The human mind has then been built up through hundreds of thousands of years by gradual accretions and laborious accumulations. Man started at a cultural zero and had to find out everything for himself; or rather a very small number of peculiarly restless and adventurous spirits did the work. The great mass of humanity has never had anything to do with the increase of intelligence except to act as its medium of transfusion and perpetuation. Creative intelligence is confined to the very few, but the many can thoughtlessly avail themselves of the more obvious achievements of those who are exceptionally highly endowed.

Even an ape will fit himself into a civilized environment. A chimpanzee can be taught to relish bicycles, roller skates, and cigarettes which he could never have devised, cannot understand, and could not reproduce. Even so with mankind. Most of us could not have devised, do not understand, and consequently could not reproduce any of the everyday conveniences and luxuries which surround us. Few of us could make an electric light, or write a good novel to read by it, or paint a picture for it to shine upon.

Professor Giddings has recently asked the question, Why has there been any history?[14] Why, indeed, considering that the "good" and "respectable" is usually synonymous with the ancient routine, and the old have always been there to repress the young? Such heavy words of approval as "venerable", "sanctified", and "revered" all suggest great age rather than fresh discoveries. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, is our protest against being disturbed, forced to think or to change our habits. So history, namely change, has been mainly due to a small number of "seers",—really gropers and monkeyers—whose native curiosity outran that of their fellows and led them to escape here and there from the sanctified blindness of their time.

The seer is simply an example of a variation biologically, such as occurs in all species of living things, both animal and vegetable. But the unusually large roses in our gardens, the swifter horses of the herd, and the cleverer wolf in the pack have no means of influencing their fellows as a result of their peculiar superiority. Their offspring has some chance of sharing to some degree this pre-eminence, but otherwise things will go on as before. Whereas the singular variation represented by a St. Francis, a Dante, a Voltaire, or a Darwin may permanently, and for ages to follow change somewhat the character and ambitions of innumerable inferior members of the species who could by no possibility have originated anything for themselves, but who can, nevertheless, suffer some modification as a result of the teachings of others. This illustrates the magical and unique workings of culture and creative intelligence in mankind.[15]

We have no means of knowing when or where the first contribution to civilization was made, and with it a start on the arduous building of the mind. There is some reason to think that the men who first transcended the animal mind were of inferior mental capacity to our own, but even if man, emerging from his animal estate, had had on the average quite as good a brain as those with which we are now familiar, I suspect that the extraordinarily slow and hazardous process of accumulating modern civilization would not have been greatly shortened. Mankind is lethargic, easily pledged to routine, timid, suspicious of innovation. That is his nature. He is only artificially, partially, and very recently "progressive". He has spent almost his whole existence as a savage hunter, and in that state of ignorance he illustrated on a magnificent scale all the inherent weaknesses of the human mind.



7. OUR SAVAGE MIND

Should we arrange our present beliefs and opinions on the basis of their age, we should find that some of them were very, very old, going back to primitive man; others were derived from the Greeks; many more of them would prove to come directly from the Middle Ages; while certain others in our stock were unknown until natural science began to develop in a new form about three hundred years ago. The idea that man has a soul or double which survives the death of the body is very ancient indeed and is accepted by most savages. Such confidence as we have in the liberal arts, metaphysics, and formal logic goes back to the Greek thinkers; our religious ideas and our standards of sexual conduct are predominantly mediaeval in their presuppositions; our notions of electricity and disease germs are, of course, recent in origin, the result of painful and prolonged research which involved the rejection of a vast number of older notions sanctioned by immemorial acceptance.

In general, those ideas which are still almost universally accepted in regard to man's nature, his proper conduct, and his relations to God and his fellows are far more ancient and far less critical than those which have to do with the movement of the stars, the stratification of the rocks and the life of plants and animals.

Nothing is more essential in our attempt to escape from the bondage of consecrated ideas than to get a vivid notion of human achievement in its proper historical perspective. In order to do this let us imagine the whole gradual and laborious attainments of mankind compressed into the compass of a single lifetime. Let us assume that a single generation of men have in fifty years managed to accumulate all that now passes for civilization. They would have to start, as all individuals do, absolutely uncivilized, and their task would be to recapitulate what has occupied the race for, let us guess, at least five hundred thousand years. Each year in the life of a generation would therefore correspond to ten thousand years in the progress of the race.

On this scale it would require forty-nine years to reach a point of intelligence which would enable our self-taught generation to give up their ancient and inveterate habits of wandering hunters and settle down here and there to till the ground, harvest their crops, domesticate animals, and weave their rough garments. Six months later, or half through the fiftieth year, some of them, in a particularly favorable situation, would have invented writing and thus established a new and wonderful means of spreading and perpetuating civilization. Three months later another group would have carried literature, art, and philosophy to a high degree of refinement and set standards for the succeeding weeks. For two months our generation would have been living under the blessings of Christianity; the printing press would be but a fortnight old and they would not have had the steam engine for quite a week. For two or three days they would have been hastening about the globe in steamships and railroad trains, and only yesterday would they have come upon the magical possibilities of electricity. Within the last few hours they would have learned to sail in the air and beneath the waters, and have forthwith applied their newest discoveries to the prosecution of a magnificent war on the scale befitting their high ideals and new resources. This is not so strange, for only a week ago they were burning and burying alive those who differed from the ruling party in regard to salvation, eviscerating in public those who had new ideas of government, and hanging old women who were accused of traffic with the devil. All of them had been no better than vagrant savages a year before. Their fuller knowledge was altogether too recent to have gone very deep, and they had many institutions and many leaders dedicated to the perpetuation of outworn notions which would otherwise have disappeared. Until recently changes had taken place so slowly and so insensibly that only a very few persons could be expected to realize that not a few of the beliefs that were accepted as eternal verities were due to the inevitable misunderstandings of a savage.

In speaking of the "savage" or "primitive mind", we are, of course, using a very clumsy expression. We shall employ the term, nevertheless, to indicate the characteristics of the human mind when there was as yet no writing, no organized industry or mechanical arts, no money, no important specialization of function except between the sexes, no settled life in large communities. The period so described covers all but about five or six thousand of the half million to a million years that man has existed on the earth.

There are no chronicles to tell us the story of those long centuries. Some inferences can be made from the increasing artfulness and variety of the flint weapons and tools which we find. But the stone weapons which have come down to us, even in their crudest forms (eoliths), are very far from representing the earliest achievements of man in the accumulation of culture. Those dim, remote cycles must have been full of great, but inconspicuous, originators who laid the foundations of civilization in discoveries and achievements so long taken for granted that we do not realize that they ever had to be made at all.

Since man is descended from less highly endowed animals, there must have been a time when the man-animal was in a state of animal ignorance. He started with no more than an ape is able to know. He had to learn everything for himself, as he had no one to teach him the tricks that apes and children can be taught by sophisticated human beings. He was necessarily self-taught, and began, as we have seen, in a state of ignorance beyond anything we can readily conceive. He lived naked and speechless in the woods, or wandered over the plains without artificial shelter or any way of cooking his food. He subsisted on raw fruit, berries, roots, insects, and such animals as he could strike down or pick up dead. His mind must have corresponded with his brutish state. He must at the first have learned just as his animal relatives learn—by fumbling and by forming accidental associations. He had impulses and such sagacity as he individually derived from experience, but no heritage of knowledge accumulated by the group and transmitted by education. This heritage had to be constructed on man's potentialities.

Of mankind in this extremely primitive condition we have no traces. There could indeed be no traces. All savages of the present day or of whom we have any record represent a relatively highly developed traditional culture, with elaborate languages, myths, and well-established artificial customs, which it probably took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate. Man in "a state of nature" is only a presupposition, but a presupposition which is forced upon us by compelling evidence, conjectural and inferential though it is.

On a geological time scale we are still close to savagery, and it is inevitable that the ideas and customs and sentiments of savagery should have become so ingrained that they may have actually affected man's nature by natural selection through the survival of those who most completely adjusted themselves to the uncritical culture which prevailed. But in any case it is certain, as many anthropologists have pointed out, that customs, savage ideas, and primitive sentiments have continued to form an important part of our own culture down even to the present day. We are met thus with the necessity of reckoning with this inveterate element in our present thought and customs. Much of the data that we have regarding primitive man has been accumulated in recent times, for the most part as a result of the study of simple peoples. These differ greatly in their habits and myths, but some salient common traits emerge which cast light on the spontaneous workings of the human mind when unaffected by the sophistications of a highly elaborate civilization.

At the start man had to distinguish himself from the group to which he belonged and say, "I am I." This is not an idea given by nature.[16] There are evidences that the earlier religious notions were not based on individuality, but rather on the "virtue" which objects had—that is, their potency to do things. Only later did the animistic belief in the personalities of men, animals, and the forces of nature appear. When man discovered his own individuality he spontaneously ascribed the same type of individuality and purpose to animals and plants, to the wind and the thunder.

This exhibits one of the most noxious tendencies of the mind—namely, personification. It is one of the most virulent enemies of clear thinking. We speak of the Spirit of the Reformation or the Spirit of Revolt or the Spirit of Disorder and Anarchy. The papers tell us that, "Berlin says", "London says", "Uncle Sam so decides", "John Bull is disgruntled". Now, whether or no there are such things as spirits, Berlin and London have no souls, and Uncle Sam is as mythical as the great god Pan. Sometimes this regression to the savage is harmless, but when a newspaper states that "Germany is as militaristic as ever", on the ground that some insolent Prussian lieutenant says that German armies will occupy Paris within five years, we have an example of animism which in a society farther removed from savagery than ours might be deemed a high crime and misdemeanor. Chemists and physicians have given up talking of spirits, but in discussing social and economic questions we are still victimized by the primitive animistic tendencies of the mind.

The dream has had a great influence in the building up of the mind. Our ideas, especially our religious beliefs, would have had quite another history had men been dreamless. For it was not merely his shadow and his reflection in the water that led man to imagine souls and doubles, but pre-eminently the visions of the night. As his body lay quiet in sleep he found himself wandering in distant places.

Sometimes he was visited by the dead. So it was clear that the body had an inhabitant who was not necessarily bound to it, who could desert it from time to time during life, and who continued to exist and interest itself in human affairs after death.

Whole civilizations and religions and vast theological speculations have been dominated by this savage inference. It is true that in very recent times, since Plato, let us say, other reasons have been urged for believing in the soul and its immortality, but the idea appears to have got its firm footing in savage logic. It is a primitive inference, however it may later have been revised, rationalized, and ennobled.

The taboo—the forbidden thing—of savage life is another thing very elementary in man's make-up. He had tendencies to fall into habits and establish inhibitions for reasons that he either did not discover or easily forgot. These became fixed and sacred to him and any departure from them filled him with dread. Sometimes the prohibition might have some reasonable justification, sometimes it might seem wholly absurd and even a great nuisance, but that made no difference in its binding force. For example, pork was taboo among the ancient Hebrews—no one can say why, but none of the modern justifications for abstaining from that particular kind of meat would have counted in early Jewish times. It is not improbable that it was the original veneration for the boar and not an abhorrence of him that led to the prohibition.

The modern "principle" is too often only a new form of the ancient taboo, rather than an enlightened rule of conduct. The person who justifies himself by saying that he holds certain beliefs, or acts in a certain manner "on principle", and yet refuses to examine the basis and expediency of his principle, introduces into his thinking and conduct an irrational, mystical element similar to that which characterized savage prohibitions. Principles unintelligently urged make a great deal of trouble in the free consideration of social readjustment, for they are frequently as recalcitrant and obscurantist as the primitive taboo, and are really scarcely more than an excuse for refusing to reconsider one's convictions and conduct. The psychological conditions lying back of both taboo and this sort of principle are essentially the same.

We find in savage thought a sort of intensified and generalized taboo in the classification of things as clean and unclean and in the conceptions of the sacred. These are really expressions of profound and persistent traits in the uncritical mind and can only be overcome by carefully cultivated criticism. They are the result of our natural timidity and the constant dread lest we find ourselves treading on holy (i. e., dangerous) ground.[17] When they are intrenched in the mind we cannot expect to think freely and fairly, for they effectually stop argument. If a thing is held to be sacred it is the center of what may be called a defense complex, and a reasonable consideration of the merits of the case will not be tolerated. When an issue is declared to be a "moral" one—for example, the prohibition of strong drink—an emotional state is implied which makes reasonable compromise and adjustment impossible; for "moral" is a word on somewhat the same plane as "sacred", and has much the same qualities and similar effects on thinking. In dealing with the relations of the sexes the terms "pure" and "impure" introduce mystic and irrational moods alien to clear analysis and reasonable readjustments. Those who have studied the characteristics of savage life are always struck by its deadly conservatism, its needless restraints on the freedom of the individual, and its hopeless routine. Man, like plants and animals in general, tends to go on from generation to generation, living as nearly as may be the life of his forbears. Changes have to be forced upon him by hard experience, and he is ever prone to find excuses for slipping back into older habits, for these are likely to be simpler, less critical, more spontaneous—more closely akin, in short, to his animal and primitive promptings. One who prides himself to-day on his conservatism, on the ground that man is naturally an anarchic and disorderly creature who is held in check by the far-seeing Tory, is almost exactly reversing the truth. Mankind is conservative by nature and readily generates restraints on himself and obstacles to change which have served to keep him in a state of savagery during almost his whole existence on the earth, and which still perpetuate all sorts of primitive barbarism in modern society. The conservative "on principle" is therefore a most unmistakably primitive person in his attitude. His only advance beyond the savage mood lies in the specious reasons he is able to advance for remaining of the same mind. What we vaguely call a "radical" is a very recent product due to altogether exceptional and unprecedented circumstances.

NOTES.

[10] It is impossible to discuss here the results which a really honest study of child psychology promises. The relations of the child to his parents and elders in general and to the highly artificial system of censorship and restraints which they impose in their own interests on his natural impulses must surely have a permanent influence on the notions he continues to have as an adult in regard to his "superiors" and the institutions and mores under which he is called to live. Attempts in later life to gain intellectual freedom can only be successful if one comes to think of the childish origin of a great part of his "real" reasons.

[11] Clarence Day in Our Simian World discusses with delightful humor the effects of our underlying simian temperament on the conduct of life.

[12] The word "imitation" is commonly used very loosely. The real question is does an animal, or even man himself, tend to make movements or sounds made by their fellow-creatures in their presence It seems to be made out now that even monkeys are not imitative in that sense and that man himself has no general inclination to do over what he sees being done. Pray, if you doubt this, note how many things you see others doing that you have no inclination to imitate! For an admirable summary see Thorndike, E. L., The Original Nature of Man, 1913, pp. 108 ff.

[13] "If the earth were struck by one of Mr. Wells's comets, and if, in consequence, every human being now alive were to lose all the knowledge and habits which he had acquired from preceding generations (though retaining unchanged all his own powers of invention and memory and habituation) nine tenths of the inhabitants of London or New York would be dead in a month, and 99 per cent of the remaining tenth would be dead in six months. They would have no language to express their thoughts, and no thoughts but vague reverie. They could not read notices, or drive motors or horses. They would wander about, led by the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals, drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside landing places, looting those shops where the smell of decaying food attracted them, and perhaps at the end stumbling on the expedient of cannibalism. Even in the country districts men could not invent, in time to preserve their lives, methods of growing food, or taming animals, or making fire, or so clothing themselves as to endure a Northern winter."—GRAHAM WALLAS, Our Social Heritage, p. 16. Only the very lowest of savages might possibly pull through if culture should disappear.

[14] "A Theory of History", Political Science Quarterly, December, 1920. He attributes history to the adventurers.

[15] Count Korzybski in his Manhood of Humanity is so impressed by the uniqueness and undreamed possibilities of human civilization and man's "time-binding" capacity that he declares that it is a gross and misleading error to regard man as an animal at all. Yet he is forced sadly to confess that man continues all too often to operate on an animal or "space-binding" plan of life. His aim and outlook are, however, essentially the same as those of the present writer. His method of approach will appeal especially to those who are wont to deal with affairs in the spirit of the mathematician and engineer. He is quite right in thinking that man has hitherto had little conception of his peculiar prerogatives and unlimited opportunities for betterment.

[16] In the beginning, too, man did not know how children came about, for it was not easy to connect a common impulsive act with the event of birth so far removed in time. The tales told to children still are reminiscences of the mythical explanations which our savage ancestors advanced to explain the arrival of the infant. Consequently, all popular theories of the origin of marriage and the family based on the assumption of conscious paternity are outlawed.

[17] Lucretius warns the reader not to be deterred from considering the evils wrought by religion by the fear of treading on "the unholy grounds of reason and in the path of sin".—De Rer. Nat. i, 80 ff.

* * * * *

IV

Thereupon one of the Egyptian priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and there was never an old man who was a Hellene. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition; nor any science which is hoary with age. —PLATO'S Timaeus, 22 (Jowett's translation).

The truth is that we are far more likely to underrate the originality of the Greeks than to exaggerate it, and we do not always remember the very short time they took to lay down the lines scientific inquiry has followed ever since.—JOHN BURNET.



8. BEGINNING OF CRITICAL THINKING

The Egyptians were the first people, so far as we know, who invented a highly artificial method of writing, about five thousand years ago, and began to devise new arts beyond those of their barbarous predecessors. They developed painting and architecture, navigation, and various ingenious industries; they worked in glass and enamels and began the use of copper, and so introduced metal into human affairs. But in spite of their extraordinary advance in practical, matter-of-fact knowledge they remained very primitive in their beliefs. The same may be said of the peoples of Mesopotamia and of the western Asiatic nations in general—just as in our own day the practical arts have got a long start compared with the revision of beliefs in regard to man and the gods. The peculiar opinions of the Egyptians do not enter directly into our intellectual heritage, but some of the fundamental religious ideas which developed in western Asia have, through the veneration for the Hebrew Scriptures, become part and parcel of our ways of thinking. To the Greeks, however, we are intellectually under heavy obligation. The literature of the Greeks, in such fragments as escaped destruction, was destined, along with the Hebrew Scriptures, to exercise an incalculable influence in the formation of our modern civilized minds. These two dominating literary heritages originated about the same time—day before yesterday—viewed in the perspective of our race's history. Previous to the Greek civilization books had played no great part in the development, dissemination, and transmission of culture from generation to generation. Now they were to become a cardinal force in advancing and retarding the mind's expansion.

It required about a thousand years for the Greek shepherds from the pastures of the Danube to assimilate the culture of the highly civilized regions in which they first appeared as barbarian destroyers. They accepted the industrial arts of the eastern Mediterranean, adopted the Phoenician alphabet, and emulated the Phoenician merchant. By the seventh century before our era they had towns, colonies, and commerce, with much stimulating running hither and thither. We get our first traces of new intellectual enterprise in the Ionian cities, especially Miletus, and in the Italian colonies of the Greeks. Only later did Athens become the unrivaled center in a marvelous outflowering of the human intelligence.

It is a delicate task to summarize what we owe to the Greeks. Leaving aside their supreme achievements in literature and art, we can consider only very briefly the general scope and nature of their thinking as it relates most closely to our theme.

The chief strength of the Greeks lay in their freedom from hampering intellectual tradition. They had no venerated classics, no holy books, no dead languages to master, no authorities to check their free speculation. As Lord Bacon reminds us, they had no antiquity of knowledge and no knowledge of antiquity. A modern classicist would have been a forlorn outlander in ancient Athens, with no books in a forgotten tongue, no obsolete inflections to impose upon reluctant youth. He would have had to use the everyday speech of the sandal-maker and fuller.

For a long time no technical words were invented to give aloofness and seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism first showed themselves. The primitive notions of man, of the gods, and of the workings of natural forces began to be overhauled on an entirely new scale. Intelligence developed rapidly as exceptionally bold individuals came to have their suspicions of simple, spontaneous, and ancient ways of looking at things. Ultimately there came men who professed to doubt everything.

As Abelard long after put it, "By doubting we come to question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth." But man is by nature credulous. He is victimized by first impressions, from which he can only escape with great difficulty. He resents criticism of accepted and familiar ideas as he resents any unwelcome disturbance of routine. So criticism is against nature, for it conflicts with the smooth workings of our more primitive minds, those of the child and the savage.

It should not be forgotten that the Greek people were no exception in this matter. Anaxagoras and Aristotle were banished for thinking as they did; Euripides was an object of abhorrence to the conservative of his day, and Socrates was actually executed for his godless teachings. The Greek thinkers furnish the first instance of intellectual freedom, of the "self-detachment and self-abnegating vigor of criticism" which is most touchingly illustrated in the honest "know-nothingism" of Socrates. They discovered skepticism in the higher and proper significance of the word, and this was their supreme contribution to human thought.

One of the finest examples of early Greek skepticism was the discovery of Xenophanes that man created the gods in his own image. He looked about him, observed the current conceptions of the gods, compared those of different peoples, and reached the conclusion that the way in which a tribe pictured its gods was not the outcome of any knowledge of how they really looked and whether they had black eyes or blue, but was a reflection of the familiarly human. If the lions had gods they would have the shape of their worshipers.

No more fundamentally shocking revelation was ever made than this, for it shook the very foundations of religious belief. The home life on Olympus as described in Homer was too scandalous to escape the attention of the thoughtful, and no later Christian could have denounced the demoralizing influence of the current religious beliefs in hotter indignation than did Plato. To judge from the reflection of Greek thought which we find in Lucretius and Cicero, none of the primitive religious beliefs escaped mordant criticism.

The second great discovery of the Greek thinkers was metaphysics. They did not have the name, which originated long after in quite an absurd fashion,[18] but they reveled in the thing. Nowadays metaphysics is revered by some as our noblest effort to reach the highest truth, and scorned by others as the silliest of wild-goose chases. I am inclined to rate it, like smoking, as a highly gratifying indulgence to those who like it, and, as indulgences go, relatively innocent. The Greeks found that the mind could carry on an absorbing game with itself. We all engage in reveries and fantasies of a homely, everyday type, concerned with our desires or resentments, but the fantasy of the metaphysician busies itself with conceptions, abstractions, distinctions, hypotheses, postulates, and logical inferences. Having made certain postulates or hypotheses, he finds new conclusions, which he follows in a seemingly convincing manner. This gives him the delightful emotion of pursuing Truth, something as the simple man pursues a maiden. Only Truth is more elusive than the maiden and may continue to beckon her follower for long years, no matter how gray and doddering he may become.

Let me give two examples of metaphysical reasoning.[19] We have an idea of an omnipotent, all-good, and perfect being. We are incapable, knowing as we do only imperfect things, of framing such an idea for ourselves, so it must have been given us by the being himself. And perfection must include existence, so God must exist. This was good enough for Anselm and for Descartes, who went on to build a whole closely concatenated philosophical system on this foundation. To them the logic seemed irrefragable; to the modern student of comparative religion, even to Kant, himself a metaphysician, there was nothing whatsoever in it but an illustration of the native operations of a mind that has made a wholly gratuitous hypothesis and is victimized by an orderly series of spontaneous associations.

A second example of metaphysics may be found in the doctrines of the Eleatic philosophers, who early appeared in the Greek colonies on the coast of Italy, and thought hard about space and motion. Empty space seemed as good as nothing, and, as nothing could not be said to exist, space must be an illusion; and as motion implied space in which to take place, there could be no motion. So all things were really perfectly compact and at rest, and all our impressions of change were the illusions of the thoughtless and the simple-minded. Since one of the chief satisfactions of the metaphysicians is to get away from the welter of our mutable world into a realm of assurance, this doctrine exercised a great fascination over many minds. The Eleatic conviction of unchanging stability received a new form in Plato's doctrine of eternal "ideas", and later developed into the comforting conception of the "Absolute", in which logical and world-weary souls have sought refuge from the times of Plotinus to those of Josiah Royce.

But there was one group of Greek thinkers whose general notions of natural operations correspond in a striking manner to the conclusions of the most recent science. These were the Epicureans. Democritus was in no way a modern experimental scientist, but he met the Eleatic metaphysics with another set of speculative considerations which happened to be nearer what is now regarded as the truth than theirs. He rejected the Eleatic decisions against the reality of space and motion on the ground that, since motion obviously took place, the void must be a reality, even if the metaphysician could not conceive it. He hit upon the notion that all things were composed of minute, indestructible particles (or atoms) of fixed kinds. Given motion and sufficient time, these might by fortuitous concourse make all possible combinations. And it was one of these combinations which we call the world as we find it. For the atoms of various shapes were inherently capable of making up all material things, even the soul of man and the gods themselves. There was no permanence anywhere; all was no more than the shifting accidental and fleeting combinations of the permanent atoms of which the cosmos was composed. This doctrine was accepted by the noble Epicurus and his school and is delivered to us in the immortal poem of Lucretius "On the Nature of Things".

The Epicureans believed the gods to exist because, like Anselm and Descartes, they thought we had an innate idea of them. But the divine beings led a life of elegant ease and took no account of man; neither his supplications, nor his sweet-smelling sacrifices, nor his blasphemies, ever disturbed their calm. Moreover, the human soul was dissipated at death. So the Epicureans flattered themselves that they had delivered man from his two chief apprehensions, the fear of the gods and the fear of death. For, as Lucretius says, he who understands the real nature of things will see that both are the illusions of ignorance. Thus one school of Greek thinkers attained to a complete rejection of religious beliefs in the name of natural science.



9. INFLUENCE OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

In Plato we have at once the skepticism and the metaphysics of his contemporaries. He has had his followers down through the ages, some of whom carried his skepticism to its utmost bounds, while others availed themselves of his metaphysics to rear a system of arrogant mystical dogmatism. He put his speculations in the form of dialogues —ostensible discussions in the market place or the houses of philosophic Athenians. The Greek word for logic is dialectic, which really means "discussion". argumentation in the interest of fuller analysis, with the hope of more critical conclusions. The dialogues are the drama of his day, employed in Plato's magical hand as a vehicle of discursive reason. Of late we have in Ibsen, Shaw, Brieux, and Galsworthy the old expedient applied to the consideration of social perplexities and contradictions. The dialogue is indecisive in its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and systematic presentation, but exposes the intricacy of all important questions and the inevitable conflict of views, which may seem altogether irreconcilable. We much need to encourage and elaborate opportunities for profitable discussion to-day. We should revert to the dialectic of the Athenian agora and make it a chosen instrument for clarifying, co-ordinating and directing our co-operative thinking.

Plato's indecision and urbane fair-mindedness is called irony. Now irony is seriousness without solemnity. It assumes that man is a serio-comic animal, and that no treatment of his affairs can be appropriate which gives him a consistency and dignity which he does not possess. He is always a child and a savage. He is the victim of conflicting desires and hidden yearnings. He may talk like a sentimental idealist and act like a brute. The same person will devote anxious years to the invention of high explosives and then give his fortune to the promotion of peace. We devise the most exquisite machinery for blowing our neighbors to pieces and then display our highest skill and organization in trying to patch together such as offer hope of being mended. Our nature forbids us to make a definite choice between the machine gun and the Red Cross nurse. So we use the one to keep the other busy. Human thought and conduct can only be treated broadly and truly in a mood of tolerant irony. It belies the logical precision of the long-faced, humorless writer on politics and ethics, whose works rarely deal with man at all, but are a stupid form of metaphysics.

Plato made terms with the welter of things, but sought relief in the conception of supernal models, eternal in the heavens, after which all things were imperfectly fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of savage animism. It invited lesser minds than his to indulge in all sorts of noble vagueness and impertinent jargon which continue to curse our popular discussions of human affairs. He consecrated one of the chief foibles of the human mind and elevated it to a religion.

Ever since his time men have discussed the import of names. Are there such things as love, friendship, and honor, or are there only lovely things, friendly emotions in this individual and that, deeds which we may, according to our standards, pronounce honorable or dishonorable? If you believe in beauty, truth, and love as such you are a Platonist. If you believe that there are only individual instances and illustrations of various classified emotions and desires and acts, and that abstractions are only the inevitable categories of thought, you would in the Middle Ages have been called a "nominalist".

This matter merits a long discussion, but one can test any book or newspaper editorial at his leisure and see whether the writer puts you off with abstractions—Americanism, Bolshevism, public welfare, liberty, national honor, religion, morality, good taste, rights of man, science, reason, error—or, on the other hand, casts some light on actual human complications. I do not mean, of course, that we can get along without the use of abstract and general terms in our thinking and speaking, but we should be on our constant guard against viewing them as forces and attributing to them the vigor of personality. Animism is, as already explained, a pitfall which is always yawning before us and into which we are sure to plunge unless we are ever watchful. Platonism is its most amiable and complete disguise.

Previous to Aristotle, Greek thought had been wonderfully free and elastic. It had not settled into compartments or assumed an educational form which would secure its unrevised transmission from teacher to student. It was not gathered together in systematic treatises. Aristotle combined the supreme powers of an original and creative thinker with the impulses of a textbook writer. He loved order and classification. He supplied manuals of Ethics, Politics, Logic, Psychology, Physics, Metaphysics, Economics, Poetics, Zoology, Meteorology, Constitutional Law, and God only knows what not, for we do not have by any means all the things he wrote. And he was equally interested, and perhaps equally capable, in all the widely scattered fields in which he labored. And some of his manuals were so overwhelming in the conclusiveness of their reasoning, so all-embracing in their scope, that the mediaeval universities may be forgiven for having made them the sole basis of a liberal education and for imposing fines on those who ventured to differ from "The Philosopher". He seemed to know everything that could be known and to have ordered all earthly knowledge in an inspired codification which would stand the professors in good stead down to the day of judgment.

Aristotle combined an essentially metaphysical taste with a preternatural power of observation in dealing with the workings of nature. In spite of his inevitable mistakes, which became the curse of later docile generations, no other thinker of whom we have record can really compare with him in the distinction and variety of his achievements. It is not his fault that posterity used his works to hamper further progress and clarification. He is the father of book knowledge and the grandfather of the commentator.

After two or three hundred years of talking in the market place and of philosophic discussions prolonged until morning, such of the Greeks as were predisposed to speculation had thought all the thoughts and uttered all the criticisms of commonly accepted beliefs and of one another that could by any possibility occur to those who had little inclination to fare forth and extend their knowledge of the so-called realities of nature by painful and specialized research and examination. This is to me the chief reason why, except for some advances in mathematics, astronomy, geography, and the refinements of scholarship, the glorious period of the Greek mind is commonly and rightfully assumed to have come to an end about the time of Aristotle's death. Why did the Greeks not go on, as modern scientists have gone on, with vistas of the unachieved still ahead of them?

In the first place, Greek civilization was founded on slavery and a fixed condition of the industrial arts. The philosopher and scholar was estopped from fumbling with those everyday processes that were associated with the mean life of the slave and servant. Consequently there was no one to devise the practical apparatus by which alone profound and ever-increasing knowledge of natural operations is possible. The mechanical inventiveness of the Greeks was slight, and hence they never came upon the lens; they had no microscope to reveal the minute, no telescope to attract the remote; they never devised a mechanical timepiece, a thermometer, nor a barometer, to say nothing of cameras and spectroscopes. Archimedes, it is reported, disdained to make any record of his ingenious devices, for they were unworthy the noble profession of a philosopher. Such inventions as were made were usually either toys or of a heavy practical character. So the next great step forward in the extension of the human mind awaited the disappearance of slavery and the slowly dawning suspicion, and final repudiation, of the older metaphysics, which first became marked some three hundred years ago.

NOTES.

[18] When in the time of Cicero the long-hidden works of Aristotle were recovered and put into the hands of Andronicus of Rhodes to edit, he found certain fragments of highly abstruse speculation which he did not know what to do with. So he called them "addenda to the Physics"—Ta meta ta physica. These fragments, under the caption "Metaphysica", became the most revered of Aristotle's productions, his "First Philosophy", as the Scholastics were wont to call it.

[19] John Dewey deduces metaphysics from man's original reverie and then shows how in time it became a solemn form of rationalizing current habits and standards. Reconstruction in Philosophy, lectures i-ii. It is certainly surprising how few philosophical writers have ever reached other than perfectly commonplace conclusions in regard to practical "morality".

* * * * *

V

And God made the two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind: and it was so.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.—Gen. i.

Ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster est finis nisi pervenire ad regnum, cuius nullus est finis?—AUGUSTINE.



10. ORIGIN OF THE MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION

In the formation of what we may call our historical mind—namely, that modification of our animal and primitive outlook which has been produced by men of exceptional intellectual venturesomeness—the Greeks played a great part. We have seen how the Greek thinkers introduced for the first time highly subtle and critical ways of scrutinizing old beliefs, and, how they disabused their minds of many an ancient and naive mistake. But our current ways of thinking are not derived directly from the Greeks; we are separated from them by the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. When we think of Athens we think of the Parthenon and its frieze, of Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, of urbanity and clarity and moderation in all things. When we think of the Middle Ages we find ourselves in a world of monks, martyrs, and miracles, of popes and emperors, of knights and ladies; we remember Gregory the Great, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas —and very little do these reminiscences have in common with those of Hellas.

It was indeed a different world, with quite different fundamental presuppositions. Marvelous as were the achievements of the Greeks in art and literature, and ingenious as they were in new and varied combinations of ideas, they paid too little attention to the common things of the world to devise the necessary means of penetrating its mysteries. They failed to come upon the lynx-eyed lens, or other instruments of modern investigation, and thus never gained a godlike vision of the remote and the minute. Their critical thought was consequently not grounded in experimental or applied science, and without that the western world was unable to advance or even long maintain their high standards of criticism.

After the Hellenes were absorbed into the vast Roman Empire critical thought and creative intelligence—rare and precarious things at best—began to decline, at first slowly and then with fatal rapidity and completeness. Moreover, new and highly uncritical beliefs and modes of thought became popular. They came from the Near East —Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor—and largely supplanted the critical traditions of the great schools of Greek philosophy. The Stoic and Epicurean dogmas had lost their freshness. The Greek thinkers had all agreed in looking for salvation through intelligence and knowledge. But eloquent leaders arose to reveal a new salvation, and over the portal of truth they erased the word "Reason" and wrote "Faith" in its stead; and the people listened gladly to the new prophets, for it was necessary only to believe to be saved, and believing is far easier than thinking.

It was religious and mystical thought which, in contrast to the secular philosophy of the Greeks and the scientific thought of our own day, dominated the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.

Before considering this new phase through which the human mind was to pass it is necessary to guard against a common misapprehension in the use of the term "Middle Ages". Our historical textbooks usually include in that period the happenings between the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the voyages of Columbus or the opening of the Protestant revolt. To the student of intellectual history this is unfortunate, for the simple reason that almost all the ideas and even institutions of the Middle Ages, such as the church and monasticism and organized religious intolerance, really originated in the late Roman Empire. Moreover, the intellectual revolution which has ushered in the thought of our day did not get well under way until the seventeenth century. So one may say that medieval thought began long before the accepted beginning of the Middle Ages and persisted a century or so after they are ordinarily esteemed to have come to an end. We have to continue to employ the old expression for convenience' sake, but from the standpoint of the history of the European mind three periods should be distinguished, lying between ancient Greek thought as it was flourishing in Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome, and elsewhere at the opening of the Christian era, and the birth of modern science some sixteen hundred years later.

The first of these is the period of the Christian Fathers, culminating in the authoritative writings of Augustine, who died in 430. By this time a great part of the critical Greek books had disappeared in western Europe. As for pagan writers, one has difficulty in thinking of a single name (except that of Lucian) later than Juvenal, who had died nearly three hundred years before Augustine. Worldly knowledge was reduced to pitiful compendiums on which the mediaeval students were later to place great reliance. Scientific, literary, and historical information was scarcely to be had. The western world, so far as it thought at all, devoted its attention to religion and all manner of mystical ideas, old and new. As Harnack has so well said, the world was already intellectually bankrupt before the German invasions and their accompanying disorders plunged it into still deeper ignorance and mental obscurity.

The second, or "Dark Age", lasted with only slight improvement from Augustine to Abelard, about seven hundred years. The prosperous villas disappeared; towns vanished or shriveled up; libraries were burned or rotted away from neglect; schools were closed, to be reopened later here and there, after Charlemagne's educational edict, in an especially enterprising monastery or by some exceptional bishop who did not spend his whole time in fighting.

From about the year 1100 conditions began to be more and more favorable to the revival of intellectual ambition, a recovery of forgotten knowledge, and a gradual accumulation of new information and inventions unknown to the Greeks, or indeed to any previous civilization. The main presuppositions of this third period of the later Middle Ages go back, however, to the Roman Empire. They had been formulated by the Church Fathers, transmitted through the Dark Age, and were now elaborated by the professors in the newly established universities under the influence of Aristotle's recovered works and built up into a majestic intellectual structure known as Scholasticism. On these mediaeval university professors—the schoolmen—Lord Bacon long ago pronounced a judgment that may well stand to-day. "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time [they], did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books."

Our civilization and the human mind, critical and uncritical, as we now find it in our western world, is a direct and uninterrupted outgrowth of the civilization and thought of the later Middle Ages. Very gradually only did peculiarly free and audacious individual thinkers escape from this or that mediaeval belief, until in our own day some few have come to reject practically all the presuppositions on which the Scholastic system was reared. But the great mass of Christian believers, whether Catholic or Protestant, still professedly or implicitly adhere to the assumptions of the Middle Ages, at least in all matters in which religious or moral sanctions are concerned. It is true that outside the Catholic clergy the term "mediaeval" is often used in a sense of disparagement, but that should not blind us to the fact that mediaeval presumptions, whether for better or worse, are still common. A few of the most fundamental of these presuppositions especially germane to our theme may be pointed out here.



11. OUR MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE

The Greeks and Romans had various theories of the origin of things, all vague and admittedly conjectural. But the Christians, relying upon the inspired account in the Bible, built their theories on information which they believed vouchsafed to them by God himself. Their whole conception of human history was based upon a far more fundamental and thorough supernaturalism than we find among the Greeks and Romans. The pagan philosophers reckoned with the gods, to be sure, but they never assumed that man's earthly life should turn entirely on what was to happen after death. This was in theory the sole preoccupation of the mediaeval Christian. Life here below was but a brief, if decisive, preliminary to the real life to come.

The mediaeval Christian was essentially more polytheistic than his pagan predecessors, for he pictured hierarchies of good and evil spirits who were ever aiding him to reach heaven or seducing him into the paths of sin and error. Miracles were of common occurrence and might be attributed either to God or the devil; the direct intervention of both good and evil spirits played a conspicuous part in the explanation of daily acts and motives.[20]

As a distinguished church historian has said, the God of the Middle Ages was a God of arbitrariness—the more arbitrary the more Godlike. By frequent interferences with the regular course of events he made his existence clear, reassured his children of his continued solicitude, and frustrated the plots of the Evil One. Not until the eighteenth century did any considerable number of thinkers revolt against this conception of the Deity and come to worship a God of orderliness who abode by his own laws.

The mediaeval thinkers all accepted without question what Santayana has strikingly described as the "Christian Epic". This included the general historical conceptions of how man came about, and how, in view of his origin and his past, he should conduct his life. The universe had come into being in less than a week, and man had originally been created in a state of perfection along with all other things—sun, moon, and stars, plants and animals. After a time the first human pair had yielded to temptation, transgressed God's commands, and been driven from the lovely garden in which he had placed them. So sin came into the world, and the offspring of the guilty pair were thereby contaminated and defiled from the womb.

In time the wickedness became such on the newly created earth that God resolved to blot out mankind, excepting only Noah's family, which was spared to repeople the earth after the Flood, but the unity of language that man had formerly possessed was lost. At the appointed time, preceded by many prophetic visions among the chosen people, God sent his Son to live the life of men on earth and become their Saviour by submitting to death. Thereafter, with the spread of the gospel, the struggle between the kingdom of God and that of the devil became the supreme conflict of history. It was to culminate in the Last Judgment, when the final separation of good and evil should take place and the blessed should ascend into the heavens to dwell with God forever, while the wicked sank to hell to writhe in endless torment.

This general account of man, his origin and fate, embraced in the Christian Epic, was notable for its precision, its divine authenticity, and the obstacles which its authority consequently presented to any revision in the light of increasing knowledge. The fundamental truths in regard to man were assumed to be established once and for all. The Greek thinkers had had little in the way of authority on which to build, and no inconsiderable number of them frankly confessed that they did not believe that such a thing could exist for the thoroughly sophisticated intelligence. But mediaeval philosophy and science were grounded wholly in authority. The mediaeval schoolmen turned aside from the hard path of skepticism, long searchings and investigation of actual phenomena, and confidently believed that they could find truth by the easy way of revelation and the elaboration of unquestioned dogmas.

This reliance on authority is a fundamental primitive trait. We have inherited it not only from our mediaeval forefathers, but, like them and through them, from long generations of prehistoric men. We all have a natural tendency to rely upon established beliefs and fixed institutions. This is an expression of our spontaneous confidence in everything that comes to us in an unquestioned form. As children we are subject to authority and cannot escape the control of existing opinion. We unconsciously absorb our ideas and views from the group in which we happen to live. What we see about us, what we are told, and what we read has to be received at its face value so long as there are no conflicts to arouse skepticism.

We are tremendously suggestible. Our mechanism is much better adapted to credulity than to questioning. All of us believe nearly all the time. Few doubt, and only now and then. The past exercises an almost irresistible fascination over us. As children we learn to look up to the old, and when we grow up we do not permit our poignant realization of elderly incapacity among our contemporaries to rouse suspicions of Moses, Isaiah, Confucius, or Aristotle. Their sayings come to us unquestioned; their remoteness makes inquiry into their competence impossible. We readily assume that they had sources of information and wisdom superior to the prophets of our own day.

During the Middle Ages reverence for authority, and for that particular form of authority which we may call the tyranny of the past, was dominant, but probably not more so than it had been in other societies and ages—in ancient Egypt, in China and India. Of the great sources of mediaeval authority, the Bible and the Church Fathers, the Roman and Church law, and the encyclopaedic writings of Aristotle, none continues nowadays to hold us in its old grip. Even the Bible, although nominally unquestioned among Roman Catholics and all the more orthodox Protestant sects, is rarely appealed to, as of old, in parliamentary debate or in discussions of social and economic questions. It is still a religious authority, but it no longer forms the basis of secular decisions.

The findings of modern science have shaken the hold of the sources of mediaeval authority, but they have done little as yet to loosen our inveterate habit of relying on the more insidious authority of current practice and belief. We still assume that received dogmas represent the secure conclusions of mankind, and that current institutions represent the approved results of much experiment in the past, which it would be worse than futile to repeat. One solemn remembrancer will cite as a warning the discreditable experience of the Greek cities in democracy; another, how the decline of "morality" and the disintegration of the family heralded the fall of Rome; another, the constant menace of mob rule as exemplified in the Reign of Terror. But to the student of history these alleged illustrations have little bearing on present conditions. He is struck, moreover, with the ease with which ancient misapprehensions are transmitted from generation to generation and with the difficulty of launching a newer and clearer and truer idea of anything. Bacon warns us that the multitude, "or the wisest for the multitude's sake", is in reality "ready to give passage rather to that which is popular and superficial than to that which is substantial and profound; for the truth is that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid".

It is very painful to most minds to admit that the past does not furnish us with reliable, permanent standards of conduct and of public policy. We resent the imputation that things are not going, on the whole, pretty well, and find excuses for turning our backs on disconcerting and puzzling facts. We are full of respectable fears and a general timidity in the face of conditions which we vaguely feel are escaping control in spite of our best efforts to prevent any thoroughgoing readjustment. We instinctively try to show that Mr. Keynes must surely be wrong about the Treaty of Versailles; that Mr. Gibbs must be perversely exaggerating the horrors of modern war; that Mr. Hobson certainly views the industrial crisis with unjustifiable pessimism; that "business as usual" cannot be that socially perverse and incredibly inexpedient thing Mr. Veblen shows it to be; that Mr. Robin's picture of Lenin can only be explained by a disguised sympathy for Bolshevism.

Yet, even if we could assume that traditional opinion is a fairly clear and reliable reflection of hard-earned experience, surely it should have less weight in our day and generation than in the past. For changes have overtaken mankind which have fundamentally altered the conditions in which we live, and which are revolutionizing the relations between individuals and classes and nations. Moreover, we must remember that knowledge has widened and deepened, so that, could any of us really catch up with the information of our own time, he would have little temptation to indulge the mediaeval habit of appealing to the authority of the past.

The Christian Epic did not have to rely for its perpetuation either on its intellectual plausibility or its traditional authority. During the Middle Ages there developed a vast and powerful religious State, the mediaeval Church, the real successor, as Hobbes pointed out, to the Roman Empire; and the Church with all its resources, including its control over "the secular arm" of kings and princes, was ready to defend the Christian beliefs against question and revision. To doubt the teachings of the Church was the supreme crime; it was treason against God himself, in comparison with which—to judge from mediaeval experts on heresy—murder was a minor offense.

We do not, however, inherit our present disposition to intolerance solely from the Middle Ages. As animals and children and savages, we are naively and unquestioningly intolerant. All divergence from the customary is suspicious and repugnant. It seems perverse, and readily suggests evil intentions. Indeed, so natural and spontaneous is intolerance that the question of freedom of speech and writing scarcely became a real issue before the seventeenth century. We have seen that some of the Greek thinkers were banished, or even executed, for their new ideas. The Roman officials, as well as the populace, pestered the early Christians, not so much for the substance of their views as because they were puritanical, refused the routine reverence to the gods, and prophesied the downfall of the State.

But with the firm establishment of Christianity edicts began to be issued by the Roman emperors making orthodox Christian belief the test of good citizenship. One who disagreed with the emperor and his religious advisers in regard to the relation of the three members of the Trinity was subject to prosecution. Heretical books were burned, the houses of heretics destroyed. So, organized mediaeval religious intolerance was, like so many other things, a heritage of the later Roman Empire, and was duly sanctioned in both the Theodosian and Justinian Codes. It was, however, with the Inquisition, beginning in the thirteenth century, that the intolerance of the Middle Ages reached its most perfect organization.

Heresy was looked upon as a contagious disease that must be checked at all costs. It did not matter that the heretic usually led a conspicuously blameless life, that he was arduous, did not swear, was emaciated with fasting and refused to participate in the vain recreations of his fellows. He was, indeed, overserious and took his religion too hard. This offensive parading as an angel of light was explained as the devil's camouflage. No one tried to find out what the heretic really thought or what were the merits of his divergent beliefs. Because he insisted on expressing his conception of God in slightly unfamiliar terms, the heretic was often branded as an atheist, just as to-day the Socialist is so often accused of being opposed to all government, when the real objection to him is that he believes in too much government. It was sufficient to classify a suspected heretic as an Albigensian, or Waldensian, or a member of some other heretical sect. There was no use in his trying to explain or justify; it was enough that he diverged.

There have been various explanations of mediaeval religious intolerance. Lecky, for example, thought that it was due to the theory of exclusive salvation; that, since there was only one way of getting to heaven, all should obviously be compelled to adopt it, for the saving of their souls from eternal torment. But one finds little solicitude for the damned in mediaeval writings. The public at large thought hell none too bad for one who revolted against God and Holy Church. No, the heretics were persecuted because heresy was, according to the notions of the time, a monstrous and unutterably wicked thing, and because their beliefs threatened the vested interests of that day.

We now realize more clearly than did Lecky that the Church was really a State in the Middle Ages, with its own laws and courts and prisons and regular taxation to which all were subject. It had all the interests and all the touchiness of a State, and more. The heretic was a traitor and a rebel. He thought that he could get along without the pope and bishops, and that he could well spare the ministrations of the orthodox priests and escape their exactions. He was the "anarchist", the "Red" of his time, who was undermining established authority, and, with the approval of all right-minded citizens, he was treated accordingly. For the mediaeval citizen no more conceived of a State in which the Church was not the dominating authority than we can conceive of a society in which the present political State may have been superseded by some other form of organization.

Yet the inconceivable has come to pass. Secular authority has superseded in nearly all matters the old ecclesiastical regime. What was the supreme issue of the Middle Ages—the distinction between the religious heretic and the orthodox—is the least of public questions now.

What, then, we may ask, has been the outcome of the old religious persecutions, of the trials, tortures, imprisonings, burnings, and massacres, culminating with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes? What did the Inquisition and the censorship, both so long unquestioned, accomplish? Did they succeed in defending the truth or "safeguarding" society? At any rate, conformity was not established. Nor did the Holy Roman Church maintain its monopoly, although it has survived, purified and freed from many an ancient abuse. In most countries of western Europe and in our own land one may now believe as he wishes, teach such religious views as appeal to him, and join with others who share his sympathies. "Atheism" is still a shocking charge in many ears, but the atheist is no longer an outlaw. It has been demonstrated, in short, that religious dogma can be neglected in matters of public concern and reduced to a question of private taste and preference.

This is an incredible revolution. But we have many reasons for suspecting that in a much shorter time than that which has elapsed since the Inquisition was founded, the present attempt to eliminate by force those who contemplate a fundamental reordering of social and economic relations will seem quite as inexpedient and hopeless as the Inquisition's effort to defend the monopoly of the mediaeval Church.

We can learn much from the past in regard to wrong ways of dealing with new ideas. As yet we have only old-fashioned and highly expensive modes of meeting the inevitable changes which are bound to take place. Repression has now and then enjoyed some temporary success, it is true, but in the main it has failed lamentably and produced only suffering and confusion. Much will depend on whether our purpose is to keep things as they are or to bring about readjustments designed to correct abuses and injustice in the present order. Do we believe, in other words, that truth is finally established and that we have only to defend it, or that it is still in the making? Do we believe in what is commonly called progress, or do we think of that as belonging only to the past? Have we, on the whole, arrived, or are we only on the way, or mayhap just starting?

In the Middle Ages, even in the times of the Greeks and Romans, there was little or no conception of progress as the word is now used. There could doubtless be improvement in detail. Men could be wiser and better or more ignorant and perverse. But the assumption was that in general the social, economic, and religious order was fairly standardized.

This was especially true in the Middle Ages. During these centuries men's single objective was the assurance of heaven and escape from hell. Life was an angry river into which men were cast. Demons were on every hand to drag them down. The only aim could be, with God's help, to reach the celestial shore. There was no time to consider whether the river might be made less dangerous by concerted effort, through the deflection of its torrents and the removal of its sharpest rocks. No one thought that human efforts should be directed to making the lot of humanity progressively better by intelligent reforms in the light of advancing knowledge.

The world was a place to escape from on the best terms possible. In our own day this mediaeval idea of a static society yields only grudgingly, and the notion of inevitable vital change is as yet far from assimilated. We confess it with our lips, but resist it in our hearts. We have learned as yet to respect only one class of fundamental innovators, those dedicated to natural science and its applications. The social innovator is still generally suspect.

To the mediaeval theologian, man was by nature vile. We have seen that, according to the Christian Epic, he was assoiled from birth with the primeval sin of his first parents, and began to darken his score with fresh offenses of his own as soon as he became intelligent enough to do so. An elaborate mechanism was supplied by the Church for washing away the original pollution and securing forgiveness for later sins. Indeed, this was ostensibly its main business.

We may still well ask, Is man by nature bad? And accordingly as we answer the question we either frame appropriate means for frustrating his evil tendencies or, if we see some promise in him, work for his freedom and bid him take advantage of it to make himself and others happy. So far as I know, Charron, a friend of Montaigne, was one of the first to say a good word for man's animal nature, and a hundred years later the amiable Shaftesbury pointed out some honestly gentlemanly traits in the species. To the modern student of biology and anthropology man is neither good nor bad. There is no longer any "mystery of evil". But the mediaeval notion of sin—a term heavy with mysticism and deserving of careful scrutiny by every thoughtful person—still confuses us.

Of man's impulses, the one which played the greatest part in mediaeval thoughts of sin and in the monastic ordering of life was the sexual. The presuppositions of the Middle Ages in the matter of the relations of men and women have been carried over to our own day. As compared with many of the ideas which we have inherited from the past, they are of comparatively recent origin. The Greeks and Romans were, on the whole, primitive and uncritical in their view of sex. The philosophers do not seem to have speculated on sex, although there was evidently some talk in Athens of women's rights. The movement is satirized by Aristophanes, and later Plato showed a willingness in The Republic to impeach the current notions of the family and women's position in general.

But there are few traces of our ideas of sexual "purity" in the classical writers. To the Stoic philosopher, and to other thoughtful elderly people, sexual indulgence was deemed a low order of pleasure and one best carefully controlled in the interests of peace of mind. But with the incoming of Christianity an essentially new attitude developed, which is still, consciously or unconsciously, that of most people to-day.

St. Augustine, who had led a free life as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage and Rome, came in his later years to believe, as he struggled to overcome his youthful temptations, that sexual desire was the most devilish of man's enemies and the chief sign of his degradation. He could imagine no such unruly urgence in man's perfect estate, when Adam and Eve still dwelt in Paradise. But with man's fall sexual desire appeared as the sign and seal of human debasement. This theory is poignantly set forth in Augustine's City of God. He furnished therein a philosophy for the monks, and doubtless his fourteenth book was well thumbed by those who were wont to ponder somewhat wistfully on one of the sins they had fled the world to escape.

Christian monasticism was spreading in western Europe in Augustine's time, and the monkist vows included "chastity". There followed a long struggle to force the whole priesthood to adopt a celibate life, and this finally succeeded so far as repeated decrees of the Church could effect it. Marriage was proper for the laity, but both the monastic and secular clergy aspired to a superior holiness which should banish all thoughts of fervent earthly love. Thus a highly unnatural life was accepted by men and women of the most varied temperament and often with slight success.

The result of Augustine's theories and of the efforts to frustrate one of man's most vehement impulses was to give sex a conscious importance it had never possessed before. The devil was thrust out of the door only to come in at all the windows. In due time the Protestant sects abolished monasteries, and the Catholic countries later followed their example. The Protestant clergy were permitted to marry, and the old asceticism has visibly declined. But it has done much to determine our whole attitude toward sex, and there is no class of questions still so difficult to discuss with full honesty or to deal with critically and with an open mind as those relating to the intimate relations of men and women.

No one familiar with mediaeval literature will, however, be inclined to accuse its authors of prudishness. Nevertheless, modern prudishness, as it prevails especially in England and the United States—our squeamish and shamefaced reluctance to recognize and deal frankly with the facts and problems of sex—is clearly an outgrowth of the mediaeval attitude which looked on sexual impulse as of evil origin and a sign of man's degradation. Modern psychologists have shown that prudishness is not always an indication of exceptional purity, but rather the reverse. It is often a disguise thrown over repressed sexual interest and sexual preoccupations. It appears to be decreasing among the better educated of the younger generation. The study of biology, and especially of embryology, is an easy and simple way of disintegrating the "impurity complex". "Purity" in the sense of ignorance and suppressed curiosity is a highly dangerous state of mind. And such purity in alliance with prudery and defensive hypocrisy makes any honest discussion or essential readjustment of our institutions and habits extremely difficult.

One of the greatest contrasts between mediaeval thinking and the more critical thought of to-day lies in the general conception of man's relation to the cosmos. To the medieval philosopher, as to the stupidest serf of the time, the world was made for man. All the heavenly bodies revolved about man's abode as their center. All creatures were made to assist or to try man. God and the devil were preoccupied with his fate, for had not God made him in his own image for his glory, and was not the devil intent on populating his own infernal kingdom? It was easy for those who had a poetic turn of mind to think of nature's workings as symbols for man's edification. The habits of the lion or the eagle yielded moral lessons or illustrated the divine scheme of salvation. Even the written word was to be valued, not for what it seemed to say, but for hidden allegories depicting man's struggles against evil and cheering him on his way.

This is a perennially appealing conception of things. It corresponds to primitive and inveterate tendencies in humanity and gratifies, under the guise of humility, our hungering for self-importance. The mediaeval thinker, however freely he might exercise his powers of logical analysis in rationalizing the Christian Epic, never permitted himself to question its general anthropocentric and mystical view of the world. The philosophic mystic assumes the role of a docile child. He feels that all vital truth transcends his powers of discovery. He looks to the Infinite and Eternal Mind to reveal it to him through the prophets of old, or in moments of ecstatic communion with the Divine Intelligence. To the mystic all that concerns our deeper needs transcends logic and defies analysis. In his estimate the human reason is a feeble rushlight which can at best cast a flickering and uncertain ray on the grosser concerns of life, but which only serves to intensify the darkness which surrounds the hidden truth of God.

In order that modern science might develop it is clear that a wholly new and opposed set of fundamental convictions had to be substituted for those of the Middle Ages. Man had to cultivate another kind of self-importance and a new and more profound humility. He had come to believe in his capacity to discover important truth through thoughtful examination of things about him, and he had to recognize, on the other hand, that the world did not seem to be made for him, but that humanity was apparently a curious incident in the universe, and its career a recent episode in cosmic history. He had to acquire a taste for the simplest possible and most thoroughgoing explanation of things. His whole mood had to change and impel him to reduce everything so far as possible to the commonplace.

This new view was inevitably fiercely attacked by the mystically disposed. They misunderstood it and berated its adherents and accused them of robbing man of all that was most precious in life. These, in turn, were goaded into bitterness and denounced their opponents as pig-headed obscurantists.

But we must, after all, come to terms in some way with the emotions underlying mysticism. They are very dear to us, and scientific knowledge will never form an adequate substitute for them. No one need fear that the supply of mystery will ever give out; but a great deal depends on our taste in mystery; that certainly needs refining. What disturbs the so-called rationalist in the mystic's attitude is his propensity to see mysteries where there are none and to fail to see those that we cannot possibly escape. In declaring that one is not a mystic, one makes no claim to be able to explain everything, nor does he maintain that all things are explicable in scientific terms.

Indeed, no thoughtful person will be likely to boast that he can fully explain anything. We have only to scrape the surface of our experiences to find fundamental mystery. And how, indeed, as descendants of an extinct race of primates, with a mind still in the early stages of accumulation, should we be in the way of reaching ultimate truth at any point? One may properly urge, however, that as sharp a distinction as possible be made between fictitious mysteries and the unavoidable ones which surround us on every side. How milk turned sour used to be a real mystery, now partially solved since the discovery of bacteria; how the witch flew up the chimney was a gratuitous mystery with which we need no longer trouble ourselves. A "live" wire would once have suggested magic; now it is at least partially explained by the doctrine of electrons.

It is the avowed purpose of scientific thought to reduce the number of mysteries, and its success has been marvelous, but it has by no means done its perfect work as yet. We have carried over far too much of mediaeval mysticism in our views of man and his duty toward himself and others.

We must now recall the method adopted by students of the natural sciences in breaking away from the standards and limitations of the mediaeval philosophers and establishing new standards of their own. They thus prepared the way for a revolution in human affairs in the midst of which we now find ourselves. As yet their type of thinking has not been applied on any considerable scale to the solution of social problems. By learning to understand and appreciate the scientific frame of mind as a historical victory won against extraordinary odds, we may be encouraged to cultivate and popularize a similar attitude toward the study of man himself.

NOTES.

[20] St. Ethelred, returning from a pious visit to Citeaux in the days of Henry II, encountered a great storm when he reached the Channel. He asked himself what he had done to be thus delayed, and suddenly thought that he had failed to fulfill a promise to write a poem on St. Cuthbert. When he had completed this, "wonderful to say, the sea ceased to rage and became tranquil".—Surtees Society Publications, i, p. 177.

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VI

Narrabo igitur primo opera artis et naturae miranda.... ut videatur quod omnis magica potestas sit inferior his operibus et indigna. —ROGER BACON.

I do not endeavor either by triumphs of confutation, or pleadings of antiquity, or assumption of authority, or even, by the veil of obscurity, to invest these inventions of mine with any majesty.... I have not sought nor do I seek either to force or ensnare men's judgments, but I lead them to things themselves and the concordances of things, that they may see for themselves what they have, what they can dispute, what they can add and contribute to the common stock.—FRANCIS BACON (Preface to the Great Instauration).



12. THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

At the opening of the seventeenth century a man of letters, of sufficient genius to be suspected by some of having written the plays of Shakespeare, directed his distinguished literary ability to the promotion and exaltation of natural science. Lord Bacon was the chief herald of that habit of scientific and critical thought which has played so novel and all-important a part in the making of the modern mind. When but twenty-two years old he was already sketching out a work which he planned to call Temporis Partus Maximus (The Greatest Thing Ever). He felt that he had discovered why the human mind, enmeshed in mediaeval metaphysics and indifferent to natural phenomena, had hitherto been a stunted and ineffective thing, and how it might be so nurtured and guided as to gain undreamed of strength and vigor.

And never has there been a man better equipped with literary gifts to preach a new gospel than Francis Bacon. He spent years in devising eloquent and ingenious ways of delivering learning from the "discredits and disgraces" of the past, and in exhorting man to explore the realms of nature for his delight and profit. He never wearied of trumpeting forth the glories of the new knowledge which would come with the study of common things and the profitable uses to which it might be put in relieving man's estate. He impeached the mediaeval schoolmen for spinning out endless cobwebs of learning, remarkable for their fineness, but of no substance or spirit. He urged the learned to come out of their cells, study the creations of God, and build upon what they discovered a new and true philosophy.

Even in his own day students of natural phenomena had begun to carry out Bacon's general program with striking effects. While he was urging men to cease "tumbling up and down in their own reason and conceits" and to spell out, and so by degrees to learn to read, the volume of God's works, Galileo had already begun the reading and had found out that the Aristotelian physics ran counter to the facts; that a body once in motion will continue to move forever in a straight line unless it be stopped or deflected. Studying the sky through his newly invented telescope, he beheld the sun spots and noted the sun's revolution on its axis, the phases of Venus, and the satellites of Jupiter. These discoveries seemed to confirm the ideas advanced long before by Copernicus—the earth was not the center of the universe and the heavens were not perfect and unchanging. He dared to discuss these matters in the language of the people and was, as everyone knows, condemned by the Inquisition.

This preoccupation with natural phenomena and this refusal to accept the old, established theories until they had been verified by an investigation of common fact was a very novel thing. It introduced a fresh and momentous element into our intellectual heritage. We have recalled the mysticism, supernaturalism, and intolerance of the Middle Ages, their reliance on old books, and their indifference to everyday fact except as a sort of allegory for the edification of the Christian pilgrim. In the mediaeval universities the professors, or "schoolmen", devoted themselves to the elaborate formulation of Christian doctrine and the interpretation of Aristotle's works. It was a period of revived Greek metaphysics, adapted to prevailing religious presuppositions. Into this fettered world Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and others brought a new aspiration to promote investigation and honest, critical thinking about everyday things.

These founders of modern natural science realized that they would have to begin afresh. This was a bold resolve, but not so bold as must be that of the student of mankind to-day if he expects to free himself from the trammels of the past. Bacon pointed out that the old days were not those of mature knowledge, but of youthful human ignorance. "These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those we count ancient, ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves." In his New Atlantis he pictures an ideal State which concentrated its resources on systematic scientific research, with a view to applying new discoveries to the betterment of man's lot.

Descartes, who was a young man when Bacon was an old one, insisted on the necessity, if we proposed to seek the truth, of questioning everything at least once in our lives. To all these leaders in the development of modern science doubt, not faith, was the beginning of wisdom. They doubted—and with good reason—what the Greeks were supposed to have discovered; they doubted all the old books and all the university professors' lecture notes. They did not venture to doubt the Bible, but they eluded it in various ways. They set to work to find out exactly what happened under certain circumstances. They experimented individually and reported their discoveries to the scientific academies which began to come into existence.

As one follows the deliberations of these bodies it is pathetic to observe how little the learning of previous centuries, in spite of its imposing claims, had to contribute to a fruitful knowledge of common things. It required a century of hard work to establish the most elementary facts which would now be found in a child's book. How water and air act, how to measure time and temperature and atmospheric pressure, had to be discovered. The microscope revealed the complexity of organic tissues, the existence of minute creatures, vaguely called infusoria, and the strange inhabitants of the blood, the red and white corpuscles. The telescope put an end to the flattering assumption that the cosmos circled around man and the little ball he lives on.

Without a certain un-Greek, practical inventive tendency which, for reasons not easily to be discovered, first began to manifest itself in the thirteenth century, this progress would not have been possible. The new thinkers descended from the magisterial chair and patiently fussed with lenses, tubes, pulleys, and wheels, thus weaning themselves from the adoration of man's mind and understanding. They had to devise the machinery of investigation as investigation itself progressed.

Moreover, they did not confine themselves to the conventionally noble and elevated subjects of speculation. They addressed themselves to worms and ditch water in preference to metaphysical subtleties. They agreed with Bacon that the mean and even filthy things deserve study. All this was naturally scorned by the university professors, and the universities consequently played little or no part in the advance of natural science until the nineteenth century.

Nor were the moral leaders of mankind behind the intellectual in opposing the novel tendencies. The clergy did all they could to perpetuate the squalid belief in witchcraft, but found no place for experimental science in their scheme of learning, and judged it offensive to the Maker of all things. But their opposition could do no more than hamper the new scientific impulse, which was far too potent to be seriously checked.

So in one department of human thought—the investigation of natural processes—majestic progress has been made since the opening of the seventeenth century, with every promise of continued and startling advance. The new methods employed by students of natural science have resulted in the accumulation of a stupendous mass of information in regard to the material structure and operation of things, and the gradual way in which the earth and all its inhabitants have come into being. The nature and workings of atoms and molecules are being cleared up, and their relation to heat, light, and electricity established. The slow processes which have brought about the mountains and valleys, the seas and plains, have been exposed. The structure of the elementary cell can be studied under powerful lenses; its divisions, conjunctions, differentiation, and multiplication into the incredibly intricate substance of plants and animals can be traced.

In short, man is now in a position, for the first time in his history, to have some really clear and accurate notion of the world in which he dwells and of the living creatures which surround him and with which he must come to terms. It would seem obvious that this fresh knowledge should enable him to direct his affairs more intelligently than his ancestors were able to do in their ignorance. He should be in a position to accommodate himself more and more successfully to the exigencies of an existence which he can understand more fully than any preceding generation, and he should aspire to deal more and more sagaciously with himself and his fellow-men.



13. HOW SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE HAS REVOLUTIONIZED THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE

But while our information in regard to man and the world is incalculably greater than that available a hundred, even fifty years ago, we must frankly admit that the knowledge is still so novel, so imperfectly assimilated, so inadequately co-ordinated, and so feebly and ineffectively presented to the great mass of men, that its direct effects upon human impulses and reasoning and outlook are as yet inconsiderable and disappointing. We might think in terms of molecules and atoms, but we rarely do. Few have any more knowledge of their own bodily operations than had their grandparents. The farmer's confidence in the phases of the moon gives way but slowly before recent discoveries in regard to the bacteria of the soil. Few who use the telephone, ride on electric cars, and carry a camera have even the mildest curiosity in regard to how these things work. It is only indirectly, through invention, that scientific knowledge touches our lives on every hand, modifying our environment, altering our daily habits, dislocating the anciently established order, and imposing the burden of constant adaptation on even the most ignorant and lethargic.

Unlike a great part of man's earlier thought, modern scientific knowledge and theory have not remained matter merely for academic discourse and learned books, but have provoked the invention of innumerable practical devices which surround us on every hand, and from which we can now scarce escape by land or sea. Thus while scientific knowledge has not greatly affected the thoughts of most of us, its influence in the promotion of modern invention has served to place us in a new setting or environment, the novel features of which it would be no small task to explain to one's great-great-grandfather, should he unexpectedly apply for up-to-date information. So even if modern scientific knowledge is as yet so imperfect and ill understood as to make it impossible for us to apply much of it directly and personally in our daily conduct, we nevertheless cannot neglect the urgent effects of scientific inventions, for they are constantly posing new problems of adjustment to us, and sometimes disposing of old ones.

Let us recall a few striking examples of the astonishing way in which what seemed in the beginning to be rather trivial inventions and devices have, with the improvements of modern science, profoundly altered the conditions of life.

Some centuries before the time of Bacon and Galileo four discoveries were made which, supplemented and elaborated by later insight and ingenuity, may be said to underlie our modern civilization. A writer of the time of Henry II of England reports that sailors when caught in fog or darkness were wont to touch a needle to a bit of magnetic iron. The needle would then, it had been found, whirl around in a circle and come to rest pointing north. On this tiny index the vast extension of modern commerce and imperialism rests.

That lentil-shaped bits of glass would magnify objects was known before the end of the thirteenth century, and from that little fact have come microscopes, telescopes, spectroscopes, and cameras; and from these in turn has come a great part of our present knowledge of natural processes in men, animals, and plants and our comprehension of the cosmos at large.

Gunpowder began to be used a few decades after the lens was discovered; it and its terrible descendants have changed the whole problem of human warfare and of the public defense.

The printing press, originally a homely scheme for saving the labor of the copyist, has not only made modern democracy and nationality possible, but has helped by the extension of education to undermine the ancient foundations upon which human industry has rested from the beginnings of civilization.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the steam engine began to supplant the muscular power of men and animals, which had theretofore been only feebly supplemented by windmills and water wheels. And now we use steam and gas engines and water power to generate potent electric currents which do their work far from the source of supply. Mechanical ingenuity has utilized all this undreamed-of energy in innumerable novel ways for producing old and new commodities in tremendous quantities and distributing them with incredible rapidity throughout the earth.