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Page 45
Who, indeed, that has ever lived in the far country does not know
that one factor in its fascination was a bittersweet awareness of the
folly, the inevitable disaster, of such alien surroundings. Who
also does not know that often when the whole will is set to identify
conduct with conviction, it may be, for all its passionate and bitter
sincerity, set in vain. In every hour of every day there are hundreds
of lives that battle honestly, but with decreasing spiritual forces,
with passion and temptation. Sometimes a life is driven by the fierce
gales of enticement, the swift currents of desire, right upon the
jagged rock of some great sin. Lives that have seemed strong and fair
go down every day, do they not, and shock us for a moment with their
irremediable catastrophe? And we must not forget that before they went
down, for many a month or even year they have been hard beset lives.
Before that final and complete ruin, they have been drifting and
struggling, driven and fighting, sin drawing nearer and nearer, their
fated lives urged on, the mind growing darker, the stars in their
souls going out, the steering of their own lives taken from their
hands. Then there has been the sense of the coming danger, the dark
presentiment of how it all must end when the "powers that tend the
soul to help it from the death that cannot die, and save it even in
extremes, begin to vex and plague it." There has been the dreadful
sense of life drifting toward a great crash, nearer and nearer to what
must be the wreck of all things. What does the humanist have to offer
to these men and women who know perfectly well where they are, and
what they are about, and where they would like to be, but who can't
get there and who are, today and every day, putting forth their last
and somber efforts, trying in vain to just keep clear of ruin until
the darkness and the helplessness shall lift and something or someone
shall give them peace!
Now, it is this defect in the will which automatically limits the
power of the intellect. It is this which the Socratic identification
ignores. So while we might readily grant that it is in the essential
nature of things that virtue and truth, wisdom and character,
understanding and goodness, are but two aspects of one thing, is it
not trifling with one of the most serious facts of human destiny
to interpret the truism to mean that, when a man knows that a
contemplated act is wrong or foolish or ugly, he is thereby restrained
from accomplishing it? Knowledge is not virtue in the sense that
mere reason or mere perception can control the will. And this is the
conclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says: "Some people
say that incontinence is impossible, if one has knowledge. It seems
to them strange, as it did to Socrates, that where knowledge exists in
man, something else should master it and drag it about like a slave.
Socrates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the existence of
incontinence, arguing that nobody with a conception of what was best
could act against it, and therefore, if he did so act, his action
must be due to ignorance." And then Aristotle adds, "The theory is
evidently at variance with the facts of experience."[35] Plato himself
exposes the theoretical nature of the assertion, its inhuman demand
upon the will, the superreasonableness which it expects but offers no
way of obtaining, when he says, "Every one will admit that a nature
having in perfection all the qualities which are required in a
philosopher is a rare plant seldom seen among men."[36]
[Footnote 35: _Ethics_, Book VII, ch. iii, pp. 206-207.]
[Footnote 36: _Republic_, VI, 491.]
It would be well if those people who are going about the world today
teaching social hygiene to adolescents (on the whole an admirable
thing to do) but proceeding on the assumption that when youth knows
what is right and what is wrong, and why it is right and why it is
wrong, and what are the consequences of right and wrong, that then,
_ipso facto_, youth will become chaste,--well if they would acquaint
themselves either with the ethics of Aristotle or with the Christian
doctrine of salvation. For if men think that knowledge by itself ever
yet produced virtue in eager and unsated lives, they are either knaves
or fools. They will find that knowledge uncontrolled by a purified
spirit and a reinforced will is already teaching men not how to
be good, but how to sin the more boldly with the better chance of
physical impunity. "Philosophy," says Black, "is a feeble antagonist
before passion, because it does not supply an adequate motive for the
conflict."[37] There were few men in the nineteenth century in whom
knowledge and virtue were more profoundly and completely joined than
in John Henry Newman. But did that subtle intellect suffice? could it
make the scholar into the saint? Hear his own words:
"O Holy Lord, who with the children three
Didst walk the piercing flame;
Help, in those trial hours which, save to Thee,
I dare not name;
Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart
Crumble to dust beneath the tempter's dart.
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