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THE PERSONALIST
VOLUME III
Issued Quarterly by the
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Ralph Tyler Flewelling, Editor
1922
LOS ANCELIS
Reprinted with the permission of the original publisher
KRAUS REPRINT CORPORATION
New York
1965
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Printed in Germany Lessing-Druckerei, Wiesbaden
CONTENTS for JANUARY, 1922 Volume III Number 1.
Wonder and the Playwright, Dunsany Josephine Hammond 5
The Pine Tree : Verse Virginia McCormick 30
Dante's Treatment of Personality The Editor 31
The Parapet: Verse Josephine Hammond 39
The University: Italy to California Robert W. Rogers 40
The Philosophy of American Life Bernard Casper Eicer 57
Current Thought 63
Notes and Discussions 67
Along the Bookshelf 69
CONTENTS for APRIL, 1922 Volume III Number 2.
The Superstitions of the Incredulous The Editor 77
Let Us Talk of Flecker Virginia Taylor McCormick 85
On Logic Ernest Carroll Moore 95
Is Spirit a Chemical Reaction? Frederick Marsh Bennett 106
The Philosopher: Verse Charles Coke Woods 112
John Burroughs: a Reversion to the Greek Spirit
George Law 1 1 3
Birch Trees: Verse John R. Moreland 120
Current Thought 126
Notes and Discussions 121
Along the Bookshelf. . 131
CONTENTS for JULY, 1922 Volume III Number 3.
The Religion of John Burroughs. Reginald Wright Kauffman 149 Ibsen's Portraiture of Women. . . Virginia Taylor McCormick 157
Life and Song: Verse John R. Moreland 170
Some Reactions to Dewey's Philosophy. . .Carl C. Rasmussen 171
The Philosophy of Sympathy James Main Dixon 183
Lasting Impressions of a Great Teacher. .John Godfrey Hill 192
Current Thought 195
Notes and Discussions 201
Along the Bookshelf 206
CONTENTS for OCTOBER, 1922 Volume III Number 4.
Prayer and the World Order The Editor 221
Two Songs Mary Sintun Leitch 233
The Grave Beauty of Masefield's Verse
Josephine Hammond 234
Italian Sonnet Fred Sherwin 243
A Personalises View of Reality John Wright Buckham 244
The Use of the Word Personalism Edgar 5. Brightman 254
The Books of Yesteryear Eve W oodbvrn Leary 260
Current Thought 265
Notes and Discussions 268
Along the Bookshelf 273
Our Contributor's Page
Virginia Taylor McCormick, associate Editor of The Lyric, a magazine of verse, is already known to our readers. Her contribution on Flecker will be welcomed by those already acquainted with his work and will form the introduction of others to this genius of song.
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Dr. Ernest Carroll Moore is director of the University of Cali- fornia, Southern Branch, located at Los Angeles, former professor at Harvard and nationally known educator. Philosopher by nature and training, when he turns from his multitudinous activities to discuss philosophy what he writes is sure to be of interest. On Logic is the title he chooses in defence of that ancient'discipline.
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Frederick Marsh Bennett is a minister of Youngstown, Ohio, whose philosophical nature has been stirred by the "scientific" statement that "after all, love is only a chemical reaction." Is it scientific to say that all values of life including the soul can be thus brought to material appraisement and that this appraisal is final? He offers an answer.
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Dr. Charles Coke Woods, a Methodist minister of Monrovia, Cali- fornia, is already widely known for his nature books, "In the Beauty of Meadow and Mountain." and "Our Spiritual Skies," as well as for his verse.
Mr. George Law, author of The Barren Ideal, has, we believe, set forth the spirit of John Burroughs with unimpeachable fidelity as well as with rare literary skill. We do not believe in John Burroughs' religious philosophy, greatly as we admire his appreciation of nature. We believe his intuitions were better than his explanations. Reginald Wright Kauffman is to present the other side in the next number.
Works by Ralph Tyler Flewelling
A tetralogy of thought-provoking books bv an author
O 1 O J
whose philosophic writings have attracted wide at- tention because of their novelty of conception, sug- gestiveness of treatment, and chasteness and simplicity of style.
Bergson and Personal Realism
This new volume is (1st) A critique of Bergson, showing his deficiencies on the side of the Philosophy of Religion. (2nd) A constructive dis- cussion of Personal Realism, aiming to show that Personality is the supreme metaphysical and spiritual reality.
The manuscript of this volume was prepared under the direction of the Sorbonne and in consultation with Professor Bergson.
Those who had the privilege of reading Professor Flewelling's previous volumes will need no urging to possess his latest philosophic work.
Philosophy and the Wfir
"This is a little war book of permanent value, because it deals with underlying causes. It shows how the false philosophy of Germany under- mined its morals and religion and made its soldiers brutal, its aims material, its policies selfish. Egoism and impersonalism have been the ruin of a great people. Let us beware of false doctrine; it leads to death." — The Lutheran Quarterly. 18 mo. Cloth.
Personalism and the Problems of Philosophy
An Appreciation of the Work of Borden Parker Bowne. Introduction by Rudolph Eucken.
"An exceedingly satisfying book, in its treatment of the thought and spirit of Methodism's greatest teacher, Dr. Bowne. Its remarkable clear- ness and simplicity, its fullness in brevity, its searching analyses, and its admirable style, demand for it a very wide reading." — Bishop L. J. Birney, S..T.D. 12 mo. Cloth.
Christ and the Dramas of Doubt
A consecutive account of all the great dramas in the world which have the problem of evil for their motive. The author begins with Prometheus Bound, passes to Job. to Hamlet, to Faust, and ends with Brand.
"The admirable literary style, the up-to-dateness of the discussion, the at-homeness with the best literature of the subject, the wide extent of which is indicated by the copious bibliography appended to this volume — all combine to make this a book well worth reading by ministry and thoughtful laity." — The Methodist Review. 12 mo. Cloth.
The Personalist
University of Southern California, 36th and University Ave.
Los Angeles
Our Contributors' Page
Josephine Hammond is so widely known as a contributor to leading magazines as well as for her work in pageantry and education that she would scarcely need introduction to new readers of The Personalist. To our old readers she has become an inspiration and a reliance. We long for a sort of ubiquitous eye that might watch the expression of pleasure on the faces of our subscribers as they see her name on our covers.
Professor Robert William Rogers is known the world over as an Assyriologist. The mention of his titles would appear pedantic. The keenness of his historical mind and the beauty of his diction make the article on the University of unusual interest.
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Dr. Bernard C'apen Ewer is Professor of Psychology in Pomona I liege and brings us the reason for naming that movement which gathers about the work of such men as James, and Dewey, and Perry, the distinctly American Philosophy. In our next issue we shall present a criticism of Pragmatism by a brilliant young phil- osopher of Columbia University.
Virginia Taylor McCormick i-, a new-comer to The Personalist comradeship who will receive most hearty welcome. She is known to many of our readers for her contributions to other leading magazines. \ recent book of her verse, Star-dust and Gardens, will shortly be reviewed in our columns. She is associate Editor of The Lyric, and is gaining most favorable mention as a lecturer on subjects of liter- ature. She is a Virginian of Virginians, both her husband and father being well known attorneys in that state, and her home is in Norfolk, Virginia.
Contents
Articles Page
I. Wonder and the Playwright, Dunsany .... 5 Josephine Hammond
The Pine Tree: Verse 30
Virginia McCormick
II. Dante's Treatment of Personality 31
J
The Editor
The Parapet: Verse 39
Josephine Hammond
III. The University: Italy to California 40
Robert W. Rogers
VI . The Philosophy of American Life 57
Bernard Casper Ewer
Current Thought 63
The Dilemma of Darwinism.
Conservation of Energy inapplicable to the Human Body.
The Concept of Personality in Early Philosophy.
What is the Essence of Religion?
Dante from the Roman Catholic Standpoint.
Notes and Discussions 67
Pilgrim Song.
Miss Hammond as a Literary Critic
Along the Bookshelf 69
Body and Mind: McDougall.
Bergson and Future Philosophy: Rostrevor.
Body and Soul: Marsh.
A Critic in Pall Mall: Wilde.
To the Gentle Personalist 4
Contributor's Page 2
Manuscripts and communications should be addressed to The Personalist, University of Southern California, University Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, Los Angeles. Stamps for the return of manuscripts should be enclosed.
Reality : A world of persons in a personal world.
To the Gentle Personalist
We close our Personalis! ic Creed Contest with the following contribution by President John A. W. Haas of Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
•IIMIlllltllllllMIIIIIHMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMMMIIMIMIMIIlllHMIIIininii; 1 1 M 1 1 1 1 1 1 J 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 M I M I ri I * 1 IIIIIMIIIIHIMIMIIIIMI |H||III1U£
| A PERSONALISTIC CREED I
/ believe that the energy of the universe de- mands will as its solution.
I believe that the order of the universe calls for intellect and purpose.
I believe that the beauty of the universe im- plies supreme feeling.
I believe that the moral implications of life nuli cute ultimate goodness.
I believe that the progress of history points to final righteousness.
I believe that a sound theory of education must posit universal human freedom.
I believe that the best philosophy of religion ends in the axiom of God as Spirit and Love.
I believe that all these claims are best united in a doctrine of personality, divine and human, individual and social.
5MM IMMMMMM Illllllllllll IMMMMMMIMM IIIIIIIMIIIIIIIIIII mill IIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII HII I Illlllllll milium,^
The Personalist
Volume III Number 1
JANUARY, 1922
PLAYWRIGHTS OF FANTASY
II
WONDER AND THE PLAYWRIGHT, LORD DUNSANY
JOSEPHINE HAMMOND Late Professor of English at Reed College
A Traveller threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the sunset; from crag to crag he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of ro- mance he came through the golden evening.
It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting, the air turned chill, and a battalion's bugles were playing "Retreat" when this knightly stranger, a British aeroplane, dipped, and went homeward over the in- fantry. That beautiful evening call, and the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which hours of thinking sometimes will not bring) that we live in such a period as the troubadours would have en- vied
Even when all the romance has been sifted from the age (as the centuries sift) and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight with the black shells bursting below?
THE PERSONALIST
The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as well as with the incidents of every day, incidents that recur year in and year out, too often for us to notice them. If a part of the moon were to fall off in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the com- ment on the lips of the imperturbable British watchers that have seen so much would be, "Hullo, what is Jerry up to now:"
And so the British aeroplane glides home in the evening, and the light fades from the air, and what is left of the houses grows more mournful in the gloaming, and night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder, for the airman has given his message to the artillery. It is as though Hermes had gone abroad sailing on his sandals, and found some bad land below those winged feet wherein men did evil and kept not the laws of gods or men; and he had brought his message back and the gods were angry.
For the wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wronders. If we do not see in them the saga and the epic, how shall we tell of them?
Tales of War: Lord Duns any.
A soldier pauses after a brutal day to mark the won- der of an airplane's passing in the chill gold light, — pauses to marvel at the sagas latent in our science. Much that is characteristic of Lord Dunsany's writing is in this vig- nette of the late evening over the battlefield, — melodic prose, acute observation, skill in etching, a preoccupation with the powers of implacable gods, an abiding sense of the wonder of life. Prescience, of glories not all revealed, of ancient ways still sensate, of laws immanent and im- mutable, makes Dunsany's work singular in a time of ra- tionalistic vociferation.
It is one of the paradoxes of our age that in a period of revelation we have lost the mode of wonderment. Per- haps, however, the mode is but hidden, and will recur, as
hions do; perhaps, too, it is a mode still used by the simple and the wise, and only by the brief chroniclers of
DUNSANY 7
our time misplaced. We have explored the remote, prob- ed the infinitesimal, mounted to magnitudes, but egocen- tric naturalism has disdained these perspectives and pre- sented the pageant of life in the flat. However much we may appreciate the tonic service of the more powerful nat- uralists in freeing us, in the past fifty years, from a banal romanticism, we can but admit that much in the work of their successors, our self-conscious primitives, wearies and depresses us. Scaling their compositions in two di- mensions, the}' forswear subtlety, luminosity, fertility. Seeking to express the ultimate of their sensations, they ramp without the curb and grace of brooded thought. Lacking the power to wonder or worship, they make the world a dull place, and spin it in vacuity.
Perhaps, to offset these drabbled gnomes, we quite un- duly acclaim those writers, minor though they may be, who, while pondering silly or sombre realities, have yet kept an imaginative fourth-dimensional reach in their texts.
A fourth-dimensional reach and an artistry that is its own excuse for being are the chief distinctions of Lord Dunsany's work.
A phrase too easily misunderstood must not be labored. Lord Dunsany is so quiet in manner, so simple in intent, he deserves the simplest terms from his critics. But the truth is, his simplicity, being cosmic, is extraordinarily complicated for the sophisticated to understand ! He ad- mits this: "In my plays I tell very simple stories, — so simple that sometimes people of this complex age, being brought up in intricacies, even fail to understand them. To be sure, no man ever wrote a simple story, because he is bound to color it with his own experience." Man's exper- ience includes the testimony of eyes, ears, mouth, and — something more. Without stress of cultism, then, let the fourth-dimensional reach suggest the something more, —
8 THE PERSONALIST
the mystery of man's correspondence with forces unfath- omed. "I want to write about men and women and the forces that have been with them from their cradle up — forces that the centuries have neither aged nor weakened. Not about people that are so interested in the latest mascot or motor that not enough remains when the trivial is lifted from them !
Lord Dunsanv is never overwhelmed with the petty trials of individual men and women: it is mankind as a whole that he flings out on a cosmic stage, where strange old gods dominate and deride man's vanities. For Dun- sanv, despite his singularity, reflects the fashion of our time bv dipping back into primitive modes for the ancient freshness of the barbaric. Only to Dunsany the old gods are not merely ancient: they were, they are, they will be. For theme he uses again and again the irony: How puny the measure of man's conceits when matched with gigan- tic potencies. The laughter of his gods is cruel, sardonic, when their victim faces the something more just beyond his reckoning. Habitually foreshortening his plays, Dun- sany omits all struggle between mankind and Destiny, and gives us only the catastrophe of man's submission to his fate.
Here, at once, is Dunsany's worth and his limitation. Tn so far as he shows man to be a dust-mote in the uni- verse, he pricks out swollen pretensions, and brings us, chastened, back to decent respect for what we do not know: worlds beyond worlds exist for us, even though imagination may not compass the mystery of their crea- tion. And when this playwright swings us to his Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, where impersonal judgments reign, he gives us release from self-centered frettings — time is naught, and man's will a jest. So he subdues us and relaxes us from our intense concern to right the world in a jiffy.
DUNSANY 9
On the other hand, (and this is most serious) although Lord Dunsany's plays take us to the Edge of the World where mystery floods, they have, philosophically, little meaning for the modern world. Lord Dunsany is, appar- ently, a fatalist, although he has nothing in common with the mechanistic fatalism of our day: I say apparently because Dunsany circumnavigated himself, as it were, too often to be ticketed ! But his plays, at least, establish an absolute rule of Nemesis. Now modern occidental philo- sophy, fundamentally, is not receptive to the fatalistic at- titude: it sees creation in flux, with man, not master of his circumstance, to be sure, yet not always an ignoble contender with it. The tragic drama of the western peo- ples has not grown from man, the victim, the puppet. Tragic drama has been with us intensely personal, dy- namic. Particularly has the Nordic strain in our culture been insistent in recognizing that forces live within man as well as without him, lifting him from the impersonal to the dignity of infinitely diverse and peculiar personal- ity. So that the drama that has given the highest aesthe- tic pleasure to occidental peoples has been that drama that has magnified man, not dwarfed him. A Prometheus wresting fire from Zeus; a Hamlet coping the hard press of circumstance with the strength of his sensibility; a Faust daring to make question of the universe; an old Irish Mother matching the courage of her endurance to the terrific toll-taking of the sea : these are the mimic disas- ters that have added assurance to men's thought. Lord Dunsany's plays, holding much wrath of the gods, have lit- tle of the strength and wit of men. He is not likely to win the more serious triumphs for his work until he pits man at his highest against the gods, nor will he win much pa- tience for his philosophy until he creates a daemonology wherein the gods are great enough to forgive.
Lord Dunsany is a poet ; it were best not to grow too
10 THE PERSONALIST
earnest with him. Too, he disclaims esoteric significances in his simple plays. But he does lay claim to artistry and to a serious intent in the presentation of tragic themes and cosmic grapples. So, willy nilly, the delicate question has to arise: can veritable tragic drama be fashioned when tragic issues are met by figurines rather than men and women? Lord Dunsany's figurines are striking, and his irony, past question, keen and true. But tragedy, to be profoundly appealing, must have substance in its charac- ters, and irony, to be immortal, must have pity in its bite. Intellectually, we may applaud the logic of the Ironist's pattern, when he opposes us, as marionettes, to the splen- dor of the gods, but his logic can never magnetize pity and terror, and without pity and terror, how can tragedy be achieved?
But, I am reminded, Dunsany's plays are frankly fan- tastic, and, in the field of fantasy, the dreamer may make what pattern he pleases and scout psychology. Of course, so long as the pattern remains in the upper air, high on the slopes of El Dorado, never slipping down to mix its pure serene with the breath of men, substance may rise, trans- lated, to the madness of fancy, as the immortal Bottom does, caparisoned in an ass's head, but patterned fancy mav not stoop to flesh : the dream loses its just propor- tions when cast in the maelstrom of human chances. Lack of recognition of this distinction mars Dunsany's work, both in inception and execution: too often he pulls the fantastic into the world of men and women, producing a confusion of values, inharmonious, inartistic. When the idol Klesh gropes in to the huddled Sailor Thieves, at the end of the The Night at the Inn, the horrific, which has held us intentlv, becomes farcical, and when, in The Gods of the Mountain, the Gods appear to the Beggars, what
on Id be impressive becomes grotesque.
Notwithstanding, then, Dunsany's declaration, — "I
DUNSANY 11
want to write about men and women and the great forces that have been with them from their cradle up," we had best not seek in his dramatic work for authentic character creation, for psychological insight or philosophical fore- sight: we had best look on his plays as excursions, primar- ily, into the fantastic and grotesque. So shall we be richer for fairy tales, ingeniously shaped, and so shall we be charmed with imageries, clear-cut and glowing: we shall be served with zestful fable and the fillip of a fine imagina- tion. Warrant we have to depart from philosophy and to relish fable, for Dunsany has also written :
But in case I shall not be able to explain my work, I think the first thing to tell them is that it does not need explana- tion. One does not explain a sunset nor does one need to explain a work of art. One must analyse, of course, that which is profitable and interesting, but the growing de- mand to be told What It's All About before one can even enjoy is becoming absurd . . I am not trying to teach any- one anything. I merely set out to make a work of art out of a simple theme, and God knows we want works of art in this age of corrugated iron. How many people hold the er- ror that Shakespeare is of the schoolroom! Whereas he is of the playground as all artists are.
All of which is wisely put, and if delightfully naive, the more does it suggest the playground, with its happy tos- sing off of a work of art, and its happy forgetfulness that a goodly share of the workshop was necessary to Shakes- peare's product!
We trifle time to pause with file and footrule when Dun- sany, Maker of Magic, Poet more than Playwright, waits the clear green of emeralds, the jade of Kabul grapes, the darker green of the great god, Illuriel, towering above the ivory throne of Darniak. There camels will pace the gold- en sands, bearing silk and queens to Samarcand: by iris marshes may we watch them go, with gold-hung palan- quins. And where the pass darkens into night, enraptur-
12 THE PERSONALIST
ed may we fear the fierce black-oynx gaze of desert men and udadsomely may we shrink before the ponderous tread of Urfreets, louring and austere! Jackals will howl 'to quite unseat our ribs', and silver bells will haunt the air. There, full ghoulishlv, shall men steal and kill, and there the menace of quick-avenging gods shall hold us tranced in quite delighted awe ! And the King shall say to Eznar- za : When at evening the sun is set we shall weep for no day that is gone. And Eznara shall make answer to the King : I will raise up my head of a night-time against the sky, and the old, old, unbought stars shall twinkle through my hair, and we shall not envy any of the diademmed queens of the world. ,
Melodrama and irony merge into poetry — we know not where, nor why, nor do wre wish to know: a tale is told, rhythms weave their charms, colors glow, wit assaults our wit, — these are ends in themselves. Why seek to learn where the Gyshon flows, and where the site of Zericon? Anywhere, at any time, the Golden Doom may fall, crowns may pass as hoops to little boys, and men, with pomp and port, may utter doggerel decrees and call them transcripts from the living gods. But there are always those who yearn to discover which wind chilled and killed Annabel Lee, what the genesis of Kubla Kahn, whence the camel in Tarascon, and what the etymology of slithy tovesl Lord Dunsany is acutely aware of this intellectual greed :
When I write of Babylon, there are people who can not sec that I write of it for love of Babylon's ways, and they think I am thinking of London still and of our beastly Par- liament. Only I get farther east than Babylon, even to the kingdoms that seem to lie in the twilight beyond the
East of the World The "public" must needs know
exactly "when it all happened" so I never neglect to inform them of the time. Since man does not alter, it does not matter in the least what time I put, unless I am writing about his clothes or his motor car, so I put "about the time of the Fall of Babylon," it seems a nice breezy time,
DUNS ANY 13
but "about the time of the invention of Carter's pills" would, of course do equally well. The result is that they (the producers) go to the British Museum, and get the ex- act costumes of the period in Babylon, and it does very nicely. There are sure to be people who say, "Now, my children, you shall come to the theatre and enjoy your- selves, but at the same time you shall learn what it is really like in Babylon." The fact is the schoolmaster has got loose, and he must be caged, so that people can enjoy themselves without being pounced on and made to lead better lives, like the African natives being carried away by lions while thev danced.
Thus does this Irishman play with his public, his ironies, his old tales. And the tales are draped in robes of rich dyes, and set out before us with cadences haunted by the Biblical rhythms to which Dunsany was bred. So does he provide the rarest of rare benefactions, fresh fairy tales for adults of certain and uncertain age. Evidently he plays with his dreams with much the same joy with which he sails toy-ships with Mr. Shaw : one can but wonder what happens when the Fatalist outspeeds the Creative Evolu- tionist! More devoted to fancy than to verisimilitude Dunsany pleads, as he plays, for hospitality for the Poet we keep so beggared without our gates.
It is easy for a philanthropist to endow a hospital, and easy for a benevolent man to work for the sake of the poor, their goal is near them, logic supports them and reasonable men applaud them upon the way. But the way of the poet is the way of the martyr. The greater his work the more infinite his goal. His own eyes cannot assess it. There is little logic in a lyric, and notoriously little money. How can an age which values all things in gold understand so unvalued a thing as a romantic fancy.
The kind of drama that we need to-day seems to me to be the kind that will build new worlds for the fancy, for the spirit as well as the bodv needs a change of scene.
It seems to me that a play that is true to fancy is as true as one that is true to modern times, for fancy is quite as real as more solid things and every bit as necessary to man. A fancy of some sort is the mainspring and end of
14 THE PERSON ALIST
every human ambition, and a writer who turns from con- ventions and problems to build with no other bricks than fancy and beauty is doing no trivial work, his raw material is the dreams, and whims, and shadowy impulses in the soul of man, out of which all else ariseth.
It is interesting, a twist of Destiny that Dunsany must enjov, that so ardent a follower of fancy is a soldier. He was trained at Sandhurst and fought and was wounded in the Boer War. As Captain of the 5th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, he served in France in the Great War. Active in his profession and in the management of a large estate in Meath, which he holds as the eighteenth Baron of his line, he has had scant time for his career of letters. Quite just- ly, as a playwright he may still be counted the amateur. He published a book of Tales as early as 1905, but it was not until 1909 that he wrote, at the invitation of Yeats, an odd bit of a play, The Glittering Gate. Since then, two vol- umes of plays, Five Plays and Plays of Gods and Men, and six or seven collections of Tales have appeared. The Glit- tering Gate and King Agimenes and the Unknown War- rior were first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin : the Gods of the Mountain and the Golden Doom at the Haymarket, in London. All of these with the exception of the Glittering Gate, have been presented with rare care and excellent effect here in America by Mr. Stuart Walker in his Portmanteau Theatre: it is his correspondence with the playwright that has brought some spirited footnotes from Lord Dunsany for the plays. A4rs. Fiske used a Night at the Inn as forepiece to Service for a brief season, and the Tents of the Arabs, The Queen s Enemies, and The Lost Silk Hat have been played here and there. The Golden Doom, perhaps the best turned of the shorter pieces, has been particularly honored in Russia. As yet, however, Lord Dunsany's work has had no long appear- ance in the public playhouses. Almost all the pieces are
DUNS ANY IS
brief, and our public has not yet learned to take its drama in incisive form. The longest play in the published vol- umes, the Laughter of the Gods, has not had, I believe, any notable presentation.
Currents of criticism have brought Dunsany full and meagre praise for his work. Mr. Bjorkman, in his intro- duction to the volume, Five Plays, calls the plays, "Things of beauty, and their beauty inheres in their design as well as in their style. Through all of them the greatest possi- ble economy of means has been observed, so that not a word, not a tone, not a gesture is wasted in obtaining the effect aimed at . . . Each play of Lord Dunsany's is an exciting adventure, conveying to the reader an exhilarating sense of motion without ever descending to stage tricks for the production of that sense." And Mr. Hale, in a mono- graph, Dunsany the Dramatist (in which he finds the play- wright, as is most reasonable, great, very great, not so great, not great at all, yet on the whole a poet of great promise!), brings his interesting analysis to a close thus:
Lord Dunsany deals not with life, but with dreams. It had almost passed beyond our recollection that there was a land in which realist and romanticist ceased to exist in themselves and blended into one. Dunsany has taught us again the name of that land, and he has called it Wonder
Lord Dunsany has opened for us the great gates lead- ing into that other world so near, and yet so distant from us all. Like all the little people his creatures have no souls, for if they had then Time might overtake them. For the only thing in the whole world that is im- perishable, the only thing that Time stands baffled before, is a dream, even a little one
The world is very tired of thinking, especially about it- self and we who are each a part of the world are all tired too .... There seems to be hardly a human problem left un- touched, uninvestigated, and hardly a human problem solved. Perhaps we have thought too much and dreamed too little. We have passed from the drama of the boudoir to that of the laboratory and the dissecting room; it may
16 THE PERSONALIST
well be that the time has come when these things shall leave us, and when we shall pass from the drama of the moment to the drama of all time, and from the destruct- ion of little things to the preservation of great things. It seems to me there must be no one who can see the plays of Lord Dunsany or read them without feeling an immense sense of relief as at the release of some intolerable burden. .... He is one of the great figures in a great literary move- ment,— in some ways he is the greatest figure, and
whatever Time may do to blot from the memory of men that which is passed, I think that the work of Dunsany will remain for always. For he has dreamed and dreams are imperishable.
Gain might come by opening the discussion as to wheth- er a dream of a star transcend' the dream of a lamp-post, particularly one with a red pillar-box such as Dunsany in the thin disguise of Manalive chases about the world on the heels of a Chestertonian whimsy, but irony in the spir- it of the playwright demands that we go on to record his curt dismissal by Miss Jameson, in her Modern Drama in Europe:
Lord Dunsany has written several short plays in the manner of a Maeterlinck compelled to turn an honest penny by writing for a Grand Giiignol which has itself been taken over by a committee for the Ruthless Propa- gation of the Higher Drama. lie has an American reputa- tion.
Damnation could no farther go ! Since it is in America that Dunsany's work has been most discussed, it is appro- priate that comment of him should appear with the other
libitions of Main Street. In Mr. Lewis' novel, Carol, who aspires to cultivation, and Kennicott, her husband, who is inclined to take the world as he finds it, go to an amateur performance in Chicago:
The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they
• nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair.
o young men in brown robes like furniture-covers
DUNSANY 17
were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.
It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sym- pathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back.
Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place.
Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded on their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with the Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth —
"Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?"
She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Kennicott. She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights. Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:
"What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of it. If that's high-brow drama, give me a cowpuncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we can go to bed."
No doubt Lord Dunsany, accustomed as he is to human averages, would, if overhearing, enjoy the honesty of Ken- nicott's dictum, even while he ignored its vulgarity, but no doubt, too, his impulse would be to trundle Kennicott from Main Street to Xanadu, not to draw him to love of Xanadu, but only to send him back to the corner drug- store refreshed and eager for his Carol.
According to the Reviews, this is substantially what he has done in his latest play, //, now being performed at the Haymarket Theatre in London. The Acacias, in the su-
18 THE PERSOXALIST
burbs, is English for Main Street. The play presents John cherishing revenge against a Porter, who, ten years back, had shut a platform gate in his face. To John, living in A-less content with Mary at the Acacias, is given a jewel which empowers its possessor to refashion the past as he would like it to have been. Whereupon, John, mindful of the lost train and the officious Porter, goes to the platform and triumphantly catches his carriage. What happens to the Porter the cables do not say. On the train John meets Miralda, another Cockney, possessed, in Persia, of a great fortune which she cannot use, so obdurate is the Chief who holds it! John promptly accompanies her to Persia, where he kills the Chief, usurps his pla,ce, and makes Miralda his favorite slave. Finding Miralda shrewishly planning his assassination, he runs away, wanders, and at length re- turns to the Acacias, where, the Maid-Servant having smashed the jewel, he resumes his A-less content with Mary. Distinguished and diverting, but poorly put to- gether, is the comment of the critics : if their verdict hold, Lord Dunsany has yet to prove himself capable in a play of length of sustained and unified dramatic construction. There are those, too, who are putting the jewel together in the shape of the British Colonial Empire and drawing a moral thereby!
Onlv once before has Dunsanv made use of a modern
-
setting — in the happy flourish of the Lost Silk Hat, where- in the Caller (very possiblv Mr. Moore) returns to domes- ticity (not possibly Mr. Moore) and his hat, despite the jibes of the Poet (quite definitely Mr. Yeats).
Po, • . A hat is not one of the essential things of life. Callrr. I don't want to appear rude, but my hat isn't quite
like yours.
Let us sit down and talk of things that matter,
things that will be remembered after a hundred years.
(They sit) Regarded in this light one sees at once the
triviality of hats. But to die, and to die beautifully
DUNS ANY 19
for hopeless love, that is a thing to make a lyric about. That is the test of essential things — try and imagine them in a lyric. One could not write a lyric about a hat.
Caller. I don't care whether you could write a lyric about my hat or whether you couldn't. All I know is that I am not going to make myself ridiculous by walking about in London without a hat. Will you get it for me or will you not?
Poet. What is a hat! Will you sacrifice for it a beautiful doom? Think of your bones, neglected and forlorn, lying forlornly because of hopeless love on endless sands. "Lying forlorn!" as Keats said. What a word!
J O
Forlorn in Africa. . . .
But the Caller, instead of going to Bosnia to perish glor- iously, returns to the maiden with whom he had quarrelled and from whom he had rushed, hatless.
Poet. (As the Caller rings the bell) You will marry. You will sometimes take a ticket with your wife as far as Paris. Perhaps as far as Cannes. Then the family will come; a large sprawling family as far as the eye can see. No monument will be set up to your memory but (as the Servant answers the bell) — but let there be graven in brass upon this house: Romance was born again here out of due time and died young.
The Romance that interests Dunsany is rarely the Ro- mance of Love. Women appear but incidentally in his plays : when they come they commonly bring futility with them. One Queen emerges, a delicate, exquisite murder- ess, who, after gracefully feasting her enemies, drowns them in the great Nile.
Queen. Ackazarpses, Ackarzapses, I cannot bear to have enemies.
Ackazarp. Indeed, Illustrious Lady, it is most wrong that you should have enemies. One so delicate, so slender and withal so beautiful should never have a foe.
Queen. If the gods could understand it they would never permit it . . . But they only look at men and their horrible wars. Why must men slay one another and make horrible wars?
20 THE PERSONALIST
And then, when the Queen has killed the enemies, five Princes and the Priest of Horus:
Ackazarp. Illustrious Lad}-, you will sleep tonight. Queen. Yes I shall sleep! sweetly.
Another Queen wanders in and out before Hie Laugh- ter of the Gods: -it is a laughter she knows too well. Light, inflexibly fragile, fragilely admantine she is, as all child- women are:
Queen. Women are blossoms in the hand of Death. They are often close to Death. . .
O do not speak of the gods. The gods are very ter- rible; all the dooms that ever be come forth from the gods. In misty windings of the wanderings they forge the future even as on an anvil. The future frightens me . . .
Tharmia. Your Majesty would be wakeful all night long and cry.
Queen. Oh, yes, I should not sleep; I should cry all night. (She goes out)
Arolind. She has no influence with the King.
Tharmia. No. But he hates to hear her cry all night.
One appealing moment comes just before the doom the Queen has sensed.
King. They have told you there is nothing at all to fear.
Indeed there is nothing. Queen. No more little fears. There is one great fear. King. A <_rreat fear! Why, what is it?
•en. I must not say. For you have often soothed me
when I was frightened, and it were not well for me to
trouble you at last .... King. What end? To whom is the end coming? Queen. I >< i not be troubled. We shall not let Fate trouble
us. The World and its daily cares, ah, they are
frightful: but Fate — I smile at Fate. Fate cannot hurt
us if we smile at it.
Fate cannot hurt us if we smile at it: beneath the so- called fatalism of Dunsanv, the essential bravery of his
DUNSANY 21
creative spirit is, perhaps, smiling at us who mark the line.
The purest romance he has done, The Tents of the Arabs, is hauntingly beautiful, a pastorale of the deserts, dramatic only as it places in opposition the desire of the King and the desire of the Camel-driver Bel-Narb, out of the wide spaces, hungers for the city, the city that "is love- liest just when the sun is set and a dusk steals along the narrower streets, a dusk that is not of the night and not of the day, a kind of mystery in which we can see cloaked fig- ures and yet not discern whose figures they be." And the King, weary of rule, longs for the tents of the Arabs. "Look, look ! It is the shadows of the camels moving to- wards Mecca. How silently they slip over the ground, beautiful shadows. Soon they are out on the desert flat on the golden sands." And then the sun will set and they will be one with the night. The Nomad in the King will not be denied: he slips away with the camels as the sun sets. In one year he will return, so he promises his Cham- berlain.
The year passes and the King, with his desert-love, Ez- narza, comes to the gates of the city.
King. Yes, we are slaves of Time . . .He destroys all things utterly.
Eznarza. There is a little child of man that is mightier than he. and who saves the world from Time.
King. Who is this little child that is mightier than Time? Is it Love that is mightier?
Eznarza. No, not Love . . .
King. What is this child of man that conquer Time and that is braver than Love?
Eznarza. Even Memory.
But more than Memory the King andEznarza may have if they choose the open places, for Bel-Narb, featured like the King, having been born of the same father, comes to the city gate, and proclaims himself the returned King. And the King, from the mask of his Arab cloak, affirms
22 THE PERS0NAL1ST
Bel-Narb: "In holy Mecca, in green-roofed Mecca of the many gates, we knew him for the King."
Eznarza. You have done wiselv, and the reward of wis- dom is happiness . . .
King. We will go back again . . . When at evening the sun is set we shall weep for no day that is gone . . .
/ narza. I will raise up my head of a night-time against the sky, and the old, old, unbought stars shall twinkle through my hair, and we shall not envy any of the dia- demmed queens of the world.
For brilliant contrast to the persuasive quietude of this idvl we may turn to the The Gods of the Mountain, a terse, sustained, vigorous achievement. Here, with swift, fine strokes, Dunsany evokes a group of Beggars. They are outside the walls of Kongros, hungry, full ready to be gath- ered to a daring enterprise by the wit of the stranger Beg- gar, Agmar. Agmar has come from the land of Marma, where seven gods carved from green stone sit against the hills.
Agmar. They are of green jade. They sit cross-legged with their right elbows resting on their left hands, the right forefinger pointing upward. We will come into the city disguised, from the direction of Marma, and will claim to be these gods. We must be seven as they are. And when we sit we must sit cross-legged as they do, with the right hand uplifted.
Ulj, timorous, suggests that it were well not to anger the gods.
mar. Is not all life a beggary to the gods? Do they not see all men asking alms with incense and balls, and subtle devices? I 'If. Yet I have a fear.
Hut at once the thief comes from the city with the three pieces of green silk he has stolen at Agmar s command.
DUNSANY 23
Ulf. We will each wear a piece of it over our rags.
Agmar. That is not the way we shall disguise ourselves.
Ulf. Not cover our rags?
Agmar. No, no. The first who looked closely would say, "These are only beggars. They have disguised them- selves.'
Ulf. What shall we do?
Agmar. Each of the seven shall wear a piece of the rai- ment underneath his rags. And peradventure here and there a little shall show through; and men shall say, "These seven have disguised themselves as beg- gars. But we know not what they be."
Slag. Hear my wise master.
Oogno. {in admiration) He is a beggar.
Ulf. He is an old beggar.
So simply and crisply is the tale begun and the first act ended.
The next movement brings us the credulous people streaming in to the Metropolitan Hall of Kongros to test the validity of an old prophesy that foretold the coming of the seven gods in the guise of men. They are quickly caught by Agmar s trick. The irony of the lines is keen, the countering very deft.
Akmos. It may be that they are benevolent gods.
Agmar. There is no benevolence greater than our be- nevolence.
Illanaun. Then we need do little: they portend no danger to us.
Oorander. Let us make sacrifices to them if they be gods.
The greed of the Beggars for the roasting sacrificial lamb, their thirst for the prized Woldery wine, almost betray them ; only the adroit intelligence of Agmar weaves plausible excuse, — the wine he magnificently pours on the ground. We leave them exultant at the end of the act. Agmar, who eats only when after the people go, Slag on guard at the door, has made a godlike answer to a citizen, come to be? life for his sick child.
24 THE PERSONALIS T
Agmar. It is indeed your child? .-. He is surely my child, master. mar. \\ as it vour wont to thwart him in his play, while
he was strong and well? One. I never thwarted him, master.
■uir. Whose child is Death: One. Death is the child of the gods. Agmar. Do you that never thwarted vour child in his play
ask this of the gods? One. (with some horror, perceiving Agmar's meaning)
Master! Agmar. Weep not. For all the houses that men have
builded are the play-fields for this child of the gods.
{The man goes away not weeping). Oogno. {taking Thahn by the wrist) Is this indeed a
man5
A \mar. A man, a man, and until just now a hungry one.
As quickly as the Beggars mount to fatness, so quickly do thev fall to their doom. Only Ulf is Greek enough to fear that punishment will follow their presumption. As Agamemnon hesitated to pass from his chariot into the palace over purple tapestry — an act more becoming to a god than to a mortal — so does Ulf quaver in his deception, believing that the mocking of the gods will bring woe.
( If. I think the gods do mock their worshippers.
mar. The gods have never mocked us. We are above all pinnacles that we have ever gazed at in dreams. I think that when man is high then most of all are the gods wont to mock him.
Security is man's chief est enemy — did not the Witch so prophesy in Macbeth? Prompt on the heels of Ulfs fore- boding, there comes in the Thief to say they are lost, for the citizens have sent two dromedarv men to Marma to see if the gods sit in their accustomed places. Agmar defies the citizens although he has no plan to circumvent the message he fears will come. He is most bold.
Agmar. They left us here and went to find the gods. A fish once took a journey into a far country to find the sea.
DUNSANY 25
And his boldness is sustained, for the two men, return- ing, report that the gods no longer sit at Marma. Not even the curious petition of a man imploring them not to walk as they had walked last night, rocks striding in the gloaming, can dim the Beggars' joy. They blaze with greed of wine and flesh and dancing girls. They hear foot- steps.
Thahn. The dancing girls! They are coming!
Thief. There is no sound of flutes, they said they would
come with music. Oogno. I do not like to hear their heavy tread. Those
that dance to us must be light of foot. Ulf. I have a fear, an old fear, and a boding.
The end comes swiftly.
{They listen. No one speaks. The stony boots come on. Enter in single file through door in right of back a procession of seven green men, even hands and faces are green; they ivear green stone sandals.)
Oogno. (cries out as they wheel). The Gods of the Moun- tain!
Agmar. (hoarsely). Be still. They are dazzled by light. They may not see us. (The leading Green Thing points his fore-finger at the lantern — the flame turns green. When the six are seated the leader points one by one at each of the seven Beggars, shooting out his forefinger at them. As he does this each Beggar in his turn gathers himself back on his throne and crosses his legs, his right arm goes swiftly stiffly upward with forefinger erect, and a staring look of horror comes in- to his eyes. In this attitude the Beggars sit motionless while a green light falls on their faces. -The gods go out. Presently enter the Citizens, some with victuals and fruit. One touches a Beggar's arm, then another's.
Citizens. They are cold; they have turned to stone. (All abase themselves, foreheads to the floor)
One. We have doubted them. We have doubted them. They have turned to stone because we have doubted them.
Another. Thev were the true eods.
All. They were the true gods.
26 THE PERSONALIST
So picturesque and impressive a piece of work needs no gloss, but some of the comment it has received invites analysis. Mr. Bjorkman says of it: The crime of hybris which to the Greeks was the 'unforgivable sin' is here made as real to us as it was to them." And Mr. Hale makes verdict thus : "It is probable that there has never been a play more gigantic than this in conception. The fatality which Dunsany shares with the Greek dramas is here in its most perfect form.'
Such annotation is not a little misleading, for just as it is impossible for Lord Dunsany to write like a Greek, so is it impossible for his modern auditor to feel like one. We later people can never reproduqe the antique, nor can we reproduce the responses of an antique people. Such an- notation forces us back into the philosophical lists we left when we mounted the slopes of El Dorado. It is a pity, I think, to return, for The Gods of the Mountain is so color- ful, so concentrated in action, so restrained and yet so gra- phic in dialogue so admirably logical, so chiseled an ironic grotesque, that it is belittling to its art to carry it from the world of fancv where its axiomatic conclusion is convinc- ing to a world of reality where it is not. Hybris was re- pellent to the Greeks because Fear of the gods was the bul- wark of their religion. On the advancing margin of our life something nobler than fear is working in men's hearts, however bound to the wheel of Fate they may feel them- selves to be. It may be argued that these Beggars are not on the advancing margin, that the Beggars in life always fear, because they are not self-sustaining. And the point is, of course, well taken, but Dunsany, with large implica- tion, would make us all Beggars, since it is in the very na- ture of man to essav the godlike, and he would have the ^ods turn us all, without mercv, into rock-bound mocker- ies of our aspirations. Such echo of Egyptian fatalism is to our accustomed thought, for we have admitted
DUNSANY 27
mercy, compensator}' values, redemptive possibilities, to our decalogue, and we no longer openly demand an eye for an eye. And although it is true that we have become crim- inallv maudlin over men's weaknesses in this — our Aee of Sympathy — yet is it equally true that our attempt to un- derstand the psychology of mankind is more excellent than devotion to the hieratic judgments of the Book of the Dead. Dunsany's beautiful simplicity is charming, re- freshing to us as clearly ordered dogma is to a child, only — life is not simple, it is not axiomatic, it is complicated, inchoate, mysterious as the vastness that holds it in its flowing. And any play, to-day, to be "gigantic in concep- tion" must deal with life, as we, unknowing, know it. For life, not logic, is the stuff of the veritable play. Pattern there must be somewhere, but how it uses the spirit of man — that we may only dream, not realize.
This excursion is not to deny what is so definitely con- noted in Dunsany's plays, that mankind is vain, shallow, covetous, cruel, selfish, stupid and presumptuous, nor to deny the righteousness of bringing the deed back upon the doer. It is merely to raise the inconsistent question: is not Dunsany himself guilty of Hybris in fashioning for us a Destiny that holds the scales like any Shylock, a pound of flesh for the defaulted bond, and no one by to stanch the wound?
Perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of the present dis- cussion is that Dunsany, with his deep-founded sense of wonder, is yet inclined to believe his dream to be a verity. He has given support to the theory that life is a Euclidian proposition by writing : "Take my Gods of the Mountain. Some Beggars, being hard up, pretend to be gods. Then they get all they want. But Destiny, Nemesis, the Gods, punish them by turning them into the very idols they de- sire to be. First of all you have a simple story told dra- matically, and along that you have hung, without any de-
28 THE PERSONALIST
liberate intention of mine — so far as I know — a truth, not true to London only or to New York or to one municipal party but to the experience of man. That is the kind of way that man does get hit bv Destiny."
Does he? Is it all so simple as this? Do not the bene- ficent forces walk hand in hand with the malevolent, and can any man tell which is which?
Thinking of these things, I find the Hungarian play Lil- ioms rising in my mind to match itself with The Gods of the Mountain. Small shrift does Liliom meet in his po- lice-court heaven, and scant change does he discover in his vagabond soul after his fifteen years' confinement in his heavenly gaol: he has just enough blind love to steal a star from the sky for his child. But somewhere, somehow, there is borne to us from this odd tale of another Beggar in life a realization that out of his experience Liliom grows in understanding, grows meagerly, but assuredly. And what greater mercy can the gods show, if, with their retri- bution, they allow understanding to be born ! In the murk of Liliom, Destinv's convergences are somehow more touched with light than they appear when Dunsany's Gods stride plainly to our view.
No "gigantic conception" has Dunsany yet given us, nor any play in mood akin to the splendid seriousness of the Greek. But poetry and ironv and design and reach — these are his gifts. Yet if he ever elects to take the near rather than the far view of human kind, he may bring us treasure worth taking to our hearts to hold. Since the
O
creation of his fantastic plays he has lived in the cauldron of malevolence upturned on the French frontier. That he has found beneficence in hell his Tales of War bear wit- ness: side by side with his just and honorable hatred of an execrated regime lies his paean to the Splendid Travel- ler flying home in the chill gold light. And I take it as happily symptomatic of the humanistic drama he may
DUNSANY 29
some day mould that cheek by jowl with the romance of the empyrean adventurer he places this evocation of the heart-piercing beauty and courage of two common men :
"And then we used to have sausages," said the Sergeant
"And mashed;" said the Private.
"Yes," said the Sergeant, "and beer. And then we used to go home. It was grand in the evenings. We used to go along a lane that was full of them wild roses. And then we'd come to a road where the houses were. They all had their bit of a garden, every house."
"Nice, I calls it, a garden," the Private said,
"Yes," said the Sergeant, "they all had their garden.
It come right down to the road. Wooden palings: none of that there wire."
"I hates wire," said the Private.
"They didn't have none of it," the N.C.O. went on. "The gardens came right down to the road, looking lovely. Old Billy Weeks he had them tall pale-blue flowers in his garden nearly as high as a man."
"Hollyhocks?" said the Private.
"No, they wasn't hollyhocks. Lovely they were. We used to stop and look at them, going by every evening. He had a path up the middle of his garden paved with red tiles, Billy Weeks had; and these tall blue flowers growing the whole way along it, both sides like. They was a wonder. Twenty gardens there must have been, counting them all; but none to touch Billy Weeks with his pale-blue flowers. There was an old windmill away to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing by over- head and screeching: just about as high again as the houses. Lord, how them birds did fly. . . . Those were great days. The bats used to come out, flutter, flutter, flutter, and then there'd be a star or two; and the smoke from the chimney going all gray; and a little cold wind going up and down like the bats; and all the colour going out of things; and the woods looking all strange, and wonderful quiet in them, and a mist coming up from the stream . . .
"You do bring it all back so," said the other .
"That's the time to be out," said the Sergeant. "Ten o'clock on a summer's night, and the night full of noises. . . .
Dogs barking, owls hooting, an old cart; and then a sound you couldn't account for at all, not anyhow.
30 THE PERSON ALI ST
I've heard sounds on nights like that nobody 'ud think you'd heard, nothing like the flute young Booker had, nothing like anything on earth."
"I never told anyone before, because they wouldn't be- lieve you. . . .
"You bring it all back wonderful,'' said the Private.
'its a great thing to have lived," said the Sergeant.
"Yes, Sergeant,'»' said the other, "I wouldn't have missed it not for anything."
For five days the barrage had rained down behind them: they were utterly cut off . . . their food was gone and they did not know where they were.
I am not sure that our other Soldier-poet, the beloved Sidney, made, with his storied water-cup, a gesture more memorably chivalric than that 'accomplished by the Irish Lord Dunsany when he set title to this Tale and called it — England.
LMlllllllllllllllillllillMlllI iiiiimiiiimiiimiitmiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiimiiiimiiiiiiitmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiinii minis
I THE PINE TREE I
A Picture that unerring hands have etched . . Black-limned upon a canvas dully grey . . . A Titan with his brawny arms outstretched, Invoking heaven . . his feet still bound bv clay!
Virginia McCormick
Swum mini iiiiiiiiiiinmimnninniiimniinumnnmniiiitiiiHiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiMiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiis
DANTE'S CONCEPTION OF PERSONALITY
THE EDITOR
"The vastest attempt which the artist can make" are the words Carlyle chooses to characterize Angelo's Last Judgment and Dante's Divine Comedy. Others as well have called attention to the fact that the Christian concep- tion of hell depends in its final analysis upon a deep com- prehension of the meaning of personality. The drama be- comes then Dante's story of the unfolding of personality, and unless we take this key we shall be at loss in our inter- pretation. That it is, above all, personal we may be cer- tain. Underneath the lilting song of it, one hears the so- ber and ever-recurring fugue of his own heartbreak, his own struggle out of the deep darkness into the light of the stars. It interests us after the lapse of six centuries be- cause it involves the human interest of his own baffled ca- reer. It is the paean of a life, bound by external circum- stances to shallows and to miseries, which out of bitterest defeat and humiliation wrested a victor)' that caused it to shine as the stars forever and ever.
Dante did in literature what Michael Angelo and the cathedral builders did in color and stone, he gave expres- sion to a culture, an attitude of mind, a wisdom of life that had been ten centuries in growth. This wisdom of life had been growing in diverse fields. It was not yet suf- ficiently formulated to express itself. But it did eventually find a voice. It found institutional voice in the papacy, it found artistic voice in the cathredrals, it found literary expression in the Divine Comedy. We read and wonder at the grotesque figures that fill the pages — the fiery male-
THE PERSONALIST
is something foreign to our modern thought, its me- .iaeval philosophy and theology are in a way repellent. The effect is much like that produced by wandering among the weird gargoyles of Notre Dame de Paris. What strange fascination holds us, what voice is it that attracts our at- tention and speaks, to our modern hearts?
Some never get farther than to what seem the crudities and cruelties of theological mediaevalism. It is true that Dante spoke in the vernacular of mediaevalism. His spirit and his outlook were those of the mediaevalist. But they were something more — vastly more — or thev had died with the tomes of theological learning of his own age. He who looks upon Dante merely as 'an exponent of a narrow theology, an embittered man who used the theological formulas of his time to lift his enemies into a terrible and eternal scorn, overlooks the profounder elements in Dante's work. It is true that Dante looks upon the world and life from the standpoint of reality, and as Matthew Arnold says "he sees it whole." It is this characteristic that gives to Dante's song the undying note. He was not misled into exalting the trivial, the transient, the passing, in the world order. With eyes looking through bitter glasses of sorrow he saw the world, life, human nature, love, righteousness, sin, death, as they were. The reason so few of us do last- ing work is because we do not get a sufficiently profound understanding of life to see through the make-believe, the transient watch-words of an hour. Dante had an eye and a mind for the eternal verities. We frame our thought in ever changing speech, our dreams in passing fashion of the hour, but the real elements of human experience, birth, love, death, God, the hereafter, are elements that abide past all garments in which they may be clothed. So while Dante was truly the child of his age as being in tune with its spirit, as understanding its speech, as acquainted with its intellectual conceptions, he passed through that which
DANTE'S CONCEPTION OF PERSONALITY 33
was transitory and setting forth that which was abiding, became the spokesman of "the ten silent centuries."
It is unfortunate that while the destruction of old the- ological concepts has been going on with remarkable rapid- ity through a series of years, very little has been done to point out the undying truths which the old conceptions embedded. We have committed the mistake of throwing out the child with the bath. It is a paradox not difficult to understand that an age of meliorism and pacifism has wrought the most cruel and deadly war of history. Is it not due to a remarkable blindness to the underlying facts of human personality? Our meliorism has gone to the ex- tent of refusing discipline to the wrong doer. Our mercy is reserved not for the victim but for the offender. This maudlin type of thinking we falsely describe as Christian. Thus it is that there has slipped out from the thinking of many men a true conception of the hideous nature of sin. If our so-called science be true, human sin is but the result of natural disease, of heredity or of environment. In- dividual responsibility is quite overlooked and we send for the surgeon or the doctor rather than for the priest. It is only fair to recall that a particularly wooden and unthink- ing persistence in earlier theological phraseology has quite unintentionally aided progress in the same direction — dis- respect for the moral mandates. All this has come in face of the fact that science tells with most terrible certainty the tale of inexorable punishment for misused powers.
It may then be important to read the deeper meaning of Dante's comedy. For his purposes he chooses the su- preme situation of all history, that when man freed from the exactions of time, divested of the trumpery of earthly pomp or fame, is seen in the light of final moral judgment. If one looks past the fantastic and grotesque, it is obvious that the sufferings portrayed all hinge upon the fact that finally the deed comes back upon the doer. One must
34 THE PERSONALIST
eventually stand under the weight of what one is and does and loves. In the Christmas Sermon, Stevenson puts as a foremost condition for success the necessity of keeping friends with one's self. A study of Dante will show a strict accord with Stevenson's conception. With Dante, hell is but the condition of discord which erring personal- ity brings upon itself, and heaven is the state of concord with God's will. The Paradise is personality acting in har- mony with that love which is the keynote to which moves the universe.
I.
dante's conception of personality grows out of his belief in freedom
Much confusion has arisen in the popular mind through the fact that Dante has been claimed by both the parties of progress and of reaction. He is named as the pioneer of religious and political liberty, and as the defen- der of mediaevalism. There is no doubt reason for both interpretations. Both contain a measure of truth. There is no use denying his devotion to mediaevalism. But his pouring of a profound conception of personality into the old wine-flasks of mediaevalism disclosed its inadequacy. Thus he assumes the mediaevalistic dualism of sacred as against secular, of time as against eternity, of the world present as against the world to come, but through his profound belief in human personality with its basic freedom he showed that the secular was important only as it was infilled with the sacred ; that eternity was determined by the events of time, that the world to come had its roots in the world that now is. In like manner he stands for the separation of church and state, the supremacy of the state over affairs temporal, and the supremacy of the church over affairs spiritual. Then by a deep recognition of the reality of the
DANTE'S CONCEPTION OF PERSONALITY 35
direct human relation to God and the fact of moral respon- sibility he shows that neither Church nor state bears auth- ority except as it possesses the character of righteousness and justice. Putting his drama in the theological forms of the church he shows how men are damned by their own wicked acts and not at all by legal or ecclesiastical decree. All is taken out of the artificial forms of institutionalism and placed upon the personalistic basis of character. Thus it is true that Dante was a great apostle of freedom. The determining power of human choice is the key-note of his work. His conception of personality roots in the assump- tion that men are free to choose courses of action; that those courses which they choose make them essentially what they are ; and that having once made their own choice for evil nothing can make them good again but their pref- erence of goodness over evil. It seems strange that facts so fundamental should have been lost sight of in modern thinking.
II.
dante's punishments the determining choices
of free persons
A study of the punishments for sin in the Inferno and of the corresponding means of restoration from the same sins in the Purgatorio throw a flood of light upon Dante's conception of personality. The punishment consists merely in the persistence of those characteristics which have been in the first life voluntarily chosen as the expression of one's personality.
Cowardice, with its vacillation between strength and weakness, its failure to act strongly in any one direction has settled into habit. The cowards in hell are represent- ed as chasing a standard this way and that eternally and resultlessly.
36 THE PERSONALIST
Carnality, recognized as a resignation of the personality to the sweeping winds of passion, becomes an habitual un- rest in which the soul is tormented by sex memories that do not fade. Even" honest person who has lived long will immediately recognize the justice and truth of the charac- terization.
The glutton's punishment lies in the result of gluttony — the earning about of corpulence, a corpulence of mind as well as of body. The avaricious have spent their lives in a meaningless scramble for self and, having no higher in- terest in life, continue the same childish and greedy quarrel. So long as they consider getting the end of life what else can they do or appreciate? The hell of the life to come is simply the continuation of that hell which they chose to begin on earth. Those whose earthly careers have been spent in sullenness and anger simply live in the slime of that anger to which they have yielded and which they love. "Sullen we were in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing within ourselves the sluggish fume; now we are sullen in the black mire." *
Heresy likewise is punished by the continuance of mental blindness. Upon the violent toward God, dews of divine mercy fall as if they were flakes of fire. The violent to na- ture continue simply to burn with violence, as thoughts of violence feed on their own flames until they come to deed. Hell discloses the fraudulent in the true light of what he has ever been, a snake with a man's face and a man's op- portunity. The political grafter is simply stuck in the pitch in which it was his pleasure to live. The hypocrites con- tinue to wear coats of gilded lead, bright in appearance but heavy to earn-. Traitors, at the farthest remove from friendship and companionship, are submerged in the ice of that isolation from God and man which their own volun- tary deed has created.
Ulcre as elsewhere Charles Eliot Norton's trail u ed.
DANTE'S CONCEPTION OF PERSONALITY 37
Is the punishment of having to live with one's self harsh and cruel? There is even" means of escape though it will not be taken. When one grows weary of the useless and tedious round of sin it is possible to rise by willing the good. This change of will admits to the Purgatorio where men are willingly fighting evil habit laid down by evil choice. The task is a hard one from which whoso looks back returns outside. It is no easy road this, but a long, long trail, which grows constantly more easy to follow un- til man attains at last complete self-mastery and self-con- trol. At the end of the Purgatorio, Virgil dismisses Dante with the words : " Free, upright, and sound is thine own will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its choice ; wherefore thee over thyself I crown and mitre."
Complete moral self-control, spiritual self-mastery, aid- ed by the incitement of heavenly grace, this then is the open sesame to salvation.
CONCLUSION
Dante has this advantage over the theological opinions of the pagans. Hades was to them something unconnect- ed with character. To Dante personality was something so fundamental, so imperishable, so necessary to the un- derstanding of life, that hell was nothing more nor less than its misuse and perversion. Of freedom he was the foremost exponent of his time and more, he was "the voice of ten silent centuries," the expression of that thirst for freedom which had been so toilsomely sought for a thous- and years as man struggled toward the new democracy. But Dante possessed the insight that freedom comes only through obedience to the highest nature, that all other freedom leads to slavery. They are mutilations of that perfect self-possession which alone can look out on life
}8 THE PERSONALIST
with full understanding and can by the same token look into the face of the ultimate mvsterv, God.
Does he seem to our times lacking in sympathy? That is because we forget that there is a false pity which is a weakness, and we have lost the distinction from our mod- ern thought. The pain of the innocent infant that thrusts his hand into the-fire would be dilated upon by some of our pandemonium thinkers as evidence of maliciousness in God, or as the evidence of God's non-existence. But the pain is an evidence of a pity which seeks to place a barrier against self-destruction. A society which in a maudlin meliorism forgets to deal justly, though in mercy, with the wrongdoer undermines its own foundation and leads the way to complete anarchy.
Which way then lie the plains of peace? In putting one's self in absolute accord with God and the universe. Dante discovers life to be a harmony of love. Love is the joy of heaven and on the steep circles of purgatory it is the voice of hope. But it extends everywhere. The love which is the harmony and joy of heaven, and the hope of those who struggle toward it, is the anguish, the punishment, of the wicked and the evil who cannot escape it. If the uni- verse is harmony, moving to love, where can he escape who lives in and cherishes hate? Though he take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the earth, or in the depths of the sea, or in the darkness, or in hell it- self, he cannot escape the presence of God. His punish- ment springs from the constant presence of that harmony which he hates. He writhes in the sense of futility and helplessness which arises out of his disharmony with that love which moves the heaven and all the stars.
Especially Contributed to attend the Dante Article.
THE PARAPET
Riverside Drive
Kneeling in prayer and not ashamed to pray, The tumult of the time disconsolate To inarticulate murmurs dies away.
In A Cathedral.
The river barges pass like measures in some song
With sweep slow-paced and long. . . And like the mists from censer-flung perfumes Float upward to the vaulted night ... a night that looms
Above the city's savagery of light With patined dome more worshipful than aught that Art
Has yet devised for pride of mortal tombs.
We lean upon the parapet, arm touching arm . . .
Steeped in the holy charm That breathes here at the sacrifice of day.
In this vast privacy Our kneeling hearts are voluble with prayer . . we pray
Like Poets, unashamed, and praying . . . dream . . . We dream . . . and tumults of a time creed-mad and grim
To inarticulate murmur die away.
Josephine Hammond
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA
PROFESSOR ROBERT W. ROGERS Drew Theological Seminary
Bidden hither by your high and gracious courtesy1 I have left mine own Atlantic, to me most dear from my earliest youth, and am come to speak to you, in whose ears is the heavy and solemn roar of the Pacific. The past, irreparable, safe beyond cavil and impervious to fate, lies in Eastern climes ; the future, as I am glad to admit, seems to lie not in the^ East, but in your great, brave, uplooking, ever-expanding and expansive West. The occasion bids me speak modestly, and impulse within, as strong as any impact without, is of the same color. I have no mood of dogmatism, nor patience with its ex- ercise, and venture to speak at all only because I have spent my life teaching, and love it more than ever; and having wandered far, seeing many universities, and, better still, hearing many men of distinction or of commanding authority, might at long last cease to hold my peace and the rather speak out the faith that is in me, and let en- thusiasm for learning, admiration for scholarship, and glowing hope for yet better days find eager and passion- ate utterance.
Let us find places on the magic carpet and be wafted far from the Pacific, aye and from the Atlantic's western shores, until we make footfall by the shores of the Medi- terranean, most interesting by far of all the seas of earth; and when we have beheld just one fair spot upon its borders, make thence to the northern Adriatic that in swift glances we may discern the very beginnings of that great system of instruction, inspiration and research, one
1 Commencement Address at the University of Southern California.
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 41
of whose later manifestations is before us to-day in this goodly place.
Our first landfall is at Salerno, at the head of its beauti- ful bay, the Gulf of Salerno. The town rises on its fair hillside, shimmering white in the morning sunlight, and the most conspicuous of its buildings is the Cathedral of St. Matthew, dedicated in honor of the Evangelist St. Matthew, whose bones are supposed to rest in its crypt. The sacred edifice was erected in 1070 by Robert Guis- card, and many a stirring historic event has its solemn bulk witnessed. In the south aisle is the tomb of Hilde- brand, afterward Pope Gregory VII, who died in the little city on the 25th of May, 1085, after his banishment from Rome by Henry IV. His dust would make renown for any place, but Salerno has greater fame than he could give, and to that our thoughts may justly turn to-day. Behind the city of Salerno there is a medicinal spring of kindly healing waters known, as were so many other springs about the Mediterranean basin, to the Romans. Perhaps because of its virtues, real or supposed, the art of healing comes very early to note in Salerno. We know the name of a physician there in the year 848, and before 946 a French bishop in arte medicinae pertissimus, met at the court of Louis IV a practitioner from Salerno less learned than he, but possessed of such skill as great ex- perience could give. Was this unnamed man represent- ative of a school? We do not know, but soon after his day we learn that Adalbert, bishop of Verdun, came to be cured by its doctors, and thenceforward allusions be- come so frequent that we come naturally to the conclu- sion that a school to train men for that noble profession whose praise is world-wide was already in existence, and its European celebrity certainly goes back to the middle of the eleventh century. The city was then called upon its coins Civitas Hippocratica, and that gives us an inter-
42 THE PERSONALIST
esting clue to the basis of its teaching. Its students were learning the rudiments of their art of medicine and sur-
O
gerv from Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician, whose Aphorisms and Prognostics and other works were turned into Latin. He was born on the island of Cos about 460 B. C, and here we find him the chief teacher in Salerno sixteen centuries later.
From humble beginnings there gradually arose an or- ganized school or college of doctors in Salerno, and thither resorted in 1099 Robert, Duke of Normandy, to be cured of his wound received in the Crusades, and to him was later dedicated Salerno's chief medical book, written in metre and containing medical aphorisms, some of which still live as proverbs of more or less wisdom. Here then in Salerno, in the teaching and practice of medicine, are the beginnings of university life and thought. In some sense every medical school that now adorns the globe may hark back to call Salerno mater gloriosa, and to take pride in her fame. Much has been learned of the human body and the healing of its ills since that remote day, and not seldom have men gone backward and were then com- pelled to turn and take place once more in the ranks which Salerno first formed. No greater illustration of this truth is needed than that Salerno had among its medical practitioners, teachers, and writers, several women, and it is not so long ago that women were newly admitted to that profession after a long exclusion in Kurope and America. But let us away upon our magic carpet from Southern Italy and its fair Mediterranean shores, and having passed above the waters of its sister sea, the deep blue Adriatic, make landing fifty miles inland at the big city of Bologna, more than four times the size of Salerno. The city has for its motto only one word, but that a word of glory and of hope, Libertas, and on its old coins were the words of a splendid boast, Bononia docet.
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 43
Few cities in the world might boast more nobly, for to practice liberty and teach mankind these were noble func- tions indeed; and Bologna has much cause to feel a not ignoble pride.
The range of teaching at Salerno was disposed on the whole to be what we should now call professional, though there is no good reason to doubt that the Liberal Arts had masters and learners. In Bologna, on the other hand, at least as early as 1000 A. D., there was a fully recognized School of the Liberal Arts which attracted students from the far away city of Genoa, and more wonderful still we even hear that a famous teacher travelled all the way from Paris to study dialectic, and another perhaps scarcely less famous went to the same shrine to unlearn what he had previously known, and then returned to Paris and "un- taught" the same to his pupils.
It is enough. Bologna was indeed a famous school in the liberal sense. It was, however destined to a great- er distinction because it became a supreme School of Law. There had been schools of law before it in Rome, Pavia and in Ravenna, only fifty miles away by the Adri- atic. None of these, however, may now claim such honors as rightly belong to Bologna in this noble science of the law. The rise to distinction is due to one man, Irenius, whose name is immortal. He was a master of the Liberal Arts and set himself to the studv of law. His books were derived from Ravenna in part at least, and down he sat to study them alone and without a master. Let me remind you of the significance of the statement. We are living in an age of ever-expanding courses of lectures in our universities, and we are rearing generations of youth in the belief, and still worse in the active practice of the idea, that he who would learn anything must hie away to some university and take a course in it. It is a silly heresy, and I despise it most heartily. There's far
U THE PERSONALIST
too much lecturing going on, and much too little insistence upon personal effort, private study. Let the teacher teach the beginnings, the A B C of the arts and sciences, and show the learner how to work, where to seek the know- ledge, how to obtain it, and then, noblest and highest of all, how to advance and extend it. He who thus points the way, shows the landmarks, indicates the pitfalls, sets imagination on fire, and kindles enthusiasm, is a great teacher, and has no need to lecture on every phase of his subject. On the other hand, he who does not make course after course until college and university catalogues show almost unending lists in which knowledge of every detail has covered learning like a forest dark and forbidding, he who so fulfills the teacher's office makes his pupils parrots and not men, stifles imagination, smothers initiative and destroys originality. Irenius was not thus stifled. What he had learned was his very own, and with that possession he began to lecture on law as no man before him had done in Bologna. In due time, we know not how soon, all Europe knew that a great teacher had come, that a genius of commanding powers had risen, and students came. He seems not to have been a great writer. We possess indeed glosses of his which are still preserved which he wrote as he expounded the laws of Justinian. Nay, his greatness was as a teacher, and his books were the lives of his pupils, and they came from all Europe and went home again to sound their master's praises and to carry on their work. It was he who gave Bologna its re- nown as a School of Law, and it was he who, though he knew it not, became one of the founders of the whole university system, and we who now stand by the great Pacific sound his praise once more and remember the shores of the Adriatic.
First a School of Liberal Arts, then a far more re- nowned School of Law, so did Bologna move onwards
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 45
toward university character as students flocked to it from the West far beyond the beautiful Alpine borders of Italy. Then came swarms of youth from Germany, and Bologna became a cosmopolitan centre of learning ; and then older men, ecclesiastics, sons of noble families, men of mature age who had already won position in the world by their own well-used experience of it; and as their numbers in- creased to three thousand, and then to live thousand, and then in 1262 to nearlv ten thousand students, Bologna was now a student university, and all Europe made up its bodv of learners. It was now an open doorway to that profession which has always had political and commercial power and has it still as none other of the learned professions.
A place so great could not be left to students of the Liberal Arts, and to Doctors of Law. Another profession almost as lucrative in the middle ages as law, the practice of medicine, would deserve and demand a place and Saler- no could point the way. There are names of physicians in Bologna documents from the beginning of the eleventh century, and by the second half of it there were doctors and professors of medicine and surgery, and graduations in these began, such as before had been in Arts and Law. The scientific school of medicine in Bologna begins with the great name of Thaddeus, who came from Florence and began to teach in the year 1260. With him began the studv of anatomv, and under him the human body was dissected in the presence of students. Mundinus stood by him and became the father of modern anatomy, writ- ing a text-book which continued in use for more than two centuries. There surely is glory enough for any city in all this, vet — did not time fail or patience forbid — there were far more to tell. I might show that its university was far in advance of its own age, and perhaps in some ways even of our age also. It early had women among its pro-
40 THE PERSONALIST
fessors, and among them Novella d'Andrea in the four- teenth century, whose personal attractions were so great that she had to lecture concealed from the eyes of her pupils by a curtain, perhaps lest beauty should fire imag- ination, and learning cease to entice when delivered by a teacher of such witching mien.
Ah, Bologna, how splendid was her contribution to art, to law, to medicine, how glorious the annals of her teach- ing work! I have walked her streets with reverence, peeped into lovely gardens through dim renaissance gate- ways, and felt a glow of happiness to behold the city which had made a contribution so noble to the modern history of learning, and a gentle and modest pride that I belonged in manner however humble to the ranks of teachers whose greater glories were Irenius and Thad- deus.
I have some fear lest I may have overtaxed your pa- tience by speaking so long of Salerno and of Bologna, but I have taken the risk, and there was method in my mad- ness. I have merely made these two universities object lessons from which I would now deduce some general principles and seek a lesson for this place and its beau- tiful environment. Let me mention the general principles first.
What is a university? There is a widespread notion — it is only a notion and a very erroneous one — that a uni- versity means a school where all the faculties or branches of knowledge are represented, or, to put it more crudely, a place where a student may learn any subject. There has seldom found place in the human mind a greater vagary, a more stupid misunderstanding. How shall we escape from it? There is but one sure way, and as safe as it is sure, and that is to go back down the long avenue of his- tory and see what the word university really did mean in the beginning, and then see how the word was applied
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 47
to typical institutions later. Let us then understand dis- tinctly and clearly that universitas means merely a number of persons. At the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries the word is ap- plied to a body of masters and students, or to either one or the other. It is in the beginnings not applied to a place, or to a school or to an institution, but, as I have been saying, is applied to the men who teach or the men who study. The correct phrase is always, "The University of Masters," or the "University of Scholars," or the "Uni- versity of Masters and Scholars." What was the word for the institution in which the "University of Masters and Scholars" had their abiding place? The academic institution was called Studium, not a University. And what was a studium? It was what we might call a school, it was the place or institution in which the University of Masters and Scholars, the teachers and the taught, were at work. Now a Studium might be a local institution in which were gathered as learners only the youth of some town or city. Whenever it rose above the rudiments, the beggarly elements of instruction, and acquired a repu- tation sufficient to attract students from a distance, it was then called a Studium. Generale, and that expression signifies not a place where everything was taught but a place where one of the higher faculties was taught, name- ly, theology, law, or medicine, and taught in such fashion as to be able to invite students from beyond local borders, and to attract them. At the beginning of the thirteenth century there were only three institutions which dared claim the great title of Studium- Generale, and they were Paris, with faculties of theology and liberal arts, Bo- logna, with a faculty of law, and Salerno with a faculty of medicine. When the fifteenth century came, the word Studium Generale dropped slowly out of use and the word university supplanted it, and acquired the general mean-
48 THE PERSONALIST
ing of the institution as well as the doctors, masters, and scholars who formed it.
In its original historical sense, and its onlv correct sense, a university is not a place where even' subject may be taught or where every faculty is represented, but an institution where students may find instruction in one or more of the higher branches, or in one or more of the pro- fessional studies. Salerno was a university when it taught nothing but law, and it was neither more nor less a university when it added the liberal arts, nor when it began the cultivation of medicine. Paris was a university, aye, and a great university, when it taught only theology and the arts. I repeat that the test is that the instruction shall be higher and not in elementary subjects and that it shall be so well ordered, so skillfully given, as to attract not a Studium Locale, but a Studium Generate. As in those days, so also in these days wherever the word uni- versity is correctly used, it has that significance and no other.
In 1876 there was opened in Baltimore a school of the higher learning, and it taught only by one faculty call- ed the Faculty of Philosophy, which is the modern term for what was in the Middle Ages the Faculty of Liberal Arts, but it was a university, it was the Johns Hopkins University, and it had even- claim, every just and right- eous claim to that style. It was a university though it had few, very few professors, but they were supreme, each in his own field, and thev attracted students at once not from Baltimore or from Maryland only, but from Mass- achusetts, and Ohio as well, and soon the fame of that university was world-wide, and Germans, English and French came gladly to its hospitable halls. It was small wonder that they came, for Silvester was professor of mathematics, Gildersleeve was professor of Greek, (where else was there a Hellenist his superior?), and Morris,
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 49
teacher incomparable, was there to represent collegiate Greek and Latin, and Remsen was professor of Chemistry and Martin of Biology and Rowland, professor of Physics, a genius indeed. And they who stood by them to help or to direct in other studies were Adams in history, Elliott in Ro- manic languages, but little less distinguished in promise, if not in performance. O, aye, the Johns Hopkins University was a real university when it had only its Faculty of Philosophy and it had no other when I came within its inspiring influence in 1883. It has a Faculty of Medicine now, and a Faculty of Engineering, but is not one whit more a university now than it was then.
The ideal is not many faculties, vast ranges of subjects, multitudinous courses ; it is men of distinction as teachers learned each in his own subject, scholars in that lofty and ennobling sense, men of light and of burning, blazing en- thusiasm, men whom Chaucer described in the musical phrase:
"Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."
Anything more? Yes, — students, students who study, stu- dents who feel within their glowing veins the warming fires of ambition, not crazed with an absorbing athleticism, not dull, witless, stupid, blase, not careless, shiftless, time- wasters, not dull driven cattle, beaten into a semblance of industry by a vast machinery of coercion administered by a resistless Dean. Professors make or unmake a university, but so also do students. They must work together. They must be fellow soldiers, commilitones as thev were often called in my university days in Germany long ago. Let us not forget the old phrase in the Middle Ages, "University of Masters and Scholars." If the professors have responsi- bility in making a university so also have the students. The students of to-day will be alumni or alumnae to-morrow,
50 THE PERSONALIST
and into their several walks of life must carry the habits formed in student days either as they now are, or begin a fierce battle to supplant them by newer and better. During all the rest of their lives they will be representing the uni- versity, and in some or many particulars influencing its decisions^ and raising or lowering its prestige. The in- fluence of students far outlasts that of the professors. The professors die or retire while the students who have filled their lecture rooms survive them by years or decades. Surely this is no light responsibility. Would there were found some way of impressing every freshman with its grave reality.
Come now, let me turn and apply some of these lessons from a glorious past to a living present, and so far as may be to a future of hope and actuality. You have honored me with a commission to speak to this University, to the Faculty whom I may salute as colleagues, though my own seat of learning be far from them, to men and women now in the next moments to be admitted by the conferring of degrees to this brotherhood begun in Salerno and Bologna ten centuries ago, and still growing and developing, and to such others of the student body as voice may reach today in this charming environment. I have somewhat to say to you collectively if not individually, as a whole if not in classes, differentiated by age or opportunity.
The first word is this, that this is a university; it has earned and deserves that splendid appellation. It is a Studium, a place of higher studies, a place admirably qual- ified to admit the youth to the ancient degree of Bachelor of Arts, and it is in that ancient and venerable sense al- so a Studium Generate, a place fit to attract and able to attract students from a distance, and not only from this rich and beautiful city. That being true and beyond all dispute on solid historical grounds, it is doubly and treb- ly true when one remembers that besides the College of
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 51
Liberal Arts this University rises to the mediaeval stand- ard in the possession of faculties of theology, law and medicine. There is no need to labor the point. Let all who share its life, whether as teachers or taught, lift heart and soul in a great and noble pride in that already achiev- ed, in the place which the University of Southern Califor- nia justlv holds as an heir of Salerno and Bologna, aye of Paris and of Oxford and Cambridge, and of the early foundations of learning in our own land. This Univer- sity is sister to the best of them, and may claim the right to emulate their glories and so far as may be to escape their mistakes. It is a high calling and very deeply re- sponsible, and in modest hesitation I must speak about it and ask you to consider how it should be met.
The first question is, what shall there be taught to those who seek the baccalaureate degree? I am scarcely old enough to face the embattled hosts which threaten any man who in this day dares to suggest any subject as necessary. Every subject has its defenders, and so it should ; but alas ! every subject has its opponents. I shall not speak dog- matically, nor ex cathedra. What is now to be spoken is a declaration of faith, not a challenge to controversy. I shall decline the tournament, refuse to enter the lists. I shall flee and let those who remain and whose business it is to decide, to declare their faith, announce their principles and put their conclusions into effect as they have author- ity and right to do, and then to forget all that I have said. What subjects should here be taught? O, I have no hesi- tation in declaring mv faith that thev should be classics, mathematics, history, philosophy, modern languages and one science.
I have mentioned science last, not as a climax, for my climax is at the other end of the line, but be- cause I would say a word about that first; and I am so old a hand at teaching as to know that the thing mention-
>2 THE PERSONALIST
ed last needs an early word of re-enforcement or it will follow its predecessors out of memory into vacuity. I feel quite sure that a man who has to live in the world of the present ought to know something about scientific methods of thought, processes and research, and the quickest and surest way to give such an insight is to teach one science, teach it well, teach it fundamentally and as much of it as the reasonable partition of time would al- low. One science and one only, not chips and bits and smatterings of two or three sciences, as is too often the custom in America, with the result that the befuddled mind carries away no real knowledge, no sure grasp of the scien- tific method.
What beside this then? Surely, enough of two of the modern languages to be able to use them as tools, as reading tools, and no more, because no more is likely really to be possible. Philosophy, aye, enough of an in- sight into the methods of philosophical thinking that the educated man may at least have heard of the problems of thought, of the universe and of man upon which the wisest men of all a^es have most seriouslv have considered. History; yea, that the youth who are to be to-morrow's men and women may catch at least a fleeting glimpse of the long procession of civilized men coming up through barbarism out of savagery. Mathematics, that the mind may see the foundations of all physics and all astronomy in that glorious science of numbers, the one sure and surely known science which deserves the high epithet pure, — pure science. The classics, — it is my climax and so it deserves to be. Our civilization, the whole of it stands supported on two great columns, one of them is Hebrew, for our relig- ion is Hebrew in origin whether we be Christians, Jews or Muhammadans, for all three are rooted in that same soil so amazingly rich in religious ideas and aspirations, so charged with a passion for Cod. The second column is
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 53
Greek, and the major part of all beside religion that our civilization boasts is derived either directly from the Greeks or indirectly from the Romans. O, how in in- expressibly sad will be the state of the coming generations if educated men and women are denied the classical train- ing, whether the denial come through their own stupid refusal, or because of the mistaken policy of the educa- tional leaders who are gradually elbowing the classics out of college and school. I make bold here and now to utter this protest in the ears of all who hear, and to beg all of a different opinion once more to weigh and consider the claim, the just and reasonable claim; of the classics, to a high and secure, though not an exclusive place in education.
In some such way as this so briefly sketched I should wish even' man or woman to be educated in college, for I am fully convinced that with this foundation any structure might be reared. Whatever the future career, whether in one of the learned professions or in science, literature or fine arts, music, sculpture or painting, the Bachelor of Arts would be ready to rear a substantial structure of high ideals and modest or lofty achievement.
Yet when all is said it matters far less what is studied, what subjects are pursued, than that what is done be done thoroughly. It is far more important to know a few things well than many things superficially. Let me speak boldly. The curse of American education is two- fold multiplicity and superficiality. Our boys and girls from their youth to manhood are taught too many things, and few or none deeply and broadly. We graduate from schools and colleges hosts who are clever in speech, some- times brilliant, who can keep up a conversation on almost anything from astronomy to zoology, but who know noth- ing well, nothing thoroughly. I have spent much time in Europe, and everywhere in my experience and every-
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where the testimony of others is the same. Nobody knows anything as do the English, German and French students of the same age. A graduate student who has spent four rears in college and is promoted Bachelor of Arts comes forward as a candidate for the higher degrees in philosophy or theology and brings to the new task so little, so pathetically little that is definite, sure, positive, reliable. He has studied German but he cannot read some scientific papers in that language. Is he a student of History? He has read Latin in college, but he can- not read a document in Mediaeval Latin. He goes to Oxford for higher studies and is hopelessly outclassed by a boy five years his junior who has just come up from Eton or Winchester, and can really read Latin. O, I have often been sick with shame to have heard Oxford professors declare that some American is clever, but that he knows nothing, and worst of all to hear them prove it. If there were some way by which every student should be compelled to study half as many subjects he would know four times as much about any one of them. The cry and call of the age is for men and women who know something and can do something with it. Fewer subjects, a greater intensity, and the beginning is made. Yet even that is only a beginning. Our next generation must do much better than we have done, or it will not do so well. It must learn a few things and learn them well, it must learn the supreme gifts of patience and perseverance. It dare not face a future greater than the past which now stretches behind us until it is willing to pay for a higher excellence in terms of toil, patient, persistent until the goal be won.
The whole learned world on the Atlantic seaboard was ringing, as I set my face westbound toward you, with plaudits of a woman and her splendid achievement. A quiet, modest little ladv had come from Paris, Madame
THE UNIVERSITY: ITALY TO CALIFORNIA 55
Curie, to receive the gift of a gram of radium, and colleges and universities clamored for the honor of doins; honor to her, and naught that could be said of her was fulsome or overwrought. It sounds like a romance, but it is the
O
romance of labor, prolonged, patient persevering. Here is a woman of unusual gifts and of sound preliminary training. She is born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw and is a student of chemistry and metallurgy in Paris under Pierre Curie, whose wife she afterward became. They worked together in his laboratorv and there, while examin- ing specimens of pitchblende from which the element Ura- nium is extracted, she had the splendid good fortune to discover a new element which she named Polonium, in honor of Poland, her native country. There might be some other mvsterious element concealed in that same pitchblend, large residues of which were found in Austria. In that search she handled twenty to thirty tons of these residues, dissolving, fractionating by re-crystallization with ever increasing strength until at last her unflagging perseverance was rewarded by the discover}- of yet another element with the strongest radioactive properities yet known. She had discovered Radium, an element, her own element. Her early training, you may be sure, was sound and thorough, not scattered, aimless, discursive like an American elective course. Yet good as it was it would have been in vain but for that magnificent display of hard and continuous labor. There is no other way, and if education fails to make that lesson plain it has failed to educate; the next generation will not rise to its opportunities nor achieve its possibilities. Am I sounding what may seem to be a minor note? Nay, far from it, this is a clarion call to this sovereign commonwealth, to this astoundingly beauti- ful, this lordly and puissant city here, to build gloriously a great university worthy of the past and its present achieve- ment, but worthv also of the unmeasured and immeasur-
THE PERSONALIST
able opportunity of to-morrow. Nothing is too great, no ideal too lofty, no hope too rich and deep for what may here be achieved. Upon these foundations already well and truly laid let great and numerous buildings stand. Let their halls resound with the hurrying feet of tens of thou- sands of high-spirited youth, making haste to laboratories, libraries, lecture rooms and seminaries of the highest re- search. Challenge the greatest universities from here all the way to Harvard, to Oxford and Cambridge, to Dublin and Edinburgh, to Paris and to Berlin. Emulate their achievements, learn to avoid their mistakes, and be con- tent with naught less than equality with their best and noblest. Gather here the most gifted, the most ambitious, the most industrious youth, and bid them sit humbly at the feet not of cheap pedagogues, but before the faces of the most learned, the most skilful, the most inspiring men and women as their teachers. Let those who teach re- member the glorious succession in which they stand from Irenius in Bologna to our day, and as they think how narrow was the Adriatic, and how vast the Pacific, how insignificant Bologna, how great and prosperous Los An- geles, let them do and dare mighty things undreamt be- fore, nor yield to the enticement of any lesser ambition.
The past is secure, the future is here in the making, and the responsibility is ours. I have spoken with passionate earnestness, mindful of the past, eager to see a greater present, and full of hope for a larger future. The present only is ours in this mighty and inspiring task of education. I am not tremulous with fear, but buoyant with hope, and grimly determined to give my best to my profession, the profession of teaching, and to honor all who serve in a call- ing so ennobled by the past, so deeply needed in the present, and the present is only a moment, a fragment of time.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AMERICAN LIFE
BERNARD C. EWER.
Pomona College
A Great philosophy is a point of view rather than a system of concepts. More than one great historic philos- phy, in fact, has received its systematic formulation long after the death of its originator. Many an imposing sys- tem, too, wrought out in ponderous volumes of topics and subtopics, has proved lifeless. Philosophic vitality lies in the central idea, the living soul of thought.
We have had in American philosophy one vital spark of originality, and, so far as I am aware, only one. This is not to say that our country has lacked philosophic learn- ing, or has failed to make notable contributions to syste- matic reflection. The work of Ladd, Bowne, Royce, and their disciples will always command respect and afford philosophic sustenance for the thoughtful. Some of this work seems to me distinctly the best literary expression which has been given to certain historical points of view. But it does not possess the peculiar characteristic of ex- pressing the essential spirit of a time or people, of depict- ing in conceptual terms the mental life of a nation. It is this characteristic which distinguishes the philosophic ut- terances of William James and John Dewey. Their phi- losophy, commonly called pragmatism, is a revelation of certain moods of the human spirit, and, I believe, uniquely expressive of the soul of America.
In the few minutes during which I may claim your at- tention I should like to indicate briefly the systematic out- lines of this philosophy, i.e., its principal concepts in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philos-
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ophv of religion. This is not a discipular advocacy of pragmatism, or a critical attempt to evaluate its merits. I wish simplv to exhibit the logical skeleton of a philoso- phy the living power of which seems to me very great, and which possibly is destined to play an increasingly large part in the affairs of mankind.
First, then, with regard to its metaphysical basis, let us note its fundamental assertion that reality is active ex- perience. This doctrine is sharply distinct from other types of metaphysical theory, (a) It is not to be confused with the metaphysical dualism which finds reality to be ultimately of two kinds, matter, or physical energy, and mind. It is true that some of James' utterances, especially in his earlier writings, have a dualistic sound. But this, I think, is merely the inevitable use of language which was not constructed for philosophic purposes. James' real thought in the matter seems to me to be found rather in his later essays, particularly "Does Consciousness Exist?" and "A World of Pure Experience." Dewey's position is harder to discern, but such notes as I have made on the point seem to me to indicate the same metaphysical as- sumption, (b) This assumption is opposed to the ideal- isms which declare that reality is a transcendent or abso- lute experience, or system of ideas, or act of will. It has a certain puzzling kinship with voluntaristic idealism, but it emphasizes the reality of the finite being and repudiates the Infinite or Absolute Self and all its works. In this sense it is pluralistic. You will perhaps recall James' de- structive analysis of the concept of relation, a concept which is the corner stone of absolutist philosophical struct- ure. Dewey's thought here again is less explicit, but it is clearly enough implied in his teaching of the possibility of real accomplishment in this world of particulars, (c) It is also to be distinguished from such an empiricist meta- physics as that of John Stuart Mill. Reality, for our
PHILOSOPHY OF AMERICAN LIFE 59
American pragmatists, is active experience. Never in the previous history of thought, so far as I am aware, has empiricism been stated in precisely this form. Experience has been regarded as passive. According to this philoso- phy we make our own real universe, in reaction to our en- vironment.
Experience in its highest form is both social and scien- tific, or rather is scientifically guided. How these features are blended we shall see presently. Here we may note simply that pragmatist philosophy reflects the contempo- rary preeminence of scientific study, and the new scientif- ic and humanitarian. interest in the phenomena of society.
So much for the metaphysical theory of pragmatism. Its epistemology has been a battle-ground which it is hard- ly necessary to review in this meeting. I may remark briefly that the functional conception of knowledge, i.e. the conception of it as the active operation of ideas, the truth of which is identical with the success of operation, stands in contrast to the dualistic view that truth is the agreement of ideas with their objects, the said objects be- ing generally independent of our ideas about them. Ac- cording to pragmatism, objects are aspects of our pur- poses ; in other words, we come back to the metaphysical assumption that reality is active experience. Further, the pragmatic doctrine stands in contrast to the teaching of idealism that truth is the agreement of finite ideas with the thought or feeling of the Absolute Mind. It seems to me virtually to abolish the historic distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between appearance and reality, though of course the ordinary unphilosophical meaning of the terms remains. Facts are real as we di- rectly experience them or study them scientifically, and there is no satisfactory evidence of a more "ultimate" reality. James' antipathy to Kant is especially significant in this respect. Scientific investigation is not the mere
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deciphering of symbolic characters on a veil which ever conceals the real stage, but is a really illuminating ad- wince into the unknown. Experimentation is therefore a a vital necessity of the mind in its search for truth. We create our truth, in fact, by the process of experiment.
Passing to the field of ethics, I have the impression that pragmatism is concerned less with the traditional concept- ual problems of the subject, e.g., the ultimate nature of goodness and the moral possibility of indeterminism, than with what may be called ethical methodology, and the practical business of making improvements in this very sad world. James seems to take it for granted that we know well enough what to aim 'at, at least ordinarily, and that our difficulty is that of earnestly realizing our aims. This difficulty is due to the imperfection of human nature, and accordingly he addresses occasional hortatory remarks to the will, remarks which grip us as moral exhortation seldom does. Dewey is less inclined to emphasize individual responsibility and the unique force of active personal con- science. His contribution to the subject is mainly meth- odology, which seems to me his greatest philosophical ac- complishment. According to it socialized effort, frankly experimental but scientifically guided, is the supreme duty of mankind. The distinction between this point of view and the traditional one of assuming absolute principles of right and wrong which we obey or disobey can hardly be exaggerated. One who finds, as an increasing number of thoughtful persons are finding, that mankind, and es- pecially the rulers of mankind, actuated by other principles, have made a sorry mess of human affairs, naturally looks with favor upon ethical pragmatism.
This matter is so important as to deserve one or two concrete illustrations. James, like the rest us, looked up- on war as an evil. But he saw psychologically its te- nacious roots which do not yield to moralistic exhortation,
PHILOSOPHY OF AMERICAN LIFE 61
and he saw also its genuinely virtuous side. So he pro- posed in his essav, "The Moral Equivalent of War," a substitute which would exhaust the pugnacious energy of war makers in constructive rather than destructive ways. The enrollment of the fighting forces of society in the more hazardous occupations on the ocean, in the mine, in reclamation works, and the like, is an idea which even- fair-minded person will regard as at least worth trying.
Peculiarly instructive for our present purpose are Dew- ey's articles on political topics, particularly his current ones on Far Eastern questions. They are characterized by keen observation of fact, a democratic social idealism, and reiterated recommendation of experimental method. As opposed to the sort of talk and surreptitious performance which are prodding and dragging the world into another war they exhibit pragmatism in its most dignified aspect, and suggest that it, quite as much as the absolute idealism of German thought, may have tremendously important political implications.
It is in the field of religion that I find pragmatism least developed. Dewey appears to lack interest in the subject. Some of his pupils have discussed it genetically, histor- ically, and psychologically with acumen ; but their discus- sion can hardly be said to crystallize in the doctrines of a philosophy of religion. We are perhaps justified in say- ing that religion itself, pragmatically speaking, is an en- ergetic social idealism or "meliorism." James has not only given us a psychological justification of religion in its usual meaning of belief in a transcendent power, but has offered also some metaphysical suggestions concerning the relation between God and man. His characteristically empirical attitude toward the problem of the survival of personality is likewise noteworthy. That problem seemed to him best dealt with by experiment along lines of so-call- ed "psychical research." So far as I am aware, however,
THE PERSOXALIST these suggestions have had no great influence in the ranks
CO o
of students of philosophy.
But the significance of pragmatism, as I said at the be- ginning of this paper, lies less in its formal conceptual statements than in its central point of view, the peculiar attitude with which it faces the universe and human life. This attitude is youthful, adventurous. The pragmatist finds present experience real and animating. He discovers truth in practical ways. He works experimentally to bet- ter human life. And he is rather unobtrusive in religious matters apart from their ethical implications. On the whole I am inclined to think that this attitude is increas- ingly prevalent, and that there are many American citizens who have no technical or literary acquaintance with prag- matism, but are nevertheless in this state of mind. More than any other point of view and scheme of thought it seems to me to constitute the philosophy of American life.
Current Thought
The Dilemma of Darwinism.
Under this title, The Philosophical Review (September) prints an article by Dr. B. I. Gilman of Boston which calls attention anew to the ambiguity implied in the doctrine of natural selection. It seems good to feel the breath of new air on one's face and to know surely that passing of the worship of the ancient fetich of mechan- ism predicted by Bowne forty years ago.
Dr. Gilman concludes: "At the outset the doctrine of selection was greeted by at least a tacit recognition of the dilemma — truism or fallacy. Huxley is reported to have said that his first idea on hear- ing of Darwinism was, 'How stupid not to have thought of that before!' It seems indeed stupid never before to have suspected that the fact of premature death must have a meaning indefinitely greater than is expressed in the saying 'Whom the gods love die young,' or than was accorded it even by Malthus. John Stuart Mill records in his Essay on Theism that all he cared to say about Darwinism was 'It is not so absurd as it looks.' This was true since it is absurd only when stretched to bursting by the evolutionary admixtures. The faint praise of these two preeminent minds was prophetic of the estimate which the future will place at once upon the immense generalization simply presented in the Darwinian principle and upon the imposing nullities of evolutionary ratiocination that have since sheltered themselves under the reputation of a great naturalist."
In line with this same article one should read the essay in the July Monist 'Does "Evolution" Explain' by Edmund Noble.
Is "The Conservation of Energy" applicable to the Human body?
W. H. Sheldon discusses this question in The Journal of Philosophy of October 27th, concluding that, though reasonable, it requires for so-called demonstration the primary assumption that it is demon-
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strable. Dr. Sheldon discloses the barrenness of the attempted proofs as thev touch living organism. The real problem seems to us untouched by cither the conservationists or the non-conservationists. It might be possible to equate the physical output with the physical intake and not hit at all upon the mysterious relation of the physical energy to the willing mind. To deny this latter relation unseats the norms of human responsibility and all institutions of society.
The Concept of Personality in Early Philosophy.
Every personalist will be interested in the article by Miss Tarrant in the Hibbert Journal for October, entitled, "The Soul in Early Greek Philosophy." She begins first with the concept of the human soul in the Homeric poems, indicates the influence of Orphism and the advance of speculation regarding the self, through Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Ep- icureans. In concluding she W'rites:
"Epicureanism and Stoicism alike carry us beyond the limits of the Greek world; and through these schools the two characteristic Greek conceptions of soul pass on to influence later thought — the idea of a material substance, part of the material body, its functions based on mechanical processes, and its life limited by the body's life; and, on the other hand and more typically Greek, the idea of a divinely-born spiritual entitv, working through the body yet fundamentally at variance with it, and capable of aspiration and upward progress which ends ideally in union with the divine life it- self. The progress of thought is marked, especially in Plato and in the Stoics, by a growing sense of the fact of personality as a thing inexplicable but fundamental. This development in philosophy corresponds to and reflects that general movement in Greek politics, morals, religion, and literature which brought the individual into continually greater prominence; he ceased to be the mere member of a clan, city, class, or sex, and with the break-up of old communi- ties and the failure of old allegiances the human being as such began to emerge as the new hope, and the new mystery, of the world."
CURRENT THOUGHT 65
What is the Essence of Religion?
We can scarcely remember having anywhere noted among modern essayists so powerful and cogent a putting of the answer to this question as that of Emile Boutroux in the July Monist. Monsieur Boutroux shows the shallowness of much modern criticism of re- ligion and, how like democracy or other social movements, it cannot be judged alone by what it has done but by its ideals and their relation to the higher demands of life.
"Whether in the history of his species, or in his individual life man is a being that aspires to transcend itself. What is the mean- ing, the value of this strange aspiration? Mainly by emphasizing certain aspects of modern science, in answering this question, it is possible to say that man is the victim of illusion, that nowhere in history could any phenomenon take place which is not simply an equivalent of preceding phenomena that gave it birth. Eadem sunt omnia semper. Wholly and from all eternity, the universe has been preformed, as regards its elements and laws. If man is conscious of something lacking, some possibility of growth, if he imagines that supernatural powers come to his assistance, these impressions are solely owing to his ignorance and vanity. His power is a given quantity, the mechanical resultant of the natural forces of which he is the accidental and temporary synthesis. His destiny is confirmed within the limits of this power.
This appreciation of things is very conceivable, and, in certain ways, it is a plausible one; but it is not necessary. Indeed, human reflection has always set forth quite a different interpretation, ac- cording to which, man has, in a very real sense, the power to con- ceive of ends superior to his natural forces; towards these ends it is possible for him to rise, because to his activity may be added that of some being greater than himself and more powerful than nature. In collaboration with this superior being, man may, in very truth, transcend both nature and himself. It appears as though it would be advisable to seek for the essence of religion along these lines.
Man is on the path of religion as soon as he makes a serious en- deavor to transcend himself not only quantitatively but also qual- itatively. A purely quantitative increase of force might be explained by simply borrowing from the reservoir, infinite, it may be, of the physical energies of the universe. An increase of worth and per-
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fection, however, if anything more than words, is greater than the forces of nature as such. Science and art actually aim at such an increase, but, depending upon nature and the given, they anticipate and seek after the true and the ideal, not knowing if they can at- tain unto it.
The originality of religion dwells in the fact that it proceeds not from power to duty, but from duty to power; that it advances resolutely, taking for granted that the problem is solved, and that it starts from God. Ab actu ad posse, such is its motto. 'Be of good cheer,' said Jesus to Pascal, 'thou wouldst not seek me hadst thou not found me.' God is being and principle, the overflowing spring of perfection and might. He who shares in the life of God can really transcend nature; he can create. Religion is creation, true, beauti- ful and beneficent, in God and by God."
Dante from the Roman Catholic Standpoint.
Most interesting to Dante students is the special volume of essays put forth by the Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica and the Rivista Scuola Cattolica. The object of the various essays seems to be to prove Dante's complete orthodoxy. The main difficulty with such an effort is that if true it is unnecessary and if necessary it proves too much.
Notes and Discussions
Pilgrim Song
On my library shelf it stands in its black leather binding as prim and slim as Grandmother herself, the hvmnal that she loved. You can read the varying phases of her earthly pilgrimage by the pen- ciled frames that are drawn about her favorite hymns.
Orphaned at an early age and sent into a pioneer state upon the borders of civilization, there must have seemed to her no abiding place. It is not strange that the pent-up loneliness and sense of wand- ering found expression in the lovely words "I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger, I can tarry, I can tarry but a night." In that wilderness home there was little of luxury and much of heart-breaking toil. There were days of weariness and nights of weeping. What wonder that her heart found comfort in the strains, "Joy cometh in the morning, there is rest in heaven"? Here are the songs that com- forted her early widowhood and here the source of strength as she saw her youngest enter the Valley of Shadows. There where the yellowing pages fall apart as if obedient still to her will is the hymn that comprised her last mortal words, "Jesus, lover of my soul."
The turning pages open doors of memory through which pour in gusts of pilgrim song until I dream of faces living and dead, of scenes near and far. Each one seems to fit into its own time, place and experience, as if sacredly devoted to bear but a single message.
"Where Jesus is, 'tis heaven," is only a simple thing, little better than doggerel. I have known but one group of people to whom it appealed so that into its cup of faulty words they poured the flood of a glorifying experience. To read it none could suspect the hidden power: that lay in the sincerity of the singers.
"If on a quiet sea toward heaven we calmly sail," brings vividly to mind the faces of dear fisher-folk of Cape Cod, as out of the shadows and the storm, of which they have experienced many, I see creep across their faces the calm of life's deeper resignation. I seem to join them again in the final prayer:
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'"Help me in every state to make Thy will my own, And when the joys of sense depart To live by faith alone."
There is another which is like the comfort song of birds at even or the voice of the hermit thrush blessing the mountain solitude with the melody of unbroken peace, or like that sweetest song of all, a mother's lullaby amidst the gathering shadows of the night. It is only "Jesus calls us o'er the tumult," but it bears ever the con- tent and image of a life that has meant more to me than all the others, moving quietly and faithfully forward amidst a world of distractions.
These snatches of song have come to mark successive phases in my discovery of God. They are mile-stones in the march of life. 'Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage."
Miss Hammond as a Literary Critic.
We have received the following letter, a part of which we quote:
"Allow me to congratulate you on listing among your contributors that rarest of all writers, a real critic. One whose literary ability, whose evident culture give her the right and power to produce what we have so long been in need of: interpretation of convincing soundness, of content and manner, that is a joy to the discriminating reader. Something almost unheard of in these days of windy-word- iness, when it is discouragingly apparent that the race is to the strident and the slangful."
Faithfully yours,
Along the Bookshelf
BODY AND MIXD, a History and a Defense of Animism, by William McDougall, F.R.S. The Macmillan Company, New- York. 1920. Pp. xix + 384.
A noteworthy book, and one among many, are really inadequate terms in which to describe McDougall's Body and Mind, a fifth edition of which has now been published. The author describes it as a defense of animism and assigns thus the reason for that defense:
"Modern science and philosophy have turned their backs upon Animism of every kind with constantly increasing decision; and the efforts of modern philosophv have been largely directed towards the excogitation of a view of man and of the world which shall hold fast to the primacy and efficiency of mind or spirit, while rejecting the animistic conception of human personality. My prolonged puz- zling over the psycho-phvsical problem has inclined me to believe that these attempts cannot be successfully carried through, and that we must accept without reserve Professor Tylor's dictum that An- imism 'embodies the very essence of spiritualistic, as opposed to materialistic, philosophy,' and that the deepest of all schisms is that which divides Animism from Materialism."
"The main body of this volume is therefore occupied with the presentation and examination of the reasoning which have led the great majoritv of philosophers and men of science to reject Animism, and of the modern attempts to render an intelligible account of the nature of man which, in spite of the rejection of Animism, shall escape Materialism. This survev leads to the conclusion that these reasonings are inconclusive and these attempts unsuccessful, and that we are therefore compelled to choose between Animism and Materialism; and, since the logical necessity of preferring the anim- istic horn of this dilemma cannot be in doubt, my survey constitutes a defense and justification of Animism."
McDougall shows that the modern rejection of Animism is prin- cipally due to the materialistic scientific claim that the mechanistic principles of explanation hold exclusive sway throughout the uni- verse. This claim he characterizes as "the mechanistic dogma."
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The book contains a valuable outline of the history of animistic theorv in the field of philosophy, the adverse developments of mod- ern science and passes to a most thorough consideration of com- peting systems, showing their deficiency and inadequateness.
He shows to those who assume to puzzle over the mystery of how the psychical can act upon the physical, that this is at least no more mysterious than the materialistic assumption that the psychical is the product of the physical.
He treats the "psychology without a soul" with eminent con- sideration and fairness and vet exposes its insufficiency. It is a brilliant disclosure of the predominating fallacies of our modern thinking and a clear call to an order of thought which shall be more satisfying and in the truest sense more scientific.
We admire the courage of Professor McDougall not only in meet- ing the issue directly by assuming the much despised term animism but more also that he has dared to raise the standard of opposition in the face of scientific anathema and to carry his questions into the camp of the enemy. This he does with the utmost calmness and good taste and with such evident scholarship as to demand attention. Every personalist will rejoice in this eminent contribution to phil- osophy and will feel it necessary to own and read the book.
BERGSON AND FUTURE PHILOSOPHY, an Essay on the scope of Intelligence, by George Rostrevor. Macmillan Company, New York. Pp. 1^52.
Though manv books are written on Bergson's philosophy few have the freshness, sympathy and interest of this small volume. The author strikes immediately at the high point in Bergson's work and that element most likely to be remembered namely, the doctrine of duration.
While strongly sympathetic he does not believe in Bergson's em- phasis of contrast if not of contradiction between the roles of in- tuition and intelligence.
Rostrevor thus states the aim of his discussion:
"How far is it possible to go, without doing violence to the intellect at all? Is it possible by hard but quiet re- flective thought to obtain an insight into the duration of our selves, and so into the nature of time? Duration being the
ALONG THE BOOKSHELF 71
very stuff of our deepest experience, will not the careful analysis of our memories enable us to apprehend it? I mean to suggest that it will."
He finds himself in entire agreement with Bergson's doctrine of time as independent reality, and though he sees that somehow dura- tion is inextricably involved with self-consciousness or personality he fails to see that time is nothing except for intelligence in the thinking subject and in the elan vitale. Thus is raised the question which neither himself nor Bergson are able adequately to solve, the fact of duration in animals and in the physical universe. It will be said of course that they meet it by asserting the substantial or in- dependent nature of time. Such victory is gained at such logical cost as to practically amount to defeat, for, in spite of all appeals to the reality of the spiritual, and Rostrevor is of all men a philosophical mystic, they are thereby logically committed to the ways of material- ism.
The relation of intelligence, intuition, selfhood and duration are thus described:
"Intelligence is the sole active element of knowledge, but memory is fresh and vivid, and intelligence, however quick its operation, cannot accomplish its habitual task all at once. First, it gives an awareness of duration, not of the self which endures; the work of abstraction has at this stage hardly begun, for the duration is still partially invested with the particular quality of the particular experience. Next comes awareness of the enduring self, and then a much more definite awareness of interesting points in the process of the duration."
Is it not, however, a fact that the awareness of duration is com- pounded of the consciousness of an enduring self, as over against a fleeting or changing experience? The arbitrary division in self- consciousness which Rostrevor here attempts is open to criticism exactly like that which he indulges against Bergson's separation of intuition and intelligence.
Most commentators on Bergson fall either into a harsh and ill- judged criticism which picks at minor flaws or into equally ill- judged but critical commendation. This book preserves a fine balance between the two, possesses fine literary style, is beautifully printed and will be welcomed by all students of contemporary thought.
12 THE PERSONAL I ST
BODY AND SOUL. By Elizabeth H. Marsh. The Cornhill Company, Boston, Mass.
This a play in the manner of Everyman; carefully reproducing the manners and thoughts of mediaeval times, when the living were so much concerned in the welfare of the departed souls of their friends, and the church promised a safe journey to Paradise — for a consideration. The time is announced as "The beginning of mod- ern incredulitv;" the first scene is placed in an abbey chapel, where acolytes, bearing the body of Lord Barcardon, lay it on the bier prepared for it. He had not been a good churchman:
". . . Living, he believed no more in God Than you believe in Baal . . or Mahomet."
And vet he had been a kindly man, good to his tenants, working for the benefit of the community, and beloved by his wife. There is no animus or preaching in the whole study, which is intensely realistic. The star of Hope shines at the close. The cry to God of the baron's Soul was finally answered; as it declares before the bier, "He answered me, when I did crv."
James Main Dixon
)■
A CRITIC IN PALL MALL. Reviews and Miscellanies by Oscar Wilde. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. Pp. 290.
It is well that the various reviews by Oscar Wilde have now been collected and put in more accessible form. Whether Wilde dis- cusses Aristotle at Afternoon Tea, the Russian novelists, or Irish Fairy Tales, he is ever the minutely observing, the justly fair, the frank but sympathetic critic, though at times superficial and trivial. These informal reviews, appearing chiefly in the Pall Mall Gazette, irivc intimate glimpses of Wilde's views and opinions on various literary and current topics of the day. Thus in an indirect way is given some direct insight into a most interesting personality. After reading Wilde the critic, one can reali/.e that back of W7ilde the brilliant conversationalist was a man of much more breadth than would at times seem. The reviews are beautifully written and con- tain much of interest.
Nellie E. Vawter
Contents
Articles Page
I. The Superstitions of the Incredulous 77
The Editor
II. Let Us Talk of Flecker 85
Virginia Taylor McCormick
III. On Logic 95
Ernest Carroll Moore
IV. Is Spirit a Chemical Reaction? 106
Frederick Marsh Bennett
The Philosopher: Verse 112
Charles Coke Woods
V. John Burroughs: a Reversion to the Greek
Spirit 113
George Law
Birch Trees: Verse. John R. Moreland 120
Current Thought 126
The Essential Sin Against Art.
Confusing the Quick and the Dead.
"Jesus' Teachings on the Last Things."
Can Neo-realism Perceive Without a Norm of Reference?
What Do We Mean by Faith ?
The Journal of Applied Sociology.
Notes and Discussions 121
Mr. Bibliophile's Defense.
The Southwestern Philosophical Association.
Waters of Forgetfulness.
Along the Bookshelf 131
Mind and Work: Myers.
Psychology : fVoodworth.
The Acquisitive Society: Tawney.
Social Psychology: Bogardus.
Our Social Heritage: W alias.
L'Etat de Guerre and Projet de Paix Perpetuelle: Rousseau.
The Rhythm of Life: Lao-Tse.
The Anglo-American Future: Gardiner.
A National System of Education: Athearn.
The Gloss of Youth: Furness.
Books Received.
To the Gentle Personalist 76
Contributor's Page 74
Reality: A world of persons in a personal world.
To the Gentle Personalist
To President John A. W. Haas of Muhlenberg Col- lege, Pennsylvania, is awarded the prize subscription in the Personalistic Creed Contest.
It seems worth reprinting from a former number.
=>miiuiiiiiHiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiuilllliliuiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii minim iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiininiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiK
A PERSONAHSTIC CREED
/ believe that the energy of the universe de- | mands will as its solution.
I believe that the order of the universe calls for intellect and purpose.
/ believe that the beauty of the universe im- plies supreme feeling.
/ believe that the moral implications of life indicate ultimate goodness. -
I believe that the progress of history points to final righteousness.
I believe that a sound theory of education must posit universal human freedom.
I believe that the best philosophy of religion ends in the axiom of God as Spirit and Love.
I believe that all these claims are best united
in a doctrine of personality, divine and
human, individual and social. 1 |
=•11111 mi iiiHiiiiimiiimiiiiumimiimiiimimimiitimiii lUIUIIIIIimuillinmilUliniM luiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittiiilllHJiiir
The Personalist
Volume III Number 2
APRIL, 1922
THE SUPERSTITIONS OFTHE INCREDULOUS
THE EDITOR
Is IT too much to say that superstition gets its initial impulse from the absence of a sense of humor? Humor enables a man to criticize the pretensions and claims of himself and his fellow-men and out of this criticism spring normal action and normal knowledge. When any man, party, or institution takes itself too seriously to be amenable to criticism it immediately bolsters its unjusti- fied claims by the appeal to standing, authority, ipsi dixit- ism, and intolerance of various kinds. It appeals from the facts to superstition, which is defined as belief not supported by the facts. We have seen within the past four centuries the proud and contemptuous ipsi dixit religious man brought low. During the past fifty years our work upon him has been cumulative and intensive. He has been living in a world thoroughly determined to leave him no superstition to which he may cling. Science has been the principal agent in this good work and it is assumed by our most "progressive" thinkers that super- stition has been all but banished from culture. It is just this assurance that gives life, fate, or whatever you may call it another laugh. For some scientists have come to take themselves with the same ipsi dixit certainty and self-assurance that once characterized the theologian. Of course, some one will at this point arise to remark that this is the proper attitude for science. Such a remark proves our point that some scientists take themselves too
78 THE PERSONALIST
seriously. In their chosen field they see no place for humor and hence have lost the gentle art of self-criticism. This assurance which has grown out of the great prac- tical triumphs of science has created a mood which domi- nates present-day life. The result is that with a great multitude any theory, however illogical, is accepted in full of its own claims if it be set forth as scientific. But it is not our aim in this essay to deal with the grosser and more popular superstitions which provide the ground for nostrums of various kinds, for quack medicine, quack psychology, quack social theory or quack "scientific" re- ligion. We wish to discuss the superstitions of the even more incredulous who are staking their whole world of knowledge upon the factuality of scientific hypotheses of which the best that may be said is that they do not dis- agree with facts so far as we at present know them, and of which the worst that may be said is that they are not scientifically proved. For long years superstition has been presumed solely the possession of religion. It was supposed to have been completely eradicated from pro- gressive and up-to-date thinking by the cold, calm, im- partial criticism of science and modernity. A strange paradox works, however, in the midst of life and fre- quently the most incredulous are the ones most likely to be caught and thrown off their guard by the skill of the magician. Incredulity scarcely ever extends to a com- plete skepticism. Frequently its denials of one class of belief are in exact intensity with its affirmation of another class. Its lack of gullibility in one line often favors a more gullible attitude in another. It is only human that while this process goes on the individual prides himself that he accepts nothing but facts. The growth of mod- ern naturalism has led to a profound feeling of sophisti- cation with the world of nature and of life. We look on men of other minds and beliefs with a sophomoric con- tempt for the period when we too labored in the freshman state of unenlightenment. Sophomoric contempt, how- ever, springs from slight and partial acquaintance with reality. We seem at present, as always, in danger from the sophomores. In our modern life and thought their
THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE INCREDULOUS 7f
smiling incredulity shames our belief until with deeper acquaintance we discover the hollowness of their claims to enlightenment.
The practical effect of this mood has been the thinning of culture, the rise of a scientific dogmatism often intoler- ant toward the higher values of life and a narrowing of interests to the exclusion of all historical perspective.
That New Knowledge Abrogates the Old
The first of these present-day superstitions might well be taken as the superstition that all discovery in the realm of knowledge contradicts and denies all previous belief or understanding. It is only fair to say that theologians of the dogmatic sort by their indifference to the honest work of science and their hostility to its innovations helped to create this mood. Herein science only accepted what was given it in the beginning. What was reluc- tantly accepted has now grown to be traditional. The superstition finds practical result in the assumption that whatever is old is ignorant and inferior. The typical text-book drills the rising generation in contempt for the past. The Greeks produced the highest type of art and philosophy. The Egyptians possessed a mechanical skill which would be the despair of the modern artisan if he were not ignorant of it; for instance, the masonry of the pyramids. The Arabic culture preserved earlier ideas and made modern science possible. The Middle Ages originated the Gothic, and yet all these attainments which out-top in single aspects those of our own age are treated with contempt as uout-of-date," "behind the times," and to be lightly dismissed. Thus it is that the age runs to light-headedness and we become impatient with all which does not immediately lend itself to our vanity and our love for self-indulgence. What we need to understand is how that which is enduring in our culture roots into the past. Any truth, however old, has its right to hear- ing. Whatever truths were known or discovered in the past have their fulfilment and find their completion in the truths of today. They are not abrogated but ful-
80 THE PERSONALIST
filled. It would be obviously ridiculous to abrogate the Venus de Milo as out of date. The truth of line and conception, the real inspiration of the artist, stand be- cause they are true. Centuries of cubism could never make the Venus de Milo fantastic. Even a certain pinch- toed Bacchante, whose foot has known the modern pointed shoe, seems deformed beside her. When that which is sometimes called art in the present day recovers itself to truth and spirituality it will be seen in its proper rela- tions to all true art.
Much the same is true even of scientific discovery. The ancients did not know nature as we do, but there is no doubt that they knew many things truly. Copernicus did not undo the truth of celestial and terrestrial relations known to the Ptolemaic astronomy. What he offered was a new and truer point of view, which threw new light on long known facts. His discovery was not an abroga- tion in the sense of making of no moment the real truths involved in Ptolemaism.
We shall never recover a culture which will have power to enhance civilization until we remove from before our eyes the cheap and narrowing superstition that new knowl- edge abrogates the old.
That Laws Are Self-Executing
This is a very popular modern superstition. We have a law mania. If some great social need arises, our reaction is to enact a law and to depend upon the law to execute itself. Our care seems to be over when the law is on the statute books. How much this popular political super- stition may be due to other causes we shall not inquire. It is at least the evidence of a very common misconcep- tion. An analogous superstition holds in the realm of scientific thinking. It is commonly supposed that to refer phenomena to a law is to complete all explanation. We do not know what gravity is except that it is gravity, but the average mind rests in disgraceful contentment when told it is a law. We have no idea of what electricity is, though we know many things about the uniformity of
THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE INCREDULOUS 81
its action, and this uniformity is what we name the law of electricity. Why it acts as it does no one can say. The neighbor who looks from his window each morning at fifteen minutes of eight may be so sure of the uniformity of my habits that he sets his clock by my appearance. The fact that I do pass at a certain hour each working day, establishing the law of my activity, does not explain why I pass at a given time each day. So the uniformity of nature may proceed from some central will but it is the will and not the uniformity which is the ground of their explanation. The great task of science is to learn the uniformities and how to apply them to practical prob- lems, without erecting the fact into the explanation of the fact. If the true import of this superstition were more widely recognized it would be less often assumed that cosmic accident could provide the ground of cosmic order and uniformity. This superstition might be named the pet fallacy, if not the idol, of the materialist.
That Scientific Hypothesis Is Identical With Fact
The peculiar function of human minds is their demand for causal explanation. We desire always to know that which lies behind the phenomena we observe. Our earli- est mental effort is probably in the direction of grasping the relation of our own wills to some causal series. We might almost affirm that the second effort, or the con- clusion from this experience is to assign phenomena not within our own causal series to some cause not ourselves. In this act we can reason only by analogy, putting up a reasonable hypothesis by which we go, until it is untenable in the light of other facts. Thus there is a constant tendency to confuse actual knowledge of phenomena with our hypothesis regarding their causal connection.
It is a weakness of the common mind to generalize, which is easy, and to oppose critical analysis, which is difficult. The profounder scientist has no illusions. He holds his hypotheses tentatively and upon the condition of their reasonableness in the light of ascertained fact. He
82 THE PERSONALIST
believes that to have this attitude is to maintain the scien- tific mind. He realizes that open-mindedness is the magna charta of scientific discovery. But it is not so with the magazine scientist, nor with the general public. With such, scientific hypothesis is mingled with fact and taken with an equal credence. Men who reject all claims of religious faith make haste to accept the newest scientific hypothesis, never dreaming that it is a guess, tenable only as it agrees with facts so far as known, but which may at any moment be exploded by the discovery of further facts. For instance, skepticism regarding the origin of the earth in cosmic flame would have been greeted twenty- five years ago as a display of ignorance. Now the astrono- mers themselves show less assurance. Yet when men now of middle life were in college it was never dreamed that we could safely doubt the cooling of the earth from a molten state, to an external crust and all the other "fixin's," including the mountain chains as wrinkles. We were pointed to volcanoes and earth heat as the final "proofs" that the inside of the earth is not yet cooled but is still a molten mass. Our sensibilities were still further drawn upon by other scientists who portrayed the horrible results still to follow from further cooling. All this aircastledom was seriously set forth and we were bidden to believe under pain of intellectual atrophy and death.
In a similar way the hypothesis of evolution has been made to serve in lieu of any discoverable facts. Evolution as a description of the order of appearance of life upon the earth is the most reasonable theory that we possess at present. Evolution as causation has never been proved. And yet this latter hypothesis is commonly so taken. No real scientist would consider this "proof" in any realm outside his own predilection. Yet we find the evolution- ary hypothesis assumed as proved and much of our histo- ries of culture, civilization, religion, and philosophy, are imaginings based upon this unproved assumption. When- ever we lack a fact either in human history or geology we fill in with evolutionary imagination what "must have taken place," though we know nothing of the actual con-
THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE INCREDULOUS 83
ditions. As illustration take the common view of ''primi- tive" religion. We look about for the crudest and lowest form of religion we can find. We note the myth and magic of African or Patagonian tribes. Then we slap on our evolutionary theory and say, "there you are," "that is primitive religion," "your Christianity evolved from that," "it was that originally." The oversight is double First, religion springs fundamentally, not from previous religion but from the moral and religious nature of man. Second, savage religions now existing can in no true sense be called primitive because they are, so far as we know as old as any other.
The same false assumption runs through much of our psychology, sociology, and economics; it fills our litera- ture so that we may very likely be the laughing-stock of future generations through our blind devotion to this superstition, that reasonable hypothesis is as entitled to acceptance as known fact.
That All Problems Can Be Solved by Resort to the Fallacy of the Abstract
We speak of this superstition largely because it is the final resort of common scientific, social, or religious super- stitions. It is the handy intellectual closet into which all inconvenient questions are hurled against some future mental wash-day. Of course, we are told we cannot wit- ness any such drastic changes as the law of evolution demands, but then we could "if there were time enough." Given millions of years and it could be done. An initial movement in cosmic dust if given time enough would accidentally produce orderly, intelligible nature, with intelligent man to understand its marvellous coordina- tions. We are told all this in cold blood and then scien- tifically ordered not to believe in miracles. Of course, in time, all possible permutations and combinations would appear and life is one of them and, voila, "there you are," explained. It would be interesting to know just how many years a tub of printer's pi would have to revolve to hit upon the exact combination that constitutes the Los
84 THE PERSONALIST
Angeles Times of February fourth, Nineteen Hundred Twenty-two. Does anyone believe that particular combi- nation would have to be produced some time? Let not such a one use his new-found wisdom in a game of chance. Figuring from the law of permutations and combinations many a gambler has cast all upon that last and necessary combination which did not appear. When will a certain type of scientist see the fallacy of the attempt to explain order by accident and the unreasonableness of declaring a presumption against intelligence in the world ground!
But ever there is that convenient closet, the appeal to the fallacy of the abstract, under the terminology of force, energy, persistence, or what not. There is little hope for clear thinking or rapid scientific progress until this super- stition has taken its way.
It may seem to the reader, assuming the precarious hypothesis that he has stayed with us to this point, that this discussion of superstition has been vain because in any case "nobody's mind has been changed." That is the nature of superstitions. One's own superstitions are to one's self the most reasonable of sciences whether we feel they must be believed in the interests of science or of religion. One cannot state a real reason for spitting on the bait in fishing. But all the fish that one ever caught were caught under those conditions and "there must be something in it." Our superstitions cannot be proved by the facts. We are therefore all the more bitter in their defense. We raise our voices to cover our feeling of insecurity. Where fact is wanting there must be more vociferation and more bitterness. Strange and inhuman will it be, if to the art of vociferation we add not the further art of calumny. To proclaim our opponent ignorant or bigoted, behind the times, unscientific, prejudiced or even "superstitious," is easier far than to educe facts for which we whistle in vain on the becalmed seas of our intellectual limitations. It may be that a harmless superstition like that of the fisher- man just mentioned has its uses, but alas for him who attempts to erect it into the dignity of knowledge. If he depends upon this alone his basket shall be empty.
LET US TALK OF FLECKER
VIRGINIA TAYLOR McCORMICK
"Let us talk of Flecker!" That was the opening wedge of many friendly arguments, much intimate exchange of opinion in those years from 1914 to the signing of the armistice, when two poets, or lovers of poetry, worn and jaded with the ceaseless whirring of bullets, met in that oasis known as rest billets, where a comparative quiet enabled the mind to resume its normal functioning in at least a degree and to shut out by sheer force and persever- ance the vision of a world gone mad and sacrificing to an unappeasable Moloch the youth and beauty of the human race! They were homesick, even as Flecker had been on Lebanon and echoed his cry:
Oh, shall I never be home again?
Meadows of England shining in the rain,
Spread wide your daisied lawns: your ramparts green
With brier fortify, with blossom screen
Till my far morning. . . .
More than any other of his day is Flecker the poets' poet, even as we say of Merrick that he is the authors1 author! In that singularly self-revealing letter which Ledwidge wrote Dr. Chase a short time before his own particular bullet found its mark, he says, "But the best of all con- temporary poems is Flecker's Gates of Damascus. Had he read The Dying Patriot? I wonder, for I am still curious as to the place it held with those darlings of the gods while they were yet waiting on the edge of the world to be at any moment flung beyond life. It is so essen- tially the spirit rather than the embodiment of patriotism that they would seem to have been especially attuned to its understanding. The Gates of Damascus will always have a high place in poetic literature where people love beauty of thought and design, for its garb is as rich as its spirit, but The Dying Patriot has a fine frenzy of
86 THE PERSONALIST
poetic passion, wanting in any other poem that is the product of a complete modernity. . . It is, if you will, a little Keatsian. . . No one more clearly than Flecker realized that poetry is an essence passed from one genera- tion of poets to another. . .
"I ponder how from Attic seed There grew an English tree, How Swinburne took from Shelley's lips The kiss of Poetry."
It is the right of divine succession, is it not? Again [ am brought to wonder! Did Mr. Kipling have some- hing more than a fancy born of many years residence imongan Eastern people when he suggested the possibility )f the tubercular germ producing similar thought curves n people of utterly different cosmos? Flecker had all he educational environs and advantages that Keats acked. He was the child of Rugby and Oxford, the inished product of Cambridge's great school of languages, vhich in itself set him apart, for through his constant eading of the Greek and Latin he acquired not only that excellent rhythmic style which is peculiarly his own today, n a world gone mad over pursuit of heavy and rhymeless orms, but he gathered into his treasure house a wealth )f lore and legend, together with quaint truths of the East, hat shed a redolent flavor upon his pages and give often a )iquant sauce to the simplest poems. I did not come to ;now Flecker by the slow gradations usual in our study >f a poet. One day I opened suddenly upon The Dying ^atriot, and it was rarely out of my hand until its text /as safe-stored in my memory. A little drunk with the eauty of it, a little dazed by the magnitude of the star hat had arisen without my knowledge, I shared it every
ttle while with a congenial spirit; but there is danger in uch sharing. Either we resent a lack of appreciation or
e are jealous of a too quickly professed sympatica!
There is more than beauty in this poem: it is a quite awless example of the "poetic pattern" which has come ) mean so much more than merely "form;" that is to say,
LET US TALK OF FLECKER 87
its conformation to a group-style, sonnet, rondeau, what you will.
In the past few years I have several times heard lectur- ers upon that absorbing subject, Contemporary Verse, read Miss Lowell's poem, Patterns, pointing out its intricate perfection of design, its independence of prescribed rhyme, the very title adding to its efficiency as a poetic pattern. I have watched the faces of the audience . . . dull, uninterested ... a little more actively bored as the verses lengthened out. . . Impelled by the cock- sureness of egotism, I have tried it out myself, carefully accenting the necessary rises and falls, putting into it all the expression possible . . . my audience trimmed hats or coupons according to the sex . . . they were far from me! A far more perfect pattern for a poem is The Dying Patriot: the rhythm is there, an exquisitely musical rhym- ing, strong yet flexible; the sequence is unbroken, the timing perfect —
"Day breaks on England down the Kentish hills, Singing in the silence of the meadow-footing rills, Day of my dreams, O day!"
And the poet, having got our attention by sheer beauty of line, brings us to the subject by a careful reference to the Crusaders, and almost before we realize what has hap- pened we see Oxford at noon, "Noon of my dreams, O noon!" and the men walking among "towers and tombs and statues all arow" bring to us a swift vision of Eng- land's intellectual life, the esprit de la patriel Then fol- lows quite naturally the
"Evening on the olden, golden sea of Wales When the first star shivers and the last wave pales."
and perhaps nowhere is the image more pregnant with meaning than in that subtle recalling of the inroads each year of the sea upon the coast: this suggestion of Nature as an enemy, to bring into more poignant relief the human enemies lying in wait . . .
86 THE PERSONALIST
poetic passion, wanting in any other poem that is the product of a complete modernity. . . It is, if you will, a little Keatsian. . . No one more clearly than Flecker realized that poetry is an essence passed from one genera- tion of poets to another. . .
"I ponder how from Attic seed There grew an English tree, How Swinburne took from Shelley's lips The kiss of Poetry."
It is the right of divine succession, is it not? Again [ am brought to wonder! Did Mr. Kipling have some- hing more than a fancy born of many years residence imongan Eastern people when he suggested the possibility )f the tubercular germ producing similar thought curves n people of utterly different cosmos? Flecker had all he educational environs and advantages that Keats acked. He was the child of Rugby and Oxford, the inished product of Cambridge's great school of languages, vhich in itself set him apart, for through his constant eading of the Greek and Latin he acquired not only that :xcellent rhythmic style which is peculiarly his own today, n a world gone mad over pursuit of heavy and rhymeless orms, but he gathered into his treasure house a wealth )f lore and legend, together with quaint truths of the East, hat shed a redolent flavor upon his pages and give often a )iquant sauce to the simplest poems. I did not come to :now Flecker by the slow gradations usual in our study if a poet. One day I opened suddenly upon The Dying ^atriot, and it was rarely out of my hand until its text /as safe-stored in my memory. A little drunk with the eauty of it, a little dazed by the magnitude of the star nat had arisen without my knowledge, I shared it every
ttle while with a congenial spirit; but there is danger in uch sharing. Either we resent a lack of appreciation or 'e are jealous of a too quickly professed sympatica!
There is more than beauty in this poem: it is a quite awless example of the "poetic pattern" which has come ) mean so much more than merely "form;" that is to say,
LET US TALK OF FLECKER 87
its conformation to a group-style, sonnet, rondeau, what you will.
In the past few years I have several times heard lectur- ers upon that absorbing subject, Contemporary Verse, read Miss Lowell's poem, Patterns, pointing out its intricate perfection of design, its independence of prescribed rhyme, the very title adding to its efficiency as a poetic pattern. I have watched the faces of the audience . . . dull, uninterested ... a little more actively bored as the verses lengthened out. . . Impelled by the cock- sureness of egotism, I have tried it out myself, carefully accenting the necessary rises and falls, putting into it all the expression possible . . . my audience trimmed hats or coupons according to the sex . . . they were far from me! A far more perfect pattern for a poem is The Dying Patriot: the rhythm is there, an exquisitely musical rhym- ing, strong yet flexible; the sequence is unbroken, the timing perfect —
"Day breaks on England down the Kentish hills, Singing in the silence of the meadow-footing rills, Day of my dreams, O day!"
And the poet, having got our attention by sheer beauty of line, brings us to the subject by a careful reference to the Crusaders, and almost before we realize what has hap- pened we see Oxford at noon, "Noon of my dreams, O noon!" and the men walking among "towers and tombs and statues all arow" bring to us a swift vision of Eng- land's intellectual life, the esprit de la patrie! Then fol- lows quite naturally the
"Evening on the olden, golden sea of Wales When the first star shivers and the last wave pales."
and perhaps nowhere is the image more pregnant with meaning than in that subtle recalling of the inroads each year of the sea upon the coast: this suggestion of Nature as an enemy, to bring into more poignant relief the human enemies lying in wait . . .
88 THE PERSONALIST
"There's a house that Britons walked in long ago, Where now the springs of ocean fall and flow, And the dead robed in red with sea-lilies overhead Sway when the long winds blow."
Morning, noon, evening, each with its own images, have passed before us and now comes night, heavily, with the promise of storm and the apostrophe, for it is more than a peroration . . .
"Sleep not my country: though night is here, afar Your children of the morning are clamorous for war: Fire in the night, O dreams!"
It is still a dream, but now the sudden awakening . . . the realization that it is himself, the dying patriot, set apart from those who fight and die for their country by a loath- some disease, denied the privilege of being shot for an ideal, or whatever name one calls that feeling which sends us forth to die with gladness for our country, he alone, on Darien, who must apostrophize that loved country, even with the understanding that England will send them as she sent them long ago "South to desert, East to ocean, West to snow," and now the supreme knowledge of his passing into the beyond . . . the passion of these last lines is almost past bearing, and their beauty no less sears our hearts . . . it is so personal, so human . . .
"West of these out to seas, colder than the Hebrides I must go Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young star-captains glow!" Surely he is one of these young Star-captains, even as the poets killed in battle! There is a peculiar art in the con- struction of this poem. Flecker, sensitive to all nuances, sees the danger of monotony and lengthens or shortens a line with consummate skill and daring, possible to only a past master of that art which always came before him- self, even in the early days of faulty flights of impassioned verse or the more finely wrought translations.
Not very long ago in a not far distant city, before an assembly of intellectuals all personally strangers to me, I substituted The Dying Patriot for Miss Lowell's Patterns in a lecture on Contemporary Verse, to illustrate the
LET US TALK OF FLECKER 89
requirements of a poetic pattern. My audience hung upon the words, throbbed to the rhythm and the image, and joyed in the beauty of the rhyme — that seems to tell its own story! Flecker was always daringly experimental in rhythm, venturing into new styles of intricate prosodic form, touching unused sound tones with lean and habile fingers, but his true British balance was never really dis- turbed by the wave of free verse jumping the Atlantic from France to America and there taking the bit between the teeth, a Pegasus run wild! Its fields did not call him; he was never ashamed of his tools, but used them with the acumen and craft of a jeweler polishing diamonds, and showing only the brilliant, sparkling stone, not the tools of his craft! One of his more glaring and to me disconcert- ing, weaknesses is the truly British custom of spilling capitals freely over his pages. It not infrequently destroys the beauty but more often gives an unintentional signifi- cance to concrete subjects. That veering to the concrete when the abstract would have strengthened his lines was an old failing, but had he been more perfect he had been perhaps less dear. Always from the earliest times of his Juvenilia he is reaching for and capturing the image. It is more surely the hall mark of his poetry than it is of the poetry of many of that inflated and self-conscious group known as the Imagist School (the capitals are not mine), and in the schoolboy effusions we find such phrases as "this pretty pamphlet polished new with pumice-stone"; one of his darling names is "little gem." The jewels rather glittered for him in those salad days! He was at all ages a bit intoxicated with the beauty of earth and a little apt to overstep the bounds of sanity when description lured him. Sometimes we are deceived by such terms as "metal grace" but for him it was entirely illuminating: the gold of life was one of his dear conceits. It is interesting to watch the keenness with which he seizes upon his own errors and wipes them out, if only time is there for all of it, alas! Tenebris Interlucen- tum was re-written entirely:
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"Once a poor song-bird that had lost her way Sang down in hell upon a blackened bough."
has no great power to charm ; there is a distinct deadening of the lyric quality, but read the last writing:
"A linnet who had lost her way Sang on a blackened bough in hell."
the very music of it is different and at the last when he describes the awakening of the ghosts . . .
"To draw a phantom brother to his side"
is heavy. The phantom gives it an air of unreality; we are not moved either by the beauty or the pathos, but —
"And some one there stole forth a hand To draw a brother to his side"
is especially characteristic of Flecker. He was by nature a sociable being, a delighter in comradeship, a seeker after good converse. . . . Even the shadows of hell lifted before a mental vision conjuring a friendliness among his own kind, the thin, pale wraiths . . . ghosts of a forgotten life! The vision is for us, too, and like Peter Pan we at once believe in ghosts, or is it fairies?
Careful craftsmanship is an unfailing attribute of Flecker's later verse; gone is the old impetuous way of dashing into a poem lured only by the image of a name. The Bridge of Fire was hung upon the resounding glory of its title — a title which would sound well for a book, its context of no importance. Even at this here is a remarkable poem for a boy, despite its hastily conceived idea, lack of polish and occasional roughness of line. He wrote and re-wrote The Burial in England many times and was at the end unsatisfied; he wanted to make it longer, more impressive, and discussed this intent with his wife and Mr. Savery shortly before his death. It seems to me better as it is — a lengthening would tend to make it didactic, perhaps heavy. There is a sonorous beauty
LET US TALK OF FLECKER 91
to it as he left it — blank verse with more than a memory of Shakespeare for those of us who love it, and poignant with the sadness of that "mattress grave" from which it was written, though the tone is triumphant throughout! The first question in a discussion of Flecker's work is always "What outside influence swayed him?" It is not always easy to see. There is perhaps no personal influence so strong as that of his wife, Greek, with all the inherit- ance of her race. In the later poems there is unquestion- ably a reflected radiance from an understood and ade- quately grasped idea of beauty that is Greek itself, not just the love of loveliness that had so intoxicated Flecker in the days of his youth when under the influence of Swin- burne's rhythmic swing or Wilde's passionate apostrophe to beauty, he produced much decadent verse, teeming with a passion totally inexperienced and rather remarkable for a looker-on in Vienna. Mr. Frank Savery was the one personal friend throughout his life whose influence was at first hand and whose devotion survived separation and other interruptions to the end. There are flashes in his writings of Sir Richard Burton, but very faint they seem to me. Less faint are illuminating gleams of Heredia, but perhaps I know Heredia better and recognize them more readily. In his decidedly luscious use of the words expressing fruition, the vine, wines, there comes to me a short and fleeting vision of de Regnier, but were not these two his companions upon Parnassus? For Flecker un- questionably attained the heights and there he found the goodly company of the French Parnassians, with whom he at once recognized kinship, camaraderie — never dis- cipleship, but we are apt to reflect the ideas of our friends, is it not true?
At times Flecker repeats an idea as if it had laid hold of him. The ugliness of physical death was one of these visions which held him in bonds, as it does all of us occa- sionally. For example, take the closing lines of The T onsen Without a Market, itself an admirable commentary upon the Spoon River Anthology, but with a beauty of line and thought not found in the American poetic symposium :
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Then said my heart, Death takes and cannot give. Dark with no dream is hateful: let me live!!
and compare
I'd rather be A living mouse than dead as a man dies.
Again The True Paradise — every line would bear quoting — no fault remained after his last pruning. Each word was weighed down to a perfect balance, and in this poem is especially evidenced the Greek influence; a worship of beauty, an overmastering desire to take into the beyond those images that had lured in life:
We poets crave no heaven but what is ours — These trees beside these rivers; these same flowers Shaped and enfragranced to the English field Where Thy best florist-craft is full revealed.
Trees by the river, birds upon the bough.
*******
Nor listen to that island-bound St. John, Who'd have no sea in Heaven to sail upon!
Is this the man who said
Do I remember tales of Galilee,
I who have slain my faith and freed my will ?
and yet there is the well-defined individualism, the same freedom of thought —
But if prepared for me new Mansions are Chill and unknown in some bright, windy Star, Mid strange-shaped souls from all the planets sevfcn, Lord, I fear deep and would not go to Heaven. Rather in feather-mist I'd fade away Like the Dawn-Writing of an April day!
It is the man I think who after many years among the Mohammedans said he found more good in Christianity than he had hitherto suspected!
This "lean and swarthy poet of despair" was less
LET US TALK OF FLECKER 93
despairing, more courageous than he would put into his lines for us to read. We must find the real crux of his thrilling battle with death between those lines, for Flecker is not of that class of poets who, like the birds, build their nests from bits of string and grass collected here and there, but rather is he like the spider who weaves her web out of her innermost self. It is through the warp and woof of his poetry that we come to a knowledge of man! His early poems are of the bird class. No philosophy, no experience is there, but the last songs, the ones which came from the soul of experience, of a life lived, are the spider's web ; we may unravel it if we will. His Juvenilia should never have been included in the collected poems; it was his right to let his youthful inexperience play its part in his development and be forgotten!
Perhaps nothing is so personal, so reminiscent, as Still- ness, next only, in my opinion, to The Dying Patriot in beauty of form and that fine distillation of mental experi- ence which sets a poem apart, and brings to us a feeling almost that we have ourselves lived through it. . . It is of profoundly experimental rhythm, expressing the poet's complex cosmos in its form as well as its context; we see him drifting out into the unknown, far beyond his hold on things corporeal, and then returning abruptly to the realities with a confidence that is as moving as it is child- like. There is a freshness of image, old words in new relations. The idea of words rustling is subtly suggestive. The symbol of his own trade applied to space and time has a quality which is original, startling in its aptness. The "drum of silence" is an image unexcelled in the literature of any day, and at the last the return from those bankless streams of ether to the one on whom he rested for the life force has a ringing sound of realism, coupled with a pathetic yearning that brings to us the memory of a small boy, afraid in the dark, reaching for the maternal hand . . .
When the words rustle no more
And the last work's done,
When the bolt lies deep in the door,
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And Fire, or Sun,
Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor;
When from the clock's last chime to the next chime
Silence beats his drum,
And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother, Time,
Wheeling and whispering come,
She with the mould of form and he with the loom of rhyme:
Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,
I am emptied of all my dreams:
I only hear Earth turning, only see
Ether's long bankless streams,
And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand on me.
Food for eternal argument is in the words of him who loved conversational combat. Jt is an un-Anglo-Saxon touch, this combativeness, for does not the true Britisher stand upon his statement, unwilling to be moved by your argument and un-anxious to waste time combating it? There is about Flecker a subtle wit, a wit that his slightly sardonic smile might tempt you to believe is humor, but it is wit that produces argument and so let us talk, of Flecker!
ON LOGIC AS SCIENCE AND ART
ERNEST CARROLL MOORE University of California, Southern Branch
When the will of the late Dr. Charles Arthur Mercier came before the Probate Division of the London courts it was found that he had provided for the setting up of a professional chair of logic and scientific method.
"The purpose of this foundation is that students may be taught not what Aristotle or some one else thought about reasoning, but how to think clearly and reason correctly, and to form opinions on rational grounds.
"The better to provide that the teaching shall be of this character, and shall not degenerate into the teaching of rigid formulae and worn-out superstitions, I make the following conditions :
"The professor is to be chosen for his ability to think and reason and to teach, and not for his acquaintance with books on logic, or with the opinions of logicians or philosophers.
"Acquaintance with the Greek and German tongues is not to be an actual disqualification for the professorship, but, in case the merits of the candidates appear in other respects approxi- mately equal, preference is to be given first:
"To him who knows neither Greek nor German.
"Next, to him who knows Greek, but not German.
"Next, to him who knows German, but not Greek.
"Last of all, to a candidate who knows both Greek and German.
"The professor is not to devote more than one-twelfth of his course of instruction to the logic of Aristotle and the schools, nor more than one-twenty-fourth to the logic of Hegel and other Germans.
"He is to proceed upon the principle that the only way to acquire an art is by practicing it under a competent instructor. Didactic inculcation is useless by itself. He is, therefore, to exercise his pupils in thinking, reasoning and scientific method as applied to other studies that the students are pursuing con- currently, and to other topics of living interest.
"Epistemology and the rational ground of opinion are to be taught. The students are to be practiced in the art of defining, classifying, and the detection of fallacies and inconsistencies."
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Logic is an old study. It was begun by Socrates, developed by Plato and formulated by Aristotle. Before their time men had thought; in Babylonia and Egypt there had been a good deal of thinking about those race- old fundamentals — food, clothing, and shelter — and about such secondary things as gods, priests, kings, soldiers, tax- gatherers, etc ; but the Greeks were the first to think about thoughts, to ask what they meant, how men came to have them, what reliance they could place upon them, and how they could perfect them. At that point began a struggle to understand what knowledge is and how men get it, which goes on to this day and which will most likely go on as long as folks endure. Knowledge — the knowledge of the farmer, the carpenter, the shoemaker, the pilot, the general — seems to be a simple thing. But knowledge is not a simple thing, but almost ineradicable confusion.
There are three great names in the history of logic and two lesser names, and all of them are the names of men who failed in their undertaking. Socrates is the first. Socrates spent his life in urging men to develop the same sort of knowledge of thinking, of goodness, of ruling that their fellowmen already had of carpentry, weaving, temple building, pottery and shoemaking. If we want to know anything, he said, we must find out what it is for. We must work out a notion of what it means and, having that notion, we can then use it. What does it mean to be just or to govern? What is justice? What is statesmanship? What is truth? What is beauty? These questions he thought could be answered in just the same way as the question: What does it mean to make a pair of shoes, to build a house, to carve a statue, to pilot a ship? If one is trying to cure a disease, he must have a notion of what health is and a notion of what this disease is, and he must so work upon the disease that it will be transformed to health. Knowledge for Socrates is practical. One gets it by means of getting notions of what he wants to produce and of what he has and of how to produce what he wants from what he has. He works on things by means of notions. These notions are not things but thoughts; and
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these thoughts are very mysterious. Where do they come from? One never sees equality or justice or health or a point or a straight line or a circle. He only thinks them. The things which we see are more or less like them, but there is no circle in nature, no exact justice, no perfect truth or beauty in things. Are they then imitations of our pre- vious beatific existence, recollections of experiences in the Elysian fields, memories of what we knew in heaven before our birth? The things of this world are many and not one of them is perfect. They are born and pass away, but that which is perfect cannot pass away. Equality, justice, truth, wisdom must endure.
All knowledge was practical at first — for Socrates it was just finding out what we must do and know and how to do it. I think it was the same for Plato, too; but Plato was a poet as well as a Socratic and hypostatized justice and beauty and truth and wisdom and talked of them sometimes as though they were not thoughts which we make and use but heavenly existences, more real and more worthy than the things of this world. You have all seen the figure of Justice on the courthouse. Plato sometimes talks as though that figure were not there to remind men of the justice which should be in their hearts and in their deeds, but to remind them of that awful Justice which stands as an archangel before the throne of God. Our thoughts, you see, can be instruments if we take them as Socrates took them; they can be images of existences if we take them as Plato is said to have taken them.
Right here the woes of logic begin. Is it a human in- strument helping us in human ways to a larger knowledge of human things or is it an oracular science giving abso- lute truth?
Aristotle's logic is for certainty. Science is demonstra- tion. Mathematics is its type, and whatever truths are scientifically arrived at must come in the same manner. If we measure the angles of a triangle and find that they equal two right angles, we cannot be said to have scienti- fic knowledge that their sum is two right angles. We must prove that by considerations which follow the defini- tion of a triangle and the axioms of geometry. Reasoned
OS THF PFP "'N\ \f 1ST
truth — nothing merely empirical — but conclusions flow- ing inexorably from their premises, truth founded, but- tressed, impregnable, absolute, is what logic must provide.
Did you ever stop to think of the falsehoods which mathematics is responsible for? It was the pattern science for Plato and Aristotle. The objects with which it deals are not points or lines or circles from the sense world; the rain does not wash them out or the grass efface them. They are eternal and unchanging and the truths which thinking can demonstrate concerning them are eternal and unchanging. Logic must follow its model. It must give us eternal and unchanging truths, too.
You have heard of the pride of the Pope due to his pos- sessing the power to bind and to loose here and hereafter. Just so the Aristotelian had an imperious nature. He pos- sessed the certainty of absolute knowledge. He reasoned by syllogisms. "Syllogism is a discourse," said Aristotle, "wherein certain things [premises] being admitted, some- thing else different from what has been admitted, follows of necessity because the admissions are what they are." Its typical form is:
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. .'. Socrates is mortal.
Now let us ask Aristotle what degree of certainty we have here and just how much more the conclusion tells us than we knew in the major premise.
How can we ever know that all men are mortal? Some may have gone to heaven in a chariot of fire. "All" ap- plies to all who are to come through all the ages. It may be that death is a penalty of our ignorance. In days to come it may be conquered. At any rate, how do we know of a certainty that all men must die or that any assertion which we can make will include all the subjects of which the assertion is made? Aristotle says no science proves its beginning axioms. Its first principles cannot be demon- strated. They are indemonstrable. Experience calls at- tention to them. They are apprehended as self-evident
ON LOGIC 99
intuitions of mind. If your reasoning from your premises is faultless you can arrive at conclusions which are just as certain as your premises. But now you are a long way from absolute certainty, for something has happened to mathematics in recent days which shows that its axioms are by no means so reliable as they were once thought to be. They have been found to be postulates, merely po- sitions taken, so that all mathematical reasoning now takes the hypothetical form if space is three dimensional, parallel lines will not meet; and in the new logic all ab- stract universals are hypothetical, "All men are mortal" being no more universal than: If I had a toothache, I should be wretched; or, If this man has taken that drug, he will be dead before tomorrow. Certainty disappears, postulation or supposing takes its place. But, is it true that the conclusion of the syllogism gives a new truth? Does it lead to something different from what is admitted when the premises are taken? The truth is that there must be no more in the conclusion than in the premises. The conclusion is not discovered by means of the premises but only uncovered in them.
Another doctrine for which Aristotle is responsible is the doctrine of natural kinds or fixed species or real defi- nitions. To define anything, we must say what its kind is and then specify its difference from other varieties. To define Socrates, we must say he is a man. We cannot say he is a philosopher, a patriot, the inventor of knowledge, the wisest of the Greeks; but only that he is a man. I had an experience some years ago which brought out the futility of that view of definition. There is a series of classics published in what is called "Everyman's Library." They are printed in England and imported by Dutton and Company, who pay an import duty upon them. Now it happens that many of these volumes are used as textbooks and that textbooks come in free of duty while other Eng- lish books must pay duty. The firm of Dutton and Co., brought a suit in the Appraiser's Court in Boston to es- tablish the fact that certain of these volumes should come in duty free, and called several Harvard professors who were using them in their classes to establish that fact. I
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was asked by the U. S. Attorney, "What is a textbook?" I replied, "It is a book used as a text for classroom dis- cussion.'' "But must it not have an introduction, notes, explanations, a glossary?" he asked; and for a half-hour we battled over the question of whether a textbook is a textbook in its nature or in its use. Aristotle taught that there are natural kinds, that they are fixed and definite.
Darwin found out that kinds are not the fixed furniture of the world but that kinds flow into each other. Our classifications now-a-days are recognized as being group- ings which we ourselves make on whatever principles may be pertinent to our inquiry. As a consequence we make as many definitions of a class as there are principles or ways of grouping or regarding its members. We are no longer limited to the definition according to nature of Aristotle. '
It is, I take it, quite impossible for any one who is now alive to imagine the intellectual despotism by which through the ages Aristotle earned the designation of "the master of them that know."
About 1527, a young lad, the son of a charcoal burner, his name Peter Ramus, came to Paris and hired himself to a rich student as his servant. He studied at night and made himself the foremost teacher of his time. He tried to reform the study of logic. "When I came to Paris," he says, "I fell into the subtleties of the sophists and they taught me the liberal arts through questions and disputes without ever showing me a single thing of profit or ser- vice. Never amidst the clamor of the college where I passed so many days, months, years, did I ever hear a single word about the application of logic. I had faith then [the scholar ought to have faith, according to Aris- totle] that it was not necessary to trouble myself about what logic is and what its purpose is, but that it concerned itself solely with creating a motive for our clamors and our disputes. I therefore disputed and clamored with all my might. If I were defending in class a thesis accord- ing to the categories I believed it my duty never to yield to my opponent, were he one hundred times right, but to seek some subtle distinction in order to obscure the whole issue.
ON LOGIC 101
On the other hand, were I disputant, all my care and efforts tended not to enlighten my opponent but to beat him by some argument good or bad even so had I been taught or directed. The categories of Aristotle were like a ball that we give children to play with and that it was necessary to get back by our clamors when we had lost it"1 He took his master's degree with the thesis that all that Aristotle said is false. But Peter Ramus did little to create a new logic.
Then came a new time, a veritable age of discoveries, when a few men quit threshing the straw which Aristotle had left and began by independent study to make discov- eries, huge discoveries. Such men were Columbus, Ma- gellan, da Vinci, Kepler and Galileo. With them modern science was born. Francis Bacon (1561) is sometimes named as its founder. He was rather its literary pro- moter. In 1620 he published a new logic built upon the thesis that knowledge is power. He did not approve of what had been accomplished thus far. "Men have entered into the desire of learning and knowledge, seldom sin- cerely, to give a true account of their gift of reason to the benefit and use of men, but as if they sought in knowledge a couch whereon to rest a searching and wandering spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or a commanding ground for a strife and contention ; or a shop for profit and sale; and not a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." Knowledge, the new knowledge, is not to be for consolation or delight, or vaunt- ing or strife or money, but for use. Men must lay aside all prejudices. They must employ a new method — that of observation and induction. But when he comes to the details of the method of discovery to be followed he de- scribes the process as the accumulation of facts and sub- sequently abstracting their identities and differences and so deriving laws or principles from them. "The value of this method," says Professor Jevons, "might be esti- mated historically by the fact that it has not been followed
1 Studies in Dialectics, Book IV, p. 151. Quoted in Graves' Ramus.
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by any of the great masters of science." So Bacon, great as was his guiding of those who came after him, failed in his undertaking.
We come next to that mighty tour de force of philoso- phy, the logic of Hegel, the natural history of the eternally self-thinking truth. Hegel's logic is a dialectical deduc- tion from consciousness of the nature of ultimate reality, a huge and glorious anthropomorphism making God and all things in the image of mind. To its author it was a demonstration of what mind must think, and what mind must think is. Subject and object are one. The mind of the thinker and the mind of the universe are identical. When we think existence, existence thinks in us. Hegel's system claims to be the philosophy itself, final and con- clusive. Is it a mystic dance uf bloodless categories or a true calculus of being? Is it the highest and most dazz- ling expression of Germany's empire of the air or is it the very texture and body of truth? Only the ages can tell. At any rate it has German lineaments. It is the most supremely confident and daring announcement of the human spirit in all history, and Dr. Mercier does well to insist that his professor of logic shall give himself to more commonplace and assured matters.
Last of all comes the so-called empirical logic of John Stuart Mill. He abjures metaphysical speculation. He will plant his feet on the firm ground of experience alone.
Just as Hegel tried to invent a logic which was wholly deductive and failed, so Mill tried to formulate a logic which was wholly inductive, and failed. Mill, says Hoff- ding, "tried to spin the forms of thought from their con- tent, Hegel the content of thought from its forms." How do we know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning? Because it has always risen every morning thus far. But what does what has been tell us about what will be? "The major premise of every conclusion in science is," says Mill, "that nature is uniform." How do we know that? We have experienced it so. We arrive at it by induction. But can experience go beyond experience and tell us for certain about what has not yet come to pass? Mill's answer is 'Yes." Ours today is no. Science does not give us cer-
ON LOGIC 103
tainties. It gives us probabilities and probability is, as Bishop Butler said, the guide of life. We do not know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning — nobody does — it may have generated nitrogen gas in such quantity as to explode before morning. Science does not give us abso- lute knowledge. Its declarations are hypothetical declara- tions. Its laws are hypothetical laws. It calls for faith no less certainly than religion does. Whatever else it is for, logic is not for certainty and it is worth while to know that. Dogmatism and fixed opinions die with that insight. Thus far we have been talking of logic as a science. It is also an art. Its one object, whether a science or an art, is to help us to learn to distinguish between good and bad reasoning. There is no such thing as logical proof that leads to absolutely conclusive truths, but in reason- ing about matters of fact we can learn to be on our guard against certain ancient errors of procedure and certain habits of thinking which are dangerous and menacing. Can one learn to be logical? Can one learn to reason? "Of course," says Carveth Read, "logic does not in the first place teach us to reason. We learn to reason, as we learn to walk and talk, by natural growth of our powers, with some assistance from friends and neighbors. But to be frank, few of us walk, talk, or reason remarkably well; and, as to reasoning, logic certainly quickens our sense of bad reasoning, both in others and in ourselves. It helps us to avoid being misled by others and to correct one's own mistakes. A man who reasons deliberately manages it better after studying logic than he could be- fore— if he tries to, if he has not a perverse liking for sophistry, and if he has the sense to know when formalities are out of place. There are some mental qualities that a man can only get from his father or mother." "As a science," says President Hibben, "thinking has its funda- mental laws, its logic; as an art it has no body of set rules which we may learn once for all, and ever after slavishly and blindly follow. There is no formula for wisdom. The art of thinking requires a command of all the re- sources of skill and inventive device of which our natures are capable."
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The first point to remember is that one cannot think without a problem — that all thinking is due to perplexity or trouble and that the first step in thinking is to define the question, locate the difficulty or formulate the prob- lem. The second step is to collect the facts which bear upon it — thinking is facing the facts.
Observation is not preliminary to it, but is an essential part of it. Thinking which tries to go on without observa- tion is intellectual somnambulism. The greatest charge against formal logic is that it is formal, that it neglects the context, that the middle term in the syllogism is frequently not the same in both premises — that it has the appearance of stating the facts and drawing its conclusion, but really leaves them out of consideration. I saw an advertisement of a truck company in last Sunday's Times which ran something like this: The flow of commodities is what is required above everything else at the present time. Motor trucks are the chief agencies for the flow of commodities. But just at the time that everything which furthers the unhampered distribution of products is of the utmost im- portance, your legislature considered a proposal to inter- fere with the business of trucking. At first glance that looks like a plain and convincing statement of facts. But I happen to know that Professor Derleth and some other engineers have been studying the roads in California to find out, if possible, how to build them so that they will not wear out so rapidly ; they have been checking the loads which motor trucks carry and find them far in excess of the indicated load. In one case they found a seven-ton truck carrying twenty-two tons.
Some time ago the ex-Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. McAdoo, said in a public speech here, that some of the coal companies had reported a profit as high as 2000 per cent per year. Mr. Robinson told me that when he be- came a member of the Coal Commission it determined to smoke out the facts in the Treasury Department about that matter. It found that three coal companies had re- ported a profit of more than 500 per cent, one of them being of 2000 per cent, but the total capitalization of those three companies was $11,000.00. Along with ob-
ON LOGIC 105
servation goes inference, a constant search for meaning. At first our conclusion is tentative, hypothetical, an hypo- thesis— we must test it. My automobile develops a squeak; that is my problem. I do my best to locate it, collecting as many facts concerning it as I can. I guess it is in the engine ; that is my hypothesis. I test it by running the engine with the clutch thrown out. There is no squeak. It must be in the transmission. I go through the same process of locating it once more and finally deter- mine that it is the body of the car. This may be taken as a typical illustration of reasoning, real reasoning — not dis- puting as a game. In it deduction and induction work together as warp and woof of the investigation. We start with facts — with a problem which requires us to interpret them — we collect such of them as seem to have a bearing on our problem. We make a guess or construct a theory as to the answer to our problem. We deduce from that guess that if it is true certain things will follow from it if we try it out under test conditions. We do so and arrive at our result. The function of logic is to help common sense out of the difficulties which it comes to. The old view of the syllogism will not aid very much in convincing an un- willing opponent. The greatest use it can serve perhaps is to indicate the exact nature of the reasoning which is being employed. It is well, therefore, to throw the argument which is being used into syllogistic form. That will not settle the question of itself, but reducing what is being said to syllogistic terms will usually help to disclose its weakness or its streneth.
IS SPIRIT A CHEMICAL REACTION?
FREDERICK MARSH BENNETT
I read in a daily paper that a scientist, whose name and importance I do not remember, has said, as a result of his researches, that "Love is in its ultimate analysis noth- ing but a chemical reaction." It is curious that there are so many people who are unable to see through the falsity and puerility of a statement of that sort. It is but natural that a daily paper should think it worth while to print it for the sensation it might create, or for the fun that might be gained from it.
In such a declaration it is assumed that the human soul is either a chemical compound or a material composition, and what is recognized as the feeling of love is but a movement, or the result of a movement, among the par- ticles which compose the substance of the soul. That chemical elements should thus be made capable of self- conscious feeling in a compound