Part 2
When in 1783 the brothers Montgolfier ascended a mile above the earth in a balloon there was a thrill of excitement, as the spectators felt that the story of Dædalus had been taken from the world of romance into the world of fact. But, after all, the invention went only a little way in the direction of the navigation of the air. It is one thing to float, and another thing to steer a craft toward a desired haven. The balloon having been invented, the next and more difficult task was to make it dirigible. It was the same problem that had puzzled the inventors of primitive times who had discovered that, by making use of a proper log, they could be carried from place to place on the water. What the landing place should be was, however, a matter beyond their control. They had to trust to the current, which was occasionally favorable to them. In the first exhilaration over their discovery they were doubtless thankful enough to go down stream, even when their business called them up stream. At least they had the pleasant sensation of getting on. They were obeying the law of progress. The uneasy radical who wanted to progress in a predetermined direction must have seemed like a visionary. But the desire to go up stream and across stream and beyond sea persisted, and the log became a boat, and paddles and oars and rudder and sail and screw propeller were invented in answer to the ever increasing demand.
But the problem of the dirigibility of a boat, or of a balloon, is simplicity itself compared with the amazing complexity of the problems involved in producing a dirigible civilization. It falls under Bacon's category of "things which never yet have been performed." Heretofore civilizations have floated on the cosmic atmosphere. They have been carried about by mysterious currents till they could float no longer. Then their wreckage has furnished materials for history.
But all the time human ingenuity has been at work attacking the great problem. Thousands of little inventions have been made, by which we gain temporary control of some of the processes. We are coming to have a consciousness of human society as a whole, and of the possibility of directing its progress. It is not enough to satisfy the modern intellect to devise plans by which we may become more rich or more powerful. We must also tax our ingenuity to find ways for the equitable division of the wealth and the just use of power. We are no longer satisfied with increase in the vast unwieldy bulk of our possessions, we eagerly seek to direct them to definite ends. Even here in America we are beginning to feel that "progress" is not an end in itself. Whether it is desirable or not, depends on the direction of it. Our glee over the census reports is chastened. We are not so certain that it is a clear gain to have a million people live where a few thousand lived before. We insist on asking, How do they live? Are they happier, healthier, wiser? As a city becomes bigger, does it become a better place in which to rear children? If it does not, must not civic ambition seek to remedy the defect?
The author of Ecclesiastes made the gloomy comment upon the civilization of his own day: "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill." In so far as that is true to-day, things are working badly. It must be within our power to remedy such an absurd situation. We have to devise more efficient means for securing fair play, and for enforcing the rules of the game. We want to develop a better breed of men. In order to do so, we must make this the first consideration. In proportion as the end is clearly conceived and ardently desired, will the effective means be discovered and employed.
Why has the reign of peace and good-will upon the earth been so long delayed? We grow impatient to hear the bells
Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand.
The answer must be that "the valiant man and free" must, like every one else, learn his business before he can expect to have any measure of success. The kindlier hand must be skilled by long practice before it can direct the vast social mechanism.
The Fury in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" described the predicament in which the world has long found itself:--
The good want power but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want; worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill.
This is discouraging to the unimaginative mind, but the very confusion is a challenge to human intelligence. Here are all the materials for a more beautiful world. All that is needed is to find the proper combination. Goodness alone will not do the work. Goodness grown strong and wise by much experience is, as the man on the street would say, "quite a different proposition." Why not try it?
We may not live to see any dramatic entrance of the world upon "the thousand years of peace," but we are living in a time when men are rapidly learning the art of doing peacefully many things which once were done with infinite strife and confusion. We live in a time when intelligence is applied to the work of love. The children of light are less content than they once were to be outranked in sagacity by the children of this world. The result is that many things which once were the dreams of saints and sages have come within the field of practical business and practical politics. They are a part of the day's work. A person of active temperament may prefer to live in this stirring period, rather than to have his birth postponed to the millennium.
It is only the incorrigible doctrinaire who refuses to sympathize with the illogical processes by which the world is gradually being made better. With him it is the millennium or nothing. He will tolerate no indirect approach. He will give no credit for partial approximations. He insists on holding every one strictly to his first fault. There shall be no wriggling out of a false position, no gradual change in function, no adaptations of old tools to new uses.
In the next essay I shall have something to say about this way of looking at things. It would do no harm to stir up the doctrinaire assumptions with the bayonet-poker.
II
On Being a Doctrinaire
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The question is sometimes asked by those who devise tests of literary taste, "If you were cast upon a desert island and were allowed but one book, what book would you choose?"
If I were in such a predicament I should say to the pirate chief who was about to maroon me, "My dear sir, as this island seems, for the time being, to have been overlooked by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, I must ask the loan of a volume from your private library. And if it is convenient for you to allow me but one volume at a time, I pray that it may be the Unabridged Dictionary."
I should choose the Unabridged Dictionary, not only because it is big, but because it is mentally filling. One has the sense of rude plenty such as one gets from looking at the huge wheat elevators in Minneapolis. Here are the harvests of innumerable fields stored up in little space. There are not only vast multitudes of words, but each word means something, and each has a history of its own, and a family relation which it is interesting to trace.
But that which I should value most on my desert island would be the opportunity of acquainting myself with the fine distinctions which are made between different human qualities. It would seem that the Aggregate Mind which made the language is much cleverer than we usually suppose. The most minute differences are infallibly registered in tell-tale words. There are not only words denoting the obvious differences between the good and the bad, the false and the true, the beautiful and the ugly, but there are words which indicate the delicate shades of goodness and truth and beauty as they are curiously blended with variable quantities of badness and falseness and ugliness. There are not only words which tell what you are, but words which tell what you think you are, and what other people think you are, and what you think they are when you discover that they are thinking that you are something which you think you are not.
In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as "fail," but the dictionary makes up for this deficiency. It is particularly rich in words descriptive of our failures. As the procession of the virtues passes by, there are pseudo-virtues that tag on like the small boys who follow the circus. After Goodness come Goodiness and Goody-goodiness; we see Sanctity and Sanctimoniousness, Piety and Pietism, Grandeur and Grandiosity, Sentiment and Sentimentality. When we try to show off we invariably deceive ourselves, but usually we deceive nobody else. Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they give us credit for that.
A scholar has a considerable amount of sound learning, and he is afraid that his fellow citizens may not fully appreciate it. So in his conversation he allows his erudition to leak out, with the intent that the stranger should say, "What a modest, learned man he is, and what a pleasure it is to meet him." Only the stranger does not express himself in that way, but says, "What an admirable pedant he is, to be sure." Pedantry is a well-recognized compound, two thirds sound learning and one third harmless vanity.
Sometimes on the street you see a man whom you take for an old acquaintance. You approach with outstretched hand and expectant countenance, but his stony glare of non-recognition gives you pause. The fact that he does not know you gives you time to perceive that you do not know him and have never seen him before. A superficial resemblance has deceived you. In the dictionary you may find many instances of such mistakes in the moral realm.
One of the most common of these mistakes in identity is the confusion of the Idealist and the Doctrinaire. An idealist is defined as "one who pursues and dwells upon the ideal, a seeker after the highest beauty and good." A doctrinaire may do this also, but he is differentiated as "one who theorizes without sufficient regard for practical considerations, one who undertakes to explain things by a narrow theory or group of theories."
The Idealist is the kind of man we need. He is not satisfied with things as they are. He is one
Whose soul sees the perfect Which his eyes seek in vain.
If a more perfect society is to come, it must be through the efforts of persons capable of such visions. Our schools, churches, and all the institutions of a higher civilization have as their chief aim the production of just such personalities. But why are they not more successful? What becomes of the thousands of young idealists who each year set forth on the quest for the highest beauty and truth? Why do they tire so soon of the quest and sink into the ranks of the spiritually unemployed.
The answer is that many persons who set out to be idealists end by becoming doctrinaires. They identify the highest beauty and truth with their own theories. After that they make no further excursions into the unexplored regions of reality, for fear that they may discover their identification to have been incomplete.
The Doctrinaire is like a mason who has mixed his cement before he is ready to use it. When he is ready the cement has set, and he can't use it. It sticks together, but it won't stick to anything else. George Eliot describes such a predicament in her sketch of the Reverend Amos Barton. Mr. Barton's plans, she says, were, like his sermons, "admirably well conceived, had the state of the case been otherwise."
By eliminating the "state of the case," the Doctrinaire is enabled to live the simple life--intellectually and ethically. The trouble is that it is too simple. To his mind the question, "Is it true?" is never a disturbing one, nor does it lead to a troublesome investigation of matters of fact. His definition of truth has the virtue of perfect simplicity,--"A truth is that which has got itself believed by me." His thoughts form an exclusive club, and when a new idea applies for admission it is placed on the waiting list. A single black-ball from an old member is sufficient permanently to exclude it. When an idea is once in, it has a very pleasant time of it. All the opinions it meets with are clubable, and on good terms with one another. Whether any of them are related to any reality outside their own little circle would be a question that it would be impolite to ask. It would be like asking a correctly attired member who was punctilious in paying his club dues, whether he had also paid his tailor. To the Doctrinaire there seems something sordid and vulgar in the anxiety to make the two ends--theory and practice--meet. It seems to indicate that one is not intellectually in comfortable circumstances.
The Doctrinaire, when he has conceived certain ideals, is not content that they should be cast upon the actual world, to take their chances in the rough-and-tumble struggle for existence, proving their right to the kingdom by actually conquering it, inch by inch. He cannot endure such tedious delays. He must have the satisfaction of seeing his ideals instantly realized. The ideal life must be lived under ideal conditions. And so, for his private satisfaction, he creates for himself such a world into which he retires.
It is a world of natural law, as he understands natural law. There are no exceptions, no deviation from general principles, no shadings off, no fascinating obscurities, no rude practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no "east windows of divine surprise," no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. If something turns up for which he cannot find a place, he sends it to the junk shop.
When the Doctrinaire descends from the homogeneous world which he has constructed, into the actual world which, in the attempt to get itself made, is becoming more amazingly heterogeneous all the time, he is in high dudgeon. The existence of these varied contradictorinesses seems to him a personal affront.
It is as if a person had lived in a natural history museum, where every stuffed animal knew his place, and had his scientific name painted on the glass case. He is suddenly dropped into a tropical jungle where the animals act quite differently. The tigers won't "stay put," and are liable to turn up just when he doesn't want to see them.
I should not object to his unpreparedness for the actual state of things if the Doctrinaire did not assume the airs of a superior person. He lays all the blame for the discrepancy between himself and the universe on the universe. He has the right key, only the miserable locks won't fit it. Having formed a very clear conception of the best possible world, he looks down patronizingly upon the commonplace people who are trying to make the best out of this imperfect world. Having large possessions in Utopia, he lives the care-free life of an absentee landlord. His praise is always for the dead, or for the yet unborn; when he looks on his contemporaries he takes a gloomy view. That any great man should be now alive, he considers a preposterous assumption. He treats greatness as if it were a disease to be determined only by post-mortem examination.
One of the earliest satires on the character of the Doctrinaire is to be found in the Book of Jonah. Jonah was a prophet by profession. He received a call to preach in the city of Nineveh, which he accepted after some hesitation. He denounced civic corruption and declared that in forty days the city would be destroyed. Having performed this professional duty, Jonah felt that there was nothing left for him but to await with pious resignation the fulfillment of his prophecy. But in this case the unexpected happened, the city repented and was saved. This was gall and wormwood to Jonah. His orderly mind was offended by the disarrangement of his schedule. What was the use of being a prophet if things did not turn out as he said? So we are told "it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry," Still he clung to the hope that, in the end, things might turn out badly enough to justify his public utterances. "Then Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city."
Poor grumpy old Jonah! Have we not sat under his preaching, and read his editorials, and pondered his books, full of solemn warnings of what will happen to us if we do not mend our ways? We have been deeply impressed, and in a great many respects we have mended our ways, and things have begun to go better. But Jonah takes no heed of our repentance. He is only thinking of those prophecies of his. Just in proportion as things begin to look up morally, he gets low in his mind and begins to despair of the Republic.
The trouble with Jonah is that he can see but one thing at a time, and see that only in one way. He cannot be made to appreciate the fact that "the world is full of a number of things," and that some of them are not half bad. When he sees a dangerous tendency he thinks that it will necessarily go on to its logical conclusion. He forgets that there is such a thing as the logic of events, which is different from the logical processes of a person who sits outside and prognosticates. There is one tendency which all tendencies have in common, that is, to develop counter tendencies.
There is, for example, a tendency on the part of the gypsy-moth caterpillar to destroy utterly the forests of the United States. But were I addressing a thoughtful company of these caterpillars I should urge them to look upon their own future with modest self-distrust. However well their programme looks upon paper, it cannot be carried out without opposition. Long before the last tree has been vanquished, the last of the gypsy moths may be fighting for its life against the enemies it has made.
The Doctrinaire is very quick at generalizing. This is greatly to his credit. One of the powers of the human mind on which we set great store is that of entertaining general ideas. This is where we think we have the advantage of the members of the brute creation. They have particular experiences which at the time are very exciting to them, but they have no abstract notions,--or, at least, no way of expressing them to us. We argue that if they really had these ideas they would have invented language long ago, and by this time would have had Unabridged Dictionaries of their own. But we humans do not have to be content with this hand-to-mouth way of thinking and feeling. When we see a hundred things that strike us as being more or less alike, we squeeze them together into one mental package, and give a single name to the whole lot. This is a great convenience and enables us to do our thinking on a large scale. By organizing our various impressions into a union, and inducing them to work together, we are enabled to do collective bargaining with the Universe.
If, for example, I were asked to tell what I think of the individuals inhabiting the United States, I should have to give it up. Assuming a round eighty million persons, all of whom it would be a pleasure to meet, there must be, at the lowest computation, seventy-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, three hundred and seventy-five people of whose characters I do not know enough to make my opinion of any value. Of the remaining fragment of the population, my knowledge is not so perfect as I would wish. As for the whole eighty million, suppose I had to give a single thought to each person, I have not enough cogitations to go around.
What we do is to stop the ruinous struggle of competing thoughts by recognizing a community of interests and forming a merger, under the collective term "American." Then all difficulties are minimized. Almost all our theorizing about human affairs is carried on by means of these symbols. Millions of different personalities are merged in one mental picture. We talk of a class even more readily than we talk of an individual.
This is all very well so long as we do not take these generalizations too seriously. The mistake of the Doctrinaire lies not in classifying people, but in treating an individual as if he could belong to only one class at a time. The fact is that each one of us belongs to a thousand classes. There are a great many ways of classifying human beings, and as in the case of the construction of tribal lays, "every single one of them is right," as far as it goes. You may classify people according to race, color, previous condition of servitude, height, weight, shape of their skulls, amount of their incomes, or their ability to write Latin verse. You may inquire whether they belong to the class that goes to church on Sunday, whether they are vaccinationists or anti-vaccinationists, whether they like problem plays, whether they are able to read a short passage from the Constitution of the United States, whether they have dyspepsia or nervous prostration or only think they have; or, if you will, you may make one sweeping division between the sheep and the goats, and divide mankind according to location, as did the good Boston lady who was accustomed to speak of those who lived out of sight of the Massachusetts State House as "New Yorkers and that kind of people."
Such divisions do no harm so long as you make enough of them. Those who are classed with the goats on one test question will turn up among the sheep when you change the subject. Your neighbor is a wild radical in theology, and you look upon him as a dangerous character. Try him on the tariff, and you find him conservative to a fault.