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   :PG.Title: Character and Opinion in the United States
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   :DC.Title: Character and Opinion in the United States
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    CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES
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      Title: Character and Opinion in the United States

      Author: George Santayana

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   CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES

   BY THE SAME AUTHOR

   THE LIFE OF REASON

   OR THE PHASES OF HUMAN PROGRESS

   Vol. I. Reason in Common Sense.

   Vol. II. Reason in Society.

   Vol. III. Reason in Religion.

   Vol. IV. Reason in Art.

   Vol. V. Reason in Science.

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   INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND RELIGION

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   THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

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   LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM THE WRITINGS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA

   Edited with a Preface by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

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   **CHARACTER & OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES**

   **WITH REMINISCENCES OF WILLIAM JAMES AND JOSIAH ROYCE**

   **AND ACADEMIC LIFE IN AMERICA**

   BY

   GEORGE SANTAYANA

   LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

   NEW YORK

   CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

   1921

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   *First Published 1920*

   *Reprinted 1921*

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PREFACE
=======

The major part of this book is composed
of lectures originally addressed to British
audiences. I have added a good deal, but
I make no apology, now that the whole may
fall under American eyes, for preserving the
tone and attitude of a detached observer.
Not at all on the ground that “to see ourselves
as others see us” would be to see
ourselves truly; on the contrary, I agree
with Spinoza where he says that other
people’s idea of a man is apt to be a better
expression of their nature than of his. I
accept this principle in the present instance,
and am willing it should be applied to the
judgements contained in this book, in which
the reader may see chiefly expressions of my
own feelings and hints of my own opinions.
Only an American—and I am not one except
by long association [1]_—can speak for the heart
of America. I try to understand it, as a
family friend may who has a different temperament;
but it is only my own mind that
I speak for at bottom, or wish to speak for.
Certainly my sentiments are of little importance
compared with the volume and
destiny of the things I discuss here: yet the
critic and artist too have their rights, and to
take as calm and as long a view as possible
seems to be but another name for the love
of truth. Moreover, I suspect that my feelings
are secretly shared by many people in
America, natives and foreigners, who may
not have the courage or the occasion to
express them frankly. After all, it has been
acquaintance with America and American
philosophers that has chiefly contributed to
clear and to settle my own mind. I have no
axe to grind, only my thoughts to burnish,
in the hope that some part of the truth of
things may be reflected there; and I am
confident of not giving serious offence to the
judicious, because they will feel that it is
affection for the American people that makes
me wish that what is best and most beautiful
should not be absent from their lives.

Civilisation is perhaps approaching one of
those long winters that overtake it from time
to time. A flood of barbarism from below
may soon level all the fair works of our
Christian ancestors, as another flood two
thousand years ago levelled those of the
ancients. Romantic Christendom—picturesque,
passionate, unhappy episode—may be
coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would
be no reason for despair. Nothing lasts for
ever; but the elasticity of life is wonderful,
and even if the world lost its memory it could
not lose its youth. Under the deluge, and
watered by it, seeds of all sorts would survive
against the time to come, even if what might
eventually spring from them, under the new
circumstances, should wear a strange aspect.
In a certain measure, and unintentionally,
both this destruction and this restoration
have already occurred in America. There is
much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect
for what is past or alien; but there is a fund
of vigour, goodness, and hope such as no
nation ever possessed before. In what sometimes
looks like American greediness and
jostling for the front place, all is love of
achievement, nothing is unkindness; it is a
fearless people, and free from malice, as you
might see in their eyes and gestures, even if
their conduct did not prove it. This soil is
propitious to every seed, and tares must
needs grow in it; but why should it not also
breed clear thinking, honest judgement, and
rational happiness? These things are indeed
not necessary to existence, and without them
America might long remain rich and populous
like many a barbarous land in the past; but
in that case its existence would be hounded,
like theirs, by falsity and remorse. May
Heaven avert the omen, and make the new
world a better world than the old! In the
classical and romantic tradition of Europe,
love, of which there was very little, was
supposed to be kindled by beauty, of which
there was a great deal: perhaps moral
chemistry may be able to reverse this operation,
and in the future and in America it
may breed beauty out of love.

.. [1] Perhaps I should add that I have not been in the United
   States since January 1912. My observations stretched, with
   some intervals, through the forty years preceding that date.

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CHAPTER I—THE MORAL BACKGROUND
==============================

About the middle of the nineteenth century,
in the quiet sunshine of provincial prosperity,
New England had an Indian summer
of the mind; and an agreeable reflective
literature showed how brilliant that russet
and yellow season could be. There were
poets, historians, orators, preachers, most of
whom had studied foreign literatures and had
travelled; they demurely kept up with the
times; they were universal humanists. But
it was all a harvest of leaves; these worthies
had an expurgated and barren conception
of life; theirs was the purity of sweet old
age. Sometimes they made attempts to rejuvenate
their minds by broaching native
subjects; they wished to prove how much
matter for poetry the new world supplied,
and they wrote “Rip van Winkle,” “Hiawatha,”
or “Evangeline”; but the inspiration
did not seem much more American
than that of Swift or Ossian or Châteaubriand.
These cultivated writers lacked
native roots and fresh sap because the
American intellect itself lacked them. Their
culture was half a pious survival, half an
intentional acquirement; it was not the
inevitable flowering of a fresh experience.
Later there have been admirable analytic
novelists who have depicted American life
as it is, but rather bitterly, rather sadly;
as if the joy and the illusion of it did not
inspire them, but only an abstract interest
in their own art. If any one, like Walt
Whitman, penetrated to the feelings and
images which the American scene was able
to breed out of itself, and filled them with a
frank and broad afflatus of his own, there
is no doubt that he misrepresented the conscious
minds of cultivated Americans; in
them the head as yet did not belong to
the trunk.

Nevertheless, *belles-lettres* in the United
States—which after all stretch beyond New
England—have always had two points of
contact with the great national experiment.
One point of contact has been oratory, with
that sort of poetry, patriotic, religious, or
moral, which has the function of oratory.
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation
is an aristocratic one. By eloquence
at public meetings and dinners, in the pulpit
or in the press, the impulses of the community
could be brought to expression;
consecrated maxims could be reapplied;
the whole latent manliness and shrewdness
of the nation could be mobilised. In the
form of oratory reflection, rising out of the
problems of action, could be turned to guide
or to sanction action, and sometimes could
attain, in so doing, a notable elevation of
thought. Although Americans, and many
other people, usually say that thought is
for the sake of action, it has evidently been
in these high moments, when action became
incandescent in thought, that they have
been most truly alive, intensively most
active, and although *doing* nothing, have
found at last that their existence was worth
while. Reflection is itself a turn, and the
top turn, given to life. Here is the second
point at which literature in America has
fused with the activities of the nation: it
has paused to enjoy them. Every animal
has his festive and ceremonious moments,
when he poses or plumes himself or thinks;
sometimes he even sings and flies aloft in a
sort of ecstasy. Somewhat in the same way,
when reflection in man becomes dominant,
it may become passionate; it may create
religion or philosophy—adventures often
more thrilling than the humdrum experience
they are supposed to interrupt.

This pure flame of mind is nothing new,
superadded, or alien in America. It is
notorious how metaphysical was the passion
that drove the Puritans to those shores;
they went there in the hope of living more
perfectly in the spirit. And their pilgrim’s
progress was not finished when they had
founded their churches in the wilderness;
an endless migration of the mind was still
before them, a flight from those new idols
and servitudes which prosperity involves,
and the eternal lure of spiritual freedom
and truth. The moral world always contains
undiscovered or thinly peopled continents
open to those who are more attached
to what might or should be than to what
already is. Americans are eminently prophets;
they apply morals to public affairs;
they are impatient and enthusiastic. Their
judgements have highly speculative implications,
which they often make explicit; they
are men with principles, and fond of stating
them. Moreover, they have an intense self-reliance;
to exercise private judgement is
not only a habit with them but a conscious
duty. Not seldom personal conversions and
mystical experiences throw their ingrained
faith into novel forms, which may be very
bold and radical. They are traditionally
exercised about religion, and adrift on the
subject more than any other people on
earth; and if religion is a dreaming philosophy,
and philosophy a waking religion, a
people so wide awake and so religious as the
old Yankees ought certainly to have been
rich in philosophers.

In fact, philosophy in the good old sense
of curiosity about the nature of things, with
readiness to make the best of them, has
not been absent from the practice of Americans
or from their humorous moods; their
humour and shrewdness are sly comments on
the shortcomings of some polite convention
that everybody accepts tacitly, yet feels to
be insecure and contrary to the principles
on which life is actually carried on. Nevertheless,
with the shyness which simple competence
often shows in the presence of
conventional shams, these wits have not
taken their native wisdom very seriously.
They have not had the leisure nor the
intellectual scope to think out and defend
the implications of their homely perceptions.
Their fresh insight has been whispered in
parentheses and asides; it has been humbly
banished, in alarm, from their solemn
moments. What people have respected have
been rather scraps of official philosophy, or
entire systems, which they have inherited
or imported, as they have respected operas
and art museums. To be on speaking terms
with these fine things was a part of social
respectability, like having family silver.
High thoughts must be at hand, like those
candlesticks, probably candleless, sometimes
displayed as a seemly ornament in a room
blazing with electric light. Even in William
James, spontaneous and stimulating as he
was, a certain underlying discomfort was
discernible; he had come out into the open,
into what should have been the sunshine,
but the vast shadow of the temple still stood
between him and the sun. He was worried
about what *ought* to be believed and the
awful deprivations of disbelieving. What
he called the cynical view of anything had
first to be brushed aside, without stopping
to consider whether it was not the true one;
and he was bent on finding new and empirical
reasons for clinging to free-will, departed
spirits, and tutelary gods. Nobody, except
perhaps in this last decade, has tried to
bridge the chasm between what he believes
in daily life and the “problems” of philosophy.
Nature and science have not been
ignored, and “practice” in some schools has
been constantly referred to; but instead
of supplying philosophy with its data they
have only constituted its difficulties; its
function has been not to build on known
facts but to explain them away. Hence a
curious alternation and irrelevance, as between
weekdays and Sabbaths, between
American ways and American opinions.

That philosophy should be attached to
tradition would be a great advantage, conducive
to mutual understanding, to maturity,
and to progress, if the tradition lay in the
highway of truth. To deviate from it in
that case would be to betray the fact that,
while one might have a lively mind, one was
not master of the subject. Unfortunately,
in the nineteenth century, in America as
elsewhere, the ruling tradition was not only
erratic and far from the highway of truth,
but the noonday of this tradition was over,
and its classic forms were outgrown. A
philosophy may have a high value, other
than its truth to things, in its truth to
method and to the genius of its author; it
may be a feat of synthesis and imagination,
like a great poem, expressing one of the
eternal possibilities of being, although one
which the creator happened to reject when
he made this world. It is possible to be a
master in false philosophy—easier, in fact,
than to be a master in the truth, because
a false philosophy can be made as simple
and consistent as one pleases. Such had
been the masters of the tradition prevalent
in New England—Calvin, Hume, Fichte, not
to mention others more relished because less
pure; but one of the disadvantages of such
perfection in error is that the illusion is
harder to transmit to another age and
country. If Jonathan Edwards, for instance,
was a Calvinist of pristine force
and perhaps the greatest *master* in false
philosophy that America has yet produced,
he paid the price by being abandoned, even
in his lifetime, by his own sect, and seeing
the world turn a deaf ear to his logic
without so much as attempting to refute it.
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation,
especially in America, is that ideas are
abandoned in virtue of a mere change of
feeling, without any new evidence or new
arguments. We do not nowadays refute
our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them
good-bye. Even if all our principles are
unwittingly traditional we do not like to
bow openly to authority. Hence masters
like Calvin, Hume, or Fichte rose before
their American admirers like formidable
ghosts, foreign and unseizable. People refused
to be encumbered with any system,
even one of their own; they were content
to imbibe more or less of the spirit of a
philosophy and to let it play on such facts
as happened to attract their attention. The
originality even of Emerson and of William
James was of this incidental character; they
found new approaches to old beliefs or new
expedients in old dilemmas. They were not
in a scholastic sense pupils of anybody or
masters in anything. They hated the scholastic
way of saying what they meant, if
they had heard of it; they insisted on a
personal freshness of style, refusing to make
their thought more precise than it happened
to be spontaneously; and they lisped their
logic, when the logic came.

We must remember that ever since the
days of Socrates, and especially after the
establishment of Christianity, the dice of
thought have been loaded. Certain pledges
have preceded inquiry and divided the
possible conclusions beforehand into the
acceptable and the inacceptable, the edifying
and the shocking, the noble and the
base. Wonder has no longer been the root
of philosophy, but sometimes impatience
at having been cheated and sometimes fear
of being undeceived. The marvel of existence,
in which the luminous and the opaque
are so romantically mingled, no longer lay
like a sea open to intellectual adventure,
tempting the mind to conceive some bold
and curious system of the universe on the
analogy of what had been so far discovered.
Instead, people were confronted with an orthodoxy—though
not always the same orthodoxy—whispering
mysteries and brandishing
anathemas. Their wits were absorbed in
solving traditional problems, many of them
artificial and such as the ruling orthodoxy
had created by its gratuitous assumptions.
Difficulties were therefore found in some
perfectly obvious truths; and obvious fables,
if they were hallowed by association, were
seriously weighed in the balance against one
another or against the facts; and many an
actual thing was proved to be impossible, or
was hidden under a false description. In
conservative schools the student learned and
tried to fathom the received solutions; in
liberal schools he was perhaps invited to
seek solutions of his own, but still to the
old questions. Freedom, when nominally
allowed, was a provisional freedom; if your
wanderings did not somehow bring you back
to orthodoxy you were a misguided being,
no matter how disparate from the orthodox
might be the field from which you fetched
your little harvest; and if you could not
be answered you were called superficial.
Most spirits are cowed by such disparagement;
but even those who snap their fingers
at it do not escape; they can hardly help
feeling that in calling a spade a spade they
are petulant and naughty; or if their inspiration
is too genuine for that, they still
unwittingly shape their opinions in contrast
to those that claim authority, and therefore
on the same false lines—a terrible tax
to pay to the errors of others; and it is
only here and there that a very great and
solitary mind, like that of Spinoza, can
endure obloquy without bitterness or can
pass through perverse controversies without
contagion.

Under such circumstances it is obvious
that speculation can be frank and happy
only where orthodoxy has receded, abandoning
a larger and larger field to unprejudiced
inquiry; or else (as has happened among
liberal Protestants) where the very heart of
orthodoxy has melted, has absorbed the most
alien substances, and is ready to bloom into
anything that anybody finds attractive. This
is the secret of that extraordinary vogue
which the transcendental philosophy has
had for nearly a century in Great Britain
and America; it is a method which enables
a man to renovate all his beliefs, scientific
and religious, from the inside, giving them a
new status and interpretation as phases of
his own experience or imagination; so that
he does not seem to himself to reject anything,
and yet is bound to nothing, except to
his creative self. Many too who have no
inclination to practise this transcendental
method—a personal, arduous, and futile art,
which requires to be renewed at every moment—have
been impressed with the results or the
maxims of this or that transcendental philosopher,
such as that every opinion leads on
to another that reinterprets it, or every evil
to some higher good that contains it; and
they have managed to identify these views
with what still seemed to them vital in
religion.

In spite of this profound mutation at the
core, and much paring at the edges, traditional
belief in New England retained its
continuity and its priestly unction; and
religious teachers and philosophers could
slip away from Calvinism and even from
Christianity without any loss of elevation
or austerity. They found it so pleasant
and easy to elude the past that they really
had no quarrel with it. The world, they
felt, was a safe place, watched over by a
kindly God, who exacted nothing but cheerfulness
and good-will from his children; and
the American flag was a sort of rainbow in
the sky, promising that all storms were over.
Or if storms came, such as the Civil War,
they would not be harder to weather than
was necessary to test the national spirit
and raise it to a new efficiency. The subtler
dangers which we may now see threatening
America had not yet come in sight—material
restlessness was not yet ominous, the pressure
of business enterprises was not yet out
of scale with the old life or out of key with
the old moral harmonies. A new type of
American had not appeared—the untrained,
pushing, cosmopolitan orphan, cock-sure in
manner but not too sure in his morality, to
whom the old Yankee, with his sour integrity,
is almost a foreigner. Was not “increase,”
in the Bible, a synonym for benefit? Was
not “abundance” the same, or almost the
same, as happiness?

Meantime the churches, a little ashamed
of their past, began to court the good opinion
of so excellent a world. Although called
evangelical, they were far, very far, from
prophesying its end, or offering a refuge from
it, or preaching contempt for it; they existed
only to serve it, and their highest divine
credential was that the world needed them.
Irreligion, dissoluteness, and pessimism—supposed
naturally to go together—could
never prosper; they were incompatible with
efficiency. That was the supreme test. “Be
Christians,” I once heard a president of Yale
College cry to his assembled pupils, “be
Christians and you will be successful.”
Religion was indispensable and sacred, when
not carried too far; but theology might well
be unnecessary. Why distract this world
with talk of another? Enough for the day
was the good thereof. Religion should be
disentangled as much as possible from history
and authority and metaphysics, and made to
rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on one’s
indomitable optimism and trust in life.
Revelation was nothing miraculous, given
once for all in some remote age and foreign
country; it must come to us directly, and
with greater authority now than ever before.
If evolution was to be taken seriously and to
include moral growth, the great men of the
past could only be stepping-stones to our
own dignity. To grow was to contain and
sum up all the good that had gone before,
adding an appropriate increment. Undoubtedly
some early figures were beautiful,
and allowances had to be made for local
influences in Palestine, a place so much more
primitive and backward than Massachusetts.
Jesus was a prophet more winsome and nearer
to ourselves than his predecessors; but how
could any one deny that the twenty centuries
of progress since his time must have raised
a loftier pedestal for Emerson or Charming or
Phillips Brooks? It might somehow not be
in good taste to put this feeling into clear
words; one and perhaps two of these men
would have deprecated it; nevertheless it
beamed with refulgent self-satisfaction in the
lives and maxims of most of their followers.

All this liberalism, however, never touched
the centre of traditional orthodoxy, and those
who, for all their modernness, felt that they
inherited the faith of their fathers and were
true to it were fundamentally right. There
was still an orthodoxy among American highbrows
at the end of the nineteenth century,
dissent from which was felt to be scandalous;
it consisted in holding that the universe exists
and is governed for the sake of man or of the
human spirit. This persuasion, arrogant as
it might seem, is at bottom an expression of
impotence rather than of pride. The soul is
originally vegetative; it feels the weal and
woe of what occurs within the body. With
locomotion and the instinct to hunt and to
flee, animals begin to notice external things
also; but the chief point noticed about them
is whether they are good or bad, friendly
or hostile, far or near. The station of the
animal and his interests thus become the
measure of all things for him, in so far as he
knows them; and this aspect of them is, by
a primitive fatality, the heart of them to
him. It is only reason that can discount
these childish perspectives, neutralise the
bias of each by collating it with the others,
and masterfully conceive the field in which
their common objects are deployed, discovering
also the principle of foreshortening
or projection which produces each perspective
in turn. But reason is a later comer
into this world, and weak; against its suasion
stands the mighty resistance of habit and of
moral presumption. It is in their interest,
and to rehabilitate the warm vegetative
autonomy of the primitive soul, that orthodox
religion and philosophy labour in the western
world—for the mind of India cannot be
charged with this folly. Although inwardly
these systems have not now a good conscience
and do not feel very secure (for they are
retrograde and sin against the light), yet outwardly
they are solemn and venerable; and
they have incorporated a great deal of moral
wisdom with their egotism or humanism—more
than the Indians with their respect for
the infinite. In deifying human interests
they have naturally studied and expressed
them justly, whereas those who perceive the
relativity of human goods are tempted to
scorn them—which is itself unreasonable—and
to sacrifice them all to the single passion
of worship or of despair. Hardly anybody,
except possibly the Greeks at their best, has
realised the sweetness and glory of being a
rational animal.

The Jews, as we know, had come to think
that it was the creator of the world, the God
of the universe, who had taken them for
his chosen people. Christians in turn had
asserted that it was God in person who,
having become a man, had founded their
church. According to this Hebraic tradition,
the dignity of man did not lie in being a
mind (which he undoubtedly is) but in being
a creature materially highly favoured, with
a longer life and a brighter destiny than other
creatures in the world. It is remarkable how
deep, in the Hebraic religions, is this interest
in material existence; so deep that we are
surprised when we discover that, according
to the insight of other races, this interest is
the essence of irreligion. Some detachment
from existence and from hopes of material
splendour has indeed filtered into Christianity
through Platonism. Socrates and
his disciples admired this world, but they
did not particularly covet it, or wish to live
long in it, or expect to improve it; what
they cared for was an idea or a good which
they found expressed in it, something outside
it and timeless, in which the contemplative
intellect might be literally absorbed. This
philosophy was no less humanistic than that
of the Jews, though in a less material fashion:
if it did not read the universe in terms of
thrift, it read it in terms of art. The pursuit
of a good, such as is presumably aimed at in
human action, was supposed to inspire every
movement in nature; and this good, for the
sake of which the very heavens revolved,
was akin to the intellectual happiness of a
Greek sage. Nature was a philosopher in
pursuit of an idea. Natural science then
took a moralising turn which it has not yet
quite outgrown. Socrates required of astronomy,
if it was to be true science, that it
should show why *it was best* that the sun
and moon should be as they are; and Plato,
refining on this, assures us that the eyes are
placed in the front of the head, rather than
at the back, because the front is the nobler
quarter, and that the intestines are long in
order that we may have leisure between meals
to study philosophy. Curiously enough, the
very enemies of final causes sometimes catch
this infection and attach absolute values to
facts in an opposite sense and in an inhuman
interest; and you often hear in America
that whatever is is right. These naturalists,
while they rebuke the moralists for thinking
that nature is ruled magically for our
good, think her adorable for being ruled,
in scorn of us, only by her own laws;
and thus we oscillate between egotism and
idolatry.

The Reformation did not reform this
belief in the cosmic supremacy of man, or the
humanity of God; on the contrary, it took
it (like so much else) in terrible German
earnest, not suffering it any longer to be
accepted somewhat lightly as a classical
figure of speech or a mystery resting on
revelation. The human race, the chosen
people, the Christian elect were like tabernacle
within tabernacle for the spirit; but
in the holy of holies was the spirit itself,
one’s own spirit and experience, which was
the centre of everything. Protestant philosophy,
exploring the domain of science and
history with confidence, and sure of finding
the spirit walking there, was too conscientious
to misrepresent what it found. As the
terrible facts could not be altered they had
to be undermined. By turning psychology
into metaphysics this could be accomplished,
and we could reach the remarkable conclusion
that the human spirit was not so much the
purpose of the universe as its seat, and the
only universe there was.

This conclusion, which sums up idealism
on its critical or scientific side, would not of
itself give much comfort to religious minds,
that usually crave massive support rather
than sublime independence; it leads to the
heroic egotism of Fichte or Nietzsche rather
than to any green pastures beside any still
waters. But the critical element in idealism
can be used to destroy belief in the natural
world; and by so doing it can open the way
to another sort of idealism, not at all critical,
which might be called the higher superstition.
This views the world as an oracle
or charade, concealing a dramatic unity, or
formula, or maxim, which all experience
exists to illustrate. The habit of regarding
existence as a riddle, with a surprising solution
which we think we have found, should
be the source of rather mixed emotions;
the facts remain as they were, and rival
solutions may at any time suggest themselves;
and the one we have hit on may
not, after all, be particularly comforting.
The Christian may find himself turned by it
into a heathen, the humanist into a pantheist,
and the hope with which we instinctively
faced life may be chastened into mere conformity.
Nevertheless, however chilling and
inhuman our higher superstition may prove,
it will make us feel that we are masters of
a mystical secret, that we have a faith to
defend, and that, like all philosophers, we
have taken a ticket in a lottery in which if
we hit on the truth, even if it seems a blank,
we shall have drawn the first prize.

Orthodoxy in New England, even so transformed
and attenuated, did not of course
hold the field alone. There are materialists
by instinct in every age and country;
there are always private gentlemen whom
the clergy and the professors cannot deceive.
Here and there a medical or scientific man,
or a man of letters, will draw from his special
pursuits some hint of the nature of things at
large; or a political radical will nurse undying
wrath against all opinions not tartly
hostile to church and state. But these
clever people are not organised, they are not
always given to writing, nor speculative
enough to make a system out of their convictions.
The enthusiasts and the pedagogues
naturally flock to the other camp.
The very competence which scientific people
and connoisseurs have in their special fields
disinclines them to generalise, or renders their
generalisations one-sided; so that their speculations
are extraordinarily weak and stammering.
Both by what they represent and by
what they ignore they are isolated and
deprived of influence, since only those who
are at home in a subject can feel the force of
analogies drawn from that field, whereas
any one can be swayed by sentimental and
moral appeals, by rhetoric and unction.
Furthermore, in America the materialistic
school is without that support from popular
passions which it draws in many European
countries from its association with anticlericalism
or with revolutionary politics;
and it also lacks the maturity, self-confidence,
and refinement proper in older societies to
the great body of Epicurean and disenchanted
opinion, where for centuries wits,
critics, minor philosophers, and men of the
world have chuckled together over their
Horace, their Voltaire, and their Gibbon.
The horror which the theologians have of
infidelity passes therefore into the average
American mind unmitigated by the suspicion
that anything pleasant could lie in that
quarter, much less the open way to nature
and truth and a secure happiness.
There is another handicap, of a more
technical sort, under which naturalistic philosophy
labours in America, as it does in
England; it has been crossed by scepticism
about the validity of perception and has
become almost identical with psychology.
Of course, for any one who thinks naturalistically
(as the British empiricists did in
the beginning, like every unsophisticated
mortal), psychology is the description of a
very superficial and incidental complication
in the animal kingdom: it treats of
the curious sensibility and volatile thoughts
awakened in the mind by the growth and
fortunes of the body. In noting these
thoughts and feelings, we can observe how
far they constitute true knowledge of the
world in which they arise, how far they ignore
it, and how far they play with it, by virtue
of the poetry and the syntax of discourse
which they add out of their own exuberance;
for fancy is a very fertile treacherous thing,
as every one finds when he dreams. But
dreams run over into waking life, and sometimes
seem to permeate and to underlie it;
and it was just this suspicion that he
might be dreaming awake, that discourse and
tradition might be making a fool of him,
that prompted the hard-headed Briton, even
before the Reformation, to appeal from
conventional beliefs to “experience.” He
was anxious to clear away those sophistries
and impostures of which he was particularly
apprehensive, in view of the somewhat foreign
character of his culture and religion. Experience,
he thought, would bear unimpeachable
witness to the nature of things;
for by experience he understood knowledge
produced by direct contact with the object.
Taken in this sense, experience is a method
of discovery, an exercise of intelligence; it
is the same observation of things, strict,
cumulative, and analytic, which produces
the natural sciences. It rests on naturalistic
assumptions (since we know when and where
we find our data) and could not fail to end
in materialism. What prevented British
empiricism from coming to this obvious
conclusion was a peculiarity of the national
temperament. The Englishman is not only
distrustful of too much reasoning and too
much theory (and science and materialism
involve a good deal of both), but he is
also fond of musing and of withdrawing into
his inner man. Accordingly his empiricism
took an introspective form; like Hamlet he
stopped at the *how*; he began to think
about thinking. His first care was now to
arrest experience as he underwent it; though
its presence could not be denied, it came in
such a questionable shape that it could not
be taken at its word. This mere presence of
experience, this ghostly apparition to the
inner man, was all that empirical philosophy
could now profess to discover. Far from
being an exercise of intelligence, it retracted
all understanding, all interpretation, all instinctive
faith; far from furnishing a sure
record of the truths of nature, it furnished
a set of pathological facts, the passive subject-matter
of psychology. These now seemed
the only facts admissible, and psychology, for
the philosophers, became the only science.
Experience could discover nothing, but all
discoveries had to be retracted, so that
they should revert to the fact of experience
and terminate there. Evidently when the
naturalistic background and meaning of
experience have dropped out in this way,
empiricism is a form of idealism, since whatever
objects we can come upon will all be
*a priori* and *a fortiori* and *sensu eminentiori*
ideal in the mind. The irony of logic actually
made English empiricism, understood in this
psychological way, the starting-point for
transcendentalism and for German philosophy.

Between these two senses of the word
experience, meaning sometimes contact with
things and at other times absolute feeling,
the empirical school in England and America
has been helplessly torn, without ever showing
the courage or the self-knowledge to
choose between them. I think we may say
that on the whole their view has been this:
that feelings or ideas were absolute atoms
of existence, without any ground or source,
so that the elements of their universe were
all mental; but they conceived these psychical
elements to be deployed in a physical
time and even (since there were many
simultaneous series of them) in some sort
of space. These philosophers were accordingly
idealists about substance but naturalists
about the order and relations of existences;
and experience on their lips meant
feeling when they were thinking of particulars,
but when they were thinking broadly, in
matters of history or science, experience
meant the universal nebula or cataract which
these feelings composed—itself no object of
experience, but one believed in and very
imperfectly presented in imagination. These
men believed in nature, and were materialists
at heart and to all practical purposes; but
they were shy intellectually, and seemed to
think they ran less risk of error in holding
a thing covertly than in openly professing it.

If any one, like Herbert Spencer, kept
psychology in its place and in that respect
remained a pure naturalist, he often forfeited
this advantage by enveloping the
positive information he derived from the
sciences in a whirlwind of generalisations.
The higher superstition, the notion that
nature dances to the tune of some comprehensive
formula or some magic rhyme, thus
reappeared among those who claimed to
speak for natural science. In their romantic
sympathy with nature they attributed to her
an excessive sympathy with themselves; they
overlooked her infinite complications and
continual irony, and candidly believed they
could measure her with their thumb-rules.
Why should philosophers drag a toy-net of
words, fit to catch butterflies, through the
sea of being, and expect to land all the fish
in it? Why not take note simply of what
the particular sciences can as yet tell us of
the world? Certainly, when put together,
they already yield a very wonderful, very
true, and very sufficient picture of it. Are
we impatient of knowing everything? But
even if science was much enlarged it would
have limits, both in penetration and in
extent; and there would always remain, I
will not say an infinity of unsolved problems
(because “problems” are created by our
impatience or our contradictions), but an
infinity of undiscovered facts. Nature is
like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully
and as truly known at a certain
distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing
her through and through, that is nonsense
in both cases, and might not reward our
pains. The love of all-inclusiveness is as
dangerous in philosophy as in art. The
savour of nature can be enjoyed by us only
through our own senses and insight, and
an outline map of the entire universe, even
if it was not fabulously concocted, would
not tell us much that was worth knowing
about the outlying parts of it. Without
suggesting for a moment that the proper
study of mankind is man only—for it may
be landscape or mathematics—we may safely
say that their proper study is what lies
within their range and is interesting to
them. For this reason the moralists who
consider principally human life and paint
nature only as a background to their figures
are apt to be better philosophers than the
speculative naturalists. In human life we are
at home, and our views on it, if one-sided,
are for that very reason expressive of our
character and fortunes. An unfortunate
peculiarity of naturalistic philosophers is
that usually they have but cursory and
wretched notions of the inner life of the
mind; they are dead to patriotism and to religion,
they hate poetry and fancy and passion
and even philosophy itself; and therefore
(especially if their science too, as often
happens, is borrowed and vague) we need
not wonder if the academic and cultivated
world despises them, and harks back to the
mythology of Plato or Aristotle or Hegel,
who at least were conversant with the spirit
of man.

Philosophers are very severe towards other
philosophers because they expect too much.
Even under the most favourable circumstances
no mortal can be asked to seize the
truth in its wholeness or at its centre. As
the senses open to us only partial perspectives,
taken from one point of view, and
report the facts in symbols which, far from
being adequate to the full nature of what
surrounds us, resemble the coloured signals
of danger or of free way which a railway
engine-driver peers at in the night, so our
speculation, which is a sort of panoramic
sense, approaches things peripherally and
expresses them humanly. But how doubly
dyed in this subjectivity must our thought be
when an orthodoxy dominant for ages has
twisted the universe into the service of moral
interests, and when even the heretics are
entangled in a scepticism so partial and
arbitrary that it substitutes psychology,
the most derivative and dubious of sciences,
for the direct intelligent reading of experience!
But this strain of subjectivity is not
in all respects an evil; it is a warm purple
dye. When a way of thinking is deeply
rooted in the soil, and embodies the instincts
or even the characteristic errors of a people,
it has a value quite independent of its truth;
it constitutes a phase of human life and
can powerfully affect the intellectual drama
in which it figures. It is a value of this
sort that attaches to modern philosophy in
general, and very particularly to the American
thinkers I am about to discuss. There
would be a sort of irrelevance and unfairness
in measuring them by the standards of
pure science or even of a classic sagacity,
and reproaching them for not having reached
perfect consistency or fundamental clearness.
Men of intense feeling—and others will
hardly count—are not mirrors but lights.
If pure truth happened to be what they
passionately desired, they would seek it
single-mindedly, and in matters within their
competence they would probably find it;
but the desire for pure truth, like any
other, must wait to be satisfied until its
organ is ripe and the conditions are favourable.
The nineteenth century was not a
time and America was not a place where such
an achievement could be expected. There
the wisest felt themselves to be, as they
were, questioners and apostles rather than
serene philosophers. We should not pay
them the doubtful compliment of attributing
to them merits alien to their tradition
and scope, as if the nobleness they actually
possessed—their conscience, vigour, timeliness,
and influence—were not enough.

CHAPTER II—THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT
===================================

During some twenty-five years—from about
1885 to 1910—there was at Harvard College
an interesting congregation of philosophers.
Why at Harvard in particular? So long as
philosophy is the free pursuit of wisdom, it
arises wherever men of character and penetration,
each with his special experience or
hobby, look about them in this world. That
philosophers should be professors is an accident,
and almost an anomaly. Free reflection
about everything is a habit to be imitated,
but not a subject to expound; and an
original system, if the philosopher has one,
is something dark, perilous, untested, and
not ripe to be taught, nor is there much
danger that any one will learn it. The genuine
philosopher—as Royce liked to say,
quoting the Upanishads—wanders alone like
the rhinoceros. He may be followed, as he
may have been anticipated; and he may
even be accompanied, though there is as
much danger as stimulus to him in flying
with a flock. In his disputations, if he is
drawn into them, he will still be soliloquising,
and meeting not the arguments
persuasive to others, but only such a version
of them as his own thought can supply. The
value of his questions and answers, as Socrates
knew so well, will lie wholly in the monition
of the argument developing within him and
carrying him whithersoever it will, like a
dream or like a god. If philosophers must
earn their living and not beg (which some
of them have thought more consonant with
their vocation), it would be safer for them
to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to sit in a
black skull-cap and white beard at the door
of some unfrequented museum, selling the
catalogues and taking in the umbrellas;
these innocent ways of earning their bread-card
in the future republic would not prejudice
their meditations and would keep their
eyes fixed, without undue affection, on a
characteristic bit of that real world which
it is their business to understand. Or if,
being mild and bookish, it is thought they
ought to be teachers, they might teach
something else than philosophy; or if philosophy
is the only thing they are competent
to teach, it might at least not be their own,
but some classic system with which, and
against which, mankind is already inoculated—preferably
the civilised ethics and charming
myths of Plato and Aristotle, which
everybody will be the better for knowing
and few the worse for believing. At best,
the true philosopher can fulfil his mission
very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself,
or at most a few voluntary companions who
may find themselves in the same boat. It
is not easy for him to shout, or address a
crowd; he must be silent for long seasons;
for he is watching stars that move slowly
and in courses that it is possible though
difficult to foresee; and he is crushing all
things in his heart as in a winepress, until
his life and their secret flow out together.

The tendency to gather and to breed
philosophers in universities does not belong
to ages of free and humane reflection: it is
scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and
to Germany. And the reason is not far to
seek. When there is a philosophical orthodoxy,
and speculation is expected to be a
reasoned defence of some funded inspiration,
it becomes itself corporate and traditional,
and requires centres of teaching, endowment,
and propaganda. Fundamental questions
have been settled by the church, the government,
or the Zeitgeist, and the function of
the professor, himself bred in that school, is
to transmit its lore to the next generation,
with such original touches of insight or
eloquence as he may command. To maintain
and elucidate such a tradition, all the
schools and universities of Christendom were
originally founded; and if philosophy seemed
sometimes to occupy but a small place in
them—as for instance in the old-fashioned
American college—it was only because the
entire discipline and instruction of the place
were permeated with a particular system of
faith and morals, which it was almost superfluous
to teach in the abstract. In those
universities where philosophical controversy
is rife, its traditional and scholastic character
is no less obvious; it lives less on meditation
than on debate, and turns on proofs, objections,
paradoxes, or expedients for seeming
to re-establish everything that had come to
seem clearly false, by some ingenious change
of front or some twist of dialectic. Its
subject-matter is not so much what is known
of the world, as what often very ignorant
philosophers have said in answer to one
another; or else, when the age is out of
patience with scholasticism, orthodoxy may
take refuge in intuition, and for fear of the
letter without the spirit, may excuse itself
from considering at all what is logical or
probable, in order to embrace whatever
seems most welcome and comforting. The
sweet homilies of the professors then become
clerical, genteel, and feminine.

Harvard College had been founded to
rear puritan divines, and as Calvinism gradually
dissolved, it left a void there and as it
were a mould, which a philosophy expressing
the same instincts in a world intellectually
transformed could flow into and fill almost
without knowing it. Corporate bodies are
like persons, long vaguely swayed by early
impressions they may have forgotten. Even
when changes come over the spirit of their
dream, a sense of the mission to which they
were first dedicated lingers about them, and
may revive, like the antiquarian and poetic
Catholicism of Oxford in the nineteenth
century. In academic America the Platonic
and Catholic traditions had never been
planted; it was only the Calvinistic tradition,
when revived in some modern disguise,
that could stir there the secret cord of
reverence and enthusiasm. Harvard was
the seminary and academy for the inner
circle of Bostonians, and naturally responded
to all the liberal and literary movements of
which Boston was the centre. In religion
it became first Unitarian and afterwards
neutral; in philosophy it might long have
been satisfied with what other New England
colleges found sufficient, namely such lofty
views as the president, usually a clergyman,
could introduce into his baccalaureate sermons,
or into the course of lectures he might
give for seniors on the evidences of Christianity
or on the theory of evolution. Such
philosophical initiation had sufficed for the
distinguished literary men of the middle of
the century, and even for so deep a sage
as Emerson. But things cannot stand
still, and Boston, as is well known, is not
an ordinary place. When the impulse to
domestic literary expression seemed to be
exhausted, intellectual ambition took other
forms. It was an age of science, of philology,
of historical learning, and the laurels
of Germany would not let Boston sleep. As
it had a great public library, and hoped to
have a great art museum, might it not have
a great university? Harvard in one sense
was a university already, in that the college
(although there was only one) was surrounded
by a group of professional schools, notably
those of law and medicine, in which studies
requisite for the service of the community,
and leading potentially to brilliant careers,
were carried on with conspicuous success.
The number of these professional schools
might have been enlarged, as has been actually
done later, until training in all the
professions had been provided. But it happens
that the descriptive sciences, languages,
mathematics, and philosophy are not studies
useful for any profession, except that of
teaching these very subjects over again;
and there was no practical way of introducing
them into the Harvard system except to
graft them upon the curriculum of the college;
otherwise neither money nor students could
have been found for so much ornamental
learning.

This circumstance, external and irrelevant
as it may seem, I think had a great
influence over the temper and quality of the
Harvard philosophers; for it mingled responsibility
for the education of youth, and
much labour in it, with their pure speculation.
Teaching is a delightful paternal art, and
especially teaching intelligent and warm-hearted
youngsters, as most American collegians
are; but it is an art like acting, where
the performance, often rehearsed, must be
adapted to an audience hearing it only once.
The speaker must make concessions to their
impatience, their taste, their capacity, their
prejudices, their ultimate good; he must
neither bore nor perplex nor demoralise them.
His thoughts must be such as can flow daily,
and be set down in notes; they must come
when the bell rings and stop appropriately
when the bell rings a second time. The best
that is in him, as Mephistopheles says in
*Faust*, he dare not tell them; and as the
substance of this possession is spiritual, to
withhold is often to lose it. For it is not
merely a matter of fearing not to be understood,
or giving offence; in the presence of
a hundred youthful upturned faces a man
cannot, without diffidence, speak in his own
person, of his own thoughts; he needs
support, in order to exert influence with a
good conscience; unless he feels that he is
the vehicle of a massive tradition, he will
become bitter, or flippant, or aggressive; if
he is to teach with good grace and modesty
and authority, it must not be he that speaks,
but science or humanity that is speaking in
him.

Now the state of Harvard College, and of
American education generally, at the time to
which I refer, had this remarkable effect on
the philosophers there: it made their sense
of social responsibility acute, because they
were consciously teaching and guiding the
community, as if they had been clergymen;
and it made no less acute their moral
loneliness, isolation, and forced self-reliance,
because they were like clergymen without a
church, and not only had no common philosophic
doctrine to transmit, but were expected
not to have one. They were invited
to be at once genuine philosophers and
popular professors; and the degree to which
some of them managed to unite these contraries
is remarkable, especially if we consider
the character of the academic public
they had to serve and to please. While the
sentiments of most Americans in politics and
morals, if a little vague, are very conservative,
their democratic instincts, and the force of
circumstances, have produced a system of
education which anticipates all that the most
extreme revolution could bring about; and
while no one dreams of forcibly suppressing
private property, religion, or the family,
American education ignores these things, and
proceeds as much as possible as if they did
not exist. The child passes very young into
a free school, established and managed by
the municipal authorities; the teachers, even
for the older boys, are chiefly unmarried
women, sensitive, faithful, and feeble; their
influence helps to establish that separation
which is so characteristic of America between
things intellectual, which remain wrapped in
a feminine veil and, as it were, under glass,
and the rough business and passions of life.
The lessons are ambitious in range, but are
made as easy, as interesting, and as optional
as possible; the stress is divided between
what the child likes now and what he is going
to need in his trade or profession. The young
people are sympathetically encouraged to
instruct themselves and to educate one
another. They romp and make fun like
young monkeys, they flirt and have their
private “brain-storms” like little supermen
and superwomen. They are tremendously
in earnest about their college intrigues and
intercollegiate athletic wars. They are fond,
often compassionately fond, of their parents,
and home is all the more sacred to them in
that they are seldom there. They enjoy a
surprising independence in habits, friendships,
and opinions. Brothers and sisters often
choose different religions. The street, the
school, the young people’s club, the magazine,
the popular novel, furnish their mental
pabulum. The force of example and of
passing custom is all the more irresistible in
this absence of authority and tradition; for
this sort of independence rather diminishes
the power of being original, by supplying a
slenderer basis and a thinner soil from which
originality might spring. Uniformity is established
spontaneously without discipline, as
in the popular speech and ethics of every
nation. Against this tendency to uniformity
the efforts of a cultivated minority to maintain
a certain distinction and infuse it into
their lives and minds are not very successful.
They have secondary schools for their boys
in which the teachers are men, and even
boarding-schools in the country, more or less
Gothic in aspect and English in regimen;
there are other semi-foreign institutions and
circles, Catholic or Jewish, in which religion
is the dominant consideration. There is also
the society of the very rich, with cosmopolitan
leanings and a vivacious interest in
artistic undertakings and personalities. But
all these distinctions, important as they may
seem to those who cultivate them, are a mere
shimmer and ripple on the surface of American
life; and for an observer who sees things in
perspective they almost disappear. By a
merciful dispensation of nature, the pupils
of these choice establishments, the moment
they plunge into business or politics, acquire
the protective colouring of their environment
and become indistinguishable from the generic
American. Their native disposition was after
all the national one, their attempted special
education was perfunctory, and the influence
of their public activities and surroundings is
overwhelming. American life is a powerful
solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost
before he can speak English, with an unmistakable
muscular tension, cheery self-confidence
and habitual challenge in the voice
and eyes, so it seems to neutralise every intellectual
element, however tough and alien it
may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will,
complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

Consider, for instance, the American
Catholics, of whom there are nominally many
millions, and who often seem to retain their
ancestral faith sincerely and affectionately.
This faith took shape during the decline of
the Roman empire; it is full of large disillusions
about this world and minute illusions
about the other. It is ancient, metaphysical,
poetic, elaborate, ascetic, autocratic, and
intolerant. It confronts the boastful natural
man, such as the American is, with a thousand
denials and menaces. Everything in
American life is at the antipodes to such
a system. Yet the American Catholic is
entirely at peace. His tone in everything,
even in religion, is cheerfully American. It is
wonderful how silently, amicably, and happily
he lives in a community whose spirit is profoundly
hostile to that of his religion. He
seems to take stock in his church as he might
in a gold mine—sure it is a grand, dazzling,
unique thing; and perhaps he masks, even
to himself, his purely imaginative ardour
about it, with the pretext that it is sure to
make his fortune both in this life and in the
next. His church, he will tell you, is a first-rate
church to belong to; the priests are fine
fellows, like the policemen; the Sisters are
dear noble women, like his own sisters; his
parish is flourishing, and always rebuilding
its church and founding new schools, orphan
asylums, sodalities, confraternities, perpetual
adoration societies. No parish can raise so
much money for any object, or if there are
temporary troubles, the fact still remains that
America has three Cardinals and that the
Catholic religion is the biggest religion on
earth. Attachment to his church in such a
temper brings him into no serious conflict
with his Protestant neighbours. They live
and meet on common ground. Their respective
religions pass among them for family
matters, private and sacred, with no political
implications.

Such was the education and such the atmosphere
of intellectual innocence which prevailed
in the public—mostly undergraduates—to
which the Harvard philosophers adapted
their teaching and to some extent their
philosophy. The students were intelligent,
ambitious, remarkably able to “do things”;
they were keen about the matters that had
already entered into their lives, and invincibly
happy in their ignorance of everything else.
A gentle contempt for the past permeated
their judgements. They were not accustomed
to the notion of authority, nor aware that
it might have legitimate grounds; they
instinctively disbelieved in the superiority of
what was out of reach. About high questions
of politics and religion their minds were open
but vague; they seemed not to think them
of practical importance; they acquiesced
in people having any views they liked on
such subjects; the fluent and fervid enthusiasms
so common among European students,
prophesying about politics, philosophy, and
art, were entirely unknown among them.
Instead they had absorbing local traditions
of their own, athletic and social, and their
college life was their true education, an
education in friendship, co-operation, and
freedom. In the eighteen-eighties a good
deal of old-fashioned shabbiness and jollity
lingered about Harvard. Boston and Cambridge
in those days resembled in some ways
the London of Dickens: the same dismal
wealth, the same speechifying, the same
anxious respectability, the same sordid back
streets, with their air of shiftlessness and
decay, the same odd figures and loud humour,
and, to add a touch of horror, the monstrous
suspicion that some of the inhabitants might
be secretly wicked. Life, for the undergraduates,
was full of droll incidents and
broad farce; it drifted good-naturedly from
one commonplace thing to another. Standing
packed in the tinkling horse-car, their
coat-collars above their ears and their feet
deep in the winter straw, they jogged in a
long half-hour to Boston, there to enjoy the
delights of female society, the theatre, or a
good dinner. And in the summer days, for
Class Day and Commencement, feminine and
elderly Boston would return the visit, led by
the governor of Massachusetts in his hired
carriage-and-four, and by the local orators
and poets, brimming with jokes and conventional
sentiments, and eager not so much
to speed the youngsters on their career, as
to air their own wit, and warm their hearts
with punch and with collective memories of
youth. It was an idyllic, haphazard, humoristic
existence, without fine imagination,
without any familiar infusion of scholarship,
without articulate religion: a flutter of
intelligence in a void, flying into trivial play,
in order to drop back, as soon as college days
were over, into the drudgery of affairs.
There was the love of beauty, but without
the sight of it; for the bits of pleasant landscape
or the works of art which might break
the ugliness of the foreground were a sort of
æsthetic miscellany, enjoyed as one enjoys a
museum; there was nothing in which the
spirit of beauty was deeply interfused, charged
with passion and discipline and intricate
familiar associations with delicate and noble
things. Of course, the sky is above every
country, and New England had brilliant sunsets
and deep snows, and sea and woods were
at hand for the holidays; and it was notable
how much even what a homely art or accident
might have done for the towns was studied
and admired. Old corners were pointed out
where the dingy red brick had lost its rigidity
and taken on a mossy tinge, and where here
and there a pane of glass, surviving all tenants
and housemaids, had turned violet in the
sunlight of a hundred years; and most
precious of all were the high thin elms,
spreading aloft, looped and drooping over
old streets and commons. And yet it seemed
somehow as if the sentiment lavished on these
things had been intended by nature for something
else, for something more important.
Not only had the mind of the nation been
originally somewhat chilled and impoverished
by Protestantism, by migration to a new
world, by absorption in material tasks, but
what fine sensibility lingered in an older
generation was not easily transmitted to the
young. The young had their own ways,
which on principle were to be fostered and
respected; and one of their instincts was to
associate only with those of their own age and
calibre. The young were simply young, and
the old simply old, as among peasants.
Teachers and pupils seemed animals of
different species, useful and well-disposed
towards each other, like a cow and a milkmaid;
periodic contributions could pass between
them, but not conversation. This circumstance
shows how much American intelligence
is absorbed in what is not intellectual. Their
tasks and their pleasures divide people of
different ages; what can unite them is ideas,
impersonal interests, liberal arts. Without
these they cannot forget their mutual
inferiority.

Certainly those four college years, judged
by any external standard, were trivial and
wasted; but Americans, although so practical
in their adult masculine undertakings, are
slow to take umbrage at the elaborate playfulness
of their wives and children. With
the touching humility of strength, they seem
to say to themselves, “Let the dear creatures
have their fling, and be happy: what else
are we old fellows slaving for?” And
certainly the joy of life is the crown of it;
but have American ladies and collegians
achieved the joy of life? Is that the
summit?

William James had a theory that if some
scientific widower, with a child about to learn
to walk, could be persuaded to allow the
child’s feet to be blistered, it would turn out,
when the blisters were healed, that the child
would walk as well as if he had practised and
had many a fall; because the machinery
necessary for walking would have matured in
him automatically, just as the machinery for
breathing does in the womb. The case of
the old-fashioned American college may serve
to support this theory. It blistered young
men’s heads for four years and prevented
them from practising anything useful; yet
at the end they were found able to do most
things as well, or twice as well, as their contemporaries
who had been all that time
apprenticed and chained to a desk. Manhood
and sagacity ripen of themselves; it
suffices not to repress or distort them. The
college liberated the young man from the
pursuit of money, from hypocrisy, from the
control of women. He could grow for a time
according to his nature, and if this growth
was not guided by much superior wisdom or
deep study, it was not warped by any serious
perversion; and if the intellectual world did
not permanently entice him, are we so sure
that in philosophy, for instance, it had anything
to offer that was very solid in itself,
or humanly very important? At least he
learned that such things existed, and gathered
a shrewd notion of what they could do for a
man, and what they might make of him.

When Harvard was reformed—and I
believe all the colleges are reformed now—the
immediate object was not to refine college
life or render it more scholarly, though
for certain circles this was accomplished
incidentally; the object was rather to extend
the scope of instruction, and make it
more advanced. It is natural that every
great city, the capital of any nation or
region, should wish to possess a university
in the literal sense of the word—an encyclopædic
institute, or group of institutes, to
teach and foster all the professions, all the
arts, and all the sciences. Such a university
need have nothing to do with education,
with the transmission of a particular moral
and intellectual tradition. Education might
be courteously presupposed. The teacher
would not be a man with his hand on a lad’s
shoulder, his son or young brother; he
would be an expert in some science, delivering
lectures for public instruction, while
perhaps privately carrying on investigations
with the aid of a few disciples whom he
would be training in his specialty. There
would be no reason why either the professors
or the auditors in such an institution should
live together or should have much in common
in religion, morals, or breeding, or should
even speak the same language. On the
contrary, if only each was competent in his
way, the more miscellaneous their types
the more perfect would these render their
*universitas*. The public addressed, also,
need not be restricted, any more than the
public at a church or a theatre or a town
library, by any requirements as to age, sex,
race, or attainments. They would come on
their own responsibility, to pursue what
studies they chose, and so long as they
found them profitable. Nor need there be
any limit as to the subjects broached, or any
division of them into faculties or departments,
except perhaps for convenience in
administration. One of the functions of
professors would be to invent new subjects,
because this world is so complex, and the
play of the human mind upon it is so external
and iridescent, that, as men’s interests
and attitude vary, fresh unities and fresh
aspects are always discernible in everything.

As Harvard University developed, all
these characteristics appeared in it in a
more or less marked degree; but the transformation
was never complete. The centre
of it remained a college, with its local constituency
and rooted traditions, and its
thousand or two thousand undergraduates
needing to be educated. Experts in every
science and money to pay them were not
at hand, and the foreign talent that could
be attracted did not always prove morally
or socially digestible. The browsing undergraduate
could simply range with a looser
tether, and he was reinforced by a fringe
of graduates who had not yet had enough,
or who were attracted from other colleges.
These graduates came to form a sort of
normal school for future professors, stamped
as in Germany with a Ph.D.; and the
teachers in each subject became a committee
charged with something of the functions of
a registry office, to find places for their
nurslings. The university could thus acquire
a national and even an international function,
drawing in distinguished talent and
youthful ambition from everywhere, and
sending forth in various directions its
apostles of light and learning.

I think it is intelligible that in such a
place and at such a crisis philosophy should
have played a conspicuous part, and also
that it should have had an ambiguous
character. There had to be, explicit or implicit,
a philosophy for the college. A place
where all polite Boston has been educated
for centuries cannot bely its moral principles
and religious questionings; it must transmit
its austere, faithful, reforming spirit. But
at the same time there had now to be a
philosophy for the university. A chief part
of that traditional faith was the faith in
freedom, in inquiry; and it was necessary,
in the very interests of the traditional
philosophy, to take account of all that was
being said in the world, and to incorporate
the spirit of the times in the spirit of the
fathers. Accordingly, no single abstract
opinion was particularly tabooed at Harvard;
granted industry, sobriety, and some semblance
of theism, no professor was expected
to agree with any other. I believe the
authorities would have been well pleased,
for the sake of completeness, to have added
a Buddhist, a Moslem, and a Catholic
scholastic to the philosophical faculty, if
only suitable sages could have been found,
house-trained, as it were, and able to keep
pace with the academic machine and to
attract a sufficient number of pupils. But
this official freedom was not true freedom,
there was no happiness in it. A slight
smell of brimstone lingered in the air. You
might think what you liked, but you must
consecrate your belief or your unbelief to
the common task of encouraging everybody
and helping everything on. You might
almost be an atheist, if you were troubled
enough about it. The atmosphere was not
that of intelligence nor of science, it was
that of duty.

In the academic life and methods of the
university there was the same incomplete
transformation. The teaching required was
for the most part college teaching, in college
subjects, such as might well have been
entrusted to tutors; but it was given by
professors in the form of lectures, excessive
in number and too often repeated; and
they were listened to by absent-minded
youths, ill-grounded in the humanities, and
not keenly alive to intellectual interests.
The graduates (like the young ladies) were
more attentive and anxious not to miss
anything, but they were no better prepared
and often less intelligent; and there is no
dunce like a mature dunce. Accordingly,
the professor of philosophy had to swim
against rather a powerful current. Sometimes
he succumbed to the reality; and if,
for instance, he happened to mention Darwin,
and felt a blank before him, he would
add in a parenthesis, “Darwin, Charles,
author of the *Origin of Species*, 1859; epoch-making
work.” At other times he might
lose himself altogether in the ideal and
imagine that he was publishing immortal
thoughts to the true university, to the world
at large, and was feeling an exhilarating
contact with masses of mankind, themselves
quickened by his message. He might see
in his mind’s eye rows of learned men and
women before him, familiar with every
doubt, hardened to every conflict of opinion,
ready for any revolution, whose minds nothing
he could say could possibly shock, or
disintegrate any further; on the contrary,
the naked truth, which is gentle in its
austerity, might come to them as a blessed
deliverance, and he might fancy himself
for a moment a sort of hero from the realms
of light descending into the nether regions
and throwing a sop of reason into the jaws
of snarling prejudice and frantic error. Or
if the class was small, and only two or three
were gathered together, he might imagine
instead that he was sowing seeds of wisdom,
warmed by affection, in the minds of genuine
disciples, future tabernacles of the truth.
It is possible that if the reality had corresponded
more nearly with these dreams, and
Harvard had actually been an adult university,
philosophers there might have distilled
their doctrines into a greater purity. As
it was, Harvard philosophy had an opposite
merit: it represented faithfully the complex
inspiration of the place and hour. As
the university was a local puritan college
opening its windows to the scientific world,
so at least the two most gifted of its philosophers
were men of intense feeling, religious
and romantic, but attentive to the facts of
nature and the currents of worldly opinion;
and each of them felt himself bound by two
different responsibilities, that of describing
things as they are, and that of finding them
propitious to certain preconceived human
desires. And while they shared this double
allegiance, they differed very much in temper,
education, and taste. William James was
what is called an empiricist, Josiah Royce an
idealist; they were excellent friends and
greatly influenced each other, and the very
diversity between them rendered their conjunction
typical of the state of philosophy in
England and America, divided between the
old British and the German schools. As
if all this intellectual complication had not
been enough, they were obliged to divide
their energies externally, giving to their
daily tasks as professors and pedagogues
what duty demanded, and only the remainder
to scholarship, reflection, and literary work.
Even this distracting circumstance, however,
had its compensations. College work was a
human bond, a common practical interest;
it helped to keep up that circulation of the
blood which made the whole Harvard school
of philosophy a vital unit, and co-operative
in its freedom. There was a general momentum
in it, half institutional, half moral, a
single troubled, noble, exciting life. Every
one was labouring with the contradiction
he felt in things, and perhaps in himself;
all were determined to find some honest
way out of it, or at least to bear it bravely.
It was a fresh morning in the life of reason,
cloudy but brightening.

CHAPTER III—WILLIAM JAMES
=========================

William James enjoyed in his youth what
are called advantages: he lived among
cultivated people, travelled, had teachers
of various nationalities. His father was
one of those somewhat obscure sages whom
early America produced: mystics of independent
mind, hermits in the desert of business,
and heretics in the churches. They
were intense individualists, full of veneration
for the free souls of their children,
and convinced that every one should paddle
his own canoe, especially on the high seas.
William James accordingly enjoyed a stimulating
if slightly irregular education: he
never acquired that reposeful mastery of
particular authors and those safe ways of
feeling and judging which are fostered in
great schools and universities. In consequence
he showed an almost physical horror
of club sentiment and of the stifling atmosphere
of all officialdom. He had a knack
for drawing, and rather the temperament
of the artist; but the unlovely secrets of
nature and the troubles of man preoccupied
him, and he chose medicine for his profession.
Instead of practising, however, he turned
to teaching physiology, and from that passed
gradually to psychology and philosophy.

In his earlier years he retained some
traces of polyglot student days at Paris,
Bonn, Vienna, or Geneva; he slipped sometimes
into foreign phrases, uttered in their
full vernacular; and there was an occasional
afterglow of Bohemia about him, in the
bright stripe of a shirt or the exuberance
of a tie. On points of art or medicine he
retained a professional touch and an unconscious
ease which he hardly acquired in
metaphysics. I suspect he had heartily
admired some of his masters in those other
subjects, but had never seen a philosopher
whom he would have cared to resemble. Of
course there was nothing of the artist in
William James, as the artist is sometimes
conceived in England, nothing of the æsthete,
nothing affected or limp. In person he was
short rather than tall, erect, brisk, bearded,
intensely masculine. While he shone in
expression and would have wished his style
to be noble if it could also be strong, he
preferred in the end to be spontaneous, and
to leave it at that; he tolerated slang in
himself rather than primness. The rough,
homely, picturesque phrase, whatever was
graphic and racy, recommended itself to
him; and his conversation outdid his writing
in this respect. He believed in improvisation,
even in thought; his lectures were
not minutely prepared. Know your subject
thoroughly, he used to say, and trust to
luck for the rest. There was a deep sense
of insecurity in him, a mixture of humility
with romanticism: we were likely to be
more or less wrong anyhow, but we might
be wholly sincere. One moment should
respect the insight of another, without trying
to establish too regimental a uniformity.
If you corrected yourself tartly, how could
you know that the correction was not the
worse mistake? All our opinions were born
free and equal, all children of the Lord, and
if they were not consistent that was the Lord’s
business, not theirs. In reality, James was
consistent enough, as even Emerson (more
extreme in this sort of irresponsibility) was
too. Inspiration has its limits, sometimes
very narrow ones. But James was not
consecutive, not insistent; he turned to a
subject afresh, without egotism or pedantry;
he dropped his old points, sometimes very
good ones; and he modestly looked for
light from others, who had less light than
himself.

His excursions into philosophy were accordingly
in the nature of raids, and it is
easy for those who are attracted by one part
of his work to ignore other parts, in themselves
perhaps more valuable. I think that
in fact his popularity does not rest on his
best achievements. His popularity rests on
three somewhat incidental books, *The Will
to Believe*, *Pragmatism*, and *The Varieties
of Religious Experience*, whereas, as it seems
to me, his best achievement is his *Principles
of Psychology*. In this book he surveys, in
a way which for him is very systematic, a
subject made to his hand. In its ostensible
outlook it is a treatise like any other, but
what distinguishes it is the author’s gift for
evoking vividly the very life of the mind.
This is a work of imagination; and the
subject as he conceived it, which is the flux
of immediate experience in men in general,
requires imagination to read it at all. It
is a literary subject, like autobiography or
psychological fiction, and can be treated
only poetically; and in this sense Shakespeare
is a better psychologist than Locke
or Kant. Yet this gift of imagination is
not merely literary; it is not useless in
divining the truths of science, and it is
invaluable in throwing off prejudice and
scientific shams. The fresh imagination and
vitality of William James led him to break
through many a false convention. He saw
that experience, as we endure it, is not a
mosaic of distinct sensations, nor the expression
of separate hostile faculties, such
as reason and the passions, or sense and the
categories; it is rather a flow of mental
discourse, like a dream, in which all divisions
and units are vague and shifting, and the
whole is continually merging together and
drifting apart. It fades gradually in the
rear, like the wake of a ship, and bites into
the future, like the bow cutting the water.
For the candid psychologist, carried bodily
on this voyage of discovery, the past is but
a questionable report, and the future wholly
indeterminate; everything is simply what
it is experienced as being.

At the same time, psychology is supposed
to be a science, a claim which would tend
to confine it to the natural history of man,
or the study of behaviour, as is actually
proposed by Auguste Comte and by some
of James’s own disciples, more jejune if
more clear-headed than he. As matters now
stand, however, psychology as a whole is
not a science, but a branch of philosophy;
it brings together the literary description of
mental discourse and the scientific description
of material life, in order to consider
the relation between them, which is the
nexus of human nature.

What was James’s position on this crucial
question? It is impossible to reply unequivocally.
He approached philosophy as
mankind originally approached it, without
having a philosophy, and he lent himself
to various hypotheses in various directions.
He professed to begin his study on the assumptions
of common sense, that there is
a material world which the animals that live
in it are able to perceive and to think about.
He gave a congruous extension to this view
in his theory that emotion is purely bodily
sensation, and also in his habit of conceiving
the mind as a total shifting sensibility. To
pursue this path, however, would have led
him to admit that nature was automatic
and mind simply cognitive, conclusions
from which every instinct in him recoiled.
He preferred to believe that mind and
matter had independent energies and could
lend one another a hand, matter operating
by motion and mind by intention. This
dramatic, amphibious way of picturing causation
is natural to common sense, and might
be defended if it were clearly defined; but
James was insensibly carried away from it
by a subtle implication of his method. This
implication was that experience or mental
discourse not only constituted a set of
substantive facts, but the *only* substantive
facts; all else, even that material world
which his psychology had postulated, could
be nothing but a verbal or fantastic symbol
for sensations in their experienced order.
So that while nominally the door was kept
open to any hypothesis regarding the conditions
of the psychological flux, in truth
the question was prejudged. The hypotheses,
which were parts of this psychological
flux, could have no object save other parts
of it. That flux itself, therefore, which he
could picture so vividly, was the fundamental
existence. The *sense* of bounding over the
waves, the *sense* of being on an adventurous
voyage, was the living fact; the rest was
dead reckoning. Where one’s gift is, there
will one’s faith be also; and to this poet
appearance was the only reality.

This sentiment, which always lay at the
back of his mind, reached something like
formal expression in his latest writings, where
he sketched what he called radical empiricism.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell,
and bursts into a thousand meanings. Here
we must no longer think of its setting, its
discoveries, or its march; to treat it radically
we must abstract its immediate objects and
reduce it to pure data. It is obvious (and
the sequel has already proved) that experience
so understood would lose its romantic
signification, as a personal adventure or a
response to the shocks of fortune. “Experience”
would turn into a cosmic dance of absolute
entities created and destroyed *in vacuo*
according to universal laws, or perhaps by
chance. No minds would gather this experience,
and no material agencies would impose
it; but the immediate objects present to
any one would simply be parts of the universal
fireworks, continuous with the rest, and all the
parts, even if not present to anybody, would
have the same status. Experience would
then not at all resemble what Shakespeare
reports or what James himself had described
in his psychology. If it could be experienced
as it flows in its entirety (which is fortunately
impracticable), it would be a perpetual mathematical
nightmare. Every whirling atom,
every changing relation, and every incidental
perspective would be a part of it. I am far
from wishing to deny for a moment the
scientific value of such a cosmic system, if it
can be worked out; physics and mathematics
seem to me to plunge far deeper than literary
psychology into the groundwork of this
world; but human experience is the stuff of
literary psychology; we cannot reach the stuff
of physics and mathematics except by arresting
or even hypostatising some elements of
appearance, and expanding them on an
abstracted and hypothetical plane of their
own. Experience, as memory and literature
rehearse it, remains nearer to us than that:
it is something dreamful, passionate, dramatic,
and significative.

Certainly this personal human experience,
expressible in literature and in talk, and no
cosmic system however profound, was what
James knew best and trusted most. Had he
seen the developments of his radical empiricism,
I cannot help thinking he would
have marvelled that such logical mechanisms
should have been hatched out of that egg.
The principal problems and aspirations that
haunted him all his life long would lose their
meaning in that cosmic atmosphere. The
pragmatic nature of truth, for instance, would
never suggest itself in the presence of pure
data; but a romantic mind soaked in
agnosticism, conscious of its own habits
and assuming an environment the exact
structure of which can never be observed,
may well convince itself that, for experience,
truth is nothing but a happy use of signs—which
is indeed the truth of literature. But
if we once accept *any* system of the universe
as literally true, the value of convenient signs
to prepare us for such experience as is yet
absent cannot be called truth: it is plainly
nothing but a necessary inaccuracy. So, too,
with the question of the survival of the
human individual after death. For radical
empiricism a human individual is simply a
certain cycle or complex of terms, like any
other natural fact; that some echoes of his
mind should recur after the regular chimes
have ceased, would have nothing paradoxical
about it. A mathematical world is a good
deal like music, with its repetitions and transpositions,
and a little trill, which you might
call a person, might well peep up here and
there all over a vast composition. Something
of that sort may be the truth of
spiritualism; but it is not what the spiritualists
imagine. Their whole interest lies
not in the experiences they have, but in the
interpretation they give to them, assigning
them to troubled spirits in another world;
but both another world and a spirit are
notions repugnant to a radical empiricism.

I think it is important to remember, if we
are not to misunderstand William James, that
his radical empiricism and pragmatism were
in his own mind only methods; his doctrine,
if he may be said to have had one, was
agnosticism. And just because he was an
agnostic (feeling instinctively that beliefs and
opinions, if they had any objective beyond
themselves, could never be sure they had
attained it), he seemed in one sense so favourable
to credulity. He was not credulous
himself, far from it; he was well aware that
the trust he put in people or ideas might
betray him. For that very reason he was
respectful and pitiful to the trustfulness of
others. Doubtless they were wrong, but
who were we to say so? In his own person
he was ready enough to face the mystery of
things, and whatever the womb of time might
bring forth; but until the curtain was rung
down on the last act of the drama (and it
might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual
cripples and the moral hunchbacks not
to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn
out to be the heroes of the play. Who could
tell what heavenly influences might not pierce
to these sensitive half-flayed creatures, which
are lost on the thick-skinned, the sane, and
the duly goggled? We must not suppose,
however, that James meant these contrite
and romantic suggestions dogmatically. The
agnostic, as well as the physician and neurologist
in him, was never quite eclipsed. The
hope that some new revelation might come
from the lowly and weak could never mean
to him what it meant to the early Christians.
For him it was only a right conceded to them
to experiment with their special faiths; he
did not expect such faiths to be discoveries
of absolute fact, which everybody else might
be constrained to recognise. If any one had
made such a claim, and had seemed to have
some chance of imposing it universally,
James would have been the first to turn
against him; not, of course, on the ground
that it was *impossible* that such an orthodoxy
should be true, but with a profound conviction
that it was to be feared and distrusted. No:
the degree of authority and honour to be
accorded to various human faiths was a moral
question, not a theoretical one. All faiths
were what they were experienced as being,
in their capacity of faiths; these faiths,
not their objects, were the hard facts we
must respect. We cannot pass, except under
the illusion of the moment, to anything
firmer or on a deeper level. There was
accordingly no sense of security, no joy, in
James’s apology for personal religion. He
did not really believe; he merely believed in
the right of believing that you might be right
if you believed.

It is this underlying agnosticism that
explains an incoherence which we might find
in his popular works, where the story and the
moral do not seem to hang together. Professedly
they are works of psychological
observation; but the tendency and suasion
in them seems to run to disintegrating the
idea of truth, recommending belief without
reason, and encouraging superstition. A
psychologist who was not an agnostic would
have indicated, as far as possible, whether
the beliefs and experiences he was describing
were instances of delusion or of rare and fine
perception, or in what measure they were a
mixture of both. But James—and this is
what gives such romantic warmth to these
writings of his—disclaims all antecedent or
superior knowledge, listens to the testimony
of each witness in turn, and only by accident
allows us to feel that he is swayed by the
eloquence and vehemence of some of them
rather than of others. This method is modest,
generous, and impartial; but if James intended,
as I think he did, to picture the
*drama* of human belief, with its risks and
triumphs, the method was inadequate.
Dramatists never hesitate to assume, and
to let the audience perceive, who is good and
who bad, who wise and who foolish, in their
pieces; otherwise their work would be as
impotent dramatically as scientifically. The
tragedy and comedy of life lie precisely in the
contrast between the illusions or passions of
the characters and their true condition and
fate, hidden from them at first, but evident
to the author and the public. If in our
diffidence and scrupulous fairness we refuse
to take this judicial attitude, we shall be led
to strange conclusions. The navigator, for
instance, trusting his “experience” (which
here, as in the case of religious people, means
his imagination and his art), insists on believing
that the earth is spherical; he has sailed
round it. That is to say, he has seemed to
himself to steer westward and westward, and
has seemed to get home again. But how
should he know that home is now where it
was before, or that his past and present
impressions of it come from the same, or
from any, material object? How should he
know that space is as trim and tri-dimensional
as the discredited Euclidians used to
say it was? If, on the contrary, my worthy
aunt, trusting to her longer and less ambiguous
experience of her garden, insists that
the earth is flat, and observes that the theory
that it is round, which is only a theory, is
much less often tested and found useful than
her own perception of its flatness, and that
moreover that theory is pedantic, intellectualistic,
and a product of academies, and a rash
dogma to impose on mankind for ever and
ever, it might seem that on James’s principle
we ought to agree with her. But no; on
James’s real principles we need not agree
with her, nor with the navigator either.
Radical empiricism, which is radical agnosticism,
delivers us from so benighted a choice.
For the quarrel becomes unmeaning when we
remember that the earth is *both* flat and
round, if it is experienced as being both.
The substantive fact is not a single object
on which both the perception and the theory
are expected to converge; the substantive
facts are the theory and the perception themselves.
And we may note in passing that
empiricism, when it ceases to value experience
as a means of discovering external things,
can give up its ancient prejudice in favour of
sense as against imagination, for imagination
and thought are immediate experiences as
much as sensation is: they are therefore, for
absolute empiricism, no less actual ingredients
of reality.

In *The Varieties of Religious Experience*
we find the same apologetic intention running
through a vivid account of what seems
for the most part (as James acknowledged)
religious disease. Normal religious experience
is hardly described in it. Religious
experience, for the great mass of mankind,
consists in simple faith in the truth and
benefit of their religious traditions. But to
James something so conventional and rationalistic
seemed hardly experience and hardly
religious; he was thinking only of irruptive
visions and feelings as interpreted by the
mystics who had them. These interpretations
he ostensibly presents, with more or less
wistful sympathy for what they were worth;
but emotionally he wished to champion them.
The religions that had sprung up in America
spontaneously—communistic, hysterical,
spiritistic, or medicinal—were despised by
select and superior people. You might
inquire into them, as you might go slumming,
but they remained suspect and distasteful.
This picking up of genteel skirts
on the part of his acquaintance prompted
William James to roll up his sleeves—not for
a knock-out blow, but for a thorough clinical
demonstration. He would tenderly vivisect
the experiences in question, to show how
living they were, though of course he could
not guarantee, more than other surgeons do,
that the patient would survive the operation.
An operation that eventually kills may be
technically successful, and the man may die
cured; and so a description of religion that
showed it to be madness might first show
how real and how warm it was, so that if it
perished, at least it would perish understood.

I never observed in William James any
personal anxiety or enthusiasm for any of
these dubious tenets. His conception even
of such a thing as free-will, which he always
ardently defended, remained vague; he
avoided defining even what he conceived to
be desirable in such matters. But he wished
to protect the weak against the strong, and
what he hated beyond everything was the
*non possumus* of any constituted authority.
Philosophy for him had a Polish constitution;
so long as a single vote was cast against
the majority, nothing could pass. The suspense
of judgement which he had imposed on
himself as a duty, became almost a necessity.
I think it would have depressed him if he
had had to confess that any important question
was finally settled. He would still have
hoped that something might turn up on the
other side, and that just as the scientific
hangman was about to despatch the poor
convicted prisoner, an unexpected witness
would ride up in hot haste, and prove him
innocent. Experience seems to most of us
to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has
sworn never to draw them.

In the discourse on “The Energies of
Men,” certain physiological marvels are recorded,
as if to suggest that the resources
of our minds and bodies are infinite, or can
be infinitely enlarged by divine grace. Yet
James would not, I am sure, have accepted
that inference. He would, under pressure,
have drawn in his mystical horns under his
scientific shell; but he was not naturalist
enough to feel instinctively that the wonderful
and the natural are all of a piece, and that
only our degree of habituation distinguishes
them. A nucleus, which we may poetically
call the soul, certainly lies within us, by which
our bodies and minds are generated and controlled,
like an army by a government. In
this nucleus, since nature in a small compass
has room for anything, vast quantities of
energy may well be stored up, which may be
tapped on occasion, or which may serve like
an electric spark to let loose energy previously
existing in the grosser parts. But the absolute
autocracy of this central power, or its
success in imposing extraordinary trials on
its subjects, is not an obvious good. Perhaps,
like a democratic government, the soul is at
its best when it merely collects and coordinates
the impulses coming from the
senses. The inner man is at times a tyrant,
parasitical, wasteful, and voluptuous. At
other times he is fanatical and mad. When
he asks for and obtains violent exertions from
the body, the question often is, as with the
exploits of conquerors and conjurers, whether
the impulse to do such prodigious things was
not gratuitous, and the things nugatory.
Who would wish to be a mystic? James
himself, who by nature was a spirited rather
than a spiritual man, had no liking for sanctimonious
transcendentalists, visionaries, or
ascetics; he hated minds that run thin. But
he hastened to correct this manly impulse,
lest it should be unjust, and forced himself to
overcome his repugnance. This was made
easier when the unearthly phenomenon had
a healing or saving function in the everyday
material world; miracle then re-established
its ancient identity with medicine, and both
of them were humanised. Even when this
union was not attained, James was reconciled
to the miracle-workers partly by his great
charity, and partly by his hunter’s instinct
to follow a scent, for he believed discoveries
to be imminent. Besides, a philosopher who is
a teacher of youth is more concerned to give
people a right start than a right conclusion.
James fell in with the hortatory tradition of
college sages; he turned his psychology,
whenever he could do so honestly, to purposes
of edification; and his little sermons on
habit, on will, on faith, and this on the latent
capacities of men, were fine and stirring, and
just the sermons to preach to the young
Christian soldier. He was much less sceptical
in morals than in science. He seems to have
felt sure that certain thoughts and hopes—those
familiar to a liberal Protestantism—were
every man’s true friends in life. This
assumption would have been hard to defend
if he or those he habitually addressed had
ever questioned it; yet his whole argument
for voluntarily cultivating these beliefs rests
on this assumption, that they are beneficent.
Since, whether we will or no, we cannot escape
the risk of error, and must succumb to some
human or pathological bias, at least we might
do so gracefully and in the form that would
profit us most, by clinging to those prejudices
which help us to lead what we all feel is a
good life. But what is a good life? Had
William James, had the people about him,
had modern philosophers anywhere, any
notion of that? I cannot think so. They
had much experience of personal goodness,
and love of it; they had standards of
character and right conduct; but as to what
might render human existence good, excellent,
beautiful, happy, and worth having as a
whole, their notions were utterly thin and
barbarous. They had forgotten the Greeks,
or never known them.

This argument accordingly suffers from
the same weakness as the similar argument
of Pascal in favour of Catholic orthodoxy.
You should force yourself to believe in it,
he said, because if you do so and are right
you win heaven, while if you are wrong
you lose nothing. What would Protestants,
Mohammedans, and Hindus say to that?
Those alternatives of Pascal’s are not the
sole nor the true alternatives; such a wager—betting
on the improbable because you
are offered big odds—is an unworthy parody
of the real choice between wisdom and folly.
There is no heaven to be won in such a
spirit, and if there was, a philosopher would
despise it. So William James would have us
bet on immortality, or bet on our power to
succeed, because if we win the wager we can
live to congratulate ourselves on our true
instinct, while we lose nothing if we have
made a mistake; for unless you have the
satisfaction of finding that you have been
right, the dignity of having been right is
apparently nothing. Or if the argument
is rather that these beliefs, whether true or
false, make life better in this world, the
thing is simply false. To be boosted by an
illusion is not to live better than to live in
harmony with the truth; it is not nearly
so safe, not nearly so sweet, and not nearly
so fruitful. These refusals to part with a
decayed illusion are really an infection to the
mind. Believe, certainly; we cannot help
believing; but believe rationally, holding
what seems certain for certain, what seems
probable for probable, what seems desirable
for desirable, and what seems false for false.

In this matter, as usual, James had a
true psychological fact and a generous instinct
behind his confused moral suggestions.
It is a psychological fact that men are
influenced in their beliefs by their will and
desires; indeed, I think we can go further
and say that in its essence belief is an
expression of impulse, of readiness to act.
It is only peripherally, as our action is
gradually adjusted to things, and our impulses
to our possible or necessary action, that our
ideas begin to hug the facts, and to acquire
a true, if still a symbolic, significance. We
do not need a will to believe; we only need
a will to study the object in which we are
inevitably believing. But James was thinking
less of belief in what we find than of
belief in what we hope for: a belief which is
not at all clear and not at all necessary in the
life of mortals. Like most Americans, however,
only more lyrically, James felt the call
of the future and the assurance that it
could be made far better, totally other,
than the past. The pictures that religion
had painted of heaven or the millennium
were not what he prized, although his
Swedenborgian connection might have made
him tender to them, as perhaps it did to
familiar spirits. It was the moral succour
offered by religion, its open spaces, the
possibility of miracles *in extremis*, that must
be retained. If we recoiled at the thought of
being dupes (which is perhaps what nature
intended us to be), were we less likely to be
dupes in disbelieving these sustaining truths
than in believing them? Faith was needed
to bring about the reform of faith itself, as
well as all other reforms.

In some cases faith in success could nerve
us to bring success about, and so justify
itself by its own operation. This is a thought
typical of James at his worst—a worst in
which there is always a good side. Here
again psychological observation is used with
the best intentions to hearten oneself and
other people; but the fact observed is not
at all understood, and a moral twist is given
to it which (besides being morally questionable)
almost amounts to falsifying the fact
itself. Why does belief that you can jump a
ditch help you to jump it? Because it is a
symptom of the fact that you *could* jump
it, that your legs were fit and that the
ditch was two yards wide and not twenty.
A rapid and just appreciation of these facts
has given you your confidence, or at least has
made it reasonable, manly, and prophetic;
otherwise you would have been a fool and
got a ducking for it. Assurance is contemptible
and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
If you had been rattled you might
have failed, because that would have been
a symptom of the fact that you were out of
gear; you would have been afraid because
you trembled, as James at his best proclaimed.
You would never have quailed if
your system had been reacting smoothly to
its opportunities, any more than you would
totter and see double if you were not intoxicated.
Fear is a sensation of actual nervousness
and disarray, and confidence a
sensation of actual readiness; they are not
disembodied feelings, existing for no reason,
the devil Funk and the angel Courage, one
or the other of whom may come down
arbitrarily into your body, and revolutionise
it. That is childish mythology, which
survives innocently enough as a figure of
speech, until a philosopher is found to take
that figure of speech seriously. Nor is the
moral suggestion here less unsound. What
is good is not the presumption of power,
but the possession of it: a clear head, aware
of its resources, not a fuddled optimism, calling
up spirits from the vasty deep. Courage
is not a virtue, said Socrates, unless it is also
wisdom. Could anything be truer both of
courage in doing and of courage in believing?
But it takes tenacity, it takes *reasonable*
courage, to stick to scientific insights such
as this of Socrates or that of James about the
emotions; it is easier to lapse into the traditional
manner, to search natural philosophy
for miracles and moral lessons, and in morals
proper, in the reasoned expression of preference,
to splash about without a philosophy.

William James shared the passions of
liberalism. He belonged to the left, which,
as they say in Spain, is the side of the heart,
as the right is that of the liver; at any rate
there was much blood and no gall in his
philosophy. He was one of those elder
Americans still disquieted by the ghost of
tyranny, social and ecclesiastical. Even the
beauties of the past troubled him; he had
a puritan feeling that they were tainted.
They had been cruel and frivolous, and must
have suppressed far better things. But
what, we may ask, might these better things
be? It may do for a revolutionary politician
to say: “I may not know what I want—except
office—but I know what I don’t
want”; it will never do for a philosopher.
Aversions and fears imply principles of
preference, goods acknowledged; and it
is the philosopher’s business to make these
goods explicit. Liberty is not an art, liberty
must be used to bring some natural art to
fruition. Shall it be simply eating and
drinking and wondering what will happen
next? If there is some deep and settled
need in the heart of man, to give direction
to his efforts, what else should a philosopher
do but discover and announce what that
need is?

There is a sense in which James was not
a philosopher at all. He once said to me:
“What a curse philosophy would be if we
couldn’t forget all about it!” In other
words, philosophy was not to him what it
has been to so many, a consolation and
sanctuary in a life which would have been
unsatisfying without it. It would be incongruous,
therefore, to expect of him that
he should build a philosophy like an edifice
to go and live in for good. Philosophy to
him was rather like a maze in which he happened
to find himself wandering, and what
he was looking for was the way out. In
the presence of theories of any sort he was
attentive, puzzled, suspicious, with a certain
inner prompting to disregard them. He
lived all his life among them, as a child lives
among grown-up people; what a relief to
turn from those stolid giants, with their
prohibitions and exactions and tiresome talk,
to another real child or a nice animal! Of
course grown-up people are useful, and so
James considered that theories might be;
but in themselves, to live with, they were
rather in the way, and at bottom our natural
enemies. It was well to challenge one or
another of them when you got a chance;
perhaps that challenge might break some
spell, transform the strange landscape, and
simplify life. A theory while you were
creating or using it was like a story you
were telling yourself or a game you were
playing; it was a warm, self-justifying
thing then; but when the glow of creation
or expectation was over, a theory was a
phantom, like a ghost, or like the minds of
other people. To all other people, even to
ghosts, William James was the soul of
courtesy; and he was civil to most theories
as well, as to more or less interesting
strangers that invaded him. Nobody ever
recognised more heartily the chance that
others had of being right, and the right they
had to be different. Yet when it came to
understanding what they meant, whether
they were theories or persons, his intuition
outran his patience; he made some brilliant
impressionistic sketch in his fancy and called
it by their name. This sketch was as often
flattered as distorted, and he was at times
the dupe of his desire to be appreciative and
give the devil his due; he was too impulsive
for exact sympathy; too subjective, too
romantic, to be just. Love is very penetrating,
but it penetrates to possibilities
rather than to facts. The logic of opinions,
as well as the exact opinions themselves,
were not things James saw easily, or traced
with pleasure. He liked to take things one
by one, rather than to put two and two
together. He was a mystic, a mystic in
love with life. He was comparable to Rousseau
and to Walt Whitman; he expressed a
generous and tender sensibility, rebelling
against sophistication, and preferring daily
sights and sounds, and a vague but indomitable
faith in fortune, to any settled intellectual
tradition calling itself science or philosophy.

A prophet is not without honour save in
his own country; and until the return wave
of James’s reputation reached America from
Europe, his pupils and friends were hardly
aware that he was such a distinguished man.
Everybody liked him, and delighted in him
for his generous, gullible nature and brilliant
sallies. He was a sort of Irishman among
the Brahmins, and seemed hardly imposing
enough for a great man. They laughed at
his erratic views and his undisguised limitations.
Of course a conscientious professor
ought to know everything he professes to
know, but then, they thought, a dignified professor
ought to seem to know everything. The
precise theologians and panoplied idealists,
who exist even in America, shook their heads.
What sound philosophy, said they to themselves,
could be expected from an irresponsible
doctor, who was not even a college graduate,
a crude empiricist, and vivisector of frogs?
On the other hand, the solid men of business
were not entirely reassured concerning a
teacher of youth who seemed to have no
system in particular—the ignorant rather
demand that the learned should have a
system in store, to be applied at a pinch;
and they could not quite swallow a private
gentleman who dabbled in hypnotism, frequented
mediums, didn’t talk like a book,
and didn’t write like a book, except like
one of his own. Even his pupils, attached
as they invariably were to his person, felt
some doubts about the profundity of one
who was so very natural, and who after some
interruption during a lecture—and he said
life was a series of interruptions—would slap
his forehead and ask the man in the front
row “What *was* I talking about?” Perhaps
in the first years of his teaching he felt a
little in the professor’s chair as a military
man might feel when obliged to read the
prayers at a funeral. He probably conceived
what he said more deeply than a
more scholastic mind might have conceived
it; yet he would have been more comfortable
if some one else had said it for him. He
liked to open the window, and look out for
a moment. I think he was glad when the
bell rang, and he could be himself again until
the next day. But in the midst of this
routine of the class-room the spirit would
sometimes come upon him, and, leaning his
head on his hand, he would let fall golden
words, picturesque, fresh from the heart,
full of the knowledge of good and evil. Incidentally
there would crop up some humorous
characterisation, some candid confession of
doubt or of instinctive preference, some
pungent scrap of learning; radicalisms plunging
sometimes into the sub-soil of all human
philosophies; and, on occasion, thoughts of
simple wisdom and wistful piety, the most
unfeigned and manly that anybody ever had.

CHAPTER IV—JOSIAH ROYCE
=======================

Meantime the mantle of philosophical
authority had fallen at Harvard upon other
shoulders. A young Californian, Josiah
Royce, had come back from Germany with a
reputation for wisdom; and even without
knowing that he had already produced a new
proof of the existence of God, merely to look
at him you would have felt that he was a
philosopher; his great head seemed too
heavy for his small body, and his portentous
brow, crowned with thick red hair, seemed
to crush the lower part of his face. “Royce,”
said William James of him, “has an indecent
exposure of forehead.” There was a
suggestion about him of the benevolent
ogre or the old child, in whom a preternatural
sharpness of insight lurked beneath a
grotesque mask. If you gave him any cue, or
even without one, he could discourse broadly
on any subject; you never caught him napping.
Whatever the text-books and encyclopædias
could tell him, he knew; and if the impression
he left on your mind was vague, that
was partly because, in spite of his comprehensiveness,
he seemed to view everything
in relation to something else that remained
untold. His approach to anything was
oblique; he began a long way off, perhaps
with the American preface of a funny story;
and when the point came in sight, it was at
once enveloped again in a cloud of qualifications,
in the parliamentary jargon of philosophy.
The tap once turned on, out flowed
the stream of systematic disquisition, one
hour, two hours, three hours of it, according
to demand or opportunity. The voice, too,
was merciless and harsh. You felt the
overworked, standardised, academic engine,
creaking and thumping on at the call of duty
or of habit, with no thought of sparing itself
or any one else. Yet a sprightlier soul
behind this performing soul seemed to watch
and laugh at the process. Sometimes a
merry light would twinkle in the little eyes,
and a bashful smile would creep over the
uncompromising mouth. A sense of the
paradox, the irony, the inconclusiveness of
the whole argument would pierce to the
surface, like a white-cap bursting here and
there on the heavy swell of the sea.

His procedure was first to gather and
digest whatever the sciences or the devil
might have to say. He had an evident sly
pleasure in the degustation and savour of
difficulties; biblical criticism, the struggle
for life, the latest German theory of sexual
insanity, had no terrors for him; it was
all grist for the mill, and woe to any tender
thing, any beauty or any illusion, that
should get between that upper and that
nether millstone! He seemed to say: If
I were not Alexander how gladly would I
be Diogenes, and if I had not a system to
defend, how easily I might tell you the
truth. But after the sceptic had ambled
quizzically over the ground, the prophet
would mount the pulpit to survey it. He
would then prove that in spite of all those
horrors and contradictions, or rather because
of them, the universe was absolutely
perfect. For behind that mocking soul in
him there was yet another, a devout and
heroic soul. Royce was heir to the Calvinistic
tradition; piety, to his mind, consisted
in trusting divine providence and justice,
while emphasising the most terrifying truths
about one’s own depravity and the sinister
holiness of God. He accordingly addressed
himself, in his chief writings, to showing
that all lives were parts of a single divine
life in which all problems were solved and
all evils justified.

It is characteristic of Royce that in his
proof of something sublime, like the existence
of God, his premiss should be something sad
and troublesome, the existence of error.
Error exists, he tells us, and common sense
will readily agree, although the fact is not
unquestionable, and pure mystics and pure
sensualists deny it. But if error exists,
Royce continues, there must be a truth
from which it differs; and the existence of
truth (according to the principle of idealism,
that nothing can exist except for a mind
that knows it) implies that some one knows
the truth; but as to know the truth
thoroughly, and supply the corrective to
every possible error, involves omniscience,
we have proved the existence of an omniscient
mind or universal thought; and this is
almost, if not quite, equivalent to the
existence of God.

What carried Royce over the evident
chasms and assumptions in this argument
was his earnestness and passionate eloquence.
He passed for an eminent logician, because he
was dialectical and fearless in argument and
delighted in the play of formal relations; he
was devoted to chess, music, and mathematics;
but all this show of logic was but a
screen for his heart, and in his heart there was
no clearness. His reasoning was not pure
logic or pure observation; it was always
secretly enthusiastic or malicious, and the
result it arrived at had been presupposed.
Here, for instance, no unprejudiced thinker,
not to speak of a pure logician, would have
dreamt of using the existence of error to
found the being of truth upon. Error is a
biological accident which may any day cease
to exist, say at the extinction of the human
race; whereas the being of truth or fact is
involved indefeasibly and eternally in the
existence of anything whatever, past, present,
or future; every event of itself renders true
or false any proposition that refers to it. No
one would conceive of such a thing as error
or suspect its presence, unless he had already
found or assumed many a truth; nor could
anything be an error actually unless the truth
was definite and real. All this Royce of
course recognised, and it was in some sense
the heart of what he meant to assert and to
prove; but it does not need proving and
hardly asserting. What needed proof was
something else, of less logical importance but
far greater romantic interest, namely, that
the truth was hovering over us and about to
descend into our hearts; and this Royce was
not disinclined to confuse with the being of
truth, so as to bring it within the range of
logical argument. He was tormented by the
suspicion that he might be himself in the
toils of error, and fervently aspired to escape
from it. Error to him was no natural, and
in itself harmless, incident of finitude; it
was a sort of sin, as finitude was too. It was
a part of the problem of evil; a terrible and
urgent problem when your first postulate or
dogma is that moral distinctions and moral
experience are the substance of the world,
and not merely an incident in it. The mere
being of truth, which is all a logician needs,
would not help him in this wrestling for
personal salvation; as he keenly felt and
often said, the truth is like the stars, always
laughing at us. Nothing would help him but
*possession* of the truth, something eventual
and terribly problematic. He longed to
believe that all his troubles and questions,
some day and somewhere, must find their
solution and quietus; if not in his own mind,
in some kindred spirit that he could, to that
extent, identify with himself. There must
be not only cold truth, not even cold truth
personified, but victorious *knowledge* of the
truth, breaking like a sun-burst through the
clouds of error. The nerve of his argument
was not logical at all; it was a confession of
religious experience, in which the agonised
consciousness of error led to a strong imaginative
conviction that the truth would be found
at last.

The truth, as here conceived, meant the
whole truth about everything; and certainly,
if any plausible evidence for such a conclusion
could be adduced, it would be interesting to
learn that we are destined to become omniscient,
or are secretly omniscient already.
Nevertheless, the aspiration of all religious
minds does not run that way. Aristotle tells
us that there are many things it is better not
to know; and his sublime deity is happily
ignorant of our errors and of our very existence;
more emphatically so the even sublimer
deities of Plotinus and the Indians. The
omniscience which our religion attributes to
God as the searcher of hearts and the judge
of conduct has a moral function rather than
a logical one; it prevents us from hiding our
sins or being unrecognised in our merits; it
is not conceived to be requisite in order that
it may be true that those sins or merits have
existed. Atheists admit the facts, but they
are content or perhaps relieved that they
should pass unobserved. But here again
Royce slipped into a romantic equivocation
which a strict logician would not have
tolerated. Knowledge of the truth, a passing
psychological possession, was substituted for
the truth known, and this at the cost of rather
serious ultimate confusions. It is the truth
itself, the facts in their actual relations, that
honest opinion appeals to, not to another
opinion or instance of knowledge; and if, in
your dream of warm sympathy and public
corroboration, you lay up your treasure in
some instance of knowledge, which time and
doubt might corrupt, you have not laid up
your treasure in heaven. In striving to prove
the being of truth, the young Royce absurdly
treated it as doubtful, setting a bad example
to the pragmatists; while in striving to lend
a psychological quality to this truth and
turning it into a problematical instance of
knowledge, he unwittingly deprived it of all
authority and sublimity. To personify the
truth is to care less for truth than for the corroboration
and sympathy which the truth,
become human, might bring to our opinions.
It is to set up another thinker, ourself enlarged,
to vindicate us; without considering
that this second thinker would be shut up,
like us, in his own opinions, and would need
to look to the truth beyond him as much as
we do.

To the old problem of evil Royce could
only give an old answer, although he rediscovered
and repeated it for himself in many
ways, since it was the core of his whole
system. Good, he said, is essentially the
struggle with evil and the victory over it;
so that if evil did not exist, good would be
impossible. I do not think this answer set
him at rest; he could hardly help feeling that
all goods are not of that bellicose description,
and that not all evils produce a healthy reaction
or are swallowed up in victory; yet
the fact that the most specious solution to
this problem of evil left it unsolved was in its
way appropriate; for if the problem had
been really solved, the struggle to find a
solution and the faith that there was one
would come to an end; yet perhaps this faith
and this struggle are themselves the supreme
good. Accordingly the true solution of this
problem, which we may all accept, is that no
solution can ever be found.

Here is an example of the difference
between the being of truth and the ultimate
solution of all our problems. There is
certainly a truth about evil, and in this case
not an unknown truth; yet it is no solution
to the “problem” which laid the indomitable
Royce on the rack. If a younger son asks
why he was not born before his elder brother,
that question may represent an intelligible
state of his feelings; but there is no answer
to it, because it is a childish question. So
the question why it is right that there should
be any evil is itself perverse and raised by
false presumptions. To an unsophisticated
mortal the existence of evil presents a task,
never a problem. Evil, like error, is an
incident of animal life, inevitable in a crowded
and unsettled world, where one spontaneous
movement is likely to thwart another, and
all to run up against material impossibilities.
While life lasts this task is recurrent, and
every creature, in proportion to the vitality
and integrity of his nature, strives to remove
or abate those evils of which he is sensible.
When the case is urgent and he is helpless,
he will cry out for divine aid; and (if he does
not perish first) he will soon see this aid
coming to him through some shift in the
circumstances that renders his situation endurable.
Positive religion takes a naturalistic
view of things, and requires it. It parts
company with a scientific naturalism only in
accepting the authority of instinct or revelation
in deciding certain questions of fact,
such as immortality or miracles. It rouses
itself to crush evil, without asking why evil
exists. What could be more intelligible than
that a deity like Jehovah, a giant inhabitant
of the natural world, should be confronted
with rivals, enemies, and rebellious children?
What could be more intelligible than that
the inertia of matter, or pure chance, or some
contrary purpose, should mar the expression
of any platonic idea exercising its magic
influence over the world? For the Greek as
for the Jew the task of morals is the same:
to subdue nature as far as possible to the uses
of the soul, by whatever agencies material or
spiritual may be at hand; and when a limit
is reached in that direction, to harden and
cauterise the heart in the face of inevitable
evils, opening it wide at the same time to
every sweet influence that may descend to it
from heaven. Never for a moment was
positive religion entangled in a sophistical
optimism. Never did it conceive that the
most complete final deliverance and triumph
would *justify* the evils which they abolished.
As William James put it, in his picturesque
manner, if at the last day all creation was
shouting hallelujah and there remained one
cockroach with an unrequited love, *that*
would spoil the universal harmony; it would
spoil it, he meant, in truth and for the tender
philosopher, but probably not for those
excited saints. James was thinking chiefly
of the present and future, but the same
scrupulous charity has its application to the
past. To remove an evil is not to remove
the fact that it has existed. The tears that
have been shed were shed in bitterness, even
if a remorseful hand afterwards wipes them
away. To be patted on the back and given
a sugar-plum does not reconcile even a child
to a past injustice. And the case is much
worse if we are expected to make our heaven
out of the foolish and cruel pleasures of
contrast, or out of the pathetic obfuscation
produced by a great relief. Such a heaven
would be a lie, like the sardonic heavens of
Calvin and Hegel. The existence of any evil
anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total
optimism.

Nevertheless philosophers have always
had a royal road to complete satisfaction.
One of the purest of pleasures, which they
cultivate above all others, is the pleasure of
understanding. Now, as playwrights and
novelists know, the intellect is no less readily
or agreeably employed in understanding evil
than in understanding good—more so, in
fact, if in the intellectual man, besides his
intelligence, there is a strain of coarseness,
irony, or desire to belittle the good things
others possess and he himself has missed.
Sometimes the philosopher, even when above
all meanness, becomes so devoted a naturalist
that he is ashamed to remain a moralist,
although this is what he probably was in the
beginning; and where all is one vast cataract
of events, he feels it would be impertinent of
him to divide them censoriously into things
that ought to be and things that ought not
to be. He may even go one step farther.
Awestruck and humbled before the universe,
he may insensibly transform his understanding
and admiration of it into the assertion
that the existence of evil is no evil at all,
but that the order of the universe is in every
detail necessary and perfect, so that the
mere mention of the word evil is blind and
blasphemous.

This sentiment, which as much as any
other deserves the name of pantheism, is
often expressed incoherently and with a false
afflatus; but when rationally conceived, as
it was by Spinoza, it amounts to this: that
good and evil are relations which things bear
to the living beings they affect. In itself
nothing—much less this whole mixed universe—can
be either good or bad; but the universe
wears the aspect of a good in so far as it
feeds, delights, or otherwise fosters any
creature within it. If we define the intellect
as the power to see things as they are, it is
clear that in so far as the philosopher is a
pure intellect the universe will be a pure good
to the philosopher; everything in it will
give play to his exclusive passion. Wisdom
counsels us therefore to become philosophers
and to concentrate our lives as much as
possible in pure intelligence, that we may be
led by it into the ways of peace. Not that
the universe will be proved thereby to be
intrinsically good (although in the heat of
their intellectual egotism philosophers are
sometimes betrayed into saying so), but that
it will have become in that measure a good
to us, and we shall be better able to live
happily and freely in it. If intelligibility
appears in things, it does so like beauty or
use, because the mind of man, in so far as it
is adapted to them, finds its just exercise in
their society.

This is an ancient, shrewd, and inexpugnable
position. If Royce had been able
to adhere to it consistently, he would have
avoided his gratuitous problem of evil without,
I think, doing violence to the sanest
element in his natural piety, which was joy
in the hard truth, with a touch of humour
and scorn in respect to mortal illusions.
There was an observant and docile side to
him; and as a child likes to see things work,
he liked to see processions of facts marching
on ironically, whatever we might say about
it. This was his sense of the power of God.
It attached him at first to Spinoza and later
to mathematical logic. No small part of his
life-long allegiance to the Absolute responded
to this sentiment.

The outlook, however, was complicated
and half reversed for him by the transcendental
theory of knowledge which he had
adopted. This theory regards all objects,
including the universe, as merely terms
posited by the will of the thinker, according
to a definite grammar of thought native to
his mind. In order that his thoughts may
be addressed to any particular object, he
must first choose and create it of his own
accord; otherwise his opinions, not being
directed upon any object in particular within
his ken, cannot be either true or false, whatever
picture they may frame. What anything
external may happen to be, when we
do not mean to speak of it, is irrelevant to
our discourse. If, for instance, the real
Royce were not a denizen and product of my
mind—of my deeper self—I could not so
much as have a wrong idea of him. The
need of this initial relevance in our judgements
seems to the transcendentalist to drive all
possible objects into the fold of his secret
thoughts, so that he has two minds, one that
seeks the facts and another that already
possesses or rather constitutes them.

Pantheism, when this new philosophy of
knowledge is adopted, seems at first to lose
its foundations. There is no longer an
external universe to which to bow; no little
corner left for us in the infinite where, after
making the great sacrifice, we may build a
safe nest. The intellect to which we had
proudly reduced ourselves has lost its preeminence;
it can no longer be called the
faculty of seeing things as they are. It has
become what psychological critics of intellectualism,
such as William James, understand
by it: a mass of human propensities
to abstraction, construction, belief, or inference,
by which imaginary things and truths
are posited in the service of life. It is therefore
on the same plane exactly as passion,
music, or æsthetic taste: a mental complication
which may be an index to other
psychological facts connected with it genetically,
but which has no valid intent, no
ideal transcendence, no assertive or cognitive
function. Intelligence so conceived understands
nothing: it is a buzzing labour in the
fancy which, by some obscure causation,
helps us to live on.

To discredit the intellect, to throw off
the incubus of an external reality or truth,
was one of the boons which transcendentalism
in its beginnings brought to the romantic
soul. But although at first the sense of relief
(to Fichte, for instance) was most exhilarating,
the freedom achieved soon proved
illusory: the terrible Absolute had been
simply transplanted into the self. You were
your own master, and omnipotent; but you
were no less dark, hostile, and inexorable to
yourself than the gods of Calvin or of Spinoza
had been before. Since every detail of this
mock world was your secret work, you were
not only wiser but also more criminal than
you knew. You were stifled, even more than
formerly, in the arms of nature, in the toils
of your own unaccountable character, which
made your destiny. Royce never recoiled
from paradox or from bitter fact; and he
used to say that a mouse, when tormented
and torn to pieces by a cat, was realising his
own deepest will, since he had sub-consciously
chosen to be a mouse in a world that should
have cats in it. The mouse really, in his
deeper self, wanted to be terrified, clawed,
and devoured. Royce was superficially a
rationalist, with no tenderness for superstition
in detail and not much sympathy with
civilised religions; but we see here that in
his heart he was loyal to the aboriginal
principle of all superstition: reverence for
what hurts. He said to himself that
in so far as God was the devil—as daily
experience and Hegelian logic proved was
largely the case—devil-worship was true
religion.

A protest, however, arose in his own mind
against this doctrine. Strong early bonds
attached him to moralism—to the opinion of
the Stoics and of Kant that virtue is the only
good. Yet if virtue were conceived after
their manner, as a heroic and sublimated
attitude of the will, of which the world hardly
afforded any example, how should the whole
whirligig of life be good also? How should
moralism, that frowns on this wicked world,
be reconciled with pantheism and optimism,
that hug it to their bosom? By the ingenious
if rather melodramatic notion that
we should hug it with a bear’s hug, that
virtue consisted (as Royce often put it) in
holding evil by the throat; so that the world
was good because it was a good world to
strangle, and if we only managed to do so,
the more it deserved strangling the better
world it was. But this Herculean feat must
not be considered as something to accomplish
once for all; the labours of Hercules
must be not twelve but infinite, since his
virtue consisted in performing them, and if
he ever rested or was received into Olympus
he would have left virtue—the only good—behind.
The wickedness of the world was
no reason for quitting it; on the contrary,
it invited us to plunge into all its depths and
live through every phase of it; virtue was
severe but not squeamish. It lived by endless
effort, turbid vitality, and *Sturm und
Drang*. Moralism and an apology for evil
could thus be reconciled and merged in the
praises of tragic experience.

This had been the burden of Hegel’s
philosophy of life, which Royce admired and
adopted. Hegel and his followers seem to
be fond of imagining that they are moving
in a tragedy. But because Aeschylus and
Sophocles were great poets, does it follow
that life would be cheap if it did not resemble
their fables? The life of tragic
heroes is not good; it is misguided, unnecessary,
and absurd. Yet that is what
romantic philosophy would condemn us to;
we must all strut and roar. We must lend
ourselves to the partisan earnestness of
persons and nations calling their rivals
villains and themselves heroes; but this
earnestness will be of the histrionic German
sort, made to order and transferable at short
notice from one object to another, since
what truly matters is not that we should
achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel
contemptuously called ideal) but that we
should carry on perpetually, if possible with
a *crescendo*, the strenuous experience of
living in a gloriously bad world, and always
working to reform it, with the comforting
speculative assurance that we never can
succeed. We never can succeed, I mean,
in rendering reform less necessary or life
happier; but of course in any specific
reform we may succeed half the time, thereby
sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to
keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality
we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all
the time; the play is always going on, and
the play’s the thing.

It was inevitable that Royce should have
been at home only in this circle of Protestant
and German intuitions; a more
refined existence would have seemed to him
to elude moral experience. Although he was
born in California he had never got used
to the sunshine; he had never tasted peace.
His spirit was that of courage and labour.
He was tender in a bashful way, as if in
tenderness there was something pathological,
as indeed to his sense there was, since he
conceived love and loyalty to be divine
obsessions refusing to be rationalised; he
saw their essence in the child who clings to
an old battered doll rather than accept a
new and better one. Following orthodox
tradition in philosophy, he insisted on seeing
reason at the bottom of things as well as
at the top, so that he never could understand
either the root or the flower of
anything. He watched the movement of
events as if they were mysterious music,
and instead of their causes and potentialities
he tried to divine their *motif*. On current
affairs his judgements were highly seasoned
and laboriously wise. If anything escaped
him, it was only the simplicity of what is
best. His reward was that he became a
prophet to a whole class of earnest, troubled
people who, having discarded doctrinal religion,
wished to think their life worth living
when, to look at what it contained, it might
not have seemed so; it reassured them to
learn that a strained and joyless existence
was not their unlucky lot, or a consequence
of their solemn folly, but was the necessary
fate of all good men and angels. Royce had
always experienced and seen about him a
groping, burdened, mediocre life; he had
observed how fortune is continually lying
in ambush for us, in order to bring good
out of evil and evil out of good. In his
age and country all was change, preparation,
hurry, material achievement; nothing
was an old and sufficient possession; nowhere,
or very much in the background, any
leisure, simplicity, security, or harmony.
The whole scene was filled with arts and
virtues which were merely useful or remedial.
The most pressing arts, like war
and forced labour, presuppose evil, work immense
havoc, and take the place of greater
possible goods. The most indispensable
virtues, like courage and industry, do likewise.
But these seemed in Royce’s world
the only honourable things, and he took
them to be typical of all art and virtue—a
tremendous error. It is very true, however,
that in the welter of material existence
no concrete thing can be good or evil in
every respect; and so long as our rough
arts and virtues do more good than harm
we give them honourable names, such as
unselfishness, patriotism, or religion; and
it remains a mark of good breeding among
us to practise them instinctively. But an
absolute love of such forced arts and impure
virtues is itself a vice; it is, as the case
may be, barbarous, vain, or fanatical. It
mistakes something specific—some habit or
emotion which may be or may have been
good in some respect, or under some circumstances
the lesser of two evils—for the very
principle of excellence. But good and evil,
like light and shade, are ethereal; all things,
events, persons, and conventional virtues
are in themselves utterly valueless, save as
an immaterial harmony (of which mind is
an expression) plays about them on occasion,
when their natures meet propitiously, and
bathes them in some tint of happiness or
beauty. This immaterial harmony may be
made more and more perfect; the difficulties
in the way of perfection, either in man, in
society, or in universal nature, are physical
not logical. Worship of barbarous virtue is
the blackest conservatism; it shuts the
gate of heaven, and surrenders existence to
perpetual follies and crimes, Moralism itself
is a superstition. In its abstract form
it is moral, too moral; it adores the conventional
conscience, or perhaps a morbid
one. In its romantic form, moralism becomes
barbarous and actually immoral; it
obstinately craves action and stress for
their own sake, experience in the gross, and
a good-and-bad way of living.

Royce sometimes conceded that there
might be some pure goods, music, for instance,
or mathematics; but the impure
moral goods were better and could not be
spared. Such a concession, however, if it
had been taken to heart, would have ruined
his whole moral philosophy. The romanticist
must maintain that *only* what is painful
can be noble and *only* what is lurid bright.
A taste for turbid and contrasted values
would soon seem perverse when once anything
perfect had been seen and loved.
Would it not have been better to leave out
the worst of the crimes and plagues that
have heightened the tragic value of the
world? But if so, why stop before we had
deleted them all? We should presently
be horrified at the mere thought of passions
that before had been found necessary by
the barbarous tragedian to keep his audience
awake; and the ear at the same time would
become sensitive to a thousand harmonies
that had been inaudible in the hurly-burly of
romanticism. The romanticist thinks he has
life by virtue of his confusion and torment,
whereas in truth that torment and confusion
are his incipient death, and it is only the
modicum of harmony he has achieved in
his separate faculties that keeps him alive
at all. As Aristotle taught, unmixed harmony
would be intensest life. The spheres
might make a sweet and perpetual music,
and a happy God is at least possible.

It was not in this direction, however,
that Royce broke away on occasion from
his Hegelian ethics; he did so in the direction
of ethical dogmatism and downright
sincerity. The deepest thing in him personally
was conscience, firm recognition of
duty, and the democratic and American
spirit of service. He could not adopt a
moral bias histrionically, after the manner
of Hegel or Nietzsche. To those hardened
professionals any rôle was acceptable, the
more commanding the better; but the
good Royce was like a sensitive amateur,
refusing the rôle of villain, however brilliant
and necessary to the play. In contempt of
his own speculative insight, or in an obedience
to it which forgot it for the time being,
he lost himself in his part, and felt that it
was infinitely important to be cast only for
the most virtuous of characters. He retained
inconsistently the Jewish allegiance to a
God essentially the vindicator of only one
of the combatants, not in this world often
the victor; he could not stomach the providential
scoundrels which the bad taste of
Germany, and of Carlyle and Browning,
was wont to glorify. The last notable act
of his life was an illustration of this, when
he uttered a ringing public denunciation of
the sinking of the *Lusitania*. Orthodox
Hegelians might well have urged that here,
if anywhere, was a plain case of the providential
function of what, from a finite
merely moral point of view, was an evil in
order to make a higher good possible—the
virtue of German self-assertion and of American
self-assertion in antithesis to it, synthesised
in the concrete good of war and
victory, or in the perhaps more blessed
good of defeat. What could be more unphilosophical
and *gedankenlos* than the intrusion
of mere morality into the higher
idea of world-development? Was not the
Universal Spirit compelled to bifurcate into
just such Germans and just such Americans,
in order to attain self-consciousness by
hating, fighting against, and vanquishing
itself? Certainly it was American duty
to be angry, as it was German duty to be
ruthless. The Idea liked to see its fighting-cocks
at it in earnest, since that was what
it had bred them for; but both were good
cocks. Villains, as Hegel had observed in
describing Greek tragedy, were not less
self-justified than heroes; they were simply
the heroes of a lower stage of culture.
America and England remained at the stage
of individualism; Germany had advanced
to the higher stage of organisation. Perhaps
this necessary war was destined, through
the apparent defeat of Germany, to bring
England and America up to the German
level. Of course; and yet somehow, on
this occasion, Royce passed over these profound
considerations, which life-long habit
must have brought to his lips. A Socratic
demon whispered No, No in his ear; it
would have been better for such things
never to be. The murder of those thousand
passengers was not a providential act, requisite
to spread abroad a vitalising war;
it was a crime to execrate altogether. It
would have been better for Hegel, or whoever
was responsible for it, if a millstone
had been hanged about his neck and he,
and not those little ones, had been drowned
at the bottom of the sea. Of this terrestrial
cock-pit Royce was willing to accept the
agony, but not the ignominy. The other
cock was a wicked bird.

This honest lapse from his logic was
habitual with him at the sight of sin, and
sin in his eyes was a fearful reality. His
conscience spoiled the pantheistic serenity
of his system; and what was worse (for he
was perfectly aware of the contradiction) it
added a deep, almost remorseful unrest to
his hard life. What calm could there be
in the double assurance that it was really
right that things should be wrong, but that
it was really wrong not to strive to right
them? There was no conflict, he once
observed, between science and religion, but
the real conflict was between religion and
morality. There could indeed be no conflict
in his mind between faith and science,
because his faith began by accepting all
facts and all scientific probabilities in order
to face them religiously. But there was an
invincible conflict between religion as he
conceived it and morality, because morality
takes sides and regards one sort of motive
and one kind of result as better than another,
whereas religion according to him gloried in
everything, even in the evil, as fulfilling the
will of God. Of course the practice of
virtue was not excluded; it was just as
needful as evil was in the scheme of the
whole; but while the effort of morality was
requisite, the judgements of morality were
absurd. Now I think we may say that a
man who finds himself in such a position
has a divided mind, and that while he has
wrestled with the deepest questions like a
young giant, he has not won the fight. I
mean, he has not seen his way to any one
of the various possibilities about the nature
of things, but has remained entangled, sincerely,
nobly, and pathetically, in contrary
traditions stronger than himself. In the
goodly company of philosophers he is an
intrepid martyr.

In metaphysics as in morals Royce perpetually
laboured the same points, yet they
never became clear; they covered a natural
complexity in the facts which his idealism
could not disentangle. There was a voluminous
confusion in his thought; some clear
principles and ultimate possibilities turned
up in it, now presenting one face and now
another, like chips carried down a swollen
stream; but the most powerful currents were
below the surface, and the whole movement
was hard to trace. He had borrowed from
Hegel a way of conceiving systems of philosophy,
and also the elements of his own
thought, which did not tend to clarify them.
He did not think of correcting what incoherence
there might remain in any view,
and then holding it in reserve, as one of the
possibilities, until facts should enable us to
decide whether it was true or not. Instead
he clung to the incoherence as if it
had been the heart of the position, in order
to be driven by it to some other position
altogether, so that while every view seemed
to be considered, criticised, and in a measure
retained (since the argument continued on
the same lines, however ill-chosen they might
have been originally), yet justice was never
done to it; it was never clarified, made
consistent with itself, and then accepted
or rejected in view of the evidence. Hence
a vicious and perplexing suggestion that
philosophies are bred out of philosophies,
not out of men in the presence of things.
Hence too a sophistical effort to find everything
self-contradictory, and in some disquieting
way both true and false, as if there
were not an infinite number of perfectly
consistent systems which the world might
have illustrated.

Consider, for instance, his chief and most
puzzling contention, that all minds are parts
of one mind. It is easy, according to the
meaning we give to the word mind, to render
this assertion clear and true, or clear and
false, or clear and doubtful (because touching
unknown facts), or utterly absurd. It
is obvious that all minds are parts of one
flux or system of experiences, as all bodies
are parts of one system of bodies. Again,
if mind is identified with its objects, and
people are said to be “of one mind” when
they are thinking of the same thing, it is
certain that many minds are often identical
in part, and they would all be identical with
portions of an omniscient mind that should
perceive all that they severally experienced.
The question becomes doubtful if what we
mean by oneness of mind is unity of type;
our information or plausible guesses cannot
assure us how many sorts of experience
may exist, or to what extent their development
(when they develop) follows the same
lines of evolution. The animals would have
to be consulted, and the other planets, and
the infinite recesses of time. The straitjacket
which German idealism has provided
is certainly far too narrow even for the
varieties of human imagination. Finally,
the assertion becomes absurd when it is
understood to suggest that an actual instance
of thinking, in which something,
say the existence of America, is absent or
denied, can be part of another actual instance
of thinking in which it is present and asserted.
But this whole method of treating the
matter—and we might add anything that
observation might warrant us in adding
about multiple personalities—would leave
out the problem that agitated Royce and
that bewildered his readers. He wanted
all minds to be one in some way which should
be logically and morally necessary, and which
yet, as he could not help feeling, was morally
and logically impossible.

For pure transcendentalism, which was
Royce’s technical method, the question does
not arise at all. Transcendentalism is an
attitude or a point of view rather than as
system. Its Absolute is thinking “as such,”
wherever thought may exert itself. The
notion that there are separate instances of
thought is excluded, because space, time,
and number belong to the visionary world
posited by thought, not to the function of
thinking; individuals are figments of constructive
fancy, as are material objects.
The stress of moral being is the same wherever
it may fall, and there are no finite
selves, or relations between thinkers; also
no infinite self, because on this principle
the Absolute is not an existent being, a
psychological monster, but a station or
office; its essence is a task. Actual thinking
is therefore never a part of the Absolute,
but always the Absolute itself. Thinkers,
finite or infinite, would be existing persons
or masses of feelings; such things are dreamt
of only. *Any* system of existences, *any* truth
or matter of fact waiting to be recognised,
contradicts the transcendental insight and
stultifies it. The all-inclusive mind is my
mind as I think, mind in its living function,
and beyond that philosophy cannot go.

Royce, however, while often reasoning on
this principle, was incapable of not going
beyond it, or of always remembering it. He
could not help believing that constructive
fancy not only feigns individuals and instances
of thought, but is actually seated
in them. The Absolute, for instance, must
be not merely the abstract subject or transcendental
self in all of us (although it was
that too), but an actual synthetic universal
mind, the God of Aristotle and of Christian
theology. Nor was it easy for Royce, a
sincere soul and a friend of William James,
not to be a social realist; I mean, not to
admit that there are many collateral human
minds, in temporal existential relations to
one another, any of which may influence
another, but never supplant it nor materially
include it. Finite experience was not
a mere element in infinite experience; it
was a tragic totality in itself. I was not
God looking at myself, I was myself looking
for God. Yet this strain was utterly incompatible
with the principles of transcendentalism;
it turned philosophy into a simple
anticipation of science, if not into an indulgence
in literary psychology. Knowledge
would then have been only faith leaping
across the chasm of coexistence and guessing
the presence and nature of what surrounds
us by some hint of material influence or
brotherly affinity. Both the credulity and
the finality which such naturalism implies
were offensive to Royce, and contrary to his
sceptical and mystical instincts. Was there
some middle course?

The audience in a theatre stand in a
transcendental relation to the persons and
events in the play. The performance may
take place to-day and last one hour, while
the fable transports us to some heroic epoch
or to an age that never existed, and stretches
through days and perhaps years of fancied
time. Just so transcendental thinking,
while actually timeless and not distributed
among persons, might survey infinite time
and rehearse the passions and thoughts of
a thousand characters. Thought, after all,
needs objects, however fictitious and ideal
they may be; it could not think if it thought
nothing. This indispensable world of appearance
is far more interesting than the
reality that evokes it; the qualities and
divisions found in the appearance diversify
the monotonous function of pure thinking
and render it concrete. Instances of thought
and particular minds may thus be introduced
consistently into a transcendental
system, provided they are distinguished not
by their own times and places, but only
by their themes. The transcendental mind
would be a pure poet, with no earthly life,
but living only in his works, and in the times
and persons of his fable. This view, firmly
and consistently held, would deserve the
name of absolute idealism, which Royce
liked to give to his own system. But he
struggled to fuse it with social realism, with
which it is radically incompatible. Particular
minds and the whole process of time,
for absolute idealism, are *ideas* only; they
are thought of and surveyed, they never
think or lapse actually. For this reason
genuine idealists can speak so glibly of the
mind of a nation or an age. It is just as
real and unreal to them as the mind of an
individual; for within the human individual
they can trace unities that run through and
beyond him, so that parts of him, identical
with parts of other people, form units as
living as himself; for it is all a web of
themes, not a concourse of existences. This
is the very essence and pride of idealism,
that knowledge is not knowledge of the
world but is the world itself, and that the
units of discourse, which are interwoven and
crossed units, are the only individuals in
being. You may call them persons, because
“person” means a mask; but you cannot
call them souls. They are knots in the web
of history. They are words in their context,
and the only spirit in them is the sense
they have for me.

Royce, however, in saying all this, also
wished not to say it, and his two thick volumes
on *The World and the Individual* leave their
subject wrapped in utter obscurity. Perceiving
the fact when he had finished, he very
characteristically added a “Supplementary
Essay” of a hundred more pages, in finer
print, in which to come to the point.
Imagine, he said, an absolutely exhaustive
map of England spread out upon English
soil. The map would be a part of England,
yet would reproduce every feature of England,
including itself; so that the map
would reappear on a smaller scale within
itself an infinite number of times, like a
mirror reflected in a mirror. In this way
we might be individuals within a larger
individual, and no less actual and complete
than he. Does this solve the problem? If
we take the illustration as it stands, there is
still only one individual in existence, the
material England, all the maps being parts
of its single surface; nor will it at all resemble
the maps, since it will be washed by
the sea and surrounded by foreign nations,
and not, like the maps, by other Englands
enveloping it. If, on the contrary, we equalise
the status of all the members of the series,
by making it infinite in both directions, then
there would be no England at all, but only
map within map of England. There would
be no absolute mind inclusive but not
included, and the Absolute would be the
series as a whole, utterly different from
any of its members. It would be a series
while they were maps, a truth while they
were minds; and if the Absolute from the
beginning had been regarded as a truth
only, there never would have been any
difficulty in the existence of individuals
under it. Moreover, if the individuals are
all exactly alike, does not their exact similarity
defeat the whole purpose of the
speculation, which was to vindicate the equal
reality of the whole and of its *limited* parts?
And if each of us, living through infinite time,
goes through precisely the same experiences
as every one else, why this vain repetition?
Is it not enough for this insatiable world to
live its life once? Why not admit solipsism
and be true to the transcendental method?
Because of conscience and good sense? But
then the infinite series of maps is useless,
England is herself again, and the prospect
opens before us of an infinite number of
supplementary essays.

Royce sometimes felt that he might have
turned his hand to other things than philosophy.
He once wrote a novel, and its
want of success was a silent disappointment
to him. Perhaps he might have been a
great musician. Complexity, repetitions,
vagueness, endlessness are hardly virtues
in writing or thinking, but in music they
might have swelled and swelled into a real
sublimity, all the more that he was patient,
had a voluminous meandering memory, and
loved technical devices. But rather than
a musician—for he was no artist—he resembled
some great-hearted mediæval
peasant visited by mystical promptings,
whom the monks should have adopted and
allowed to browse among their theological
folios; a Duns Scotus earnest and studious
to a fault, not having the lightness of soul
to despise those elaborate sophistries, yet
minded to ferret out their secret for himself
and walk by his inward light. His was a
gothic and scholastic spirit, intent on devising
and solving puzzles, and honouring God
in systematic works, like the coral insect or
the spider; eventually creating a fabric
that in its homely intricacy and fulness
arrested and moved the heart, the web of it
was so vast, and so full of mystery and
yearning.

CHAPTER V—LATER SPECULATIONS
============================

A question which is curious in itself and
may become important in the future is this:
How has migration to the new world affected
philosophical ideas? At first sight we might
be tempted, perhaps, to dismiss this question
altogether, on the ground that no such effect
is discernible. For what do we find in
America in the guise of philosophy? In the
background, the same Protestant theology as
in Europe and the same Catholic theology;
on the surface, the same adoption of German
idealism, the same vogue of evolution, the
same psychology becoming metaphysics,
and lately the same revival of a mathematical
or logical realism. In no case has the
first expression of these various tendencies
appeared in America, and no original system
that I know of has arisen there. It would
seem, then, that in philosophy, as in letters
generally, polite America has continued the
common tradition of Christendom, in paths
closely parallel to those followed in England;
and that modern speculation, which is so very
sensitive to changed times, is quite indifferent
to distinctions of place.

Perhaps; but I say advisedly *polite*
America, for without this qualification what
I have been suggesting would hardly be true.
Polite America carried over its household
gods from puritan England in a spirit of consecration,
and it has always wished to remain
in communion with whatever its conscience
might value in the rest of the world. Yet
it has been cut off by distance and by revolutionary
prejudice against things ancient or
foreign; and it has been disconcerted at the
same time by the insensible shifting of the
ground under its feet: it has suffered from
in-breeding and anæmia. On the other hand,
a crude but vital America has sprung up
from the soil, undermining, feeding, and
transforming the America of tradition.

This young America was originally composed
of all the prodigals, truants, and adventurous
spirits that the colonial families
produced: it was fed continually by the
younger generation, born in a spacious, half-empty
world, tending to forget the old
straitened morality and to replace it by
another, quite jovially human. This truly
native America was reinforced by the miscellany
of Europe arriving later, not in the hope
of founding a godly commonwealth, but only
of prospering in an untrammelled one. The
horde of immigrants eagerly accepts the
external arrangements and social spirit of
American life, but never hears of its original
austere principles, or relegates them to the
same willing oblivion as it does the constraints
which it has just escaped—Jewish, Irish,
German, Italian, or whatever they may be.
We should be seriously deceived if we overlooked
for a moment the curious and complex
relation between these two Americas.

Let me give one illustration. Professor
Norton, the friend of Carlyle, of Burne-Jones,
and of Matthew Arnold, and, for the matter
of that, the friend of everybody, a most
urbane, learned, and exquisite spirit, was
descended from a long line of typical New
England divines: yet he was loudly accused,
in public and in private, of being un-American.
On the other hand, a Frenchman of ripe judgement,
who knew him perfectly, once said to
me: “Norton wouldn’t like to hear it, but he
is a terrible Yankee.” Both judgements
were well grounded. Professor Norton’s mind
was deeply moralised, discriminating, and sad;
and these qualities rightly seemed American
to the French observer of New England,
but they rightly seemed un-American to
the politician from Washington.

Philosophical opinion in America is of
course rooted in the genteel tradition. It is
either inspired by religious faith, and designed
to defend it, or else it is created somewhat
artificially in the larger universities, by
deliberately proposing problems which, without
being very pressing to most Americans,
are supposed to be necessary problems of
thought. Yet if you expected academic
philosophers in America, because the background
of their minds seems perfunctory, to
resemble academic philosophers elsewhere,
you would be often mistaken. There is no
prig’s paradise in those regions. Many of
the younger professors of philosophy are no
longer the sort of persons that might as well
have been clergymen or schoolmasters: they
have rather the type of mind of a doctor, an
engineer, or a social reformer; the wide-awake
young man who can do most things
better than old people, and who knows it.
He is less eloquent and apostolic than the
older generation of philosophers, very professional
in tone and conscious of his *Fach*;
not that he would deny for a moment the
many-sided ignorance to which nowadays we
are all reduced, but that he thinks he can get
on very well without the things he ignores.
His education has been more pretentious
than thorough; his style is deplorable;
social pressure and his own great eagerness
have condemned him to over-work, committee
meetings, early marriage, premature authorship,
and lecturing two or three times a day
under forced draught. He has no peace in
himself, no window open to a calm horizon,
and in his heart perhaps little taste for mere
scholarship or pure speculation. Yet, like
the plain soldier staggering under his clumsy
equipment, he is cheerful; he keeps his faith
in himself and in his allotted work, puts up
with being toasted only on one side, remains
open-minded, whole-hearted, appreciative,
helpful, confident of the future of goodness
and of science. In a word, he is a cell in that
teeming democratic body; he draws from
its warm, contagious activities the sanctions
of his own life and, less consciously, the spirit
of his philosophy.

It is evident that such minds will have
but a loose hold on tradition, even on the
genteel tradition in American philosophy.
Not that in general they oppose or dislike it;
their alienation from it is more radical; they
forget it. Religion was the backbone of that
tradition, and towards religion, in so far as
it is a private sentiment or presumption,
they feel a tender respect; but in so far as
religion is a political institution, seeking to
coerce the mind and the conscience, one
would think they had never heard of it.
They feel it is as much every one’s right to
choose and cherish a religion as to choose and
cherish a wife, without having his choice
rudely commented upon in public. Hitherto
America has been the land of universal good-will,
confidence in life, inexperience of poisons.
Until yesterday it believed itself immune
from the hereditary plagues of mankind. It
could not credit the danger of being suffocated
or infected by any sinister principle. The
more errors and passions were thrown into
the melting-pot, the more certainly would
they neutralise one another and would truth
come to the top. Every system was met
with a frank gaze. “Come on,” people
seemed to say to it, “show us what you are
good for. We accept no claims; we ask for
no credentials; we just give you a chance.
Plato, the Pope, and Mrs. Eddy shall have
one vote each.” After all, I am not sure
that this toleration without deference is not
a cruel test for systematic delusions: it lets
the daylight into the stage.

Philosophic tradition in America has
merged almost completely in German idealism.
In a certain sense this system did not
need to be adopted: something very like
it had grown up spontaneously in New
England in the form of transcendentalism
and unitarian theology. Even the most
emancipated and positivistic of the latest
thinkers—pragmatists, new realists, pure empiricists—have
been bred in the atmosphere
of German idealism; and this fact should
not be forgotten in approaching their views.
The element of this philosophy which has
sunk deepest, and which is reinforced by the
influence of psychology, is the critical attitude
towards knowledge, subjectivism, withdrawal
into experience, on the assumption that
experience is something substantial. Experience
was regarded by earlier empiricists
as a method for making real discoveries, a
safer witness than reasoning to what might
exist in nature; but now experience is taken
to be in itself the only real existence, the
ultimate object that all thought and theory
must regard. This empiricism does not look
to the building up of science, but rather to a
more thorough criticism and disintegration
of conventional beliefs, those of empirical
science included. It is in the intrepid prosecution
of this criticism and disintegration
that American philosophy has won its wings.

It may seem a strange Nemesis that a
critical philosophy, which on principle reduces
everything to the consciousness of it, should
end by reducing consciousness itself to other
things; yet the path of this boomerang is
not hard to trace. The word consciousness
originally meant what Descartes called
thought or cogitation—the faculty which
attention has of viewing together objects
which may belong together neither in their
logical essence nor in their natural existence.
It colours events with memories and facts
with emotions, and adds images to words.
This synthetic and transitive function of
consciousness is a positive fact about it, to
be discovered by study, like any other somewhat
recondite fact. You will discover it if
you institute a careful comparison and contrast
between the way things hang together
in thought and the way they hang together
in nature. To have discerned the wonderful
perspectives both of imagination and of will
seems to me the chief service done to philosophy
by Kant and his followers. It is the
positive, the non-malicious element in their
speculation; and in the midst of their
psychologism in logic and their egotism about
nature and history, consciousness seems to
be the one province of being which they have
thrown true light upon. But just because
this is a positive province of being, an actual
existence to be discovered and dogmatically
believed in, it is not what a malicious criticism
of knowledge can end with. Not the nature
of consciousness, but the data of consciousness,
are what the critic must fall back upon
in the last resort; and Hume had been in
this respect a more penetrating critic than
Kant. One cannot, by inspecting consciousness,
find consciousness itself as a passive
datum, because consciousness is cogitation;
one can only take note of the immediate
objects of consciousness, in such private
perspective as sense or imagination may
present.

Philosophy seems to be richer in theories
than in words to express them in; and much
confusion results from the necessity of using
old terms in new meanings. In this way,
when consciousness is disregarded, in the
proper sense of cogitation, the name of consciousness
can be transferred to the stream
of objects immediately present to consciousness;
so that consciousness comes to signify
the evolving field of appearances unrolled
before any person.

This equivocation is favoured by the allied
ambiguity of an even commoner term, idea.
It is plausible to say that consciousness is a
stream of ideas, because an idea may mean
an opinion, a cogitation, a view taken of
some object. And it is also plausible to say
that ideas are objects of consciousness, because
an idea may mean an image, a passive datum.
Passive data may be of any sort you like—things,
qualities, relations, propositions—but
they are never cogitations; and to call *them*
consciousness or components of consciousness
is false and inexcusable. The ideas that may
be so called are not these passive objects, but
active thoughts. Indeed, when the psychological
critic has made this false step, he
is not able to halt: his method will carry
him presently from this position to one even
more paradoxical.

Is memory knowledge of a past that is
itself absent and dead, or is it a present
experience? A complete philosophy would
doubtless reply that it is both; but psychological
criticism can take cognisance of
memory only as a mass of present images and
presumptions. The experience remembered
may indeed be exactly recovered and be
present again; but the fact that it was
present before cannot possibly be given now;
it can only be suggested and believed.

It is evident, therefore, that the historical
order in which data flow is not contained
bodily in any one of them. This order is
conceived; the hypothesis is framed instinctively
and instinctively credited, but it is
only an hypothesis. And it is often wrong,
as is proved by all the constitutional errors
of memory and legend. Belief in the order
of our personal experiences is accordingly
just as dogmatic, daring, and realistic as
the parallel belief in a material world.
The psychological critic must attribute both
beliefs to a mere tendency to feign; and if
he is true to his method he must discard the
notion that the objects of consciousness are
arranged in psychological sequences, making
up separate minds. In other words, he must
discard the notion of consciousness, not only
in the sense of thought or cogitation, but in
the sense he himself had given it of a stream
of ideas. Actual objects, he will now admit,
not without a certain surprise, are not ideas
at all: they do not lie in the mind (for there
is no mind to be found) but in the medium
that observably surrounds them. Things
are just what they seem to be, and to say
they are consciousness or compose a consciousness
is absurd. The so-called appearances,
according to a perfected criticism of
knowledge, are nothing private or internal;
they are merely those portions of external
objects which from time to time impress
themselves on somebody’s organs of sense
and are responded to by his nervous system.

Such is the doctrine of the new American
realists, in whose devoted persons the logic
of idealism has worked itself out and appropriately
turned idealism itself into its opposite.
Consciousness, they began by saying, is merely
a stream of ideas; but then ideas are merely
the parts of objects which happen to appear
to a given person; but again, a person (for
all you or he can discover) is nothing but his
body and those parts of other objects which
appear to him; and, finally, to appear, in any
discoverable sense, cannot be to have a ghostly
sort of mental existence, but merely to be
reacted upon by an animal body. Thus we
come to the conclusion that objects alone
exist, and that consciousness is a name for
certain segments or groups of these objects.

I think we may conjecture why this
startling conclusion, that consciousness does
not exist, a conclusion suggested somewhat
hurriedly by William James, has found a
considerable echo in America, and why the
system of Avenarius, which makes in the
same direction, has been studied there sympathetically.
To deny consciousness is to
deny a pre-requisite to the obvious, and to
leave the obvious standing alone. That is a
relief to an overtaxed and self-impeded
generation; it seems a blessed simplification.
It gets rid of the undemocratic notion that
by being very reflective, circumspect, and
subtle you might discover something that
most people do not see. They can go on
more merrily with their work if they believe
that by being so subtle, circumspect, and
reflective you would only discover a mare’s
nest. The elimination of consciousness not
only restores the obvious, but proves all
parts of the obvious to be equally real. Not
only colours, beauties, and passions, but all
things formerly suspected of being creatures
of thought, such as laws, relations, and
abstract qualities, now become components
of the existing object, since there is no longer
any mental vehicle by which they might
have been created and interposed. The
young American is thus reassured: his joy
in living and learning is no longer chilled by
the contempt which idealism used to cast
on nature for being imaginary and on science
for being intellectual. All fictions and all
abstractions are now declared to be parcels
of the objective world; it will suffice to live
on, to live forward, in order to see everything
as it really is.

If we look now at these matters from a
slightly different angle, we shall find psychological
criticism transforming the notion
of truth much as it has transformed the notion
of consciousness. In the first place, there is
a similar ambiguity in the term. The truth
properly means the sum of all true propositions,
what omniscience would assert, the
whole ideal system of qualities and relations
which the world has exemplified or will
exemplify. The truth is all things seen under
the form of eternity. In this sense, a psychological
criticism cannot be pertinent to
the truth at all, the truth not being anything
psychological or human. It is an ideal realm
of being properly enough not discussed by
psychologists; yet so far as I know it is
denied by nobody, not even by Protagoras
or the pragmatists. If Protagoras said that
whatever appears to any man at any moment
is true, he doubtless meant true on that
subject, true of that appearance: because
for a sensualist objects do not extend beyond
what he sees of them, so that each of his
perceptions defines its whole object and is
infallible. But in that case the truth about
the universe is evidently that it is composed
of these various sensations, each carrying an
opinion impossible for it to abandon or to
revise, since to revise the opinion would
simply be to bring a fresh object into view.
The truth would further be that these sensations
and opinions stand to one another in
certain definite relations of diversity, succession,
duration, *et cætera*, whether any of
them happens to assert these relations or
not. In the same way, I cannot find that
our contemporary pragmatists, in giving
their account of what truth is (in a different
and quite abstract sense of the word truth),
have ever doubted, or so much as noticed,
what in all their thinking they evidently
assume to be the actual and concrete truth:
namely, that there are many states of mind,
many labouring opinions more or less useful
and good, which actually lead to others, more
or less expected and satisfactory. Surely
every pragmatist, like every thinking man,
always assumes the reality of an actual truth,
comprehensive and largely undiscovered, of
which he claims to be reporting a portion.
What he rather confusingly calls truth, and
wishes to reduce to a pragmatic function, is
not this underlying truth, the sum of all true
propositions, but merely the abstract quality
which all true propositions must have in
common, to be called true. By truth he
means only correctness. The possibility of
correctness in an idea is a great puzzle to
him, on account of his idealism, which
identifies ideas with their objects; and he
asks himself how an idea can ever come to
be correct or incorrect, as if it referred to
something beyond itself.

The fact is, of course, that an idea can
be correct or incorrect only if by the word
idea we mean not a datum but an opinion;
and the abstract relation of correctness, by
virtue of which any opinion is true, is easily
stated. An opinion is true if what it is
talking about is constituted as the opinion
asserts it to be constituted. To test this
correctness may be difficult or even impossible
in particular cases; in the end we may be
reduced to believing on instinct that our
fundamental opinions are true; for instance,
that we are living through time, and that
the past and future are not, as a consistent
idealism would assert, mere notions in the
present. But what renders such instinctive
opinions true, if they are true, is the fact
affirmed being as it is affirmed to be. It is
not a question of similarity or derivation
between a passive datum and a hidden
object; it is a question of identity between
the fact asserted and the fact existing. If
an opinion could not freely leap to its object,
no matter how distant or hypothetical, and
assert something of that chosen object, an
opinion could not be so much as wrong;
for it would not be an opinion about
anything.

Psychologists, however, are not concerned
with what an opinion asserts logically, but
only with what it is existentially; they are
asking what existential relations surround
an idea when it is called true which are absent
when it is called false. Their problem is
frankly insoluble; for it requires us to discover
what makes up the indicative force
of an idea which by hypothesis is a passive
datum; as if a grammarian should inquire
how a noun in the accusative case could be
a verb in the indicative mood.

It was not idly that William James
dedicated his book on Pragmatism to the
memory of John Stuart Mill. The principle
of psychological empiricism is to look for
the elements employed in thinking, and to
conclude that thought is nothing but those
elements arranged in a certain order. It is
true that since the days of Mill analysis has
somewhat extended the inventory of these
elements, so as to include among simples,
besides the data of the five senses, such things
as feelings of relation, sensations of movement,
vague ill-focused images, and perhaps
even telepathic and instinctive intuitions.
But some series or group of these immediate
data, kept in their crude immediacy, must
according to this method furnish the whole
answer to our question: the supposed power
of an idea to have an object beyond itself,
or to be true of any other fact, must be
merely a name for a certain position which
the given element occupies in relation to
other elements in the routine of experience.
Knowledge and truth must be forms of contiguity
and succession.

We must not be surprised, under these
circumstances, if the problem is shifted, and
another somewhat akin to it takes its place,
with which the chosen method can really
cope. This subterfuge is not voluntary; it
is an instinctive effect of fidelity to a point
of view which has its special validity, though
naturally not applicable in every sphere. We
do not observe that politicians abandon
their party when it happens to have brought
trouble upon the country; their destiny as
politicians is precisely to make effective all
the consequences, good or evil, which their
party policy may involve. So it would be
too much to expect a school of philosophers
to abandon their method because there are
problems it cannot solve; their business is
rather to apply their method to everything
to which it can possibly be applied; and
when they have reached that limit, the very
most we can ask, if they are superhumanly
modest and wise, is that they should
make way gracefully for another school of
philosophers.

Now there is a problem, not impossible
to confuse with the problem of correctness
in ideas, with which psychological criticism
can really deal; it is the question of the
relation between a sign and the thing signified.
Of this relation a genuinely empirical account
can be given; both terms are objects of
experience, present or eventual, and the
passage between them is made in time by an
experienced transition. Nor need the signs
which lead to a particular object be always
the same, or of one sort; an object may
be designated and announced unequivocally
by a verbal description, without any direct
image, or by images now of one sense and
now of another, or by some external relation,
such as its place, or by its proper name, if
it possesses one; and these designations all
convey knowledge of it and may be true
signs, if in yielding to their suggestion we
are brought eventually to the object meant.

Here, if I am not mistaken, is the genuine
application of what the pragmatists call their
theory of truth. It concerns merely what
links a sign to the thing signified, and renders
it a practical substitute for the same. But
this empirical analysis of signification has
been entangled with more or less hazardous
views about truth, such as that an idea is
true so long as it is believed to be true, or
that it is true if it is good and useful, or that
it is not true until it is verified. This last
suggestion shows what strange reversals a
wayward personal philosophy may be subject
to. Empiricism used to mean reliance
on the past; now apparently all empirical
truth regards only the future, since truth is
said to arise by the verification of some
presumption. Presumptions about the past
can evidently never be verified; at best they
may be corroborated by fresh presumptions
about the past, equally dependent for their
truth on a verification which in the nature
of the case is impossible. At this point the
truly courageous empiricist will perhaps say
that the real past only means the ideas of
the past which we shall form in the future.
Consistency is a jewel; and, as in the case of
other jewels, we may marvel at the price
that some people will pay for it. In any
case, we are led to this curious result: that
radical empiricism ought to deny that any
idea of the past can be true at all.

Such dissolving views, really somewhat
like those attributed to Protagoras, do not
rest on sober psychological analysis: they
express rather a certain impatience and a
certain despairing democracy in the field of
opinion. Great are the joys of haste and of
radicalism, and young philosophers must
not be deprived of them. We may the
more justly pass over these small scandals
of pragmatism in that William James and
his American disciples have hardly cared to
defend them, but have turned decidedly in
the direction of a universal objectivism.

The spirit of these radical views is not at
all negative: it is hopeful, revolutionary,
inspired entirely by love of certitude and
clearness. It is very sympathetic to science,
in so far as science is a personal pursuit and
a personal experience, rather than a body
of doctrine with moral implications. It is
very close to nature, as the lover of nature
understands the word. If it denies the
existence of the cognitive energy and the
colouring medium of mind, it does so only
in a formal sense; all the colours with which
that medium endows the world remain
painted upon it; and all the perspectives
and ideal objects of thought are woven into
the texture of things. Not, I think, intelligibly
or in a coherent fashion; for this new
realism is still immature, and if it is ever
rendered adequate it will doubtless seem
much less original. My point is that in its
denial of mind it has no bias against things
intellectual, and if it refuses to admit ideas
or even sensations, it does not blink the
sensible or ideal objects which ideas and
sensations reveal, but rather tries to find a
new and (as it perhaps thinks) a more honourable
place for them; they are not regarded
as spiritual radiations from the natural world,
but as parts of its substance.

This may have the ring of materialism;
but the temper and faith of these schools
are not materialistic. Systematic materialism
is one of the philosophies of old age. It
is a conviction that may overtake a few
shrewd and speculative cynics, who have long
observed their own irrationality and that
of the world, and have divined its cause;
by such men materialism may be embraced
without reserve, in all its rigour and pungency.
But the materialism of youth is part
of a simple faith in sense and in science; it
is not exclusive; it admits the co-operation
of any other forces—divine, magical, formal,
or vital—if appearances anywhere seem to
manifest them. The more we interpret the
ambiguities or crudities of American writers
in this sense, the less we shall misunderstand
them.

It seems, then, that the atmosphere of the
new world has already affected philosophy
in two ways. In the first place, it has accelerated
and rendered fearless the disintegration
of conventional categories; a disintegration
on which modern philosophy has always
been at work, and which has precipitated its
successive phases. In the second place, the
younger cosmopolitan America has favoured
the impartial assemblage and mutual confrontation
of all sorts of ideas. It has produced,
in intellectual matters, a sort of
happy watchfulness and insecurity. Never
was the human mind master of so many facts
and sure of so few principles. Will this
suspense and fluidity of thought crystallise
into some great new system? Positive gifts
of imagination and moral heroism are requisite
to make a great philosopher, gifts
which must come from the gods and not
from circumstances. But if the genius should
arise, this vast collection of suggestions and
this radical analysis of presumptions which
he will find in America may keep him from
going astray. Nietzsche said that the earth
has been a mad-house long enough. Without
contradicting him we might perhaps soften
the expression, and say that philosophy has
been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
It is time for it to become less solemn and
more serious. We may be frightened at
first to learn on what thin ice we have been
skating, in speculation as in government;
but we shall not be in a worse plight for
knowing it, only wiser to-day and perhaps
safer to-morrow.

CHAPTER VI—MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE
====================================================

The language and traditions common to
England and America are like other family
bonds: they draw kindred together at the
greater crises in life, but they also occasion
at times a little friction and fault-finding.
The groundwork of the two societies is so
similar, that each nation, feeling almost at
home with the other, and almost able to
understand its speech, may instinctively
resent what hinders it from feeling at home
altogether. Differences will tend to seem
anomalies that have slipped in by mistake
and through somebody’s fault. Each will
judge the other by his own standards, not
feeling, as in the presence of complete
foreigners, that he must make an effort of
imagination and put himself in another
man’s shoes.

In matters of morals, manners, and art,
the danger of comparisons is not merely
that they may prove invidious, by ranging
qualities in an order of merit which might
wound somebody’s vanity; the danger is
rather that comparisons may distort comprehension,
because in truth good qualities
are all different in kind, and free lives are
different in spirit. Comparison is the expedient
of those who cannot reach the heart
of the things compared; and no philosophy
is more external and egotistical than that
which places the essence of a thing in its
relation to something else. In reality, at
the centre of every natural being there is
something individual and incommensurable,
a seed with its native impulses and aspirations,
shaping themselves as best they can
in their given environment. Variation is
a consequence of freedom, and the slight
but radical diversity of souls in turn makes
freedom requisite. Instead of instituting in
his mind any comparisons between the
United States and other nations, I would
accordingly urge the reader to forget himself
and, in so far as such a thing may be possible
for him or for me, to transport himself ideally
with me into the outer circumstances of
American life, the better to feel its inner
temper, and to see how inevitably the
American shapes his feelings and judgements,
honestly reporting all things as they appear
from his new and unobstructed station.

I speak of the American in the singular,
as if there were not millions of them, north
and south, east and west, of both sexes, of
all ages, and of various races, professions,
and religions. Of course the one American I
speak of is mythical; but to speak in parables
is inevitable in such a subject, and it is
perhaps as well to do so frankly. There is
a sort of poetic ineptitude in all human discourse
when it tries to deal with natural and
existing things. Practical men may not
notice it, but in fact human discourse is
intrinsically addressed not to natural existing
things but to ideal essences, poetic or logical
terms which thought may define and play
with. When fortune or necessity diverts our
attention from this congenial ideal sport to
crude facts and pressing issues, we turn our
frail poetic ideas into symbols for those
terrible irruptive things. In that paper
money of our own stamping, the legal tender
of the mind, we are obliged to reckon all the
movements and values of the world. The
universal American I speak of is one of these
symbols; and I should be still speaking in
symbols and creating moral units and a false
simplicity, if I spoke of classes pedantically
subdivided, or individuals ideally integrated
and defined. As it happens, the symbolic
American can be made largely adequate to
the facts; because, if there are immense
differences between individual Americans—for
some Americans are black—yet there is
a great uniformity in their environment,
customs, temper, and thoughts. They have
all been uprooted from their several soils and
ancestries and plunged together into one
vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise
quite empty. To be an American is of
itself almost a moral condition, an education,
and a career. Hence a single ideal figment
can cover a large part of what each American
is in his character, and almost the whole of
what most Americans are in their social
outlook and political judgements.

The discovery of the new world exercised
a sort of selection among the inhabitants of
Europe. All the colonists, except the negroes,
were voluntary exiles. The fortunate, the
deeply rooted, and the lazy remained at
home; the wilder instincts or dissatisfaction
of others tempted them beyond the horizon.
The American is accordingly the most adventurous,
or the descendant of the most
adventurous, of Europeans. It is in his
blood to be socially a radical, though perhaps
not intellectually. What has existed in the
past, especially in the remote past, seems to
him not only not authoritative, but irrelevant,
inferior, and outworn. He finds it
rather a sorry waste of time to think about
the past at all. But his enthusiasm for the
future is profound; he can conceive of no
more decisive way of recommending an
opinion or a practice than to say that it is
what everybody is coming to adopt. This
expectation of what he approves, or approval
of what he expects, makes up his optimism.
It is the necessary faith of the pioneer.

Such a temperament is, of course, not
maintained in the nation merely by inheritance.
Inheritance notoriously tends to
restore the average of a race, and plays
incidentally many a trick of atavism. What
maintains this temperament and makes it
national is social contagion or pressure—something
immensely strong in democracies.
The luckless American who is born a conservative,
or who is drawn to poetic subtlety,
pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless
has the categorical excellence of work, growth,
enterprise, reform, and prosperity dinned
into his ears: every door is open in this
direction and shut in the other; so that he
either folds up his heart and withers in a
corner—in remote places you sometimes find
such a solitary gaunt idealist—or else he flies
to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save
his soul—or perhaps not to save it.

The optimism of the pioneer is not limited
to his view of himself and his own future:
it starts from that; but feeling assured,
safe, and cheery within, he looks with smiling
and most kindly eyes on everything
and everybody about him. Individualism,
roughness, and self-trust are supposed to go
with selfishness and a cold heart; but I
suspect that is a prejudice. It is rather
dependence, insecurity, and mutual jostling
that poison our placid gregarious brotherhood;
and fanciful passionate demands
upon people’s affections, when they are disappointed,
as they soon must be, breed ill-will
and a final meanness. The milk of
human kindness is less apt to turn sour if
the vessel that holds it stands steady, cool,
and separate, and is not too often uncorked.
In his affections the American is seldom
passionate, often deep, and always kindly.
If it were given me to look into the depths
of a man’s heart, and I did not find good-will
at the bottom, I should say without any
hesitation, You are not an American. But
as the American is an individualist his good-will
is not officious. His instinct is to think
well of everybody, and to wish everybody
well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship,
expecting every man to stand on his own
legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he
has given his neighbour a chance he thinks
he has done enough for him; but he feels it
is an absolute duty to do that. It will take
some hammering to drive a coddling socialism
into America.

As self-trust may pass into self-sufficiency,
so optimism, kindness, and good-will may
grow into a habit of doting on everything.
To the good American many subjects are
sacred: sex is sacred, women are sacred,
children are sacred, business is sacred,
America is sacred, Masonic lodges and college
clubs are sacred. This feeling grows out of
the good opinion he wishes to have of these
things, and serves to maintain it. If he did
not regard all these things as sacred he might
come to doubt sometimes if they were wholly
good. Of this kind, too, is the idealism of
single ladies in reduced circumstances who
can see the soul of beauty in ugly things, and
are perfectly happy because their old dog has
such pathetic eyes, their minister is so
eloquent, their garden with its three sunflowers
is so pleasant, their dead friends were
so devoted, and their distant relations are
so rich.

Consider now the great emptiness of
America: not merely the primitive physical
emptiness, surviving in some regions, and
the continental spacing of the chief natural
features, but also the moral emptiness of a
settlement where men and even houses are
easily moved about, and no one, almost, lives
where he was born or believes what he has
been taught. Not that the American has
jettisoned these impedimenta in anger; they
have simply slipped from him as he moves.
Great empty spaces bring a sort of freedom
to both soul and body. You may pitch
your tent where you will; or if ever you
decide to build anything, it can be in a style
of your own devising. You have room,
fresh materials, few models, and no critics.
You trust your own experience, not only
because you must, but because you find you
may do so safely and prosperously; the
forces that determine fortune are not yet
too complicated for one man to explore.
Your detachable condition makes you lavish
with money and cheerfully experimental;
you lose little if you lose all, since you remain
completely yourself. At the same time your
absolute initiative gives you practice in
coping with novel situations, and in being
original; it teaches you shrewd management.
Your life and mind will become dry and
direct, with few decorative flourishes. In
your works everything will be stark and
pragmatic; you will not understand why
anybody should make those little sacrifices
to instinct or custom which we call grace.
The fine arts will seem to you academic
luxuries, fit to amuse the ladies, like Greek
and Sanskrit; for while you will perfectly
appreciate generosity in men’s purposes, you
will not admit that the execution of these
purposes can be anything but business. Unfortunately
the essence of the fine arts is that
the execution should be generous too, and
delightful in itself; therefore the fine arts
will suffer, not so much in their express professional
pursuit—for then they become
practical tasks and a kind of business—as in
that diffused charm which qualifies all human
action when men are artists by nature.
Elaboration, which is something to accomplish,
will be preferred to simplicity, which
is something to rest in; manners will suffer
somewhat; speech will suffer horribly. For
the American the urgency of his novel attack
upon matter, his zeal in gathering its fruits,
precludes meanderings in primrose paths;
devices must be short cuts, and symbols
must be mere symbols. If his wife wants
luxuries, of course she may have them; and
if he has vices, that can be provided for too;
but they must all be set down under those
headings in his ledgers.

At the same time, the American is
imaginative; for where life is intense,
imagination is intense also. Were he not
imaginative he would not live so much in
the future. But his imagination is practical,
and the future it forecasts is immediate; it
works with the clearest and least ambiguous
terms known to his experience, in terms of
number, measure, contrivance, economy, and
speed. He is an idealist working on matter.
Understanding as he does the material potentialities
of things, he is successful in invention,
conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies.
All his life he jumps into the train
after it has started and jumps out before it
has stopped; and he never once gets left
behind, or breaks a leg. There is an enthusiasm
in his sympathetic handling of material
forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal
character which it might otherwise assume.
The good workman hardly distinguishes his
artistic intention from the potency in himself
and in things which is about to realise that
intention. Accordingly his ideals fall into
the form of premonitions and prophecies;
and his studious prophecies often come true.
So do the happy workmanlike ideals of the
American. When a poor boy, perhaps, he
dreams of an education, and presently he
gets an education, or at least a degree; he
dreams of growing rich, and he grows rich—only
more slowly and modestly, perhaps,
than he expected; he dreams of marrying
his Rebecca and, even if he marries a Leah
instead, he ultimately finds in Leah his
Rebecca after all. He dreams of helping
to carry on and to accelerate the movement
of a vast, seething, progressive society, and
he actually does so. Ideals clinging so close
to nature are almost sure of fulfilment; the
American beams with a certain self-confidence
and sense of mastery; he feels that
God and nature are working with him.

Idealism in the American accordingly
goes hand in hand with present contentment
and with foresight of what the future very
likely will actually bring. He is not a
revolutionist; he believes he is already on
the right track and moving towards an
excellent destiny. In revolutionists, on the
contrary, idealism is founded on dissatisfaction
and expresses it. What exists seems
to them an absurd jumble of irrational
accidents and bad habits, and they want the
future to be based on reason and to be the
pellucid embodiment of all their maxims.
All their zeal is for something radically different
from the actual and (if they only knew
it) from the possible; it is ideally simple,
and they love it and believe in it because
their nature craves it. They think life would
be set free by the destruction of all its organs.
They are therefore extreme idealists in the
region of hope, but not at all, as poets and
artists are, in the region of perception and
memory. In the atmosphere of civilised
life they miss all the refraction and all the
fragrance; so that in their conception of
actual things they are apt to be crude
realists; and their ignorance and inexperience
of the moral world, unless it comes of
ill-luck, indicates their incapacity for education.
Now incapacity for education, when
united with great inner vitality, is one root
of idealism. It is what condemns us all,
in the region of sense, to substitute perpetually
what we are capable of imagining for
what things may be in themselves; it is
what condemns us, wherever it extends, to
think *a priori*; it is what keeps us bravely
and incorrigibly pursuing what we call the
good—that is, what would fulfil the demands
of our nature—however little provision the
fates may have made for it. But the want
of insight on the part of revolutionists
touching the past and the present infects
in an important particular their idealism
about the future; it renders their dreams
of the future unrealisable. For in human
beings—this may not be true of other
animals, more perfectly preformed—experience
is necessary to pertinent and concrete
thinking; even our primitive instincts are
blind until they stumble upon some occasion
that solicits them; and they can be much
transformed or deranged by their first partial
satisfactions. Therefore a man who does
not idealise his experience, but idealises *a
priori*, is incapable of true prophecy; when
he dreams he raves, and the more he criticises
the less he helps. American idealism, on
the contrary, is nothing if not helpful,
nothing if not pertinent to practicable transformations;
and when the American frets,
it is because whatever is useless and impertinent,
be it idealism or inertia, irritates him;
for it frustrates the good results which he
sees might so easily have been obtained.

The American is wonderfully alive; and
his vitality, not having often found a suitable
outlet, makes him appear agitated on
the surface; he is always letting off an
unnecessarily loud blast of incidental steam.
Yet his vitality is not superficial; it is
inwardly prompted, and as sensitive and
quick as a magnetic needle. He is inquisitive,
and ready with an answer to any
question that he may put to himself of his
own accord; but if you try to pour instruction
into him, on matters that do not touch
his own spontaneous life, he shows the
most extraordinary powers of resistance and
oblivescence; so that he often is remarkably
expert in some directions and surprisingly
obtuse in others. He seems to bear lightly
the sorrowful burden of human knowledge.
In a word, he is young.

What sense is there in this feeling, which
we all have, that the American is young?
His country is blessed with as many elderly
people as any other, and his descent from
Adam, or from the Darwinian rival of Adam,
cannot be shorter than that of his European
cousins. Nor are his ideas always very
fresh. Trite and rigid bits of morality and
religion, with much seemly and antique
political lore, remain axiomatic in him, as in
the mind of a child; he may carry all this
about with an unquestioning familiarity
which does not comport understanding. To
keep traditional sentiments in this way
insulated and uncriticised is itself a sign of
youth. A good young man is naturally
conservative and loyal on all those subjects
which his experience has not brought to a
test; advanced opinions on politics, marriage,
or literature are comparatively rare
in America; they are left for the ladies to
discuss, and usually to condemn, while the
men get on with their work. In spite of
what is old-fashioned in his more general
ideas, the American is unmistakably young;
and this, I should say, for two reasons: one,
that he is chiefly occupied with his immediate
environment, and the other, that his reactions
upon it are inwardly prompted,
spontaneous, and full of vivacity and self-trust.
His views are not yet lengthened;
his will is not yet broken or transformed.
The present moment, however, in this, as
in other things, may mark a great change in
him; he is perhaps now reaching his majority,
and all I say may hardly apply to-day, and
may not apply at all to-morrow. I speak
of him as I have known him; and whatever
moral strength may accrue to him later, I
am not sorry to have known him in his
youth. The charm of youth, even when it
is a little boisterous, lies in nearness to the
impulses of nature, in a quicker and more
obvious obedience to that pure, seminal
principle which, having formed the body
and its organs, always directs their movements,
unless it is forced by vice or necessity
to make them crooked, or to suspend
them. Even under the inevitable crust of
age the soul remains young, and, wherever
it is able to break through, sprouts into
something green and tender. We are all as
young at heart as the most youthful American,
but the seed in his case has fallen upon
virgin soil, where it may spring up more
bravely and with less respect for the giants
of the wood. Peoples seem older when their
perennial natural youth is encumbered with
more possessions and prepossessions, and
they are mindful of the many things they
have lost or missed. The American is not
mindful of them.

In America there is a tacit optimistic assumption
about existence, to the effect that
the more existence the better. The soulless
critic might urge that quantity is only a
physical category, implying no excellence,
but at best an abundance of opportunities
both for good and for evil. Yet the young
soul, being curious and hungry, views existence
*a priori* under the form of the good;
its instinct to live implies a faith that most
things it can become or see or do will be
worth while. Respect for quantity is accordingly
something more than the childish joy
and wonder at bigness; it is the fisherman’s
joy in a big haul, the good uses of which he
can take for granted. Such optimism is
amiable. Nature cannot afford that we
should begin by being too calculating or
wise, and she encourages us by the pleasure
she attaches to our functions in advance of
their fruits, and often in excess of them;
as the angler enjoys catching his fish more
than eating it, and often, waiting patiently
for the fish to bite, misses his own supper.
The pioneer must devote himself to preparations;
he must work for the future, and it
is healthy and dutiful of him to love his
work for its own sake. At the same time,
unless reference to an ultimate purpose is at
least virtual in all his activities, he runs the
danger of becoming a living automaton,
vain and ignominious in its mechanical constancy.
Idealism about work can hide an
intense materialism about life. Man, if he
is a rational being, cannot live by bread
alone nor be a labourer merely; he must
eat and work in view of an ideal harmony
which overarches all his days, and which is
realised in the way they hang together, or in
some ideal issue which they have in common.
Otherwise, though his technical philosophy
may call itself idealism, he is a materialist in
morals; he esteems things, and esteems
himself, for mechanical uses and energies.
Even sensualists, artists, and pleasure-lovers
are wiser than that, for though their idealism
may be desultory or corrupt, they attain
something ideal, and prize things only for
their living effects, moral though perhaps
fugitive. Sensation, when we do not take
it as a signal for action, but arrest and
peruse what it positively brings before us,
reveals something ideal—a colour, shape,
or sound; and to dwell on these presences,
with no thought of their material significance,
is an æsthetic or dreamful idealism. To
pass from this idealism to the knowledge
of matter is a great intellectual advance,
and goes with dominion over the world; for
in the practical arts the mind is adjusted to
a larger object, with more depth and potentiality
in it; which is what makes people feel
that the material world is real, as they call
it, and that the ideal world is not. Certainly
the material world is real; for the philosophers
who deny the existence of matter
are like the critics who deny the existence
of Homer. If there was never any Homer,
there must have been a lot of other poets no
less Homeric than he; and if matter does
not exist, a combination of other things
exists which is just as material. But the
intense reality of the material world would
not prevent it from being a dreary waste in
our eyes, or even an abyss of horror, if it
brought forth no spiritual fruits. In fact,
it does bring forth spiritual fruits, for otherwise
we should not be here to find fault
with it, and to set up our ideals over against
it. Nature is material, but not materialistic;
it issues in life, and breeds all sorts of warm
passions and idle beauties. And just as
sympathy with the mechanical travail and
turmoil of nature, apart from its spiritual
fruits, is moral materialism, so the continual
perception and love of these fruits is moral
idealism—happiness in the presence of immaterial
objects and harmonies, such as we
envisage in affection, speculation, religion,
and all the forms of the beautiful.

The circumstances of his life hitherto
have necessarily driven the American into
moral materialism; for in his dealings with
material things he can hardly stop to enjoy
their sensible aspects, which are ideal, nor
proceed at once to their ultimate uses, which
are ideal too. He is practical as against the
poet, and worldly as against the clear philosopher
or the saint. The most striking
expression of this materialism is usually supposed
to be his love of the almighty dollar;
but that is a foreign and unintelligent view.
The American talks about money, because
that is the symbol and measure he has at
hand for success, intelligence, and power;
but as to money itself he makes, loses,
spends, and gives it away with a very light
heart. To my mind the most striking expression
of his materialism is his singular
preoccupation with quantity. If, for instance,
you visit Niagara Falls, you may
expect to hear how many cubic feet or metric
tons of water are precipitated per second
over the cataract; how many cities and
towns (with the number of their inhabitants)
derive light and motive power from it; and
the annual value of the further industries
that might very well be carried on by the
same means, without visibly depleting the
world’s greatest wonder or injuring the
tourist trade. That is what I confidently
expected to hear on arriving at the adjoining
town of Buffalo; but I was deceived. The
first thing I heard instead was that there
are more miles of asphalt pavement in Buffalo
than in any city in the world. Nor is this
insistence on quantity confined to men of
business. The President of Harvard College,
seeing me once by chance soon after the beginning
of a term, inquired how my classes
were getting on; and when I replied that
I thought they were getting on well, that
my men seemed to be keen and intelligent,
he stopped me as if I was about
to waste his time. “I meant,” said he,
“*what is the number* of students in your
classes.”

Here I think we may perceive that this
love of quantity often has a silent partner,
which is diffidence as to quality. The democratic
conscience recoils before anything that
savours of privilege; and lest it should
concede an unmerited privilege to any pursuit
or person, it reduces all things as far
as possible to the common denominator of
quantity. Numbers cannot lie: but if it
came to comparing the ideal beauties of
philosophy with those of Anglo-Saxon, who
should decide? All studies are good—why
else have universities?—but those must be
most encouraged which attract the greatest
number of students. Hence the President’s
question. Democratic faith, in its diffidence
about quality, throws the reins of education
upon the pupil’s neck, as Don Quixote
threw the reins on the neck of Rocinante,
and bids his divine instinct choose its own
way.

The American has never yet had to face
the trials of Job. Great crises, like the Civil
War, he has known how to surmount victoriously;
and now that he has surmounted a
second great crisis victoriously, it is possible
that he may relapse, as he did in the other
case, into an apparently complete absorption
in material enterprise and prosperity. But
if serious and irremediable tribulation ever
overtook him, what would his attitude be?
It is then that we should be able to discover
whether materialism or idealism lies at the
base of his character. Meantime his working
mind is not without its holiday. He spreads
humour pretty thick and even over the
surface of conversation, and humour is one
form of moral emancipation. He loves landscape,
he loves mankind, and he loves knowledge;
and in music at least he finds an
art which he unfeignedly enjoys. In music
and landscape, in humour and kindness, he
touches the ideal more truly, perhaps, than
in his ponderous academic idealisms and
busy religions; for it is astonishing how
much even religion in America (can it
possibly be so in England?) is a matter of
meetings, building-funds, schools, charities,
clubs, and picnics. To be poor in order to
be simple, to produce less in order that the
product may be more choice and beautiful,
and may leave us less burdened with unnecessary
duties and useless possessions—that
is an ideal not articulate in the American
mind; yet here and there I seem to have
heard a sigh after it, a groan at the perpetual
incubus of business and shrill society. Significant
witness to such aspirations is borne
by those new forms of popular religion, not
mere variations on tradition, which have
sprung up from the soil—revivalism, spiritualism,
Christian Science, the New Thought.
Whether or no we can tap, through these or
other channels, some cosmic or inner energy
not hitherto at the disposal of man (and
there is nothing incredible in that), we
certainly may try to remove friction and
waste in the mere process of living; we
may relax morbid strains, loosen suppressed
instincts, iron out the creases of the soul,
discipline ourselves into simplicity, sweetness,
and peace. These religious movements
are efforts toward such physiological economy
and hygiene; and while they are thoroughly
plebeian, with no great lights, and no idea of
raising men from the most vulgar and humdrum
worldly existence, yet they see the
possibility of physical and moral health on
that common plane, and pursue it. That is
true morality. The dignities of various types
of life or mind, like the gifts of various
animals, are relative. The snob adores one
type only, and the creatures supposed by
him to illustrate it perfectly; or envies and
hates them, which is just as snobbish.
Veritable lovers of life, on the contrary, like
Saint Francis or like Dickens, know that in
every tenement of clay, with no matter what
endowment or station, happiness and perfection
are possible to the soul. There must
be no brow-beating, with shouts of work or
progress or revolution, any more than with
threats of hell-fire. What does it profit a
man to free the whole world if his soul is not
free? Moral freedom is not an artificial
condition, because the ideal is the mother
tongue of both the heart and the senses. All
that is requisite is that we should pause in
living to enjoy life, and should lift up our
hearts to things that are pure goods in themselves,
so that once to have found and loved
them, whatever else may betide, may remain
a happiness that nothing can sully. This
natural idealism does not imply that we are
immaterial, but only that we are animate and
truly alive. When the senses are sharp, as
they are in the American, they are already
half liberated, already a joy in themselves;
and when the heart is warm, like his, and
eager to be just, its ideal destiny can hardly
be doubtful. It will not be always merely
pumping and working; time and its own
pulses will lend it wings.

CHAPTER VII—ENGLISH LIBERTY IN AMERICA
======================================

The straits of Dover, which one may sometimes
see across, have sufficed so to isolate
England that it has never moved quite in
step with the rest of Europe in politics,
morals, or art. No wonder that the Atlantic
Ocean, although it has favoured a mixed
emigration and cheap intercourse, should
have cut off America so effectually that all
the people there, even those of Latin origin,
have become curiously different from any
kind of European. In vain are they reputed
to have the same religions or to speak the
same languages as their cousins in the old
world; everything has changed its accent,
spirit, and value. Flora and fauna have
been intoxicated by that untouched soil and
fresh tonic air, and by those vast spaces; in
spite of their hereditary differences of species
they have all acquired the same crude savour
and defiant aspect. In comparison with
their European prototypes they seem tough,
meagre, bold, and ugly. In the United
States, apart from the fact that most of the
early colonists belonged to an exceptional
type of Englishman, the scale and speed
of life have made everything strangely
un-English. There is cheeriness instead of
doggedness, confidence instead of circumspection;
there is a desire to quizz and to
dazzle rather than a fear of being mistaken
or of being shocked; there is a pervasive
cordiality, exaggeration, and farcical humour;
and in the presence of the Englishman, when
by chance he turns up or is thought of, there
is an invincible impatience and irritation that
his point of view should be so fixed, his mind
so literal, and the freight he carries so excessive
(when you are sailing in ballast yourself),
and that he should seem to take so little
notice of changes in the wind to which you
are nervously sensitive.

Nevertheless there is one gift or habit,
native to England, that has not only been
preserved in America unchanged, but has
found there a more favourable atmosphere
in which to manifest its true nature—I mean
the spirit of free co-operation. The root of
it is free individuality, which is deeply seated
in the English inner man; there is an indomitable
instinct or mind in him which he
perpetually consults and reveres, slow and
embarrassed as his expression of it may be.
But this free individuality in the Englishman
is crossed and biased by a large residue of
social servitude. The church and the aristocracy,
entanglement in custom and privilege,
mistrust and bitterness about particular
grievances, warp the inner man and enlist him
against his interests in alien causes; the
straits of Dover were too narrow, the shadow
of a hostile continent was too oppressive, the
English sod was soaked with too many dews
and cut by too many hedges, for each individual,
being quite master of himself, to
confront every other individual without fear
or prejudice, and to unite with him in the
free pursuit of whatever aims they might
find that they had in common. Yet this
slow co-operation of free men, this liberty
in democracy—the only sort that America
possesses or believes in—is wholly English in
its personal basis, its reserve, its tenacity,
its empiricism, its public spirit, and its
assurance of its own rightness; and it
deserves to be called English always, to
whatever countries it may spread.

The omnipresence in America of this spirit
of co-operation, responsibility, and growth is
very remarkable. Far from being neutralised
by American dash and bravura, or lost
in the opposite instincts of so many alien
races, it seems to be adopted at once in the
most mixed circles and in the most novel
predicaments. In America social servitude
is reduced to a minimum; in fact we may
almost say that it is reduced to subjecting
children to their mothers and to a common
public education, agencies that are absolutely
indispensable to produce the individual and
enable him to exercise his personal initiative
effectually; for after all, whatever metaphysical
egotism may say, one cannot vote
to be created. But once created, weaned,
and taught to read and write, the young
American can easily shoulder his knapsack
and choose his own way in the world. He
is as yet very little trammelled by want of
opportunity, and he has no roots to speak
of in place, class, or religion. Where individuality
is so free, co-operation, when it is
justified, can be all the more quick and hearty.
Everywhere co-operation is taken for granted,
as something that no one would be so mean
or so short-sighted as to refuse. Together
with the will to work and to prosper, it is of
the essence of Americanism, and is accepted
as such by all the unkempt polyglot peoples
that turn to the new world with the pathetic
but manly purpose of beginning life on a new
principle. Every political body, every public
meeting, every club, or college, or athletic
team, is full of it. Out it comes whenever
there is an accident in the street or a division
in a church, or a great unexpected emergency
like the late war. The general instinct is to
run and help, to assume direction, to pull
through somehow by mutual adaptation, and
by seizing on the readiest practical measures
and working compromises. Each man joins
in and gives a helping hand, without a preconceived
plan or a prior motive. Even the
leader, when he is a natural leader and not a
professional, has nothing up his sleeve to force
on the rest, in their obvious good-will and
mental blankness. All meet in a genuine
spirit of consultation, eager to persuade but
ready to be persuaded, with a cheery confidence
in their average ability, when a point
comes up and is clearly put before them, to
decide it for the time being, and to move on.
It is implicitly agreed, in every case, that
disputed questions shall be put to a vote,
and that the minority will loyally acquiesce
in the decision of the majority and build
henceforth upon it, without a thought of ever
retracting it.

Such a way of proceeding seems in America
a matter of course, because it is bred in the
bone, or imposed by that permeating social
contagion which is so irresistible in a natural
democracy. But if we consider human nature
at large and the practice of most nations, we
shall see that it is a very rare, wonderful, and
unstable convention. It implies a rather
unimaginative optimistic assumption that
at bottom all men’s interests are similar and
compatible, and a rather heroic public spirit—such
that no special interest, in so far as
it has to be overruled, shall rebel and try
to maintain itself absolutely. In America
hitherto these conditions happen to have
been actually fulfilled in an unusual measure.
Interests have been very similar—to exploit
business opportunities and organise public
services useful to all; and these similar
interests have been also compatible and
harmonious. A neighbour, even a competitor,
where the field is so large and so
little pre-empted, has more often proved a
resource than a danger. The rich have
helped the public more than they have fleeced
it, and they have been emulated more than
hated or served by the enterprising poor.
To abolish millionaires would have been to
dash one’s own hopes. The most opposite
systems of religion and education could look
smilingly upon one another’s prosperity,
because the country could afford these superficial
luxuries, having a constitutional religion
and education of its own, which everybody
drank in unconsciously and which assured
the moral cohesion of the people. Impulses
of reason and kindness, which are potential
in all men, under such circumstances can
become effective; people can help one another
with no great sacrifice to themselves, and
minorities can dismiss their special plans
without sorrow, and cheerfully follow the
crowd down another road. It was because
life in America was naturally more co-operative
and more plastic than in England
that the spirit of English liberty, which
demands co-operation and plasticity, could
appear there more boldly and universally
than it ever did at home.

English liberty is a method, not a goal.
It is related to the value of human life very
much as the police are related to public
morals or commerce to wealth; and it is no
accident that the Anglo-Saxon race excels in
commerce and in the commercial as distinguished
from the artistic side of industry,
and that having policed itself successfully
it is beginning to police the world at large.
It is all an eminence in temper, good-will,
reliability, accommodation. Probably some
other races, such as the Jews and Arabs,
make individually better merchants, more
shrewd, patient, and loving of their art.
Englishmen and Americans often seem to
miss or force opportunities, to play for quick
returns, or to settle down into ponderous
corporations; for successful men they are
not particularly observant, constant, or
economical. But the superiority of the
Oriental is confined to his private craft; he
has not the spirit of partnership. In English
civilisation the individual is neutralised; it
does not matter so much even in high places
if he is rather stupid or rather cheap; public
spirit sustains him, and he becomes its instrument
all the more readily, perhaps, for not
being very distinguished or clear-headed in
himself. The community prospers; comfort
and science, good manners and generous
feelings are diffused among the people, without
the aid of that foresight and cunning
direction which sometimes give a temporary
advantage to a rival system like the German.
In the end, adaptation to the world at large,
where so much is hidden and unintelligible,
is only possible piecemeal, by groping with a
genuine indetermination in one’s aims. Its
very looseness gives the English method its
lien on the future. To dominate the world
co-operation is better than policy, and empiricism
safer than inspiration. Anglo-Saxon
imperialism is unintended; military conquests
are incidental to it and often not
maintained: it subsists by a mechanical
equilibrium of habits and interests, in which
every colony, province, or protectorate has
a different status. It has a commercial and
missionary quality, and is essentially an
invitation to pull together—an invitation
which many nations may be incapable of
accepting or even of understanding, or which
they may deeply scorn, because it involves a
surrender of absolute liberty on their part;
but whether accepted or rejected, it is an
offer of co-operation, a project for a limited
partnership, not a complete plan of life to be
imposed on anybody.

It is a wise instinct, in dealing with
foreigners or with material things (which
are foreigners to the mind), to limit oneself
in this way to establishing external relations,
partial mutual adjustments, with a great
residuum of independence and reserve; if
you attempt more you will achieve less;
your interpretations will become chimerical
and your regimen odious. So deep-seated
is this prudent instinct in the English nature
that it appears even at home; most of the
concrete things which English genius has
produced are expedients. Its spiritual
treasures are hardly possessions, except as
character is a possession; they are rather
a standard of life, a promise, an insurance.
English poetry and fiction form an exception;
the very incoherence and artlessness which
they share with so much else that is English
lend them an absolute value as an expression.
They are the mirror and prattle of the inner
man—a boyish spirit astray in the green
earth it loves, rich in wonder, perplexity,
valour, and faith, given to opinionated little
prejudices, but withal sensitive and candid,
and often laden, as in *Hamlet*, with exquisite
music, tender humour, and tragic self-knowledge.
But apart from the literature
that simply utters the inner man, no one
considering the English language, the English
church, or English philosophy, or considering
the common law and parliamentary government,
would take them for perfect realisations
of art or truth or an ideal polity.
Institutions so jumbled and limping could
never have been planned; they can never be
transferred to another setting, or adopted
bodily; but special circumstances and contrary
currents have given them birth, and
they are accepted and prized, where they
are native, for keeping the door open to a
great volume and variety of goods, at a
moderate cost of danger and absurdity.

Of course no product of mind is *merely*
an expedient; all are concomitantly expressions
of temperament; there is something
in their manner of being practical which is
poetical and catches the rhythm of the
heart. In this way anything foreign—and
almost all the elements of civilisation in
England and America are foreign—when
it is adopted and acclimatised, takes on a
native accent, especially on English lips;
like the Latin words in the language, it
becomes thoroughly English in texture. The
English Bible, again, with its archaic homeliness
and majesty, sets the mind brooding,
not less than the old ballad most redolent of
the native past and the native imagination;
it fills the memory with solemn and pungent
phrases; and this incidental spirit of poetry
in which it comes to be clothed is a self-revelation
perhaps more pertinent and welcome
to the people than the alien revelations
it professes to transmit. English law and
parliaments, too, would be very unjustly
judged if judged as practical contrivances
only; they satisfy at the same time the
moral interest people have in uttering and
enforcing their feelings. These institutions
are ceremonious, almost sacramental; they
are instinct with a dramatic spirit deeper
and more vital than their utility. Englishmen
and Americans love debate; they love
sitting round a table as if in consultation,
even when the chairman has pulled the
wires and settled everything beforehand, and
when each of the participants listens only to
his own remarks and votes according to his
party. They love committees and commissions;
they love public dinners with after-dinner
speeches, those stammering compounds
of facetiousness, platitude, and business.
How distressing such speeches usually
are, and how helplessly prolonged, does not
escape anybody; yet every one demands
them notwithstanding, because in pumping
them up or sitting through them he feels he
is leading the political life. A public man
must show himself in public, even if not
to advantage. The moral expressiveness of
such institutions also helps to redeem their
clumsy procedure; they would not be useful,
nor work at all as they should, if people
did not smack their lips over them and feel
a profound pleasure in carrying them out.
Without the English spirit, without the
faculty of making themselves believe in
public what they never feel in private, without
the habit of clubbing together and facing
facts, and feeling duty in a cautious, consultative,
experimental way, English liberties
forfeit their practical value; as we see when
they are extended to a volatile histrionic
people like the Irish, or when a jury in
France, instead of pronouncing simply on
matters of fact and the credibility of witnesses,
rushes in the heat of its patriotism
to carry out, by its verdict, some political
policy.

The practice of English liberty presupposes
two things: that all concerned are fundamentally
unanimous, and that each has a
plastic nature, which he is willing to modify.
If fundamental unanimity is lacking and all
are not making in the same general direction,
there can be no honest co-operation, no
satisfying compromise. Every concession,
under such circumstances, would be a
temporary one, to be retracted at the first
favourable moment; it would amount to
a mutilation of one’s essential nature, a
partial surrender of life, liberty, and happiness,
tolerable for a time, perhaps, as the
lesser of two evils, but involving a perpetual
sullen opposition and hatred. To put things
to a vote, and to accept unreservedly the
decision of the majority, are points essential
to the English system; but they would be
absurd if fundamental agreement were not
presupposed. Every decision that the
majority could conceivably arrive at must
leave it still possible for the minority to
live and prosper, even if not exactly in the
way they wished. Were this not the case, a
decision by vote would be as alien a fatality
to any minority as the decree of a foreign
tyrant, and at every election the right of
rebellion would come into play. In a hearty
and sound democracy all questions at issue
must be minor matters; fundamentals must
have been silently agreed upon and taken
for granted when the democracy arose. To
leave a decision to the majority is like leaving
it to chance—a fatal procedure unless one is
willing to have it either way. You must be
able to risk losing the toss; and if you do
you will acquiesce all the more readily in the
result, because, unless the winners cheated
at the game, they had no more influence
on it than yourself—namely none, or very
little. You acquiesce in democracy on the
same conditions and for the same reasons,
and perhaps a little more cheerfully, because
there is an infinitesimally better chance of
winning on the average; but even then the
enormity of the risk involved would be
intolerable if anything of vital importance
was at stake. It is therefore actually required
that juries, whose decisions may really
be of moment, should be unanimous; and
parliaments and elections are never more
satisfactory than when a wave of national
feeling runs through them and there is
no longer any minority nor any need of
voting.

Free government works well in proportion
as government is superfluous. That most
parliamentary measures should be trivial or
technical, and really devised and debated
only in government offices, and that government
in America should so long have been
carried on in the shade, by persons of no
name or dignity, is no anomaly. On the
contrary, like the good fortune of those who
never hear of the police, it is all a sign that
co-operative liberty is working well and
rendering overt government unnecessary.
Sometimes kinship and opportunity carry
a whole nation before the wind; but this
happy unison belongs rather to the dawn of
national life, when similar tasks absorb all
individual energies. If it is to be maintained
after lines of moral cleavage appear, and is
to be compatible with variety and distinction
of character, all further developments must
be democratically controlled and must remain,
as it were, in a state of fusion. Variety
and distinction must not become arbitrary
and irresponsible. They must take directions
that will not mar the general harmony,
and no interest must be carried so far as to
lose sight of the rest. Science and art, in
such a vital democracy, should remain popular,
helpful, bracing; religion should be
broadly national and in the spirit of the
times. The variety and distinction allowed
must be only variety and distinction of
service. If they ever became a real distinction
and variety of life, if they arrogated to
themselves an absolute liberty, they would
shatter the unity of the democratic spirit
and destroy its moral authority.

The levelling tendency of English liberty
(inevitable if plastic natures are to co-operate
and to make permanent concessions to one
another’s instincts) comes out more clearly
in America than in England itself. In
England there are still castles and rural
retreats, there are still social islands within
the Island, where special classes may nurse
particular allegiances. America is all one
prairie, swept by a universal tornado.
Although it has always thought itself in an
eminent sense the land of freedom, even
when it was covered with slaves, there is no
country in which people live under more
overpowering compulsions. The prohibitions,
although important and growing, are
not yet, perhaps, so many or so blatant as
in some other countries; but prohibitions
are less galling than compulsions. What
can be forbidden specifically—bigamy, for
instance, or heresy—may be avoided by a
prudent man without renouncing the whole
movement of life and mind which, if carried
beyond a certain point, would end in those
trespasses against convention. He can indulge
in hypothesis or gallantry without
falling foul of the positive law, which indeed
may even stimulate his interest and ingenuity
by suggesting some indirect means of satisfaction.
On the other hand, what is exacted
cuts deeper; it creates habits which overlay
nature, and every faculty is atrophied that
does not conform with them. If, for instance,
I am compelled to be in an office
(and up to business, too) from early morning
to late afternoon, with long journeys in
thundering and sweltering trains before and
after and a flying shot at a quick lunch
between, I am caught and held both in soul
and body; and except for the freedom to
work and to rise by that work—which may
be very interesting in itself—I am not
suffered to exist morally at all. My evenings
will be drowsy, my Sundays tedious, and
after a few days’ holiday I shall be wishing
to get back to business. Here is as narrow
a path left open to freedom as is left open
in a monastic establishment, where bell and
book keep your attention fixed at all hours
upon the hard work of salvation—an infinite
vista, certainly, if your soul was not made
to look another way. Those, too, who may
escape this crushing routine—the invalids,
the ladies, the fops—are none the less prevented
by it from doing anything else with
success or with a good conscience; the
bubbles also must swim with the stream.
Even what is best in American life is compulsory—the
idealism, the zeal, the beautiful
happy unison of its great moments. You
must wave, you must cheer, you must push
with the irresistible crowd; otherwise you
will feel like a traitor, a soulless outcast, a
deserted ship high and dry on the shore.
In America there is but one way of being
saved, though it is not peculiar to any of
the official religions, which themselves must
silently conform to the national orthodoxy,
or else become impotent and merely ornamental.
This national faith and morality
are vague in idea, but inexorable in spirit;
they are the gospel of work and the belief
in progress. By them, in a country where
all men are free, every man finds that what
most matters has been settled for him
beforehand.

Nevertheless, American life *is* free as a
whole, because it is mobile, because every
atom that swims in it has a momentum of
its own which is felt and respected throughout
the mass, like the weight of an atom
in the solar system, even if the deflection
it may cause is infinitesimal. In temper
America is docile and not at all tyrannical;
it has not predetermined its career, and its
merciless momentum is a passive resultant.
Like some Mississippi or Niagara, it rolls
its myriad drops gently onward, being
but the suction and pressure which they
exercise on one another. Any tremulous
thought or playful experiment anywhere
may be a first symptom of great changes,
and may seem to precipitate the cataract
in a new direction. Any snowflake in a
boy’s sky may become the centre for his
*boule de neige*, his prodigious fortune; but
the monster will melt as easily as it grew,
and leaves nobody poorer for having existed.
In America there is duty everywhere, but
everywhere also there is light. I do not
mean superior understanding or even moderately
wide knowledge, but openness to light,
an evident joy in seeing things clearly and
doing them briskly, which would amount to
a veritable triumph of art and reason if the
affairs in which it came into play were
central and important. The American may
give an exorbitant value to subsidiary things,
but his error comes of haste in praising
what he possesses, and trusting the first
praises he hears. He can detect sharp
practices, because he is capable of them,
but vanity or wickedness in the ultimate
aims of a man, including himself, he cannot
detect, because he is ingenuous in that
sphere. He thinks life splendid and blameless,
without stopping to consider how far
folly and malice may be inherent in it. He
feels that he himself has nothing to dread,
nothing to hide or apologise for; and if he
is arrogant in his ignorance, there is often
a twinkle in his eye when he is most boastful.
Perhaps he suspects that he is making
a fool of himself, and he challenges the
world to prove it; and his innocence is
quickly gone when he is once convinced that
it exists. Accordingly the American orthodoxy,
though imperious, is not unyielding.
It has a keener sense for destiny than for
policy. It is confident of a happy and
triumphant future, which it would be shameful
in any man to refuse to work for and to
share; but it cannot prefigure what that
bright future is to be. While it works
feverishly in outward matters, inwardly it
only watches and waits; and it feels tenderly
towards the unexpressed impulses in its
bosom, like a mother towards her unborn
young.

There is a mystical conviction, expressed
in Anglo-Saxon life and philosophy, that our
labours, even when they end in failure, contribute
to some ulterior achievement in which
it is well they should be submerged. This
Anglo-Saxon piety, in the form of trust and
adaptability, reaches somewhat the same insight
that more speculative religions have
reached through asceticism, the insight that
we must renounce our wills and deny ourselves.
But to have a will remains essential
to animals, and having a will we must kick
against the pricks, even if philosophy thinks
it foolish of us. The spirit in which parties
and nations beyond the pale of English
liberty confront one another is not motherly
nor brotherly nor Christian. Their valorousness
and morality consist in their indomitable
egotism. The liberty they want
is absolute liberty, a desire which is quite
primitive. It may be identified with the
love of life which animates all creation, or
with the pursuit of happiness which all men
would be engaged in if they were rational.
Indeed, it might even be identified with the
first law of motion, that all bodies, if left
free, persevere in that state of rest, or of
motion in a straight line, in which they
happen to find themselves. The enemies of
this primitive freedom are all such external
forces as make it deviate from the course
it is in the habit of taking or is inclined to
take; and when people begin to reflect
upon their condition, they protest against
this alien tyranny, and contrast in fancy
what they would do if they were free with
what under duress they are actually doing.
All human struggles are inspired by what, in
this sense, is the love of freedom. Even
craving for power and possessions may be
regarded as the love of a free life on a
larger scale, for which more instruments and
resources are needed. The apologists of
absolute will are not slow, for instance,
to tell us that Germany in her laborious
ambitions has been pursuing the highest
form of freedom, which can be attained only
by organising all the resources of the world,
and the souls of all subsidiary nations,
around one luminous centre of direction
and self-consciousness, such as the Prussian
government was eminently fitted to furnish.
Freedom to exercise absolute will methodically
seems to them much better than
English liberty, because it knows what it
wants, pursues it intelligently, and does not
rely for success on some measure of goodness
in mankind at large. English liberty is so
trustful! It moves by a series of checks,
mutual concessions, and limited satisfactions;
it counts on chivalry, sportsmanship, brotherly
love, and on that rarest and least lucrative of
virtues, fair-mindedness: it is a broad-based,
stupid, blind adventure, groping towards an
unknown goal. Who but an Englishman
would think of such a thing! A fanatic, a
poet, a doctrinaire, a dilettante—any one
who has a fixed aim and clear passions—will
not relish English liberty. It will seem
bitter irony to him to give the name of
liberty to something so muffled, exacting,
and oppressive. In fact English liberty is
a positive infringement and surrender of the
freedom most fought for and most praised in
the past. It makes impossible the sort of
liberty for which the Spartans died at
Thermopylæ, or the Christian martyrs in the
arena, or the Protestant reformers at the
stake; for these people all died because
they would not co-operate, because they were
not plastic and would never consent to lead
the life dear or at least customary to other
men. They insisted on being utterly different
and independent and inflexible in their chosen
systems, and aspired either to destroy the
society round them or at least to insulate
themselves in the midst of it, and live a
jealous, private, unstained life of their own
within their city walls or mystical conclaves.
Any one who passionately loves his particular
country or passionately believes in his particular
religion cannot be content with less
liberty or more democracy than that; he
must be free to live absolutely according to
his ideal, and no hostile votes, no alien
interests, must call on him to deviate from
it by one iota. Such was the claim to
religious liberty which has played so large
a part in the revolutions and divisions of the
western world. Every new heresy professed
to be orthodoxy itself, purified and restored;
and woe to all backsliders from the reformed
faith! Even the popes, without thinking to
be ironical, have often raised a wail for liberty.
Such too was the aspiration of those mediæval
cities and barons who fought for their liberties
and rights. Such was the aspiration even of
the American declaration of independence
and the American constitution: cast-iron
documents, if only the spirit of co-operative
English liberty had not been there to expand,
embosom, soften, or transform them. So
the French revolution and the Russian one
of to-day have aimed at establishing society
once for all on some eternally just principle,
and at abolishing all traditions, interests,
faiths, and even words that did not belong
to their system. Liberty, for all these
pensive or rabid apostles of liberty, meant
liberty for themselves to be just so, and
to remain just so for ever, together with
the most vehement defiance of anybody
who might ask them, for the sake of
harmony, to be a little different. They
summoned every man to become free in
exactly their own fashion, or have his head
cut off.

Of course, to many an individual, life
even in any such free city or free church,
fiercely jealous of its political independence
and moral purity, would prove to be a grievous
servitude; and there has always been a
sprinkling of rebels and martyrs and scornful
philosophers protesting and fuming against
their ultra-independent and nothing-if-not-protesting
sects. To co-operate with anybody
seems to these *esprits forts* contamination,
so sensitive are they to any deviation
from the true north which their compass
might suffer through the neighbourhood of
any human magnet. If it is a weakness to
be subject to influence, it is an imprudence
to expose oneself to it; and to be subject
to influence seems ignominious to any one
whose inward monitor is perfectly articulate
and determined. A certain vagueness of
soul, together with a great gregariousness and
tendency to be moulded by example and by
prevalent opinion, is requisite for feeling free
under English liberty. You must find the
majority right enough to live with; you
must give up lost causes; you must be willing
to put your favourite notions to sleep in
the family cradle of convention. Enthusiasts
for democracy, peace, and a league of nations
should not deceive themselves; they are not
everybody’s friends; they are the enemies
of what is deepest and most primitive in
everybody. They inspire undying hatred in
every untamable people and every absolute
soul.

It is in the nature of wild animal life to
be ferocious or patient, and in either case
heroic and uncompromising. It is inevitable,
in the beginning, that each person or faction
should come into the lists to serve some
express interest, which in itself may be
perfectly noble and generous. But these
interests are posited alone and in all their
ultimate consequences. The parties meet,
however diplomatic their procedure, as buyers
and sellers bargain in primitive markets.
Each has a fixed programme or, as he
perhaps calls it, an ideal; and when he has
got as much as he can get to-day, he will
return to the charge to-morrow, with absolutely
unchanged purpose. All opposed
parties he regards as sheer enemies to be
beaten down, driven off, and ultimately converted
or destroyed. Meantime he practises
political craft, of which the climax is war;
a craft not confined to priests, though they
are good at it, but common to every missionary,
agitator, and philosophical politician
who operates in view of some vested interest
or inflexible plan, in the very un-English
spirit of intrigue, cajolery, eloquence, and
dissimulation. His art is to worm his way
forward, using people’s passions to further
his own ends, carrying them off their feet in
a wave of enthusiasm, when that is feasible,
and when it is not, recommending his cause
by insidious half-measures, flattery of private
interests, confidence-tricks, and amiable suggestions,
until he has put his entangled
victims in his pocket; or when he feels
strong enough, brow-beating and intimidating
them into silence. Such is the inevitable
practice of every prophet who heralds an
absolute system, political or religious, and
who pursues the unqualified domination of
principles which he thinks right in themselves
and of a will which is self-justified
and irresponsible.

Why, we may ask, are people so ready to
set up absolute claims, when their resources
are obviously so limited that permanent
success is impossible, and their will itself, in
reality, is so fragile that it abandons each of
its dreams even before it learns that it cannot
be realised? The reason is that the feebler,
more ignorant, and more childlike an impulse
is, the less it can restrain itself or surrender
a part of its desire in order the better to
attain the rest. In most nations and most
philosophies the intellect is rushed; it is
swept forward and enamoured by the first
glimpses it gets of anything good. The
dogmas thus precipitated seem to relieve
the will of all risks and to guarantee its enterprises;
whereas in fact they are rendering
every peril tragic by blinding us to it, and
every vain hope incorrigible. A happy shyness
in the English mind, a certain torpor
and lateness in its utterance, have largely
saved it from this calamity, and just because
it is not brilliant it is safe. Being reticent,
it remains fertile; being vague in its destination,
it can turn at each corner down the
most inviting road. In this race the intellect
has chosen the part of prudence, leaving
courage to the will, where courage is indispensable.
How much more becoming and
fortunate is this balance of faculties for an
earthly being than an intellect that scales
the heavens, refuting and proving everything,
while the will dares to attempt and to reform
nothing, but fritters itself away in sloth,
petty malice, and irony! In the English
character modesty and boldness appear in
the right places and in a just measure.
Manliness ventures to act without pretending
to be sure of the issue; it does not cry that
all is sure, in order to cover up the mortal
perils of finitude; and manliness has its
reward in the joys of exploration and
comradeship.

It is this massive malleable character,
this vigorous moral youth, that renders co-operation
possible and progressive. When
interests are fully articulate and fixed, co-operation
is a sort of mathematical problem;
up to a certain precise limit, people can
obviously help one another by summing their
efforts, like sailors pulling at a rope, or by a
division of labour; they can obviously help
one another when thereby they are helping
themselves. But beyond that, there can be
nothing but mutual indifference or eternal
hostility. This is the old way of the world.
Most of the lower animals, although they run
through surprising transformations during
their growth, seem to reach maturity by a
predetermined method and in a predetermined
form. Nature does everything for
them and experience nothing, and they live
or die, as the case may be, true to their
innate character. Mankind, on the contrary,
and especially the English races, seem to
reach physical maturity still morally immature;
they need to be finished by education,
experience, external influences. What
so often spoils other creatures improves them.
If left to themselves and untrained, they
remain all their lives stupid and coarse,
with no natural joy but drunkenness; but
nurseries and schools and churches and social
conventions can turn them into the most
refined and exquisite of men, and admirably
intelligent too, in a cautious and special
fashion. They may never become, for all
their pains, so agile, graceful, and sure as
many an animal or *a priori* man is without
trouble, but they acquire more representative
minds and a greater range of material
knowledge. Such completion, in the open
air, of characters only half-formed in the
womb may go on in some chance direction,
or it may go on in the direction of a greater
social harmony, that is, in whatever direction
is suggested to each man by the suasion of
his neighbours. Society is a second mother
to these souls; and the instincts of many
animals would remain inchoate if the great
instinct of imitation did not intervene and
enable them to learn by example. Development
in this case involves assimilation;
characters are moulded by contagion and
educated by democracy. The sphere of
unanimity tends to grow larger, and to
reduce the margin of diversity to insignificance.
The result is an ever-increasing
moral unison, which is the simplest form of
moral harmony and emotionally the most
coercive.

Democracy is often mentioned in the same
breath with liberty, as if they meant the
same thing; and both are sometimes identified
with the sort of elective government that
prevails in Great Britain and the United
States. But just as English liberty seems
servitude to some people because it requires
them to co-operate, to submit to the majority,
and to grow like them, so English democracy
seems tyranny to the wayward masses,
because it is constitutional, historical, and
sacred, narrowing down the power of any
group of people at any time to voting for one
of two or three candidates for office, or to
saying yes or no to some specific proposal—both
the proposals and the candidates being
set before them by an invisible agency; and
fate was never more inexorable or blinder
than is the grinding of this ponderous political
mill, where routine, nepotism, pique, and
swagger, with love of office and money, turn
all the wheels. And the worst of it is that
the revolutionary parties that oppose this
historical machine repeat all its abuses, or
even aggravate them. It would be well if
people in England and America woke up to
the fact that it is in the name of natural
liberty and direct democracy that enemies
both within and without are already rising
up against their democracy and their liberty.
Just as the Papacy once threatened English
liberties, because it would maintain one
inflexible international religion over all men,
so now an international democracy of the
disinherited many, led by the disinherited
few, threatens English liberties again, since
it would abolish those private interests which
are the factors in any co-operation, and
would reduce everybody to forced membership
and forced service in one universal flock,
without property, family, country, or religion.
That life under such a system might have its
comforts, its arts, and its atomic liberties, is
certain, just as under the Catholic system it
had its virtues and consolations; but both
systems presuppose the universality of a type
of human nature which is not English, and
perhaps not human.

The great advantage of English liberty
is that it is in harmony with the nature of
things; and when living beings have managed
to adapt their habits to the nature of things,
they have entered the path of health and
wisdom. No doubt the living will is essentially
absolute, both at the top and at the
bottom, in the ferocious animal and in the
rapt spirit; but it is absolute even then only
in its deliverance, in what it asserts or
demands; nothing can be less absolute or
more precarious than the living will in its
existence. A living will is the flexible voice
of a thousand submerged impulses, of which
now one and now another comes to the
surface; it is responsive, without knowing
it, to a complex forgotten past and a changing,
unexplored environment. The will is
a mass of passions; when it sets up absolute
claims it is both tragic and ridiculous. It
may be ready to be a martyr, but it will have
to be one. Martyrs are heroic; but unless
they have the nature of things on their side
and their cause can be victorious, their
heroism is like that of criminals and madmen,
interesting dramatically but morally
detestable. Madmen and criminals, like
other martyrs, appeal to the popular imagination,
because in each of us there is a little
absolute will, or a colony of little absolute
wills, aching to be criminal, mad, and heroic.
Yet the equilibrium by which we exist if we
are sane, and which we call reason, keeps
these rebellious dreams under; if they run
wild, we are lost. Reason is a harmony;
and it has been reputed by egotistical philosophers
to rule the world (in which unreason
of every sort is fundamental and rampant),
because when harmony between men and
nature supervenes at any place or in any
measure, the world becomes intelligible and
safe, and philosophers are able to live in it.
The passions, even in a rational society,
remain the elements of life, but under mutual
control, and the life of reason, like English
liberty, is a perpetual compromise. Absolute
liberty, on the contrary, is impracticable;
it is a foolish challenge thrown by a new-born
insect buzzing against the universe; it is
incompatible with more than one pulse of
life. All the declarations of independence
in the world will not render anybody really
independent. You may disregard your environment,
you cannot escape it; and your
disregard of it will bring you moral empoverishment
and some day unpleasant
surprises. Even Robinson Crusoe—whom
offended America once tried to imitate—lived
on what he had saved from the wreck,
on footprints and distant hopes. Liberty to
be left alone, not interfered with and not
helped, is not English liberty. It is the
primeval desire of every wild animal or
barbarous tribe or jealous city or religion,
claiming to live and to tramp through the
world in its own sweet way. These combative
organisms, however, have only such
strength as the opposite principle of co-operation
lends them inwardly; and the
more liberty they assume in foreign affairs
the less liberty their members can enjoy at
home. At home they must then have
organisation at all costs, like ancient Sparta
and modern Germany; and even if the
restraints so imposed are not irksome and
there is spontaneous unison and enthusiasm
in the people, the basis of such a local
harmony will soon prove too narrow. Nations
and religions will run up against one another,
against change, against science, against all
the realities they had never reckoned with;
and more or less painfully they will dissolve.
And it will not be a normal and fruitful
dissolution, like that of a man who leaves
children and heirs. It will be the end of
that evolution, the choking of that ideal in
the sand.

This collapse of fierce liberty is no ordinary
mutation, such as time brings sooner or later
to everything that exists, when the circumstances
that sustained it in being no longer
prevail. It is a deep tragedy, because the
narrower passions and swifter harmonies are
more beautiful and perfect than the chaos or
the dull broad equilibrium that may take
their place. Co-operative life is reasonable
and long-winded; but it always remains
imperfect itself, while it somewhat smothers
the impulses that enter into it. Absolute
liberty created these elements; inspiration,
free intelligence, uncompromising conviction,
a particular home and breeding-ground, were
requisite to give them birth. Nothing good
could arise for co-operation to diffuse or to
qualify unless first there had been complete
liberty for the artist and an uncontaminated
perfection in his work. Reason and the
principle of English liberty have no creative
afflatus; they presuppose spontaneity and
yet they half stifle it; and they can rest in no
form of perfection, because they must remain
plastic and continually invite amendments,
in order to continue broadly adjusted to an
infinite moving world. Their work is accordingly
like those cathedrals at which many
successive ages have laboured, each in its
own style. We may regret, sometimes, that
some one design could not have been carried
out in its purity, and yet all these secular
accretions have a wonderful eloquence; a
common piety and love of beauty have
inspired them; age has fused them and
softened their incongruities; and an inexpressible
magic seems to hang about the
composite pile, as if God and man breathed
deeply within it. It is a harmony woven
out of accidents, like every work of time and
nature, and all the more profound and fertile
because no mind could ever have designed it.
Some such natural structure, formed and
reformed by circumstances, is the requisite
matrix and home for every moral being.

Accordingly there seems to have been
sober sense and even severe thought behind
the rant of Webster when he cried, “Liberty
*and* Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!”
because if for the sake of liberty
you abandon union and resist a mutual
adaptation of purposes which might cripple
each of them, your liberty loses its massiveness,
its plasticity, its power to survive
change; it ceases to be tentative and human
in order to become animal and absolute.
Nature must always produce little irresponsible
passions that will try to rule her,
but she can never crown any one of them
with more than a theatrical success; the
wrecks of absolute empires, communisms,
and religions are there to prove it. But
English liberty, because it is co-operative,
because it calls only for a partial and shifting
unanimity among living men, may last
indefinitely, and can enlist every reasonable
man and nation in its service. This is the
best heritage of America, richer than its virgin
continents, which it draws from the temperate
and manly spirit of England. Certainly
absolute freedom would be more beautiful
if we were birds or poets; but co-operation
and a loving sacrifice of a part of ourselves—or
even of the whole, save the love in us—are
beautiful too, if we are men living together.
Absolute liberty and English liberty are incompatible,
and mankind must make a
painful and a brave choice between them.
The necessity of rejecting and destroying
some things that are beautiful is the deepest
curse of existence.

THE END

*Printed in Great Britain by* R. & R. Clark, Limited, *Edinburgh*.

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