He once noted that humor is akin to philosophy for they are both viewpoints born of a large perspective of life.
For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountaintops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all: a man who is both great and good? So many of us are mere talents, clever children in the play of life, that when genius stands in our presence we can only bow down before it as an act of God, a continuance of creation. Such men are the very lifeblood of history, to which politics and industry are but frame and bones.
It was on some such life-and-death emergency as this, presumably, that human reasoning began. That same incompleteness and adaptability of native reactions which we see today in the infant, which makes it so inferior to a newborn animal but leaves it in recompense the possibility of learning — that same plasticity saved man and the higher mammals; while powerful organisms like the mammoth and the mastodon, that had prowled about hitherto supreme, succumbed to the icy change and became mere sport for paleontological curiosity. They shivered and passed away, while man, puny man, remained.
The animal stood up erect and became man, slave still to a thousand circumstances, timidly brave before countless perils, but in his precarious way destined henceforth to be lord of the earth.
The illustrious ancients, when they wished to make clear and propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such investigation of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and seeing them as they really were. When things were thus investigated, knowledge became complete. When knowledge was complete, their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls became perfect. When their souls were perfect, their own selves became cultivated. When their selves were cultivated, their families became regulated. When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into proper order. When their states were in proper order, then the whole world became peaceful and happy.
We do not know how profound a thinker Copernicus was, except through this immeasurable influence of his work. With him modernity begins. With him secularism begins. With him reason makes it French Revolution against a faith immemorially enthroned, and man commences his long effort to rebuild with thought the shattered palace of his dreams. Heaven becomes mere sky and space and nothingness, or it descends upon the earth and breeds visions of Utopia in the hungry hearts of men who once had hoped for Paradise.
But which of us is original except in form? What idea can we conceive today that has not enjoyed, in one garb or another, a hoary antiquity of time? It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a thousand falsehoods.
Now there are two modes of approach to an analysis of the world; we may begin with matter, and then we shall be forced to deduce from it all the mystery of mind; or we may begin with mind, and then we shall be forced to look upon matter as merely a bundle of sensations. For how can we know matter except through our senses? — and what is it then for us but our idea of it? Matter, as known to us, is but a form of mind.
It was Kant who labored best to rescue mind from matter; who argued so irrefutably (because so unintelligibly) against the uses of “pure reason” and who, by the prestidigitation of his thought, brought back to life, magician-wise, the dear beliefs of the ancient faith.
The world heard him gladly, for it felt that it could live by faith alone, and did not love a science that merely darkened its aspirations and destroyed its hopes.
But Darwin, without attacking any creed, described what he had seen. Suddenly the world turned red, and nature, which had been so fair in the autumn’s colors under the setting sun, seemed to be only a scene of slaughter and strife, in which birth was an accident, and only death a certainty. “Nature” became “natural selection,” that is, a struggle for existence; and not for existence merely, but for mates and power, a ruthless elimination of the “unfit” of the tendered flowers, the gentler animals, and the kindlier men. The surface of the earth seethed with warring species and competing individuals, every organism was the prey of some larger beast; every life was lived at the expense of some other life; great “natural” catastrophes came, ice ages, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, pestilences, famines, wars; millions and millions of living things were “weeded out,” were quickly or slowly killed. Some species and some individuals survived for a little while — this was evolution. This was nature, this was reality.
Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife, and his wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of his amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape, which the fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which in its turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear. Man was not immortal; he was condemned to death from the hour of his birth.
Let me not pretend to do more here than to reveal my prejudices, to record the men who, beyond all others, have brought me that strange mixture of music, emotion, imagery, and thought, which is poetry.
Homer was probably one of the singers who chanted these commemorative songs; we give him name to all the poets who composed these tales, because we are at ease with unity, and dislike the fragmentariness of truth. Every nation’s literature begins with such epics, “vedas,” or “sagas”; they are as natural to a nation’s childhood as to an individual’s; they take the place of those patriotic histories in which one’s country is always right, wins every battle, and is especially beloved of God.
It seems unimportant and irrelevant that the tale as Homer tells it is not true, that his men and women — and even some of his deities — are apparently the creatures of his lordly imagination; it is so well invented, and so vivaciously recounted, that if the facts were different, so much the worse for the facts. Beauty has its rights as well as truth; and the Iliad is more important than the Trojan War.
Nor does it matter that these ancient epics are not complex in art or thought; they were addressed to the ear, not to the mind, and to the people, not to subtle lords; they had to be understood as soon as heard, and they had to be carried onward with vigorous action. Today we lead intricate and often introverted lives, in which actions as the Greeks knew it is a rare exception, found chiefly in the press and gathered from afar; man is now an animal that stops and thinks. Therefore our literature is an analysis of motives and thought; it is in mental conflict that we find the profoundest wars and the darkest tragedies. But in Homer’s day life was action, and Homer was action’s prophet.
“Dante,” said Voltaire, “was a madman, and his work is monstrosity. He has many commentators, and therefore cannot be understood. His reputation will go on increasing, for no one ever reads him.” And he writes: “Shakespeare, who flourished in the time of Lope de Vega is a barbarian” who composed “monstrous farces called tragedies.”
So Dante resolved to write: he would tell, in terrible allegory, how he had gone through hell, how he had been made clean by the purgatory of suffering, and how he had won a heaven of happiness at last, under the guidance of wisdom and love.
What we like in him most is the madness and richness of his speech. His style is as his life was, full of energy, riot, color, and excess; “nothing succeeds like excess.” It is all hurried and breathless, this style; Shakespeare wrote in haste, and never found leisure to repent.
Perhaps you have never had a chance to go to college, and have never considered what else our children learn there except for the latest morals. They might learn many fine things if they came to it old enough, but our youngsters take so long to grow up in these complex days that they are too immature, when they enter college, to absorb or understand the treasures offered them there so lavishly. If you have studied with life rather than with courses, it may be as well; the rough tutelage of reality has ripened you into some readiness to know great men. Here at this spacious table you will prepare yourself for membership in the International of the Mind; you will be friends with Plato and Leonardo, with Bacon and Montaigne; and when you have passed through that goodly company you will be fit for the fellowship of the finest leaders of your time and place.
But let us understand each other: you must not expect any material gain from this intimacy with great men. Some lucre may flow incidentally in later years from the maturity and background that you will win, but these dividends, like those of the insurance companies, are not in any way guaranteed. Indeed, you will be “losing time” from your profession or your business; if you long for millions you had better lay aside this map of the City of God, and keep your nose to the earth. And there will be blocks along the line: occasionally you will come to an obscure or lengthy book, a bad upgrade, and all your strength will have to be subpoenaed to your task.
Initium dimidium facti, said the Romans — “the start is half the deed.” Let us gird up our loins and screw our courage to the sticking point for these initial hills, and the rest will be level road, with knowledge and wisdom at every milestone, and pleasant reaches of beauty everywhere. We want here not entertainment only, but education, and we want it in such order that the knowledge we win may fall into logical sequence in our memories, and give us at last that full perspective which is the source and summit of understanding.
Why is our list henceforth historically arranged? First, because it is well to study history as it was lived and made, taking all the activities of a civilization together — economic, social, political, scientific, philosophical, religious, literary, and artistic; in this way we shall see every work of literature, philosophy, or art in its proper place, and better understand its origin and significance — perspective is all. Second, because this arrangement will let the most delightful and entertaining masterpieces alternate with ponderous instructive tomes; it will be an aid to digestion.
Plato speaks, and paints his perfect state; the immaculately reasonable Aristotle preaches the golden mean, and marries the richest girl in Greece.
And so the Revolution comes, aristocracy is guillotined, art and manners droop, truth replaces beauty, and science remakes the world nearer to its head’s desire.
Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief. The philosophers four parent-century were almost as unhappy as the composers: the began with Schopenhauer, who wrote an encyclopedia of misery, and ended with Nietzsche, who loved life because it was a tragedy, but went insane with the thought that he might have to live it again.
We call Poe a great artist when we only mean that his biography is interesting and his sufferings attractive to us. It is always easier to love the weak than the strong; the strong do not need our love, and instinctively we look for flaws in their irritating perfection; every statue is a provocation.
These are sad books, but by the time we reach the end of our list we shall be strong enough to face truth without anesthesia. We may still believe, despite all our knowledge, that the race that made Plato and Leonardo will some day grow wisdom enough to control population, to keep the seas open to food and fuel for all peoples, and all markets open for all traders and all capital, and so by some international organization graduate humanity out of war. Stranger things than that have been accomplished in the history of mankind; forty times such a marvel could not be equal the incredible development of man from slime or beast Confucius and Christ. We have merely begun.
Life is better than literature, friendship is sweeter than philosophy, and children reach into our hearts with a profounder music than comes from any symphony, but even so these living delights offer no derogation to the modest and secondary pleasures of our books.
When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world with Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats. For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answer back, and always wait our call. When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding.
Never before thad man so believed in mankind, and perhaps never again since. Search through all ancient Greek and Latin literature, and you will find no affirmatory belief in human progress. Not until the Occident brough into the Orient the virus of — the fever of — progress can you find in any Hindu or Chinese thinker any belief in the notion that man marches forward through the years. It is a relatively new idea for men to have and to hold.
What shall we mean by “progress”? Subjective definitions will not do; we must not conceive progress in terms of one nation, or one religion, or one code of morals; an increase of kindness, for example, would alarm our young Nietzscheans. Nor may we define progress interms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness. Is it possible to find an objective definition for our term — one that will hold for any individual, any group, even for any species? Let us provisionally define progress as “increasing control of the environment by life,” and let us mean by environment “all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire.” Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.
We must not compare nations in their youth with nations in the mellowness of their cultural maturity, and we must not compare the worst or the best of one age with the selected best or worst of all the collected past. If we find the type of genius prevalent in young countries like America and Australia tends to the executive, explorative, and scientific kind rather than to the painter of pictures or poems, the carver of statues or words, we shall understand that each age and place calls for and needs certain brands of genius rather than others, and that the cultural sort can only come when its practical predecessors have cleared the forest and prepared the way.
If we find that philosophers are of slighter stature now than in the days of broad-back Plato and the substantial Socrates, that our sculptors are lesser men than Donatello or Angelo, our painters inferior to Velazquez, our poets and composers unnameable with Shelley and Bach, we shall not despair; these stars did not all shine on the same night. Our problem is whether the total and average level of human ability has increased, and stand at its peak today.
When we take a total view, and compare our modern existence, precarious and chaotic as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, brutality, cannibalism, and diseases of primitive peoples, we are a little comforted: the lowest strata of our race may still differ only slightly from such men, but above those strata thousands and millions have reached to mental and moral heights inconceivable, presumably, to the early mind. Under the complex strain of city life we sometimes take imaginative refuge in the quiet simplicity of savage days, but in our less romantic moments we know that this is a flight-reaction from our actual tasks, that this idolatry of barbarism, like so many of our young opinions, is merely an impatient expression of adolescent mal-adaptation, part of the suffering involved in the contemporary retardation of individual maturity. A study of such savage tribes as survive shows their high rate of infantile mortality, their short tenure of life, their inferior speed, their inferior stamina, their inferior will, and their inferior plagues. The friendly and flowing savage is like Nature — delightful but for the insects and the dirt.
The savage, however, might turn the argument around, and inquire how we enjoy our politics and our wars, and whether we think ourselves happier than the tribes whose weird names resound in the textbooks of anthropology. The believer in progress will have to admit that we have made too many advances in the art of war, and that our politicians, with startling exceptions, would have adorned the Roman Forum in the days of Milo and Clodius. As to happiness, no man can say; it is an elusive angel, destroyed by detection and seldom amenable to measurement. Presumably it depends first upon health, secondly upon love, and thirdly upon wealth. As to wealth, we make such progress that it lies on the conscience of our intellectuals; as to love, we try to atone for our lack of depth by unprecedented inventiveness and variety. Our thousand fads of diet and drugs predispose us to the belief that we must be ridden with disease as compared with simpler men in simpler days, but this is a delusion. We think that where there are so many doctors there must be more sickness than before. But in truth we have not more ailments than in the past, but only more money; our wealth allows us to treat and cherish and master illness from which primitive men died without even knowing their Greek names.
Fire made man independent of climate, gave him a greater compass on the earth, tempered his tools to hardness and durability, and offered him as food a thousand things inedible before. Not least of all it made him master of the night, and shed an animating brilliance over the hours of evening and dawn. Picture the dark before man conquered it; even now the terrors of that primitive abyss survive in our traditions and perhaps in our blood — once every twilight was a tragedy, and man crept into his cave at sunset trembling with fear. Now we do not creep into our caves until sunrise, and though it is folly to miss the sun, how good it is to be liberated from our ancient fears! This overspreading of the night with a billion man-made stars has brightened the human spirit, and made for a vivacious jollity in modern life. We shall never be grateful enough for the light.
Our memories are too forgetful, and our imagination too unimaginative, to let us realize the boon we have in our security from the larger and subhuman beasts of prey. Animals are now our playthings and our helpless food, but there was a time when man was hunted as well as hunter, when every step from cave or hut was an adventure, and the possession of the earth was still at stake. This war to make the planet human was surely the most vital in human history; but its side all other wars were but family quarrels, achieving nothing. That struggle between strength of body and power of mind was waged through long and unrecorded years; and when at last it was won, the fruit of man’s triumph — his safety on the earth — was transmitted across a thousand generations, with a hundred other gifts from the past, to be part of our heritage at birth. What are all our temporary retrogressions against the background of such a conflict and such a victory?
Meredith said that woman will be the lat creature to be civilized by man. He was as wrong as it is possible to be in the limits of one sentence. For civilization came through two things chiefly: the home, which developed those social disposition that form the psychological cement of society, and agriculture, which took man from his wandering life as hunter, herder, and killer, and settled him long enough in one place to let him build homes, schools, churches, colleges, universities, civilization. But it was woman who gave man agriculture and the home; she domesticated man as she domesticated the sheep and the pig. Man is woman’s last domestic animal, and perhaps he is the last creature that will be civilized by woman. The task is just begun: one look at our menus reveals us as still in the hunting stage.
Here are two other men disputing: one says to the other, “Let us not fight — we may both be killed; let us take our difference to some elder of the tribe, and submit to his decision.” It was a crucial moment in human history! For if the answer was “No,” barbarism continued; if it was “Yes,” civilization planted another root in the memory of man: the replacement of chaos with order, of brutality with judgment, of violence with law. Here, too, is a gift unfelt, because we are born within the charmed circle of its protection, and never know its value until we wander into the disordered or solitary regions of the earth. God knows that our congresses and our parliaments are dubious inventions, the distilled mediocrity of the land, but despite them we manage to enjoy a security of life and property which we shall appreciate more warmly when civil war or revolution reduces us to primitive conditions. Compare the safety of travel today with the robber-infested highways of medieval Europe. Never before in history was there such order and liberty as exist in England today, and may someday exist in America, when a way is found of opening municipal office to capable and honorable men. However, we must not excite ourselves too much about political corruption or democratic mismanagement: politics is not life, but only a graft upon life; under its vulgar melodrama the traditional order of society quietly persists, in the family, in the school, in the thousand devious influences that change our native lawlessness into some measure of cooperation and goodwill. Without consciousness of it, we partake in a luxurious patrimony of social order built up for us by a hundred generations of trial and error, accumulated knowledge, and transmitted wealth.
So far as character is concerned, we have probably retrogressed: subtlety of thought has grown at the expense of stability of soul; in the presence of our fathers we intellectuals feel uncomfortably that though we surpass them in the number of ideas that we have crowded in our heads, and though we have liberated ourselves from delightful superstitions which still bring them aid and comfort, we are inferior to them in uncomplaining courage, fidelity to our tasks and purposes, and simple strength of personality.
Less than one hundred years ago our jails were dens of filth and horror, colleges for the graduation of minor criminals into major criminals; now our prisons are vacation resorts for tired murderers. We still exploit the lower strata of our working classes, but we sooth our consciences with “welfare work.” Eugenics struggles to balance with artificial selection the interference of human kindliness and benevolence with that merciless elimination of the weak and the infirm which was once the mainspring of natural selection.
We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and monogamy; and all the villainy and politics of five continents are gathered upon one page for the encouragement of our breakfasts.
These multiplying inventions are the new organs with which we control our environment: we do not need to grow them on our bodies, as animal must; we make them and use them, and lay them aside till we need them again. We grow gigantic arms that build in a month the pyramids that once consumed a million men; we make for ourselves great eyes that search out the invisible stars of the sky, and little eyes that peer into the invisible cells of life; we speak, if we wish, with quiet voices that reach across continents and seas; we move over the land and the air with the freedom of timeless gods.
In a large degree Buckle was right: we progress only in knowledge, and these other gifts are rooted int he slow enlightenment of the mind.
Here is a bridge: a hundred thousand tons of iron suspended from four ropes of steel flung bravely from shore to shore, and bearing the passage of countless men; this is poetry as eloquent as Shakespeare ever wrote. Or consider this citylike building that mounts boldly into the sky, guarded against every strain by the courage of our calculations, and shining like diamond-studded granite in the night.
Yes, it is true that victory of man over matter has not yet been matched with any kindred victory of man over himself. The argument for progress falters here again. Psychology has hardly begun to comprehend, much less to control, human conduct and desire; it is mingled with mysticism and metaphysics, with psychoanalysis, behaviorism, glandular mythology, and other diseases of adolescence.
More and more completely we pass on to the next generation the gathered experience of the past. It is almost a contemporary innovation, this tremendous expenditure of wealth and labor in the equipment of schools and the provision of instruction for all; perhaps it is the most significant feature of our time. We have not excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of human knowledge far beyond any age in history. Think now not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the stupid, bigoted, and brutal Athenian Assembly, of the unfranchised mob and its Orphic rites, of the secluded and enslaved woman who could acquire education only by becoming courtesan.
Consider it not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates, but as an ennobling intimacy with great men. Consider it not as the preparation of the individual to “make a living,” but as the development of every potential capacity in him for the comprehension, control, and appreciation of his world. Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual and makes him human. Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we become human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place humankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before.
No other soul, I suppose, has ever been so influential. It is not so much that several hundred million men and women profess the Buddhist religion today; in truth, Buddhism does not follow Buddha, but is a mass of legends and superstitions that have no more right to use his name than the ferocious Christianity of Calvin or Torquemada or Tennessee has to use the name of Christ. But Buddha means India, for the spirit of India lies in religion rather than in science, in contemplation rather than in action, in a fraternal gentleness rather than in the application of mathematics to artillery, or of chemistry to bombs.
It was gunpowder that made the infantry as important as the cavalry, and gave the common man a new prestige in war and a new power in revolutions. It was gunpowder that turned war from a gentleman’s game, occasionally fatal, to a form of standardized mass destruction, a mode of removing from the earth, with a new minutes’ bombardment, the work of a hundred thousand artists’ hands laboring for three centuries.
When Columbus discovered us, he put an end to the Italian Renaissance by changing trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. When, in 1564, Michelangelo died and Shakespeare was born, it was a sign that the Renaissance had died in Italy and had been reborn in England.
I know how partial and provincial all lists must be. We are all born within frontiers of space and time and, struggle as we will, we never escape from our boxes. To us, civilization means Europe and America, and the Orient, which considers us barbaric, seems barbarous.