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Page 19
We ventured to say in the preceding chapter that, under the influences
of more than three centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidarity of
mankind is breaking down. For humanism makes an inhuman demand upon
the will; it minimizes the force of the subrational and it largely
ignores the superrational elements in human experience; it does not
answer enough questions. Indeed, it is frankly confessed, particularly
by students of the political and economic forces now working in
society, that the new freedom born in the Renaissance is, in some
grave sense, a failure. It destroyed what had been the common moral
authority of European civilization in its denial of the rule of the
church. But for nearly four centuries it has become increasingly clear
that it offered no adequate substitute for the supernatural moral and
religious order which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one of
the most enlightened and humane positivists of the last generation.
In his _Recollections_, published three years ago, there is a final
paragraph which runs as follows: "A painful interrogatory, I must
confess, emerges. Has not your school held the civilized world,
both old and new alike, in the hollow of their hand for two long
generations past? Is it quite clear that their influence has been
so much more potent than the gospel of the various churches?
_Circumspice_. Is not diplomacy, unkindly called by Voltaire the field
of lies, as able as ever it was to dupe governments and governed by
grand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and inexplicable purposes,
and turning the whole world over with blood and tears, to a strange
Witch's Sabbath?"[11] This is his conclusion of the whole matter.
[Footnote 11: _Recollections_: II, p. 366 ff.]
But while the reasons for the failure are not far to seek, it is worth
while for the preacher to dwell on them for a moment. In strongly
centered souls like a Morley or an Erasmus, humanism produces a
stoical endurance and a sublime self-confidence. But it tends, in
lesser spirits, to a restless arrogance. Hence, both those lower
elements in human nature, the nature and extent of whose force it
either cloaks or minimizes, and those imponderable and supersensuous
values which it tends to ignore and which are not ordinarily included
in its definition of experience, return to vex and plague it. Indeed
the worst foe of humanism has never been the religious view of the
world upon whose stored-up moral reserves of uncompromising doctrine
it has often half-consciously subsisted. Humanism has long profited
from the admitted truth that the moral restraints of an age that
possesses an authoritative and absolute belief survive for some time
after the doctrine itself has been rejected. What has revealed the
incompleteness of the humanistic position has been its constant
tendency to decline into naturalism; a tendency markedly accelerated
today. Hence, we find ourselves in a disintegrating and distracted
epoch. In 1912 Rudolph Eucken wrote: "The moral solidarity of mankind
is dissolved. Sects and parties are increasing; common estimates and
ideals keep slipping away from us; we understand one another less
and less. Even voluntary associations, that form of unity peculiar to
modern times, unite more in achievement than in disposition, bring men
together outwardly rather than inwardly. The danger is imminent that
the end may be _bellum omnium contra omnes_, a war of all against
all."[12]
[Footnote 12: _Harvard Theo. Rev._, vol. V, no. 3, p. 277.]
That disintegration is sufficiently advanced so that we can see the
direction it is taking and the principle that inspires it. Humanism
has at least the value of an objective standard in the sense that it
sets up criteria which are without the individual; it substitutes a
collective subjectivism, if we may use the term, for personal whim
and impulse. Thus it proclaims a classic standard of moderation in all
things, the golden mean of the Greeks, Confucius' and Gautama's law
of measure. It proposes to bring the primitive and sensual element in
man under critical control; to accomplish this it relies chiefly upon
its amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human nature. But
the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue was the product of a
personality distinguished, if we accept the dialogues of Plato, by
a perfect harmony of thought and feeling. Probably it is not wise to
build so important a rule upon so distinguished an exception!
But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. It likewise
proposes to rationalize those supersensuous needs and convictions
which lie in the imaginative, the intuitive ranges of experience.
The very proposal carries a denial of their value-in-themselves.
Its inevitable result in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. The
greatest of all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I venture
to ask about death," said a disciple to the sage. "While you do not
know life," replied he, "how can you know about death?"[13] Even more
typical of the humanistic attitude towards the distinctively religious
elements of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as: "To
give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting
spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them may be called wisdom."[13]
The precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in another
observation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were
... disorder and spiritual beings."[13] For the very elements of
experience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the world
where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces where
souls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to be
frightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannot
see life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith,
like Taoism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish beside
such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism is
inevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption
and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the
Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a like
manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which
men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one
hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism
on the other.
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