoned for quoting myself, that the world would have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting out to be superhuman. The virtue that results from a right cultivation of one’s humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living, is poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The difference is none the less marked between the man who is moving towards poise and the man who is moving away from it. Since the break with the somewhat artificial decorum of the eighteenth century most men have been moving away from it. It would not be easy to argue with any plausibility that the typical modernist is greatly concerned with the law of measure; his interest, as a glance at our newspapers should suffice to show, is rather in the doing of stunts and the breaking of records, in “prodigies, feats of strength and crime,” the very topics that, according to the traditional report, Confucius banished from his conversation. “Let us confess it,” says Nietzsche, speaking not merely for the rank and file but for the leaders, “proportionateness is foreign to us.” It is foreign to us because we no longer refer our experience to any centre. With the growth of the naturalistic temper, the normal has come to have less appeal than the novel. The pursuit of poise has tended to give way to that of uniqueness, spontaneity, and above all intensity. “The last remnant of God on earth,” says Nietzsche himself, “are the men of great longing, of great loathing, of great satiety.” Once grant that there is no constant element in life and one might agree with Walter Pater that a man’s highest ambition should be “to burn with a hard gem-like flame,” to get “as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” Æsthetic perceptiveness is an excellent thing, but thus to set it up as an end in itself is almost at the opposite pole from humanism. Yet Pater has been called a humanist. One might so regard him if one accepted his view that the distinctive humanistic trait is an all-embracing curiosity. Humanism appears primarily, not in the enlargement of comprehension and sympathy, desirable though this enlargement may be, but in the act of selection, in the final imposition on mere multiplicity of a scale of values. Matthew Arnold, with his striving for centrality, has far better claims to be regarded as a humanist than Pater--and that in spite of his inadequacy on the side of religion. The model that Arnold sets up for imitation in the name of culture is a constant corrective of everything that is one-sided and out of proportion. “I hate,” he says, speaking not only for himself but for all true humanists, “all over-preponderance of single elements.”

We have seen thus far that the word humanist has two main meanings--an historical meaning in its application to the scholars who turned away from the Middle Ages to the Greeks and Romans, and a psychological meaning, as one may say, that derives directly from the historical one: humanists in this latter sense are those who, in any age, aim at proportionateness through a cultivation of the law of measure. Keeping this definition in mind, we should now be prepared to deal with the confusions in the use of the word of which I spoke at the beginning. These confusions have arisen from its misapplication to various types of naturalists and supernaturalists, especially the former.

For example, the eminent orientalist, M. Sylvain Lévi, has in a recent book used the term humanism in speaking of persons as far apart as Buddha and Rousseau. Buddha, it is true, had his humanistic side: he recommended that one follow a via media between asceticism and self-indulgence. But, unlike Confucius, he is in his primary emphasis not humanistic, but religious. The association of humanism with Rousseau is especially unjustifiable. Rousseau was, in the current sense of the word, a highly vital individual, but he cannot be properly regarded as either religious or humanistic. He attacked both humanism and religion in their traditional forms, and instead of working out some modern equivalent for these forms, helped to usher in the era of free naturalistic expansion in the midst of which we are still living. He was above all for free temperamental expansion. He was himself emotionally expansive to a degree that was incompatible not only with artificial but with real decorum. He encouraged the humanitarian hope that brotherhood among men may be based on emotional overflow. In general the most serious confusion in the use of the word humanist has arisen from its appropriation by the humanitarians. Walt Whitman was, for instance, highly Rousseauistic in his notion of brotherhood. We should therefore know what to think of the assertion of Mr. Lewis Mumford that Walt Whitman was a true humanist; also of the assumption of the term by the left-wing Unitarians and other Protestants who have been moving towards humanitarianism.

The humanitarian has favoured not only temperamental expansion; he has also, as a rule, favoured the utmost expansion of scientific knowledge with a view to realising the Baconian ideal. Perhaps indeed the chief driving power behind the humanitarian movement has been the confidence inspired in man by the progressive control physical science has enabled him to acquire over the forces of nature. It goes without saying that the humanist is not hostile to science as such but only to a science that has overstepped its due bounds, and in general to every form of naturalism, whether rationalistic or emotional, that sets up as a substitute for humanism or religion. In the case of such encroachments there is not only a quarrel between the naturalist and the humanist, but a quarrel of first principles. When first principles are involved the law of measure is no longer applicable. One should not be moderate in dealing with error. I have pointed out elsewhere the danger of confounding the humanistic attitude with that of the Laodicean.

The reason for the radical clash between the humanist and the purely naturalistic philosopher is that the humanist requires a centre to which he may refer the manifold of experience; and this the phenomenal world does not supply. In getting his centre the humanist may appeal primarily to tradition, or as I have said, to intuition. In the latter case he will need to submit to a searching Socratic dialectic the word intuition itself--to distinguish between intuitions of the One and intuitions of the Many. Otherwise he will run the risk of not being a modern but only a modernist. The contrast between modern and modernist is not unlike that between Socrates and the sophists. Both modern and modernist are under compulsion to accept in some form the ancient maxim that man is the measure of all things. Only, the measure of the modern is based on a perception of the something in himself that is set above the flux and that he possesses in common with other men; whereas the perception with which the modernist is chiefly concerned, to the subversion of any true measure whatsoever, is of the divergent and the changeful both within and without himself. The present menace to humanism, it has been said, is less from its enemies than from those who profess to be its friends. Thus Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford proclaims himself a humanist, and at the same time seeks to show that the true humanist was not Socrates but that precursor of recent “flowing” philosophers, Protagoras.

It should be noted that many of our votaries of change and mobility are more emotional than Protagoras or any other Greek sophist. They tend to make, not their own thoughts, but their own feelings the measure of all things. This indulgence in feeling has been encouraged by the sentimentalists who have discovered in feeling not only the quintessentially human element, but, as I said in speaking of Rousseau, the ultimate ground of fraternal union. In our own time, partly perhaps as a result of the psycho-analytical probing of the sources of the emotional life in the subconscious, there is a growing distrust of the sentimentalist. To be sure, one may, according to the psycho-analyst, turn the emotions to good account by a process of “sublimation.” Why not escape still more completely from one’s complexes and infantile survivals by adjusting oneself to the cosmic order that is revealed to the scientific investigator in his laboratory? One may thus cease to be ego-centric and become truly mature and disinterested. This is the attitude that Mr. Walter Lippmann recommends in A Preface to Morals, and it is this attitude that, by a flagrant misuse of the word, he terms “humanism.” It is well that a man should adjust himself to the reality of the natural order and, as a preliminary, should strive to be objective in the scientific sense; but humanism calls for an adjustment to a very different order that is also “real” and “objective” in its own way. It insists in short that there is a “law for man” as well as a “law for thing,” and is in this sense dualistic. Mr. Lippmann’s attempt to base ethics on monistic postulates is, from either a religious or humanistic point of view, a revival of the stoical error. Yet he would have us believe that any one who has become disinterested after the scientific fashion has got the equivalent not only of humanism but of “high religion.” By thus dissimulating the gap between the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the laboratory, he is flattering some of the most dangerous illusions of the present time. He escapes from the main humanitarian tendency to give to feeling a primacy that does not belong to it, only to encourage its other main tendency to accord to physical science a hegemony to which it is not entitled.

It is self-evident that humanitarianism of the scientific or utilitarian type, with its glorification of the specialist who is ready to sacrifice his rounded development, if only he can contribute his mite to “progress,” is at odds with the humanistic ideal of poise and proportion. The religious pretensions of humanitarianism of this type are even more inacceptable, at least if one understands by religion anything resembling the great traditional faiths. The Baconian has inclined from the outset to substitute an outer for an inner working--the effort of the individual upon himself--that religion has, in some form or other, always required. The result has been to encourage the acquisitive life and also the pursuit of material instead of spiritual “comfort.” A typical example of this utilitarian trend is Professor T. N. Carver’s Religion Worth Having, in which he so exalts the “productive life” that religion is all but identified with thrift. At this rate it may soon be possible to get one’s religion securely tucked away in a safe-deposit drawer! One should, however, be grateful to Professor Carver for not having called himself a humanist.

It does not seem possible to supply from the sentimental or Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement the elements that are, religiously speaking, absent from its utilitarian side. The nature to which the Rousseauist invites one to return, is, as I have sought to show elsewhere, only a projection of the idyllic imagination. In the state of nature or some similar state thus projected, in other words in Arcadia, man is “good.” Practically this has meant that there is in the natural man an altruistic impulse that may prevail over his egoism. The upshot of this myth of man’s natural goodness has been to discredit the traditional controls, both humanistic and religious. Humility, conversion, decorum, all go by the board in favour of unrestricted temperamental overflow. The crucial question is whether the immense machinery of power that has resulted from the efforts of the utilitarians can be made, on this basis of unlimited expansion, to serve disinterested ends. Everything converges indeed on both sides of the humanitarian movement upon the idea of service. If it can be shown that there has been no vital omission in the passage from the service of God to the service of man, one may safely side with all the altruists from the third Earl of Shaftesbury to John Dewey. Unfortunately a formidable mass of evidence has been accumulating (the Great War was for many a convincing demonstration) that, in the natural man as he exists in the real world and not in some romantic dreamland, the will to power is more than a match for the will to service.

The benefits that have ensued from the major concentration upon the natural order that has been under way since the Renaissance have been numerous and dazzling. We are still celebrating these benefits under the name of progress. It is no longer possible, however, to allay the suspicion that the price which has been paid for progress of this type has been a growing superficiality in dealing with the still more important problems of the human order. “Nothing is more certain,” says Burke in a well-known passage, “than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.” The whole debate would seem to narrow down to the question whether it is possible to secure on utilitarian-sentimental lines a valid equivalent for Burke’s two principles. As for the “spirit of a gentleman,” its decline is so obvious as scarcely to admit of argument. It has even been maintained that in America, the country in which the collapse of traditional standards has been most complete, the gentleman is at a positive disadvantage in the world of practical affairs; he is likely to get on more quickly if he assumes the “mucker pose.” According to William James, usually taken to be the representative American philosopher, the very idea of the gentleman has about it something slightly satanic. “The prince of darkness,” says James, “may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but, whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”

As for the “spirit of religion,” I have already glanced at its humanitarian substitute. The humanitarian maintains that the spirit that appears in Christianity will, if disengaged from mere dogma, be found to be something very similar to his own spirit of service. One should at least be able to understand the position of the person who has become convinced that there is a supernatural element in genuine Christianity, lost in the passage from the old dispensation to the new, for which mere altruism is no substitute, and who therefore takes his stand on the side of tradition. Dogmatic and revealed religion, he argues, was alone capable of rescuing the ancient world from a decadent naturalism. It alone affords an avenue of escape from the analogous situation that confronts the world to-day.

III

The relation of the humanist to this religious traditionalist can scarcely be defined too carefully. Between the humanist and the humanitarian, I have said, there is a clash of first principles. Between the humanist and the authentic Christian, on the other hand, there is room for important co-operation. To be sure, many of the leaders of the early Church were satisfied with nothing short of a stark supernaturalism and inclined to reject the genuinely humanistic elements of the ancient civilisation along with its naturalistic errors. But the orthodox attitude has, in spite of the difficulties of reconciling otherworldliness with a merely secular wisdom, come to be one of friendliness to the classical humanities. Mr. T. S. Eliot is probably close to this attitude when he maintains that humanism is of very great value, but only in subordination to the historical Church. As an independent doctrine, at least in any large way, it is, he maintains, ineffective. A broad survey of the past does not, however, confirm the view that humanism is thus either precarious or parasitical. The two most notable manifestations of the humanistic spirit that the world has seen, that in ancient Greece and that in Confucian China, did not have the support of Christianity or any other form of revealed religion. Take again the humanism of seventeenth-century France: the ideal of the finely poised gentleman who “does not plume himself on anything” was often allied with Christianity (“devout humanism”), but it was also found among the free-thinkers (“libertines”) who were hostile to every form of belief in the supernatural.