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Page 44
So the second problem of the preacher is clear. Man asserts his
potential independence of the natural law. But to realize that, he
must bridge the gulf between himself and the supernatural lawgiver
to whose dictates he confesses he is subject. He is not free from the
bondage of the lower, except through the bondage to the higher. Nor
can he live by that higher law unaided and alone. Here we strike at
the root of humanism. Its kindly tolerance of the church is built
up on the proud conviction that we, with our distinctive doctrine of
salvation, are superfluous, hence sometimes disingenuous and always
negligible. The humanist believes that understanding takes the place
of faith. What men need is not to be redeemed from their sins, but to
be educated out of their follies.
But does right knowing in itself suffice to insure right doing?
Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of knowledge and
virtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way,
under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine.
Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence
and from external and social observation, would say that there was no
sadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of right
knowledge to secure right performance. Right knowledge is not in
itself right living. We have striking testimony on that point from one
of the greatest of all humanists, no less a person than Confucius.
"At seventy," he says, "I could follow what my heart desired without
transgressing the law of measure."[33] The implication of such
testimony makes no very good humanistic apologetic! Most of us, when
desire has failed, can manage to attain, unaided, the identification
of understanding and conduct, can climb to the poor heights of a
worn-out and withered continence. But one wonders a little whether,
then, the climbing seems to be worth while.
[Footnote 33: _Analects_, II, civ.]
But the doctrine usually begins by minimizing the free agency of
the individual, playing up the factors of compulsion, either of
circumstance or inheritance or of ignorance, as being in themselves
chiefly responsible for blameful acts. These are therefore considered
involuntary and certain to be reformed when man knows better and has
the corresponding strength of his knowledge. But Aristotle, who deals
with this Socratic doctrine in the third book of the _Ethics_, very
sensibly remarks, "It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong
actions upon external causes rather than upon the facility with which
we ourselves are caught by such causes, and, while we take credit for
our noble actions to ourselves, lay the blame of our shameful actions
upon pleasure."[34] "The facility with which we are caught"--there
is the religious understanding there is that perversion of will which
conspires with the perils and chances of the world so that together
they may undo the soul.
[Footnote 34: _Ethics_, Book III, ch. ii, p. 61.]
Of course, as Aristotle admits, there is this half truth lying at the
root of the Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge that every
vicious person is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to
abstain from doing in the sense that what he is about to do could
not be defended upon any ground of enlightened self-interest. And
so, while he finds sin sweet and evil pleasant, these are delusive
experiences, which, if he saw life steadily and whole, he would know
as such. But one reason for this ignorance is unwillingness to know.
Good men do evil, and understanding men sin, partly because they are
misled by false ideas, partly, also, because, knowing them false,
they cannot or will not give them up. This is what Goethe very well
understood when he said, "Most men prefer error to truth, because
truth imposes limitations and error does not."
And another reason is that when men do know, they find a deadly and
mysterious, a sort of perverted joy--a sweet and terrible and secret
delight,--in denying their own understanding. Thus right living calls
for a repeated and difficult exercise of the will, what Professor
Babbitt calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track that
knowledge indicates." Such moral mastery is not identical with moral
perception and most frequently is not its accompaniment, unless
observation and experience are alike fallacious. Thus the whole
argument falls to the ground when we confess that possession of
knowledge does not guarantee the application of it. Therefore the two
things, knowledge and virtue, according to universal experience, are
not identical. Humanists indeed use the word "knowledge" for the most
part in an esoteric sense. Knowledge is virtue in the sense that it
enables us to see virtue as excellent and desirable; it is not virtue
in the sense that it alone enables us to acquire it.
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