Part 14
Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity are fixed in a matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain jeers with reason at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on the Index all books which taught that the earth went round the sun; but really such action is not much worse than that of a man professing to write a book like this at the outset of the twentieth century who takes the attitude Mr. Chamberlain does toward the teaching of Darwin. The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of the fundamental truths concerning the solar system; and the attempt that Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a distinction between them is fantastic. Again, take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and Teutons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons who idealize humanity, or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and he says: “For this humanity about which man has philosophized to such an extent suffers from the serious defect that it does not exist at all. History reveals to us a great number of various human beings, but no such thing as humanity”; yet on this very page he attributes the history of the growth of our civilization to its “Teutonic” character, and he uses the word “Teuton” as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter a looseness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or revolutionist used the word “humanity.” All that he says in derision of such a forced use of the word “humanity” could with a much greater percentage of truthfulness be said as regards the words and ideas symbolized by Teutonism and Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed, as he uses them they amount to little more than expressions of his personal likes and dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to use the words continually coming to one’s mind in dealing with him, both brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to claim everything good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that they are Teutons; but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. The noted Italians in question, he states, were all of German origin, descended from the Germans who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. Now, of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be serious with himself, he must know perfectly well that even by the time of Dante seven or eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the other great Italians he mentions eight or ten centuries had passed, since the Germanic invasion. In other words, these great Italians were separated from the days of the Gothic and Lombard invasions by the distance which separates modern England from the Norman invasion; and his thesis has just about as much substance as would be contained in the statement that Wellington, Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in their several spheres because they were all pure-blood descendants of the motley crew that came in with William the Conqueror. The different ethnic elements which entered into the Italy of the seventh century were in complete solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been quite as impossible to trace them to their several original strains as nowadays to trace in the average Englishman the various strains of blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two incompatible things in the quickest possible succession if they happen to suit his philosophy of the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the tall, long-headed man of the north; although, because of some crank in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may have black as well as blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle Europe he usually condemns; but if his mind happens to run with approbation toward the Tyrolese, for instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans it is to which they belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He greatly admires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors to persuade himself that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but he does not like the teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject of good works (teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the way), and accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.
Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain’s ideas are true and noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the intolerance of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance of their Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they could not have done their great work if there had not been in their characters an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to accept their teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously capricious as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He glories in the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic peril--pure nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities stand on a par as regards any importance in their after effects. Perhaps his attitude toward Byron is more practically mischievous, or at least shows a much less desirable trait of character. He says that the personality of Byron “has something repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton, because we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,” which makes him “unsympathetic, un-Teutonic”; but he adds that Teutons do not object in the least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a proof of genuine race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal of duty with gross licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain says that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protestants, but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of the Gallican church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as these, and the haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least reference to its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it) to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of which he approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having any serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages which at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound, and at worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there are many pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide learning and wide literary and even scientific knowledge. There could be no more unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few books of such pretensions more ludicrously unsound; and yet it is a book which students and scholars, and men who, though neither students nor scholars, are yet deeply interested in life, must have on their book-shelves. Much the same criticism should be passed upon him that he himself passes upon John Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the Discovery of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but at whom he rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more than Papal pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but with the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize loosely, after the manner of Darwin’s successors in the ’70s and ’80s, upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr. Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best--the methods and modesty of such books as Sutherland’s “Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct”--and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness concerning problems which at present no one can more than imperfectly understand. He is unwise to follow Brougham’s example and make omniscience his foible.
Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of Christ’s teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account.
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.
This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned below[10] is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under the rather fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn. The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his revolt against sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the author advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for both individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the name of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking. He speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding in curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits. He fails to see that the line of separation between the school of Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is as sharp as that which distinguishes both of these schools from the apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly condemns. He sees that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It was the fact that Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies to bad extremes, and at the same time refused to be frightened out of supporting good policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that made them of such far-reaching usefulness.
[10] “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos Reyles. Translation from Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.
“Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.
“The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.
“Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M. Bernard.
“The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.
“William James.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science and Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into English by Jonathan Nield.
“Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell.
“The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By William James.
“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L. Pogson.
“From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.
“The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.
I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest type, both scientific and religious.
Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest. There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”
Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:
“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company. There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent to make, and finally the mob of the _sans-culottes_ rejoicing in the overthrow of law, order, and decency.”
This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr. Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny--physical, intellectual, spiritual--which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s to be published with the approval--as in his case--of the orthodox thought of the church to which the writer belongs.
The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the doctrine of evolution, although--quite rightly, and in true scientific spirit, by the way--he insists most strongly upon the fact that we are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He, of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically condemned.