CHAPTER VII

THIS UNBELIEVING WORLD

1. DORSEY

We have now to consider some of our minor misbehaviorists, and may as well begin with George A. Dorsey, Ph.D., former Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and author of “Why We Behave Like Human Beings.”

I would hate to be asked to analyze this book or to reduce its contents to an understandable outline. No matter what philosophy I attributed to it, I could be flatly contradicted by quotations from the book itself. Thus in one place he says, “Biologically, rape and the theft of a loaf of bread are natural behavior; celibacy and asceticism are crimes against nature.” And in another place he describes the courtship habits of various mammalia, showing that rape at least is by no means biologically natural even among the lower animals. The author is an eclectic, wandering freely through the pages of Darwin, Bergson, Dr. Watson and many others, picking and choosing what for the moment pleases his fancy, untroubled by the clashing of the various views which his staccato style records.

Dorsey, though he says nothing new, constructs a curious puzzle of inconsistencies, but Dr. Watson, I think, is the key. He even says that Dr. Watson read the last two chapters prior to their publication, which sounds like a claim that the great behaviorist approved of them. It would seem that he did not read them very carefully. Nevertheless, though marked by the bar-sinister, “Why We Behave Like Human Beings” is clearly a Watsonian child.

It begins, as do so many of our “thoughtful” books, with anatomy, physiology, biology, a long history of the lower forms of life, of the protozoa and the amœba and their kin, of the physical details of the human body, in embryo and out of it. The public thirst for facts of this sort is too great not to be taken advantage of by all who have psychological or philosophical axes to grind.

And having posed his facts, and duly mixed them with alleged facts, he proceeds in the time-honored manner to attribute to his own inferences the authority due only to the facts themselves. He also makes large use of the custom of speaking of alleged “mechanisms” in metaphorical terms, personifying them and thus making them “go” with an energy which they are not supposed to possess. Thus he lends a vividness as of life to what is in reality a picture of death. And having denied God in substance, he does not forget now and then to fling Him a kind word.

Man, we have been told, cannot by taking thought add a single cubit to his stature. Other creatures seem to be more fortunate, for we learn on page 66 that “some Primates experimented in fingers.” And on this same page “a lemur lost his second finger.” No, he did not advertise. He lost it on purpose, the way Freud lost the book his wife gave him when he was vexed at her. But in this case the object was to “give the thumb more grasping space.” And “some tried claws instead of nails.”

Thus are evolutionary processes given aims and wills of their own. As a mode of literary expression it would, of course, be proper enough did it not serve to smuggle into the argument a multitude of those vital things which the makers of such arguments are forever pretending to exclude. Could primates really “experiment” with their fingers the way a Curie can experiment with pitchblend, choosing, rejecting, moulding the very substance of themselves in accordance with some “purpose,” Darwin need not have troubled himself trying to discover how species originated. We would all know.

What Dorsey really feels behind his smoke-screen of rhetoric can be seen on page XIII of his Preface, where he says:

“As philosophy was moonshine before it began to investigate the elementary properties of matter and energy, so, I suspect, religion will be subject to quackery and hypocrisy until humanity itself becomes more human than human nature and religion itself ceases worrying about heaven and hell and devotes its energies to making this earth a paradise.”

That is, when religion ceases to deal with the supernatural it will cease to be subject to quackery and hypocrisy. Very likely. It would be difficult for either hypocrisy or quackery to attach itself to anything which had ceased to exist. How, then, is this earthly paradise to be brought about? Dorsey does not tell us in so many words. But he says that we may soon hope for the discovery of a method whereby the several hundred ova of the human female may be removed and fertilized outside of the body.

This method is already employed with fish in the modern hatchery. Its advantages are obvious. In the first place, we could almost do away with the necessity of raising males, or at least could let the surgeon see to it that few of them remained males. This would solve a great many social problems and release a lot of energy for industrial employment. As it is, millions of spermatozoa go to waste in every man. Also, the females, having furnished the ova, would no longer be females in any troublesome sense of the word. More saving. Nor should it be difficult to induce the Eugenics Society to superintend the whole business. Of course some will object that this is not a picture of a terrestrial paradise, that it looks more like some particularly repulsive corner of Hell which Dante forgot or forbore to describe. But such malcontents can be dealt with by removing their germ-plasm from the stream of our national life and refusing it a place in the government hatcheries. Progress of this sort need not be suffered to halt on account of the existence of a few persons not socially minded.

But how about philosophy? It was moonshine until it began to investigate the elementary properties of matter and energy, and elementary properties are ultimate properties. And religion will be subject to quackery and hypocrisy until it ceases worrying about ultimate properties and busies itself with making earth a paradise. So moonshine mixed with quackery and hypocrisy is the substance of those movements having other than a narrow, earthly aim. No coins are liable to be counterfeited save those which are honored at some bank outside of our humdrum sphere. And as science is supposed to be matter of fact and practical, quack scientists become unthinkable.

When, however, was it that philosophy left off being moonshine? It must have been some time ago, for even the ancient Greeks--to say nothing of the Hindus and Chinese--were eager to investigate the elementary properties of matter and energy. As they were in the habit of keeping their science a secret from the common man, we do not know how much science they had. But it is evident from their philosophy that they were always thinking about matter and energy. Their conclusions may sound quaint--though not quite so quaint today as a half-century ago--but it is certain that moonshine was largely mixed with observation until modern metaphysics, predominantly German, took the field. I cannot stop to prove this, but I refer Mr. Dorsey to any Story of Philosophy, even Will Durant’s. I also recommend that he read some good history of science, for he says on page 86: “Science knows nothing of the ultimate origin of the source of energy; it only accepts both facts [what facts?] and goes on with its business of trying to find out what matter is and what energy can do. In other words, the problem of the origin of life is locked up in the origin of matter and of energy.”

One often hears this allegation--that science goes on with its own business, leaving the problem of ultimate origin aside. Yet every major hypothesis which science has ever constructed is an attempt to account for this very ultimate origin--or primal origin, if you prefer. It could not be otherwise. How could science try “to find out what matter is” without at the same time trying to find out how matter originated? Neither matter nor energy is a fact, isolated and handed out on a plate for human use. Science must needs attempt to discover the nature of that with which it works. And the only way to explain a fact, let alone acquiring the power of producing phenomena at will, is by discovering a preceding or accompanying fact.

If we find the dead body of a man in the kitchen, and then find a knife sticking into his heart, the knife helps to explain the dead body. A bloody finger-print of the cook’s thumb helps further. If we then learn that the dead man had been the cook’s lover and that he had been flirting with the second-parlor maid, we have taken another step. But if we want to know how to prevent such incidents (or to bring them about, if that be our aim) we must go on and learn “Why We Behave Like Human Beings.” The very title of Mr. Dorsey’s book shows it to be a search for the ultimate. Does he wish us to understand that it is therefore unscientific moonshine?

But let him proceed with his personifications. “Nature,” he says,[146] “can mean anything.” Whether he is referring to the word “nature” or to the sum of things commonly called “nature” I do not know. When we were talking of primates, the thing nature appeared to mean a great deal, since it could experiment with fingers and weigh nails in the balance against claws. Or was the primate an independent experimenter, and not a part of nature? Dorsey goes on by speaking of a certain development as being “an amazing tribute to the persistence of nature,” and of a time when “nature” began to branch out on “new lines.” Clearly nature here is something with will, force and purpose.

He writes also of “the vertebrate idea,” as if it were an idea possessed by some backbone--in the days, too, when the only backbone in the world was a thread-like notochord, such as that of the amphioxus. So the idea was originally the notochord’s!

But through all this verbal debris something seems to shine like a skeleton through the dark, which it is not difficult to recognize as the _élan vital_ of Bergson--that God which nothing developed out of nothing, which _inheres_ in things of an origin as tenuous as its own and is determined to go somewhere but is by no means certain where--nor can the imagination of man picture how.

The motion pictures have accustomed us to demand a continuous stream of action, of facts or of what look like facts. Nothing but motion seems any longer to interest us. Probably we have fallen into the habit of ignoring all comment which may be made upon it. The danger is that the comment nevertheless may impress us, reaching our minds when our intelligence is off its guard, so that we end by mistaking comment for something else. We remember that we came upon it in company with facts; and are not conclusions, like men, to be judged by the company they keep?

Unfortunately, facts cannot choose their company, and may be mustered in to screen the nakedness of any theory whatsoever. To discover the _non-sequitur_, the disharmony between the facts and their evil companions, requires mental effort--and against mental effort, also, the movie has somewhat prejudiced us.

However, it does not require much mental effort to sift fact from fancy in Dorsey. “The drive for a mate,” he assures us,[147] “is backed by a sensori-motor mechanism which functions till the mate is secured.” But everybody knows that the mechanism in question does not continue to function until a mate is secured; lacking a mate (to say nothing of the possibility of sublimation), its force will eventually be drained away through other channels. He himself admits this a few lines later on. But first he must say (on this same page) that “the mate-impulse is driven by an unconscious mechanism, and not by any desire of offspring.”

Let it be granted that sex will function without desire of offspring--even in the face of a deadly dread of offspring. If it were not so, contraceptive methods would hardly have been invented to sterilize the sexual act. But how about this precious “mechanism” being unconscious? Does he mean that the mechanism itself is unconscious? Or that it acts without our being conscious of it? He leaves us in the dark, and we are driven to seek such light as our own experience may supply. And why does he leave us in the dark? Because, regarding us as mechanisms, he sees no difference between unconsciousness in ourselves and unconsciousness in the sex-glands and their accompanying organs!

So he leaves us with the biologically natural raper who is unconscious of his rapacity, or whose body is ignorant of its biological naturalness. We may take our choice of interpretations. To say that the knife is ignorant of the murder committed with it, and to say that the murderer is ignorant of the murder he commits with the knife, is therefore saying one and the same thing. Both knife and murderer are mechanisms. And so, it is to be hoped, is the murdered one. Unconsciousness on his part would certainly help murder to fall unnoticed into the procession of the biologically natural.

And now we turn to page 434 and learn that “as one calls the roll of the men who have rendered useful social service, one is impressed by the notion that most of them have succeeded not because but in spite of their training.” Here is the behaviorist, who calls in Dr. Watson to read his manuscript, delivering us suddenly hand and foot over to the hereditarians, to the eugenists--whom on other pages he professes to abhor. For it is utterly impossible to suppose that Dorsey means that the great succeed in spite of all circumstances through exercise of individual will inherited from nobody, and all their own.

Then, two pages further on, we come to the eternal question of woman’s sphere. “Freedom of movement is soon limited for girls. Some learn to skip the rope and play jackstones only under parental frowns.... And as for climbing trees, playing marbles, going off swimming, who ever heard of such a thing!”

I turn at once to the date line at the end of the preface, and learn with astonishment that it reads, “New York City, June 1, 1925.” So New York parents are frowning--at least some of them are--when their girls skip the rope or play jackstones. Or were in 1925. What changes must recently have taken place, or how the newspapers of the world must have lied about New York! But anyway, this looks like a whole-souled endorsement of the more modern way of bringing up girls and a condemnation of the ultra-conservatism of New York--unless Dorsey was thinking of the girls of Thibet and forgot to mention it.

He is still modern on page 439, where he says: “It is psychologically significant that children of both sexes are born with erogenous zones.... The sex-mechanism is inherently perfect at birth. The [interior] impulse for a mate appears later, at puberty. But the mechanism itself is so built into our structure that inaction is biologically abnormal. Yet we speak of ‘control’; and dose youth with endless formulæ.”

Let us, then, cease to speak of control--at least long enough to enquire into the meaning of these Dorsey adjectives. Here we have “psychologically” significant, and “biologically” abnormal, with the adverb “inherently” attached to the word perfect. (I also note, on page 103, that, “biologically,” immortality is a figure of speech.)

Does he mean that the erogenous zones are insignificant when viewed, say, from a social rather than a psychological standpoint? Does he mean to admit that their inaction is normal if we could once get away from whatever is implied by this ubiquitous biology of his? And who is to guess what is meant by a perfection which inheres in anything at birth?

To inhere, I believe, means to be fixed or to exist in something else; to be an essential part of; to be innate. At least my dictionary says it does. Now what is a perfection which inheres in a just-born erogenous zone? Does it mean that the zone is born ready to perform all its functions? But this is contrary to notorious fact. Or is the zone born imperfect, and permitted to use its inherent perfection only later? But we have just been told that inaction is biologically abnormal. If any meaning is to be supposed to inhere in words, Dorsey must here be trying to tell us that between the time of birth and the time of puberty, the erogenous zones should not be subjected to the biologically abnormal condition of inactivity.

And yet, on this same page, he continues: “What happens to the sex-response mechanism between birth and marriageable age? Biologically nothing; nothing is expected of it.” That is to say, biologically speaking, nothing is expected of the erogenous zones before puberty except that they shall endure the biologically abnormal condition of inaction. But perhaps “biologically nothing” means just nothing, and perhaps just nothing is the meaning of the whole passage. Let us hope so.

“Raise the standard of man’s morality!” he next admonishes us--we are now at pages 443 and 444. “But not by talk. Work will do it. Many a boy is so hard at work he has no further energy left. His sex-impulse is expended in life impulse activities.” Admirable! This is evidently biologically abnormal and in complete contradiction with what has gone before, but it is nevertheless good sense and capital ethics.

“Girls begin to find outlets for their energy in action, in sports and games, and in the broader affairs of life interests.” Admirable again. But what has become of the frowns of their jackstone-hating parents? And the next line reads: “All-night dances can dissipate a lot of energy for both sexes.” Readers who doubt the existence of this line are referred to the book, page 444. The all-night dance has at last found its place among the means recommended for curbing sexual precocity.

We skip a dozen pages, and read: “Until recently it was a woman-made world we lived in. The wife-mother was the center of the home.” This is refreshing. We have heard it so often said that until recently, when universal suffrage came to the rescue, this was a man-made world. Dorsey lays the blame on women, which is at least a change. But how came woman to make the world when it was the home and not the world which she was the center of? Be that as it may, “it was her interest to make [the home] a real center. It became a hive of industry and a swarm of children.” It certainly did. And we are back boosting the good old times again. Nor are they quite over yet, for “women generally married for love, as they do now if their mate-hunger is unimpaired.”

That flicker of partiality for sports and games for girls seems to have died out. Dorsey returns to conservatism. And the argument proceeds: “Now women have their ‘rights.’ In obtaining ‘rights’ she abdicated a throne: she no longer rules by divine right. The children that ‘bless the home’ are turned over to the nurse while mother presides at bridge.... All this, of course makes for ‘progress.’ But in our social progress we have acquired special schools where boys may learn to be pimps and girls to be prostitutes.”

This seems to me a little severe. But at least we are sure of Dorsey now. Girls used to be restrained, and he favors restraint. “Social conditions are changing, but the average American girl still approaches her majority fitted for no economically independent career. Brought up as a social parasite, it is her belief and the all-around understanding that marriage is her career.”

What does this mean? That marriage was a girl’s career was the all-around understanding in the days when the wife-mother was the center of a home that was a hive of industry and a swarm of children. And now we are asked to believe that girls still brought up with such ideas are social parasites. Was woman a parasite when she occupied the throne which some now have abdicated? This argument has gone insane. Girls must be brought up as social parasites or sent to schools for prostitutes. Are we in a woman-made world now, or in a man-made world? I confess that I do not know where we are. But I read on: “Many a mother nearly ‘dies of shame’ when Mamie bobs her hair and marches off in the garb of a girl scout. ‘Girls didn’t do such outlandish things in my day!’ They did not.” The jackstone-hating mother thus comes once more to the fore, and she believes that her girls are going to the devil in boy scout’s clothes with bobbed hair to the old swimming-hole. I hope those schools for prostitutes are not hard by.

The girls, too, come in for their meed of shame. For after saying harsh things of Freud, Dorsey first writes, “It is natural for the boy to pattern his reactions towards his mother after his father; for the girl to prefer her father,”--which seems to have been taken from The Complete Freudian--and then clenches the matter by adding: “These innocent tendencies may be shamed into permanent attachments, making it difficult for the boy or girl later to make perfect substitutions.”

Did Dr. Watson really read this chapter (it is the last in the book) and pass without remark the statement that a seeking-motion reflex like the foregoing may have a substituted stimulus built into it by _shame_? Or do he and Dorsey consider shame a pleasant emotion? No; we are here plainly in the presence of mother and father fixations, of the Œdipus complex--an innocent thing made dangerous and eternal by being driven into the unconscious mind by shame. And Dorsey believes in no unconscious mind, or in any other sort of mind. Usually he encloses the hateful word in quotation marks. But he says (on page 11), “We do not use the brains we have.” Is that the solution?

These are deep waters, so let us get back to our girl scouts. “For we have to learn anew what our stone-ax ancestors knew. Girls can be as ‘outlandish’ as boys! The girls themselves are just beginning to discover it.” Are they? Bless their hearts! Everybody else has always known it. What follows, however, is news. “Marriage behavior is in for further conditioning. The sex-complex may become simple again.”[148]

Dorsey’s attitude towards the woman question at last becomes clear. It is a return to the stone-age to which he hopefully looks forward--the stone age and the simple, unconditioned reflex of the erogenous zone stimulated by exterior contacts, with no inner-born, nonsensical, complex sentiments to render it biologically abnormal. We have finally re-established harmonious relations with the gut-reactions so much admired by Dr. Watson.

Dorsey says that he does not see how the Darwinian theory of evolution by means of the accumulation of minor variations through natural selection can have worked unless the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters be taken for a fact. Nevertheless he informs us[149] that “our ancestral primate was a small, warm-blooded, primitive mammal with forty-four teeth, four short legs, all alike, and feet with five toes armed with claws.” This forbear “lived on insects, fruit and nuts. Who was _its_ ancestor? Where did it get its mammæ?” he then asks. And he answers himself: “Circumstantial evidence points to a dog-toothed, low-browed, Tirassic reptile, called Cynodont.”

No, Dorsey has not become a convert to the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters. He does not much believe in heredity. Upon undivulged circumstantial evidence, however, he settles the moot question of human descent. And he calls his book a bit of “propaganda for _critical_ judgments.”

He settles also the problem of will.

“As for will, it is as free as air. And much more difficult to catch.”[150] The meaning here is itself a little difficult to catch. Nor is the following quite clear: “Our psychology is human, but our behavior is individual.” When did our psychology become human? It is welcome news. Our behavior has always been individual, of course. But Dorsey, as a behaviorist, should have said that it was the collectivity of our reaction-mass--which certainly cannot be either free, individual or human unless it is controlled by some psychic power.

[Illustration: DR. GEORGE A. DORSEY

“We do not use the brains we have”]

“Psychic power?” Dorsey exclaims. “I know what power is; I know what psyche is; I also know that knowledge may be power. But I can discover only one way to get knowledge into my head: through my sense perceptions. And only one way to get any power out of that knowledge: by inference, by reason.... When I want magic I go see Houdini.”

Good! But why, if reason can turn knowledge into power, go to Houdini for magic? Turning knowledge into power is real magic, glorious, white and true. It happens every day. Even Dorsey can lead us to the eternal verities, it seems. But he will not permit us long to remain even in their neighborhood. “We learn to think logically,” he declares, “just as we learn to speak correctly or to behave decently. I may think well, I may shave well ... who shall say? My way of thinking and my way of shaving are my own ways.... I may change both tomorrow; someone is always inventing new ways of adjustment, new ways of exciting human protoplasm to change its shaving soap. New thought also. Why not? We have new books, new scandals, new elements, new diseases, new razors, new glands, new logic.”[151]

“The point is that there is no thought without muscular or glandular activity. This is true whether the stomach thinks hunger, the dreamer thinks air-castles, the prisoner thinks freedom, or the maiden thinks of her lover. Thinking is a bodily act as coughing or scratching one’s head. During thinking energy is consumed, mechanism is involved.”[152]

Do you comprehend? The man who scratches his head has always been supposed to be thinking. Now we know that the scratching is the thinking--thinking is a bodily act. The rumbling of the bowels is thinking. The stomach thinks. Everything thinks but ourselves.

No wonder we have new thoughts when so many new thinkers come forward. New logic. My stomach may think that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to twenty-three right angles, or that a bite of mince pie is bigger than the whole pie. It is _my_ stomach. What it thinks is nobody’s business. And by tomorrow my stomach’s protoplasm may become so excited that it will think some other way.

I can see how we have new scandals at the same time that we have new books. But I don’t see how we are going to get back merely to the stone age by our new ways of thinking. They will certainly take us back much further than that. And I wonder what our physicians will say to the suggestion that our glands are new? They have been offered to us as new discoveries, but this Dorsey seems to hint that they may be new inventions. I “think” we might better have gone to see Houdini after all. For “rational conduct is a dream” on page 470, and on page 455 it is the only way of converting knowledge into power. Over this mystery I scratch my head in vain.

Then there is the Church.

“As a projector of unsocial behavior,” says Dorsey, “the so-called Christian Church, with its endless squabbles over forms, creeds and rituals, and its eternal betrayal of humanity, is not far behind.”[153] Not far behind what? Good form. For “good form is in the saddle; it is ruthless, it is mighty, and it does prevail. It is not founded on intelligence.”

I am glad that the Church has at least good form to keep it company. But I confess that I do not know what church is the “so-called Christian” one; whether it is Protestant or Catholic; nor what the real, honest-to-goodness Christian Church, if any, calls itself in Dorsey’s mind.

“Socially useful behavior is not more prevalent, because sociably fashionable behavior has a better lobby.”[154] Our Dorsey is now turning radical, for he goes on: “By Fashion I do not mean the, or a Four Hundred; I mean those in power of money and of government, our bosses; the people who are trying to make us buy their wares, join their club, vote their ticket, think their thoughts, and help them kill or cripple their enemies.” Radical and pacifist. But I had not heard that force was being used by anybody to make people join their clubs.

“What,” the now thoroughly aroused former professor of anthropology demands--page 473--“can be of less consequence to you than whether I _believe_ in this or that kind of a God, Savior, government or society? What is of consequence to you, to society, and to me, is what I do.”

Very true, Mr. Dorsey. And I for one apologize. But we were under the impression--seemingly mistaken--that your beliefs might, at times, influence your conduct, or even enable us to guess what, under given circumstances, you were likely to do before you actually did it and it was too late.

I hope I have not given the impression that Dorsey is unimportant. He--like the one who is to follow--is immensely important. He has a large and enthusiastic public. I have never seen the rationality of his argument seriously questioned in any periodical of general circulation. And that fact, perhaps, is the most important one of all.

2. THE BRAZEN BOUGH

Lewis Browne’s “This Believing World,” which ran through four large printings within the first four months of its existence, is an interesting example of the sort of reasoning that passes with a generation devoted to materialism, mechanism, humanism, monism and the newer psychologies, and yet is not quite ready to pay the consequences of its position or to abandon altogether the banner of the cause which it has deserted.

Browne is what may be termed an “admirer” of Jesus Christ. He treats him always with the utmost kindness, speaking of him[155] as “a gentle, loving, helpless youth ... the very incarnation of perfection,”--a perfection with which an “insistent pacifism” is soon included. “The spirit of Jesus,” it also appears, “was innately Jewish and puritanical.”[156] Moreover, “Jesus, one must remember ... like every other great Jewish prophet ... preached only ethics.”[157]

Thus the great fame of the Nazarene, which rests upon the idea not that He was the incarnation of perfection but the Incarnation of God, is sought to be preserved and appropriated by an eclectic modernism which denies the very basis of His title to supreme distinction. Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Paine are thought to have been a little crude in some of their anti-religious tirades. But they addressed a people that was at least familiar with its Bible. They never presupposed such childish ignorance of history and scripture as is everywhere taken for granted in “This Believing World.”

Browne, who naturally has small use for the Church of Rome, is sympathetic towards such leaders of the Reformation as Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. But not even Protestantism wins his unqualified approval. He says[158] that “Protestantism includes every type of religious thought,” and “only slowly, and with many pangs” is “shaking off the religion about Christ. Only slowly, very slowly, is it beating its way back to the religion of Jesus.”

This seems like a fairly clear thesis, uttered by one who has never read either the New Testament or the Old, and who consequently is able to look upon Christianity, or “the religion of Jesus” (i.e., the religion which he thinks was taught by Jesus), as an excellent system of human morality of which he has heard good report, and holds that it should not be confused with supernaturalism, or “the religion about Christ,” of which he has heard bad and understands has been invented somehow without historical warrant.

Were this all, I might pass him unmentioned. One cannot stop to complain of every popular author who speaks without information. But the total depravity of the Browne method of thinking, of argument, of logic--to employ such words in his connection; the illimitable naïveté with which he propounds mutually exclusive and antagonistic assumptions in that agreeable and easy-flowing style of his, positively cries out for remark. How he “gets by with it,” is more than I can understand. “This Believing World” is logical only in two particulars. It follows the same author’s short history of the Jews, entitled, “Stranger than Fiction”; and it is dedicated to H. G. Wells. Such substance as it has marks it as a less aureate branch sprung from Fraser’s “The Golden Bough.”

“In the beginning,” it begins, after certain preliminaries--we are now in fact on page 27,--“In the beginning was fear; and fear was in the heart of man.... Boulders toppled and broke his bones; diseases ate his flesh; death seemed ever ready to lay him low. And he, poor gibbering half-ape nursing his wound in some draughty cave, could only tremble.”

Is it necessary to remark that there is no evidence whatever pointing to this as the early state of man? That it is merely an assumption assumed to help along one particular theory of evolution, and is contradicted by those modern researches tending to show that savages, when actually degraded, are degenerate rather than primitive? Yet Browne illustrates his text with an original pen-and-ink sketch of this Missing Link. The drawing is extremely good and spirited. One only wishes it were a photograph. And he continues: “Since blows could not subdue the hostile rocks or streams [the rocks were hostile, evidently, because they supplied caves, and the streams because they supplied fish], our ancestor tried to subdue them with magic.... Self-preservation must have forced them to [the] certainty [that spells would work], for without it self-preservation would have been impossible. Man had to have faith in himself or die--and he would not die. So he had faith [in himself, you will note] and developed religion.”[159]

This is so vivid that it sounds like the description of an eye-witness. And he goes on in a no less certain tone: “By the word faith we mean that indispensable--and therefore imperishable--illusion in the heart of man that, though he may seem a mere worm on the earth, he nevertheless can make himself the lord of the universe. By the word religion, however, we mean one special technique by which man seeks to realize that illusion. It was by no means the first such technique to be invented by man; and it may not be the last, either. Long before man thought of religion, he tried to control the ‘powers’ of the universe by [this] magic.”[160]

Very well. Man, once half ape, has become, in seeming at least, a mere worm; but he entertains an indispensable and “therefore” imperishable illusion that he can make himself lord of the universe--certainly a strange conviction for either a worm or an ape to entertain. To support this illusion, he first invents magic, which is an attempt to coerce the “powers,” and then invents religion--which Browne later explains as an attempt to “cajole” the powers. Religion and magic are merely two different kinds of technic, each designed to fool the technician until by dint of fooling illusion becomes reality. The “powers” are not fooled because they are always enclosed in quotation marks, which I understand to indicate that they do not exist. What next?

“He [‘dawn man’] saw on every side of him the fell and bewildering ‘powers,’ and illogically but naturally his first concern was not how they worked but how they could be avoided.”[161]

We thus make our acquaintance with the Browne idea of “logic.” A logical dawn man would have waited to be devoured by the fell powers, imaginary or not, before trying to avoid them. Logic would have compelled him to understand before doing anything else. Fortunately for us, dawn man was illogical. He escaped extinction.

And so we read on, up to the beginning of the fifty-ninth page, becoming better and better acquainted with our ancestor all the while. The conviction grows that Browne was there. Then, suddenly, he tells us that, though he is aware that his narrative has made it seem “as though the writer knew for certain just what had happened ... actually he knows nothing of the sort. All he knows is what many learned anthropologists after much painstaking research, have _surmised_.” The italics are his own. “Of course,” thus begins page 60, “they may have surmised quite badly. Their underlying theory may be entirely wrong, and religion, instead of having been originally created to elude or conquer fear, may have arisen quite independently of it. Religion may be an altogether primal instinct in the human race--something just as old and fundamental and innate as fear itself. Who knows?”

As candor, this is flawless. But it is disturbing. If learned anthropologists, after much painstaking research, can be entirely wrong (and indeed a great many other learned anthropologists, after equally painstaking research, have time and time again declared these particular learned anthropologists to be wrong altogether) why cannot the learned anthropologists and biologists who furnished the data for the spirited pen-and-ink sketch of our gibbering, half-ape _aïeul_ be wrong as well? What if this surmising about monkeys and worms be as badly done as may be this surmising about religion? And what is the use of going on with all this if it be just a guess?

Shall we continue because it is stranger than fiction? But it is not in itself as interesting as is fiction. We were lured into reading by the idea that it was being presented as truth. And now we are haunted by the fear that it may be a blasphemous invention--that religion rather than this anthropology may have some truth in it.

So we skip “What Happened in India,” “What Happened in China,” “What Happened in Persia,” and “What Happened in Israel,” since, after all, it may never have happened; and turn to part seven, “What Happened in Europe.” Here, as near home as this, we ought to be on safe ground, with dependable historians instead of surmising anthropologists to act as guides. This is the portion of the book which deals with the Christian religion, in itself of more interest to most than are the Shebatum taboos, Taoism, or the heliotropisms of Zoroaster. What, then, did happen in Europe in the days when Christianity was born?

“The prologue of the story of that new religion opens in Galilee. Almost two thousand years ago there was born in the Galilean village of Nazareth, a Jewish child to whom was given the name of Joshua, or Jesus. We do not know for certain how the early years of this child [Browne adheres to the lower cases in all emergencies] were spent. The Gospels recount many legends concerning his conception, birth, and youth, but they are no more to be relied upon than the suspiciously similar legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster.”[162]

The anthropologists were only possibly wrong; but the Gospels recount legends, and Browne here does not say maybe. Neither does he say where he gets his information concerning the birthplace of Christ. Had he ever read even the first Gospel he would have learned that Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judæa. Perhaps our author referred himself only to his own stranger-than-fiction history of the Jews.

Anyway, he goes on to declare that this Child “cherished many of the primitive notions of the simple folk to whom he belonged, believing that disease and sometimes even death were caused by the presence of foul demons, and could be removed by prayer. He knew little if any Greek, and could never have even heard of Greek science or philosophy. All he knew was the Bible, and probably the text of that had been taught him only by rote.... Above all he must have been taught to prize as dearer than life the old obsession of his people that someday they would be miraculously freed by the Messiah. Indeed, so well was that last drilled into him that, as he matured, the hunger for the realization of the hope became his all consuming passion.”[163]

We now have One “who preached only ethics,” and yet cherished an all-consuming passion for the realization of the obsessive hope of His people that someday they would be miraculously freed by a Messiah.

If Browne will turn to another book with which he seems to be as unfamiliar as he is with the Bible, the dictionary, to wit, he will find ethics defined in some such manner as follows: “Ethics, the science that treats of the principles of human morality and duty; moral philosophy; morals.” An obsessive belief in miracles is something quite beyond ethics, either of a puritanically Jewish or any other variety. Nor do the cherished primitive notions of simple folk to the effect that diseases may be cured by prayer savor much of ethics. I do not of course mean that Christ had no ethics; but Browne has introduced Him to us as one who preached ethics only. Did He, then, keep his one “all consuming passion” out of his preaching?

This attempt to distinguish between “the religion _of_ Jesus” and the “religion _about_ Jesus,” is as old as modern ignorance of the subject. But Browne, given all the ignorance in the world, seems unable to state it without letting it sting itself to death with its own tail. And he goes on, still further to murder the dead body of his own philosophy: “Now ... there was in the land an evangelist ... called John the Baptizer.... Jesus was for a time a follower of John, one of a multitude of young Jews and Jewesses who believed in the mission of the wild prophet. His gospel was much like that of his teacher. ‘The time is fulfilled,’ he cried, ‘and the Kingdom of God is at hand.’”[164] That is, the new gospel was the messianic gospel of a wild prophet--and the “follower” who preached it preached only ethics!

And--“when the stories of that young preacher’s wandering [the reference is to Christ, not to John] were gathered together in later years and set down in writing, it was said that he performed all manner of miracles as he went about the land. Perhaps there is a fragment of truth in that tradition, for if people will only believe with sufficient faith, miracles become not at all impossible.... And Jesus could quite command implicit faith. He himself believed; with all his heart and soul he believed that soon would come the Great Release.... He spoke without the slightest flourish, using plain words and homely parables. He indulged in no philosophy or theology, for, after all, he was an untutored toiler who knew nothing of such vanities. Nor, seemingly, did he preach any inordinate heresies.”[165]

How does Browne know how He spoke? Surely he cannot be depending upon the “stories of that young preacher’s wanderings” that were “gathered together in later years and set down in writing,” for he has already told us that “they are no more to be relied on than the suspiciously similar legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster.” Again it seems to be suggested that Browne was there.

But this at least seems clear: Browne holds that Jesus preached “The Kingdom of God is at hand”; that it is not at all impossible that He performed miracles, though only of the faith-cure sort (I have insufficient space for the discussion of miracles as distinguished from faith-cures); and that He did not preach “any inordinate heresies” from the Jewish standpoint. “He was not a heretic in the sense that Ikhanaton or Zoroaster were heretics. Outwardly he was distinctly a conforming Jew.”[166]

“Yet [on the same page] for all his conformity ... Jesus was definitely a rebel.... His whole gospel was intended but to comfort the disinherited, for it declared that no matter how unlettered they might be they could nevertheless be taken into the Kingdom of God when it came.... Now such a gospel was literally saturated with heresy.”

Saturated with heresy, but not with inordinate heresy--is that it?

[Illustration: RABBI LEWIS BROWNE

Stranger than fiction]

“Because it [Christ’s gospel] denounced the rich and commanded them to divest themselves of all their possessions, it attacked the whole sacrificial cult.... A people without possessions could never possibly afford fat bullocks to burn or skins of oil to pour away.... Moreover, because this gospel minimized the importance of learning, and commanded men to keep merely the spirit of the law, it attacked the whole Rabbinical cult.”[167]

Again I wonder where Browne obtained these details without having recourse to “legends.” And so he goes on down to the bottom of the page, by which time this same gospel has become “charged with quite devastating heresy.” Devastating, but not inordinate!

If Browne’s mind works in this way, so presumably do the minds of his readers. Religion aside, not a few results may be expected from a “modern temper” of this sort--from the fact that there are in this Republic a large number of people incapable of being troubled by equivocations, by the glaring inconsistencies of flatly contradictory statements living at seeming peace in the midst of the same argument, or people incapable of remembering or too careless to remember more than one statement at a time.

This “modern temper” makes it possible for men and women who do not accept the supernatural character of Christ to beg His authority for their own notions, no matter how opposed those notions may be to what is said in the New Testament records. In interpreting a statute one is compelled by a rule of law to consider all its parts together. In interpreting the Bible one indulges in the habit of selecting here a jot and there a tittle. Those selected become authority. Those rejected become legendary by the very act of rejection even at the hand of caprice or lack of information.

Browne speaks, on page 268, of “the stupid and silly and gross extravagances,” the “pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that clog and confuse the Gospel accounts.” But the method for distinguishing the false from the true seems to be very simple. If a line of Scripture fits in with your preconceptions, it is wise and genuine. If not, it is either a forgery or the author was wrong. The principle of “the economy of hypotheses” is thus conserved.

It will be objected that this is what we do with any book, and that one who does not attribute divine authority either to the Bible or to the Church which promulgated it as canonical scripture, is guilty of no intellectual malpractice in using individual judgment.

But no ordinary book is treated in this way. An author whose good faith is impugned in one particular becomes a doubtful author. If he is convicted of one inaccuracy, his reputation for accuracy suffers to that extent. If his proofs have been carelessly read, one ceases to put much credence in individual words which possibly may be misprints. And if the book is suspected of being actually fraudulent in essential particulars, it ceases altogether to be of any documentary value except in so far as it be confirmed by other sources of information regarded as more trustworthy.

But our Brownes call the Gospels stupid, silly, grossly extravagant legends piously embellished with patent falsehoods--and then proceed to quote them (though it may be at second hand) as conclusive evidence where such quotation suits their purpose. Where quotation does not suit their purpose, they use paraphrase. If that won’t do, they rewrite entire passages as they claim they should have been written, creating doctrines out of whole cloth, which, whatever may be the nature of the weave, certainly bear no evidence of having come from a scriptural loom. Everywhere the gospel according to Browne claims to be the Gospel of Jesus. It seeks protection beneath the shadow of the Cross. Why?

It would seem that many who deny Christ’s divinity still regard Him with a sort of reverence, even a sort of fear. They would find it uncomfortable to think that they were not following His precepts. So they meet the admonitions of theologians with the allegation that said theologians have corrupted the intent of the sayings of this Great Teacher. These “individualists” are afraid to stand alone. They have ceased to follow the so-called “higher criticism.” It is apt to get too high. It has even been known to give aid and comfort to the theologians. The lower criticism, the no-criticism, is much easier.

Thus we have come to have a public which buys the books of the Brownes--men and women who have habituated their minds to a scorn of those rational processes which would tell them that certain assumptions entail certain consequences. They want to hunt with the hounds, and also to run with the hares. Browne’s masterpiece of dual allegiance, however, relates, as we shall see, not so much to the Carpenter as to the Apostle to the Gentiles. But he is not yet ready for that bit of double-dealing. He first must say:[168] “What really marked Jesus as one unlike any preacher who had come before him was not so much what he said, as the particular authority on which he said it.” (The particular authority of a preacher of ethics?) “Every other prophet had uttered his heresies in the name of God.... But this carpenter from Nazareth, for all his meekness and humility, spoke only in his own name. ‘Take _my_ yoke upon ye,’ he said. So did he speak, not as the mouthpiece of God, but as one vested with an almost divine authority of his own.... Such a tone would have sounded blasphemous ... even in a prince or a learned man.... But it ... created and sustained the impression that he was a transcendent person, and bestowed upon him the power to take cringing serfs and make them over into towering men. Only because he believed in himself so firmly ... could he make others accept his words. His tone was not that of a mere prophet, but almost that of God Himself.

“It was not merely that he could perform what were thought to be miracles.... It was more that he could carry himself with the divine assurance of an ‘Anointed One.’”[169]

Strange conduct, surely, for One who preached merely ethics; who went about crying, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” and meant only that the Kingdom of Good Moral Conduct was at hand. Why not say that He meant “The Kingdom of Eugenics is at hand!” and be done with it? And what can Browne mean by an “almost” divine authority, or a tone “almost” that of God Himself? It would seem that Christ was the Son of God, or was not; that He claimed to be the Messiah, or did not claim to be the Messiah. Browne, ignoring the law of the excluded middle term, attempts to insert a middle term by means of the word “almost.” And he adds: “Whether Jesus himself was convinced he was the Messiah is a problem still unsolved.... Charlatans and madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, had time and again been hailed by the hysterical mob as the Awaited One. Is it any wonder therefore that an exalted person like this young carpenter, Jesus, should have been hailed likewise?”[170]

But that is not the question. We are not concerned with what hysterical mobs may have thought about charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, but with what Jesus thought about Himself. We are also concerned with what Jesus did when He was hailed as the Awaited One. It would seem that an exalted person, not self-convinced of his Messiahship, would have been constrained by his own exalted character to enter a disclaimer in such a case.

Of course, if one could quote the Gospels without fear of setting Mr. Browne to thinking of “all the stupid and silly and gross extravagances, all the pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that clog and confuse the Gospel accounts,” one could prove even to him that Jesus actually claimed to be the Messiah. For in the Gospel According to St. John it is written,[171] “Jesus said unto him [Thomas], I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” And, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

Doubtless Browne considers these and similar passages as suspiciously similar to certain legends told many centuries earlier about Zoroaster. But in any case his own argument should force him to conclude that Jesus was the Messiah; or was self-deluded; or was a charlatan. Or does Browne consider it possible to be a charlatan and an exalted person at one and the same time? Out of charity we must conclude that he decides in favor of the delusion hypothesis. Of the other alternatives, his text forbids one and his presumable sanity forbids the other. So it was the victim of a delusion which we are not even certain that he entertained who took cringing serfs and made them over into towering men.

“This Believing World” continues: “By the time Jesus reached the capital his fame had already preceded him. A great mob rushed out ... wildly throwing their cloaks to the ground beneath the feet of the colt on which he rode. They hailed him as their Messiah.... ‘Hosanna!’ they cried, ecstatically, ‘Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!’”

Browne quotes the Gospels! But what makes him think that this triumphant entrance into Jerusalem is not a pious embellishment, or even a patent falsehood? He only tells us that “One wonders whether those poor wretches out of the alleys and dunghills of old Jerusalem understood who the man Jesus really was. One wonders whether even his own disciples understood--or whether even his most pious devotees today understand. To that frantic mob, at least, he was simply an arch-zealot, a martial hero who had come to lead them in bloody rebellion against Rome.”[172]

If this meant anything to the author it would mean that he himself was a believer in the divinity of Christ. He seems here to be chiding the Jerusalem mob, to say nothing of Christ’s pious devotees of today, for not being sufficiently aware of the spiritual nature of the miraculous Messiah’s mission. But no. Browne is thinking of a “gentle, loving, helpless youth”; of a spirit “innately puritanical,” a heretic who was outwardly “distinctly a conforming Jew” with an insistent pacificism, who adopted a tone that would have “sounded blasphemous even in a prince,” and surely was astonishing in a teacher of ethics.

“The priests,” Browne goes on, “... were afraid of Jesus ... not merely because his heresies endangered their own position.”[173] “Had he been stronger in body no doubt he would never have joined the school of John the Baptist and become a saver of souls. Instead, he would have joined the Zealots, fighting with the sword against Rome.... From the beginning his strength must have been not the strength of the body but of the soul; and towards the end even that strength must have ebbed low in him.”[174]

“And then he died. But he died only to come to life again, to come to a life more enduring, more wondrously potent than had ever been vouchsafed to him in the days before his shameful death. Indeed, he literally came to life again ... according to those who had most earnestly followed him.”[175]

“It was enormously difficult to prove that he had really been the Promised One. No doubt that was why the disciples began to piece together those genealogies we find in the Gospels. No doubt that, too, was why those extravagant legends concerning the conception, birth, childhood, and ministry of Jesus began to be devised. Uncharitable critics may say the disciples resorted to fraud in these matters--but it was all intensely pious and well-intentioned fraud. Before the ordinary Jew could be made to accept Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus simply had to be proved a descendant of David.... The disciples may not have been even remotely conscious that they were departing from the truth.”[176]

Thus Browne seeks to destroy all reason for admiring, and at the same time pretends to continue to admire. Such passages need no comment. Being no uncharitable critic myself, I will merely remark that the world now learns for the first time that the ordinary Jew can apparently be made to accept Jesus as the Messiah by means of the genealogies which are a part of the gospel story as it has come down to us. And what happened in Europe after this?

3. ST. PAUL AS SCAPEGOAT

“On a sudden--at least, so it seemed to those who had not marked the mounting of its steady ground swell,” Browne proceeds, “that little Nazarene sect,” the followers of Christ after the Crucifixion, “became a high sea that broke and rolled across the whole Roman Empire ... sweeping over one land after another until finally it had inundated the whole face of the West and half the face of the East.

“To explain how that could have happened, one must remember what was going on just then in the Roman Empire. A great hunger was gnawing at its vitals, a desperate hunger for salvation.”[177]

Now what does Browne mean by salvation in this instance? Ethical salvation? Salvation by law and order? Or salvation in the miraculous Christian sense, i.e., salvation from the macula of original sin? He is evidently writing from vague memories of what he has read and heard, from a host of facts, fancies and prejudices which he has uncritically allowed to find lodgment in his mind. It is not likely that he means anything in particular. But he tells us that--

“The whole Roman world seemed to be writhing in the throes of death, and the fear of that death drove it to a frantic and panicky clutching after any and every chance of life. As a result, the mysteries, those secret cults [of Greece and Rome] which whipped men into orgies of hopefulness, flourished everywhere.... Those mysteries ... in origin ... were largely Oriental, and in essence they grew out of the belief that by certain magic rites a man could take on the nature of an immortal god.... That same legend was told--with variations--concerning Dionysus, Osiris, Orpheus, Attis, Adonis, and heaven knows how many other such gods. Arising out of the common desire for an explanation of the annual death and rebirth of vegetation, that legend was common to many parts of the world.”[178]

It seems that what so agitated the Romans was a desire to explain the annual death and rebirth of vegetation--a phenomenon almost unknown in the climate of Rome. Anyway, they ran to these explanations in the midst of their panicky fear. But surely those mad pagan orgies which whipped men into hopefulness were not puritanical, ethical orgies.

Nor were early Christian orgies, according to Browne. For “By the first century of this era, the legend [of Christ] had spread to every civilized province of the Roman Empire ... and had everywhere made the people drunk with the heady liquor of its mystery salvation.”[179]

So Browne now admits that Christianity, even in the first century of its era, had ceased to be a mere ethic and become a “mystery salvation.” Granting for the sake of an argument which is no argument that, coming from One whose “all consuming passion” was the obsessive hope of His people that some day they would be “miraculously freed” by the Messiah it could ever have been anything else--granting this self-contradictory assumption, where are we to suppose the heady liquor came from? Answer, “From more learned folk.” For--

“Side by side with these religious cults flourishing among the lower elements ... different schools of philosophic thought flourished among the more learned folk. One of these was the philosophy developed in the city of Alexandria by an Egyptian Jew named Philo. According to this philosophy, God, the Father of All, manifested himself only through an intermediary called the Logos, the Word. This Logos, which was sometimes called the ‘Son of God,’ or the ‘Holy Ghost,’ had created the earth and was the sole mediator between it and heaven.”[180]

So--“If in later years the Nazarene faith began to take on the color and shape of those heathen cults and strange philosophies, these Palestinian Nazarenes were not in the least responsible. It was one from outside the original brotherhood, a Jew from beyond the borders of Palestine, who was responsible. It was Saul of Tarsus [later called Paul] who brought on that change.”[181]

You will note that St. Paul was responsible for coloring Christianity not only with the strange philosophy of learned folk but with the color of mystery cults which, originating in a desire to explain the annual death and rebirth of vegetation, whipped men among the lower elements of society into orgies of hopefulness. And he did this notwithstanding the fact that before his own conversion Christianity, originating with One who was a transcendant person who spoke in a tone “almost” that of God himself, and yet was but an ethical teacher, an insistent pacifist who but for bodily weakness would have taken up arms against the Roman Empire and perished by the sword--Christianity had already become drunk with the heady liquor of mystery salvation.

There seems to be some idea floating around in Browne’s head. He seems vaguely aware that since the Crucifixion there had come a change. Indeed, there had. But it was not a change from ethics to religion, nor a change from a belief in a non-miraculous Messiah to a belief in a Messiah who was miraculous. Nobody ever believed in a non-miraculous Messiah. A non-miraculous Messiah is a contradiction in terms. But since the Crucifixion it had become evident even to charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools that Jesus was not to found a temporal, national kingdom of the Jews. Even the people were beginning to understand that Christ’s Kingdom was spiritual and at least as broad as the earth. And if the Palestinian Nazarenes were not responsible, it must have been because their own belief and their own preaching signally failed of effect.

But let us get back to this Saul of Tarsus, who “must have had rather more than a passing acquaintance with Greek and Alexandrian philosophy.”

“Most important of all, he must very early have learnt from slaves in the household or from Gentile playmates, of the mystery cults ... and of the savior-gods in whom the masses put their impassioned trust.”[182] And Christianity was already one of these mystery cults, a heady liquor that was to become a high sea and break over all the West and half of the East by the end of the first century--or as soon as the disciples, who were not in the least responsible, had invented a sufficiency of legends to make up a technic capable of fooling the people. Or are we to understand that St. Paul wrote the Gospels?

“Now Saul was a person of very violent likes and dislikes. He is said to have been an epileptic, and certainly he was a man of strange temperament. Whatever he did, he did with an intensity and extravagance that were distinctly abnormal.”[183] The Eugenics Society should take note of this, in case another St. Paul arises among us. “But on his way to Damascus [to persecute the Nazarenes] a queer thing happened.... He was suddenly overcome by a seizure of some sort.”

Browne does not attempt to name it, but a “seizure” in an epileptic subject is usually called an epileptic fit. Why does he not name it? Because he wants to help folks believe that they may continue to call themselves Christians while assuming that everything which marks Christianity is a disease. But the disease must be a polite one.

“And when, trembling and astonished, Saul came to himself, behold he was a changed man.... When he got to Damascus he ... had become a complete convert ... believing in the Messiahship of Jesus and in his resurrection.... He was but little interested in the gospel of the man Jesus,”--the ethics which cried, “Behold, the Kingdom of God is at Hand!”--he was interested only in the death and rebirth of the savior-god, Christ.... “Saul [under the name of Paul] became the great preacher of ‘Christ crucified.’”[184]

“Jesus ... was not the founder of Christianity, but its foundling.... Nor had his immediate disciples created the new faith.”[185] “The Messiah put forward by them had all along been the Jewish Messiah.” Thus once more Browne confuses the idea of a Jewish Messiah with non-miraculous morality. “Nor was it Saul, the studious young Pharisee, who founded the new faith, but his other self, Paul, the citizen of Rome.... It is unfair to compare Paul to Jesus, for the two belonged spiritually and intellectually to entirely different orders of men.... The one was a prophet and a dreamer of dreams; the other was an organizer and a builder of churches.”[186]

According to this, it was a prophet and a dreamer who inspired the early disciples with the idea that he was the Jewish Messiah--those same disciples who saw in him a teacher of ethics only, yet corrupted the Gospels in the attempt to prove that he was something more--those same disciples who were not in the least responsible for the belief in Christ as divine that afterward crept into the Church through the door of epilepsy. And this ethical teacher is the same Being who believed with all His soul in the Promised One and permitted Himself to be greeted as the Promised One!

This amazing series of contradictions does not come from confronting Browne with other authorities, but merely from confronting Browne with Browne and without going outside of one chapter of one single book. Strange indeed is the behavior of those who seek to eat their cake and at the same time to throw it away.

For Browne would have it that Jesus, the prophet, dreamer and inspirer of belief in His Messiahship, was made a foundling in his own spiritual house by His antithesis, Paul--who accomplished this feat of dispossession by winning general acceptance for the very belief in question. Or does Browne think that when the Jewish Messiah came to be understood as the Savior of the World, the idea was less dreamlike and prophetic?

Paul is evidently now drunk with the heady liquor of mystery-salvation. He has had a seizure. But Browne has been telling us how Paul’s other self, Saul, the studious young Pharisee, has been listening all his life to tales of mystery-cults and savior-gods from the lips of household slaves and Gentile playmates; how he has acquired more than a passing acquaintance with the Logos philosophy of a Jew residing in Alexandria. All this is heady liquor. Jew and Gentile, high and low, slaves and playmates--none of them are exactly Puritans or ethical rationalists. And the new religion, most heady of all, appeals--not to the youthful Saul, who might supposedly be the dreamer of the pair, but to the more mature Paul, the Roman citizen, organizer and man of affairs.

Of course it is historically correct to say that the new religion did appeal to Paul rather than to Saul. But what happened on the road to Damascus was not, even on Browne’s own showing, a change from a disbelief to belief in miracle religion, but a change from disbelief to belief in Jesus as the Son of God. An epileptic fit, we are about to be told, makes a common man over into a moral and intellectual giant. It transforms a listener to tales and mystical philosophies into a cold thinker. And this cold thinking leads to the acceptance of Christianity in its original form. I am not questioning that cold thinking might not lead to such a result; am not trying to intimate that there is anything antagonistic between a cold brain and a warm heart. Browne’s fallacy here is historical--the attempt to prove that Paul was a cold thinker and pretended to be nothing else.

As to a touching belief in the efficacy of disease, we may find it in minds much less confused than Browne’s. It runs through such books as “The Psychology of Religious Mysticism,” by James H. Leuba, professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr. According to Browne, mental unbalance produces indomitable courage and inflexible will. According to Professor Leuba, the hysterical saints lived lives of “joyful activity, broken only by transports of surpassing love and peaceful rest.”[187] Not a very comprehensive description of the lives of saints. But if there be such hysteria as this, such epilepsy as Browne describes, it is a pity that the germs cannot be isolated, propagated, and sown broadcast.

These authors are among those who ruin their hypotheses by inadvertently accounting for too much. Their hysteria and epilepsy, stretched to meet all demands, lose the quality of disease and take on the quality of genius. Would it not be well at least to distinguish two types of hysteria (some writers make even epilepsy hysterical), the malignant and the benign? Or if the word hysteria merely means emotion, why not recognize the fact that an emotion may indicate conditions as categorically opposite as those reflected in the sensations of pleasure and of pain? It is grossly irrational to narrow it down to a single sinister meaning if it is to be put forward as the “cause” and the “explanation” of such diverse effects as those which are clothed in the willing garb of a Sister of Charity and those which lead to the unwilling wearing of a straight-jacket.

Nor is it any less absurd to say that St. Paul, having partaken of heady salvation-liquor such as was drunken of aforetime only by charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, and adding to its potency by insisting upon its universal applicability--to say all this even by implication, and then to add as Browne does[188] that “in his own class, Paul was one of the stupendously great men of the earth.”

“He was,” the narrative continues, “a superb statesman. And he was possessed of an energy, a courage, and an indomitable will, the like of which have rarely been known in all the history of great men.... Again and again he was scourged and imprisoned.... And yet he persisted, never resting from his grueling labor of carrying his Christ to the Gentiles, incessantly running to and fro, preaching, writing, arguing and comforting, until at last, a tired and broken man, he died a martyr’s death in the city of Rome.... It was in the year 67, according to tradition, that Paul was beheaded.”

Once again Browne considers himself privileged to repudiate all that a man stands for, his sole claim to distinction, and yet to put him on a pedestal of insincere rhetoric. When he speaks of Paul’s “own class” does he mean the class of “charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools”? Indeed, St. Paul himself is reported to have said, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”

But Browne has yet stranger things in store. He proceeds to write the history of the Church.

4. THE CHURCH AS SCAPEGOAT

Paul, says Browne, “had spent perhaps thirty years in the labor of spreading the idea of Christ, and by the time of his death that idea had already struck root far and wide in the Empire. It had divorced itself from Judaism, taking over the Sunday of the Mithraists in place of the Jewish Sabbath, and substituting Mithraist ritual for the Temple sacrifice.”[189] [The Mithraist ritual centered in the slaughter of a bull!]

“Through Judaism, the religion of Persia left its mark also on Christianity; and not merely through Judaism, but also through Mithraism.”[190] [Mithra is personified diffused sunshine!]

“In most of the cities there were already thriving christian brotherhoods, little secret societies much like those of the mysteries.... With the passing of the years, the pagan element grew.... The life-story of Jesus was embellished with a whole new array of marvels and miracles, and the man himself was made over into a veritable mystery savior-god. His character and nature fell into the maw of an alien philosophy, and then came drooling out in sodden and swollen distortion. He became the Lamb whose blood washed away all sin. He became the Son of God supernaturally conceived by the Virgin.... He became the Logos and the Avatar and the Savior.”[191]

Browne here is complaining of alleged corruptions from Persian and other sources, all largely Oriental; as were in their origin the Greek and Roman “mysteries,” of which he has complained hitherto. But he goes on to allege that “Although the religion of Jesus and of the first disciples was distinctly Oriental, although the whole Messiah idea was markedly a thing of the East, the religion about a Savior Christ was largely European.... Indeed, one gravely doubts whether Jesus, the simple peasant teacher in hilly Galilee, would have known who in the world that Savior Christ was.”

Geography is evidently too much for Browne. Persia has suddenly become European. And St. Paul, with his “more than passing acquaintance” with the Logos philosophy of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, and his subsequent conversion to the “distinctly Oriental ... Messiah idea,” is of the West. Perhaps Alexandria was not in Africa in the early days of the Christian era, and maybe Persia was then in the extreme Occident.

“It was inevitable for that change to come about. Christianity ... was gaining too many converts too rapidly.... It would not have been so bad had they been converts from a world of ignorance.... But they were converts instead from a world of what we would call stupidity.”[192]

So preaching founded upon the epistles of St. Paul, a man “who was one of the stupendously great men of the earth,” and “a superb statesman,” appealed chiefly not to the ignorant but to the naturally stupid! “No such testaments [as the stupid epistles of St. Paul and the silly legends and pious frauds called the Gospels] could be offered by the priests of Mithra, Cybele or Attis. For their deities were after all mythical. Only the Christians had a real man to worship; a unique and divine man, it is true, but nevertheless a person who had known human woe and pain, who had suffered, and who had for at least three days been dead. That element of naturalism, of closeness to human reality, must have made Christianity a faith of extraordinary attractiveness.”[193]

Surely Browne does not believe that a simple teacher of ethics, who, with good health, would have been a soldier, was actually dead and rose again, for he has told us that such a legend arose from pious frauds suspiciously like the frauds practiced long before in the case of Zoroaster. He must be meaning to say that the stupid followers of St. Paul and later preachers of miracle religion _believed_ Christ to have been a Divine Man who was once dead. They must, then, have believed in the Resurrection. Is that to be regarded as an element of naturalism?

“There was a wondrous comfort in that religion”--of the stupid; “a mighty zeal that made it possible for the martyrs to go to their death actually with a smile on their lips. It took vile slaves out of the slums where they rotted, and somehow breathed supernal heroism into them. It told them that ... death for the truth would mean only life everlasting.”[194]

“Then came Constantine, and, in the year 313, an end to the persecutions.”[195] An end to the persecution of a corrupt yet wonder-working Christianity originated by the abnormal St. Paul, you will observe, which must have worked through the powers of hysteria, epilepsy and suggestion. One would think that there was little harm left for Constantine to do. Nevertheless, “It was a costly triumph for Christianity, as every other such triumph has been in all history. What happened to Buddhism when it set out to conquer the Far East, now happened also to Christianity in the West.” What, did it lose its power? No. “It became an official and successful institution--and so degenerate.”[196]

A Mithraist ritual, draped in the rags of dying pagan mysteries and Philo-Pauline doctrines from an European Africa, manages to degenerate! It staggers on its downward way, growing more and more drunken with the heady liquor of mystery salvation drawn from a Europe located in the Orient.

“A faith cannot be institutionalized,” Browne informs us, “for it is a thing of the spirit.”

An institution, then, is something which subsists in matter. Men with faith in anything cannot be drawn together into an institution. Only men who believe in nothing can belong to institutions.

“Even dogmas or rites, which are things almost of the flesh, cannot be organized beyond certain bounds.”[197]

What bounds? And within or without what bounds is it possible for a rite not to be organized? And to what extent is a dogma, like that of the Logos, for example, “almost of the flesh”? Anyway, “even after Christianity became primarily a thing of dogmas and rites, it nevertheless began to crack and crumble.”[198]

Why “nevertheless”? After what he has said of dogmas and rites he should have said “because of.” And does he say “began” to crack and crumble when it had already suffered the corruptions of St. Paul and Constantine?

Yes; and it begins to crack and crumble just as it is setting out as a tidal wave to overwhelm the West and half of the East! And as faith cannot be institutionalized, a sufficient lack of faith might have kept it from cracking and crumbling, also from “drooling out in sodden and swollen distortions.”

“Paul,” continues our author, “had used his theological terms rather loosely.”[199] His stupendous greatness, then, was not as a teacher of religion. “Paul [same page] had spoken of Jesus as a savior.”

Browne then tells of the controversies which arose over the doctrine of the Trinity and other matters, adding: “Scores of such questions arose.... Jesus had not been conscious of even the most ponderous of such questions. That dear, fervent young preacher, who had lived and died in the sublimity of a simple faith could never possibly have been conscious of them. Had he heard them posed, he would probably have shaken his head in mute bewilderment.... When one puts beside the Gospel accounts of the preaching of Jesus the official records of the wrangling and bickering of those church fathers, one feels that here is to be found the most tragic and sordid epic of frustration that the whole history of mankind can tell.”[200]

Browne omits to name the church fathers he has in mind. But why put beside records, which are at least official, the silly legendary gospels which unconscious zealots corrupted into drooling distortions to suit their fancy?

And if Jesus could not have been conscious of even the most ponderous of theological questions, what is he supposed to have thought of the multitudes who greeted his entrance into Jerusalem, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” That would seem to pose a rather ponderous theological question.

Moreover, all histories of the Jews which are not stranger than fiction give the impression that the Scribes and Pharisees of Christ’s day were somewhat given to discussing theological questions, ponderous and other. One living in their midst and not being conscious of at least some of the questions that were to be debated later by the Church fathers must have been unconscious at all points.

“More than sixteen hundred years have passed since Christianity was made the state religion in the decadent Roman Empire. Throughout all those years [notwithstanding its cracking and its crumbling] it has been extending its borders.... It is estimated that at the present time about one third of the entire population of the world is Christian--approximately five hundred and sixty-five million souls. And of course, it is to the spirit of Paul regnant in Christendom that one must credit that enormous expansion.... It is because countless monks and healers and warriors and saints have felt Paul’s call [sic!] to go out and win the heathen to Christ, that today more souls are turned to Christ than to any other deity on earth.”

I do not know if Browne attributes the Pauline triumph to the Apostle’s loose handling of theological terms, but he says, “these wholesale increases in numbers were not made save at a high price.... Just as Buddha had to be idolized before he could conquer the East, so Jesus had to be idolized, too, for pagan Europe.”[201]

Yet--“despite all these compromises, the new religion remained always heavens above the old [paganism]. By assimilating pagan rites and myths ... Christianity became at last almost completely pagan in semblance; but it never became quite pagan in character. The Old Testament puritanism which had so marked the life of Jesus was never routed.... If the spirit of Paul insisted that Cybele be taken over as the Mother of Christ, the spirit of Jesus insisted that her wild Corybantes with their lustful rites, and her holy eunuchs with their revolting perversions, be left severely behind. If the spirit of Paul demanded that the wild Celtic goddess named Bridget be accepted into Christianity, the Spirit of Jesus demanded that first she be made lily-white and a saint.... It [the Spirit of Christ] set its face hard against sacred prostitution and against all those other loosenesses and obscenities which arose out of the pagan’s free attitude towards sex.”[202]

So it was the spirit of a man who was “in his own class” one of the “stupendously great men of the earth,” who favored prostitution, insisted upon taking Cybele into his loosely-worded theology, and--having failed to secure the lustful Corybantes and the holy eunuchs who still had a capacity for perversions--demanded and obtained the acceptance of a wild Celtic goddess named Bridget.

Browne describes this Spirit-of-Paul’s Bridget. She was, it appears, one of three deities who “had already [2000 years ago] been sufficiently detached from their physical bodies to be thought of as remote gods and goddesses.” The other two were Ogmius and Maponus.

At their festivals, “men and women lay together in the fields, and behaved as did all other primitive peoples in their religious festivals.... Not until the Christian idea of morality was brought to them did the Celts grow conscious of any wickedness in their old rites. And even then they did not give them up at once. Indeed, to this day their descendants have not given them up entirely.”[203]

“The difference between [the] Babylonian cult of Ishtar and the primitive Celtic cult of Bridget was entirely one of degree.... Both were inspired by dread of the same evil, sterility: and both sought to attain one end, fecundity. But one, the Babylonian, was far less primitive ... far less wildly promiscuous and bestial. The Babylonian rites were conducted within the confines of stone temples, not out in the furroughs of the torch-lit fields.”[204]

This undoubtedly gave the Babylonians the ethical advantage. And it seems that the Celtic gods and goddesses were not only primitive, but continually kept their followers alarmed lest they (the goddesses) should forget how to become fecund. The ritual in the furrows of the torch-lit fields, “to this day not given up entirely,” was for the purpose of overcoming the deities’ “bashfulness,” Browne tells us, and to set them an example of what was desired. And if the spirit of Paul could have had its way, such a ritual, though perhaps conducted within stone temples, would have been established in Rome! And there it would doubtless have been practiced today--as it is, I gather from Browne, in present-day Ireland!

“The spirit of Jesus flickering in Christianity made it at least nominally a religion of ethics,” Browne goes on. “For Jesus, one must remember, had not been in the least concerned with ritual. Like every other great Jewish prophet, he had preached only ethics. And despite all the compromises of the world-conquering Pauls, that ethical emphasis of the teaching of Jesus persisted as a mighty leaven in the church. It gave to the early Christians that gentle nobility which history tells us graced their faith.”[205]

When was this? Brown says that “of the life of the first Nazarenes we know exceedingly little.”[206] He gives the year 67 as the date of St. Paul’s martyrdom. Can it be that the early Christians were gentle and noble even after the loose sex ideas and loose theological terms of the great Apostle had been given a chance to begin their deadly work?

“The church itself, with its foul record of crusades and inquisitions and pogroms, cannot be said to have ever been really civilized. But that admission does not at all discredit the potency of the spirit of Jesus.... True, there were indeed Dark Ages in Europe when the power of the Church was at its height. But who knows how far darker they might have been, and how much longer they might have endured, had the Church not existed?”[207] “One must remember that Christianity came into a world that was sinking.... It alone sought to keep civilization going. It failed. It could not keep from failing. But be it said to its glory that at least it tried.”[208]

“The glory of trying to save the world from bestiality belongs primarily to but one element alone in Christianity; the original Nazerene element. And that element, one must remember, was never dominant in the faith save during those years before it was really Christian. Once Paul came on the scene, the light of the religion of Jesus began to fade, and the glare of the religion about Christ [that is, the doctrine that Christ was the Son of God and the Redeemer of the World] blazed over all.”[209]

“Yet though the light from Galilee [the light of One who ‘like every other great Jewish prophet’ taught only ethics, yet believed with all his soul in the Messianic idea] faded ... it never was quite snuffed out.... For long centuries it smouldered.... And then slowly that forgotten spark began to brighten once more. A devastating incursion of Huns and Saracens blew the spark to a flame. As never before in full six hundred years, the Christians began to think again of their suffering Savior.”[210]

This certainly is what Browne writes, incredible as it may seem. The Pauline doctrine “about Jesus” has been overshadowing the world, threatening to extinguish the spark of the merely ethical religion preached by Jesus himself. And now the spark blows into a flame--and lo! it, too, is a religion about Jesus! Men begin to think again of their suffering “_Savior_!” Moreover, Jesus was a pacifist, and all that was needed to fan the spirit of his teaching into a flame was a devastating incursion of Huns and Saracens. Was it the ethics of the invaders which did the trick?

“Like a mad fire the hope spread over Europe that the year 1000 would see the return of the Redeemer.” Yes, the word is “Redeemer.” So Brown does know what “Savior” means. And we were right in thinking that he intends to say that the spark so long all but quenched by a religion about Jesus proved, when it revived, to be itself a religion about Jesus, a belief in Him as a supernatural Being, able, if he liked, to return--in short, the Logos, as had been taught by the “abnormal” St. Paul. And Browne appears to be utterly unconscious that he has stultified his whole argument. The fact that he has in effect said that the world expected a helpless teacher of ethics to return after a thousand years; and has also said that belief in this helpless ethical teacher constituted a belief in a miraculous Savior and Redeemer, which belief had been for hundreds of years all but stifled by the doctrine that he was indeed a miraculous Savior and Redeemer--all this troubles the Browne mind not at all.

“The year 1000 passed, and no Redeemer came--but Europe was a little redeemed nevertheless.” By the ethical Huns and Saracens, apparently. “Men turned from what the Church of Christ insisted on offering them, and instead began to grope after the gospel of Jesus for themselves. They took to reading the Scriptures in their original tongues.” (The people did? Or does he mean in the vernacular? In either case it must have exposed them to what Browne gives us to understand is a mass of silly fables.) “And reading them they began to see at last how far the Church had wandered from the pristine truth.” (A truly wonderful feat of discriminating literary criticism. Were the people so familiar with Zoroastrian tales that they were able at once to discard all passages having a suspicious resemblance to them?) “They discovered at last how shamelessly the priests had substituted rite for right, how flagrantly they had ritualized all morality.... The clerical authorities took alarm. Despotically they issued proclamations prohibiting the laity from even glancing at the bible.”

Browne owes it to the world to publish those despotic proclamations, so that we may know their authors. I have myself seen the Bible in chains in Italian churches, and I understand that chains were much more common in the middle ages than now. But if the object was not to keep the books from being stolen but to keep them from being read, the riveters of the chains were indeed stupid people. For they chained the books by the backs and in a manner which permitted them always to lie open.

So--“the Bible was read nevertheless.... The flame of heresy burned on.” But why, if the Church was so opposed to it, did it gather the Bible together in the first place? Browne does not say. What he does say is that “In the fourteenth century, Wycliffe did godly mischief in England; in the fifteenth John Huss carried on in Bohemia; in the sixteenth Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin led the Protestant revolt.”[211]

“But one must not imagine that Protestantism was ever purely Nazarene in spirit--any more than Catholicism was ever unrelievedly Pauline.” (True enough. I have even heard it said that Catholicism is to a certain extent Petrine.) “Protestantism includes every type of religious thought. Only slowly and with many pangs, is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ.” (Then that revival of belief in a supernatural Savior and Redeemer, instituted by the Saracens and Huns, was not a flash in the pan, but carried over to a certain extent into the godly mischief of Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin!) “Only slowly, very slowly is it [Protestantism] beating its way back to the religion of Jesus.”[212] That is, to ethics.

“Though the Church of Christ may stand guilty of untold and untellable evil, the religion of Jesus, ... has accomplished good sufficient to outweigh that evil tenfold.”

If the evil referred to expressed itself in facts, why is it untellable? Browne, I think, should tell it, and in detail. He ought not to emulate St. Paul in the loose use of words. As the page stands, we cannot be sure that he does not refer to the Church of England and the hanging, drawing and quartering of Catholic priests during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. But the “religion of Jesus,” i. e. ethics, “Has made life liveable for countless millions of harried souls. It has taken rich and poor, learned and ignorant, white, red, yellow, and black--it has taken them all and tried to show them a way to salvation. To all pain it has held out a balm; to all in distress it has offered peace. To every man without distinction it has said: Jesus died for you! To every human creature on earth it has said: You too can be saved! And therein lies Christianity’s highest virtue. It has helped make the weak strong and the dejected happy. It has stilled the fear that howls in man’s breast and crushed the unrest that gnaws at his soul. In a word it has worked--in a measure.”[213]

I wish I might let this eloquent passage stand without comment. Taken by itself, it sounds almost like the words of a sincere believer in Christ as the supernatural Savior of Men. But, taken in connection with what has gone before, it seems to me abominable. Here is a man who has denied the supernatural nature of Christ time after time in the preceding 300 pages. And now he is using words which imply such a miraculous nature, or else mean nothing at all. Yes, they mean something. They mean that this light, this balm, this peace, this salvation which is Christianity’s highest virtue, is an illusion. To every man this Christianity has said: Jesus died for you! Here the doctrine of the Vicarious Atonement is indicated. And St. Paul, in preaching that doctrine, that “religion about Jesus,” founded a new faith and made Christ the mere foundling of Christianity! True, Browne has also said a great deal on the other side. That is precisely the trouble. He thinks it is possible to stand both with the sheep and with the goats.

But the final chapter of “This Believing World” (for Christianity is not its climax) is consistent. It is entitled, “What Happened in Arabia.” And it thus concludes:

“Islam ... has been one of the most effective civilizing forces in the history of Africa and Asia, and in a measure also in that of Europe.... The supreme gift of Islam was the idea of unity which it somehow drilled into the heads of a hundred races--not merely the unity of God, but even more the unity of mankind.... Every other great religion taught more or less the same doctrine [in regard to submitting to Allah], but none with such fierceness and unrestraint.... Islam excluded no man from the army of Allah.... And that is why to this day Islam can still win converts with twice the ease of any other religion. That is why to this day Islam is one of the mightiest institutions on earth for the ordering and beautifying of life in at least the ‘backward’ lands.”

In the beginning there was fear. In the end there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet!

5. THE STORIES OF DURANT

It is with regret that I include Will Durant among the Misbehaviorists. He is no crude mechanist, and his popularity is so great that, like Sinclair Lewis, he has almost ceased to be a mere individual and become an institution. And in some respects his success is a most gratifying and hopeful sign of the times.

[Illustration: DR. WILL DURANT

Almost an institution]

Some say that it was Durant who showed us that we were fond of serious reading and not of the light novels which the publishers for so many years fancied that we craved. But in reality it was “The Education of Henry Adams” which showed us that. And I am not so certain that a mere love of heavy reading is such a good sign. By the time reading becomes substantial it begins to make some difference what it is weighted with.

I like to think that “The Story of Philosophy” has been bought in such quantities because it is, to a very great and very charming extent, The Story of the Philosophers. Durant’s ability as a writer of biography amounts almost to genius. Nor are his accounts of the philosophers’ philosophies often other than good bits of skillful summing-up interspersed with apt quotations. My only misgivings revolve around the stories of Durant--those paragraphs of criticism and seemingly personal opinion with which he usually ends his chapters--around those and certain omissions. What have we here, the story of philosophy, or only the story of a certain bias purporting to be the story of philosophy?

As was to be expected of a born biographer, Durant follows the method of using environment to explain belief. The pessimism of Schopenhauer is due to the fact that he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Holy Alliance, when Waterloo had been fought, the Revolution was dead, and the Son of the Revolution rotting on a rock in a distant sea. “Something of [Schopenhauer’s] despair came from the pathetic distance of St. Helena.”[214] And when “Mme. Clotilde de Vaux (whose husband was spending his life in jail) took charge of Comte’s heart, his affection for her warmed and colored his intelligence.” So Comte’s later Religion of Humanity was due to the happiness of his illegitimate union, just as his earlier Positivism had been due to the marital infelicity which led him to attempt suicide in the Seine.

It is the method by which Taine years ago sought to explain all English literature. Durant is an environmentalist--which, after all, is better than being a mad hereditarian. One is tempted to enquire into his own environment, his college, his religious and philosophical surroundings, and to read dates and geography between his lines. But I cannot bring myself to apply either the environment or the heredity hypothesis to the exclusion of that entity which comes from neither, that ego which learns or does not learn from its contact with that which is not itself.

That Durant is not himself a philosopher, is evident--and in his favor. We really do not need another philosopher just now--of the sort we would be likely to get. He has no system of his own, no universal touch-stone, no central thesis giving unity to his several beliefs. In his mind Kant, Darwin and Bergson meet, but no more mingle than do oil and water. An emulsifying _tertium quid_ is lacking. This lack should have made him an ideal historian of other men’s theories. And it almost did.

But there is another lack. The complete historian should have a complete experience. He should have been submerged in the main stream of thought, even if he has failed to sound all its dead-waters to the bottom. And if environment and the accident of birth do not offer him such experience, he should have that thirst for knowledge which leads to exploration and discovery.

The Durant ego lacks precisely that. It was born in a lake, and it has no thirst for the sea. Like certain aquatic creatures, it takes what floats into its mouth, but makes no explorations. What Durant has given us is simply not the story of philosophy. It is merely a series of interesting comments upon the curriculum of a certain type of college which does not even belong to the University of World Thought. This provincialism is unfortunate, for it is certain to deceive provincial readers with the idea that they have listened to the whole story.

It is difficult, after the reading of a book which is an avowed recapitulation of many foreign opinions, to say what an author’s own opinions may be. It is evident that Durant is no Catholic; not quite so evident whether or no he is a believing Protestant. He seems to have little sympathy with Protestantism as a whole, and less yet with Fundamentalism. It may be safe to say that his personal bias takes the direction of a vague Humanism.

To quote, without taking the greatest precaution not to pass off some mere explanatory paraphrase as the author’s own, would be so unfair that I hesitate to quote at all in proof of anything. There are, however, certain passages which are clearly Durant, and not Plato, Aristotle or Nietzsche boiled down--though even here we must be on guard lest what we see is Durant under the momentary influence of his subject, not Durant in his daily habit. It is the wind which does not blow, the things which he does not say, that speak most eloquently and surely of the man.

Chapters, and most of them long chapters, are given to Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche; a chapter to three contemporary Europeans--Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce and Bertrand Russell; and a final chapter to the three American moderns, George Santayana, William James and John Dewey. There are adequate pages devoted to Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, and many a lesser light. Some, you will note, are pre-Christian; some are atheistic; some deistic, monistic, or agnostic. It is a chorus which is irreligious with a vast predominance, with here and there a tolerant voice for modernistic Protestantism. Bishop Berkeley, represented by a few paragraphs, stands practically alone as the exponent of a particular faith.

It will be said that this is the story of philosophy, not of theology. But I cannot see the force of the explanation. Theology is certainly philosophy; and why should one man be barred because he begins with the assumption that God has revealed Himself in an Incarnation, and another admitted who begins with the assumption that God has revealed himself in the human will of a super-man devoted satanically to selfish ends, or is in the process of revealing himself in an _élan vital_, or begins with the assumption that there is no God? Surely the historian is not bound to believe every philosophy he outlines. And surely the Christian assumption is no more of a foregone conclusion than are the others.

Nor even if it be granted that the story of philosophy, because of the current use of the word, is naturally a story of secular philosophy, does Durant come off any better. The Chinese philosophers and the Vedantic philosophers of India may be said to be so widely separated from us in time and space that they do not belong in a history of our culture. That was more true in the days when Durant was a boy than it is today. But let it pass. What about the Scholastics?

The Scholastics were not only theologians, but philosophers and scientists; they dominated the thought of Christendom for a thousand years, and still dominate a large section of Christendom, not counting their influence in quarters where it is felt rather than recognized.

Durant admits that his treatment of Scholasticism is “inadequate,” but excuses himself with the plea that the inadequacy was due to lack of space. But he finds space for ten and a half pages about Benedetto Croce--and no page at all for St. Augustine, Albertus Magnus, or St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Angelic Doctor’s name, however, is mentioned. It appears in a pictorial table of “philosophic affiliations,” constructed in the manner of a family tree. According to this table, Aquinas stems from Aristotle, who stems from Plato, who stems from Socrates, who stems from the Sophists. There is also a branch line of affiliation extending to the left like a bar sinister, connecting the great scholastic with Christian Theology followed by a question mark. I do not fathom the meaning of the question mark. But Christian Theology (?) itself stems from Zeno the Stoic, and he from Diogenes, and he from Antisthenes, and he from Heraclitus. There is yet another branch line leading from Antisthenes, touching Socrates, and ending in Aristippus, of the house of Democritus and Leucippus.

So Aquinas appears to be quite free from any unquestioned philosophic affiliation with St. Augustine, Albertus Magnus, St. Paul, or even Jesus Christ. We begin to be glad that Durant had no room for an “adequate” treatment of the Scholastics.

Unfortunately, he does not quite drop them with the chart. In a note “To the Reader” he refers to them as “half-legendary.” It is odd that a school which included the leading thinker, secular or sacred, of the Thirteenth Century, the age of Dante, should have become legendary in the New York of 1926, from which Durant dates his book.

Turning from legends, we come to Benedetto Croce, who, writes Durant[215] “is a sceptic with an almost German gift for obscurity ... an anti-clerical who writes like an American Hegelian ... an Italian Catholic who has kept nothing of his religion except its scholasticism and its devotion to beauty.” And lo, we are back to legend again! “Perhaps the comparative infertility of Italy in the philosophy of the last hundred years,” Durant goes on, “is due in some part to the retention of scholastic attitudes and methods even by thinkers who have abandoned the old theology.” Adding,[216] “He [Croce] is, after all, a product of the scholastic tradition ... he is a germanized Italian.”

Now it is quite true that, though Thomas Aquinas was a native of the Kingdom of Naples, he studied under Albertus Magnus at Cologne--probably during the year 1244; returned to Cologne in 1284; and perhaps visited it several times thereafter. But both he and his illustrious master were scholastics of the school of St. Augustine, who died in the year 430. The one German thing about St. Augustine is that Eucken, the German philosopher, says of him: “If our age wishes to take up and treat in an independent way the problems of religion, it is not so much to Schleiermacher or Kant or even Luther or St. Thomas that it must refer as to Augustine, and outside of religion, there are points upon which Augustine is more modern than Hegel or Schopenhauer.”

Durant surely cannot mean that a living Italian has been “Germanized” through having absorbed the teachings of a master who died in 1280 and was the follower of another master, in Hippo, who died in 430. As one of the chief tenets of Scholasticism is that the Christian creed can be proven by reason alone without recourse to Revelation, Croce of course had to repudiate his scholasticism, German or not, along with his religion. All that can remain to him, if anything remains, is a certain training of the mind. Whether he has shown the effects of such training, or made good use of it, is a matter of opinion. What Durant shows here is total unfamiliarity with his subject. He is merely applying certain notions which he picked up uncritically from unauthorative sources. But having mentioned this Scholasticism which he seems not to have read, he goes on, _re_ Croce, to ask: “How could an Italian be unkind to a Church that had brought all the world to Canossa, and had levied imperial tribute on every land to make Italy the art-gallery of the world?”

My own rather extended acquaintance of the art-galleries of the world has heretofore inclined me to believe that Italy has been more sinned against than sinning in this regard--and that in Italy, itself, such stolen masterpieces as are to be seen were largely stolen from the Church and placed in galleries belonging to an anti-clerical state. But perhaps I am mistaken--and mistaken also in thinking that since 1870 the Pope has been self-imprisoned in the Vatican when in reality he has been roaming for the (until very recently) irreligious Italian Government abroad, stealing pictures. Or was it before 1870 that the thieving from foreigners was done--during the days when Italy was overrun with foreign armies, and the term Italy was a mere “geographical expression?” Does he refer to the marble treasures of the Vatican rescued from war and neglect in Greece and elsewhere? Or were the thefts of a still earlier date, when most of Europe was comparatively barbarian? I can think of one such instance. Some of the decorations for St. Mark’s, Venice, were brought by the Venetian merchants from the Orient--as was the body of their patron saint.

But Durant continues: “So Italy remained loyal to the old faith, and contented itself with the ‘Summa’ of Aquinas for philosophy.”

When? Why, until Giambatista Vico came. He “stirred the Italian mind again; but Vico went, and philosophy seemed to die with him. Rosmini thought for a time that he would rebel; but he yielded. Throughout Italy men became more and more irreligious, and more and more loyal to the Church. Benedetto Croce (born in 1866) is an exception.”[217]

What Durant must mean is that the more irreligious one becomes the more loyal one naturally is to the Catholic Church. If that be true, the Italian _Risorgimento_ (the political movement which led to the union of Italy under an anti-clerical government) was certainly most loyal--and it expressed its loyalty by taking the Church’s temporal empire away from it! But in what respect was Croce an exception to this devotion and this irreligion?

For one thing, he was nearly killed beneath the ruins of a house at Casamicciola during the earthquake of 1883. For another, he was “given so thorough a training in Catholic theology that at last, to restore the balance, he became atheist.”

But this, apart from the training, was precisely what the _Risorgimento_ did, so there is no exception here. The exception, then, must lie in the fact that he did not remain loyal. He could not get enough of the Catholic theology out of his system to be loyal to the Catholic Church--though he could be loyal enough to imitate the _Risorgimento_ in repudiating it! This, as Durant himself says[218] of Croce’s philosophy in general, “is as clear as a starless night.”

I wish to record my entire agreement with this final verdict as to the Croce philosophy. From the most absurd premises in the world, Durant has somehow arrived at a correct and satisfactory conclusion.

But he does not stop here. He goes on to say that Croce “slides easily into logical casuistry and refutes more readily than he can conclude.” It is easy to see that Scholasticism is being held to blame here. Durant does not like Scholasticism, and he does not like Croce. Not that there is the slightest evidence that Durant ever read a single scholastic author. I am merely assuming that he has. And he would like to derive the cause of one dislike from the source of the other. So he permits himself to use the word “casuistry” as loosely as Browne would have us believe St. Paul used theological terms--that is, he uses it as an old lady sitting by the fire might use it, to denote sophistry, and sophistry to denote an unsound argument. A philosopher could never have so forgotten the original meaning of casuistry as the art of dealing with cases of conscience, especially when writing of Croce with the idea that he was a scholastic. But perhaps it was the “German” scholasticism of his subject which fogged the Durant mind at this point.

But how explain the following? He tells of Croce becoming Minister of Public Education and a Senator, and denouncing the World War. Then he adds: “But Italy has forgiven him now; and all the youth of the land look up to him as their unbiased guide, philosopher and friend.”[219]

Had Durant but said, “The anti-fascist wing of the _Intelligencia_, most of whom are far from young and cling to the atheistic French Revolutionary philosophy of the _Risorgimento_, look up to Croce,” the statement would have been true--in so far as a member of the _Intelligencia_ may be said to look up to anybody. Every unbiased person who has spent much time in Italy of late knows that most of the youth of that country today look upon Mussolini, and not Croce, as their guide, philosopher and friend. And Mussolini is a Catholic. Has Durant never heard of the Black Shirts or of the March on Rome?

But perhaps I am wrong in finding fault with Durant’s fondness for catering to popular misconceptions which no doubt he shares. He quotes his favorite Bergson as saying, “The time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by the many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes.”

One wonders how this modicum is to be discovered without criticism, and is informed (still by Bergson) that “the true statement is of itself able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.” Is this not saying that a garden will grow more flowers if one does not criticise it by trying to pull up the weeds? Is it not sheer nonsense to talk of erroneous ideas displacing themselves without anybody taking the trouble to refute anything, when there was never a time in the history of man when ideas, true and false, did not have to meet the objections of the fault-finder? No; Durant assures us that Bergson speaks with “the voice of wisdom herself,” and that when we “‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ a philosophy we are merely offering another one.”

Merely, you understand. Then all philosophies are indifferent mixtures, one as good as another. Here is pragmatism mixed with _laissez-faire_. And like pragmatism (which at one and the same time holds that whatever you think is true is indeed true for the moment and as far as you are concerned, and that nevertheless the test of truth is the fruit it bears), it does not understand itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[146] _Op. cit._, p. 83.

[147] _Ibid._, p. 429.

[148] _Op. cit._, p. 446.

[149] _Op. cit._, page 71.

[150] _Ibid._, p. 454.

[151] _Ibid._, p. 155.

[152] _Ibid._, p. 456.

[153] _Op. cit._, p. 437.

[154] _Ibid._, p. 473.

[155] “This Believing World,” p. 298.

[156] _Ibid._, p. 296.

[157] _Ibid._, p. 297.

[158] _Op. cit._, p. 300.

[159] _Op. cit._, p. 29.

[160] _Ibid._, pp. 29-30.

[161] _Ibid._, p. 30.

[162] _Op. cit._, p. 259.

[163] _Op. cit._, pp. 259-260.

[164] _Ibid._, p. 261.

[165] _Op. cit._, p. 263.

[166] _Ibid._, p. 264.

[167] _Ibid._, p. 265.

[168] _Op. cit._, p. 266.

[169] _Op. cit._, p. 267.

[170] _Ibid._, p. 267.

[171] St. John, XIV.

[172] “This Believing World,” p. 269.

[173] _Ibid._, p. 271.

[174] _Ibid._, p. 272.

[175] _Ibid._, p. 273.

[176] _Ibid._, p. 276.

[177] “This Believing World,” p. 277.

[178] _Loc. cit._

[179] _Ibid._

[180] _Op. cit._, p. 278.

[181] _Ibid._, p. 279.

[182] _Ibid._, p. 280.

[183] _Op. cit._, p. 280.

[184] _Ibid._, p. 281.

[185] _Ibid._, p. 282.

[186] _Ibid._, p. 284.

[187] “The Psychology of Religious Mysticism,” p. 189.

[188] “This Believing World,” p. 284.

[189] “This Believing World,” p. 285.

[190] _Op. cit._, p. 218.

[191] _Ibid._, p. 285.

[192] _Op. cit._, p. 287.

[193] _Ibid._, p. 288.

[194] _Ibid._, p. 289.

[195] _Ibid._, p. 290.

[196] _Op. cit._, p. 292.

[197] _Ibid._, p. 292.

[198] _Loc. cit._

[199] _Loc. cit._

[200] _Op. cit._, pp. 292-293.

[201] _Loc. cit._

[202] _Op. cit._, p. 296.

[203] _Op. cit._, p. 64.

[204] _Ibid._, p. 70.

[205] _Ibid._, p. 279.

[206] _Ibid._, p. 274.

[207] _Ibid._, p. 277.

[208] _Ibid._, p. 298.

[209] _Ibid._, pp. 298-299.

[210] _Op. cit._, p. 299.

[211] _Op. cit._, p. 300.

[212] _Ibid._, p. 300.

[213] _Ibid._, p. 301.

[214] “The Story of Philosophy,” p. 326.

[215] _Op. cit._, p. 507.

[216] _Ibid._, p. 511.

[217] _Op. cit._, p. 509.

[218] _Ibid._, p. 316.

[219] _Op. cit._, p. 509.