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Page 8
We begin, then, with the humanist. He is the man who ignores, as
unnecessary, any direct reference to, or connection with, ultimate or
supernatural values. He lives in a high but self-contained world. His
is man's universe. His law is the law of reasonable self-discipline,
founded on observation of nature and a respect for social values,
and buttressed by high human pride. He accepts the authority of the
collective experience of his generation or his race. He believes,
centrally, in the trustworthiness of human nature, in its group
capacity. Men, as a race, have intelligently observed and experimented
with both themselves and the world about them. Out of centuries of
critical reflection and sad and wise endeavor, they have evolved
certain criteria of experience. These summations could hardly be
called eternal laws but they are standards; they are the permits and
prohibitions for human life. Some of them affect personal conduct
and are moral standards; some of them affect civil government and are
political axioms; some of them affect production and distribution and
are economic laws; some of them affect social relationships. But in
every case the humanist has what is, in a sense, an objective because
a formal standard; he looks without himself as an individual, yet to
himself as a part of the composite experience and wisdom of his race,
for understanding and for guides. Thus the individual conforms to the
needs and wisdom of the group. Humanism, at its best, has something
heroic, unselfish, noble about it. Its votaries do not eat to their
liking nor drink to their thirst. They learn deep lessons almost
unconsciously; to conquer their desires, to make light of toil and
pain and discomfort; the true humanist is well aware that Spartan
discipline is incomparably superior to Greek accidence. This is what
one of the greatest of them, Goethe, meant when he said: "Anything
which emancipates the spirit without a corresponding growth in
self-mastery is pernicious."
All humanists then have two characteristics in common: first,
they assume that man is his own arbiter, has both the requisite
intelligence and the moral ability to control his own destiny;
secondly, they place the source and criterion of this power in
collective wisdom, not in individual vagary and not in divine
revelation. They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the
perfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that is
binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most significantly,
this authority is not rigid, complete, fixed. There is nothing
complete in the humanist's world. Experience accumulates and man's
knowledge grows; the expectation and joy in progress is a part of it;
man's code changes, emends, expands with his onward marching. But the
humanistic point of view assumes something relatively stable in life.
Hence our phrase that humanism gives us a classic, that is to say, a
simple and established standard.
It is to be observed that there is nothing in humanism thus defined
which need be incompatible with religion. It is not with its content
but its incompleteness that we quarrel. Indeed, in its assertion of
the trustworthiness of human experience, its faith in the dignity and
significance of man, its respect for the interests of the group, and
its conviction that man finds his true self only outside his immediate
physical person, beyond his material wants and desires, it is quite
genuinely a part of the religious understanding. But we shall have
occasion to observe that while much of this may be religious this is
not the whole of religion. For the note of universality is absent.
Humanism is essentially aristocratic. It is for a selected group that
it is practicable and it is a selected experience upon which it rests.
Its standards are esoteric rather than democratic. Yet it is hardly
necessary to point out the immense part which humanism, as thus
defined, is playing in present life.
But there is another law which, from remotest times, man has
followed whenever he dared. It is not the law of the group but of
the individual, not the law of civilization but of the jungle. "Most
men," says Aristotle, "would rather live in a disorderly than a sober
manner." He means that most men would rather consult and gratify their
immediate will, their nearest choices, their instantaneous desires,
than conform the moment to some regulated and considerate, some
comprehensive scheme of life and action. The life of unreason is their
desire; the experience whose bent is determined by every whim, the
expression which has no rational connection with the past and no
serious consideration for the future. This is of the very essence of
lawlessness because it is revolt against the normal sequence of law
and effect, in mind and conduct, in favor of untrammeled adventure.
Now this is naturalism or paganism as we often call it. Naturalism
is a perversion of that high instinct in mankind which issues in the
old concept of supernaturalism. The supernaturalist, of a former and
discredited type, believed that God violates the order of nature
for sublime ends; that He "breaks into" His own world, so to speak,
"revealing" Himself in prodigious, inexplicable, arbitrary ways. By a
sort of degradation of this notion, a perversion of this instinct, the
naturalist assumes that he can violate both the human and the divine
law for personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or indecent
or impious ways. The older supernaturalism exalts the individualism
of the Creator; naturalism the egotism of the creature. I make the
contrast not merely to excoriate naturalism, but to point out the
interdependence between man's apparently far-separated expressions
of his spirit, and how subtly misleading are our highly prized
distinctions, how dangerous sometimes that secondary mental power
which multiplies them. It sobers and clarifies human thinking a
little, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublime
and the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the
fool, the genius and the freak.
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