Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

riors. It seeks to enhance the glamour of their profession by brilliant uniforms and decorations and processions and celebrations. How is it possible for the child who is growing to manhood to escape the conviction that the greatness of a nation is measured by its conquests, albeit they are utterly unjust, and by its wars, albeit they are carnivals of slaughter? Where do we find the tomb of a sage which rivals the tomb of Napoleon? How can each coming generation fail to be influenced by teachings so destructive of social welfare and peace, when it sees the highest officials of the government, its men of letters, its inventors, its engineers, going about modestly in the same garb as their fellow men, receiving no special honor, wearing no decorations except for length of service; in every way less regarded than military men even of low rank? The whole Western world, forced to fight for generations against invasion from the East, has become impregnated with a spirit of conquest and violence utterly hostile to permanent peace.

China, on the other hand, has always regarded military leaders as inferiors, and has honored them far less than she has her scholars, her poets, and her civil functionaries. A popular proverb says: 'Don't use good iron to make a sword; don't waste a good man to make a soldier.'

The Chinese are taught from infancy the stupidity of destroying life and property, and the utility of producing wealth, and of living in harmony with one's family and one's neighbors. Our highest honors, our most memorable tokens of respect and veneration, are bestowed upon our wise men and our public functionaries. For twelve centuries our great academy of the 'Forest of Pens' has never admitted a general or a Buddhist priest. A field-marshal has the same political rank as a provincial governor; but he does not receive

[ocr errors]

the high salary, the public regard, or the external marks of respect given the latter.

The West esteems material things above all else. Its people are constantly struggling to advance, to increase their fortunes and their honors, to enlarge their treasures; above all, to impose on others their ideas, their sentiments, and their customs.

In the Orient civilization is based primarily upon non-material things. Our teachings and our rites aim to cultivate harmony and discourage controversy. Men of ardent and warlike natures learn to fight; but to fight their own anti-social impulses. By the time they grow old, they have been trained all their life to conquer the avarice and cupidity natural to their later years. The whole teaching of Confucius is directed toward making men honor and admire moral greatness and despise material things.

This explains why the Orient has fallen behind in material civilization, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, which was followed by a great outburst of scientific progress in Europe.

But what has been the result of this excessive material progress? By it the whole Occident has been ruined, shattered, ground to pieces. The Orient is to-day far better off than the rest of the world.

Is it not possible to use what wisdom there may be in the teachings of the West to correct the defects of the East, and to apply the training and habits of Asia to alleviate the evils of Europe?

Western schools invariably teach that power and wealth are acquired by force and fighting. Would it not be wiser to teach the art of living in peace? We should never lose sight of the fact that we are making to-day the history of the future, and we should consequently be ever seeking the shortest

[ocr errors]

and surest road toward the common happiness of mankind. Sixty million men have been under arms. Thirty-two nations have been at war for nearly five years. The ruins which encumber the Western world are not yet cleared away; and already the people are arming again; their governments are manœuvring for supremacy more ardently than ever. New wars are brewing on every side.

[ocr errors]

This desire to possess what we do not own, to get wealth by hook or by crook, is not a sentiment likely to heal the ills of humanity, especially in the West, where the love of combat is already so deeply rooted. While waiting for some more rational scheme of education to cure these ills, governments might at least if they really wish to avoid war obviate some of the causes which are leading directly to future conflicts. If the question of the Near East had been discussed and adjusted for decades by a council of the Great Powers, Germany would have known that all the rest of the world was against her, and would have bowed to its decision. Now that Western industries are urgently seeking markets, the question of the Far East will again become acute. It is certain that Japan, the United States, Great Britain, and eventually France, will each do all in its power to secure a lion's share of our trade. If the alliance we foresee between Germany and Russia is formed, or even if Russia alone recovers rapidly from her ruin, the situation will soon demand adjustment, discussion, and action.

The League of Nations is not a success, because each of its members seeks to preserve full liberty to extend its dominion and power. Each member wishes to use the League to cripple the progress of its neighbors, but does not propose to be crippled in its own progress. The spirit of conquest and vio

lence is just as strong as ever in the Occident. To be sure, the history of civilization is receiving a little more attention in the schools, and recitals of slaughter and carnage are not quite so prominent in courses of instruction as heretofore. But military training is gaining ground.

The West has not yet begun to teach what we have always taught in China, that the welfare of the nations and the happiness of mankind do not depend primarily on science, intelligence, glory, or a government powerful abroad; but that they depend on labor, thrift, consideration for our neighbors, and mutual helpfulness. The latter are non-material objects in life, but the most important for which we can strive. Idleness, prodigality, covetousness, tyranny-these we must root out of our hearts. Confucius says: 'You do not keep in your house a thing that is poisonous and spoiled. Why then do you keep in your heart a sentiment that envenoms human happiness?' His doctrine is based on three principles: self-perfection, respect of justice, and resistance to tyranny. These are the principles upon which all social life is based.

Europe is already old enough for us to discern from its history the common origin of all its wars and revolutions, and to base on them a doctrine and a method of instruction that will protect us from deceiving ourselves and others. During China's five thousand years of history, practically every doctrine and theory of life and society has been examined and tested. Even Communism, which is now ruining Russia, was tried for twenty years in the twelfth century of the Christian era throughout the whole Celestial Empire. The results were precisely what they have been in Russia: misery, famine, public despair, violent revolutions, and bloody repression. The land was reallotted each year according to the number of persons in a

family; the government distributed in the spring the seed which must be returned to it in the autumn. Cattle and other livestock were loaned to farmers by the government. But the principles of private property and of personal liberty are too deeply rooted in the hearts of men. China had to give up this unnatural theory. Ought such lessons, bought with so much suffering, to be of no service whatever to the

world? Is humanity to continue thus blindly mutilating itself, plunging headlong through ever bloodier disasters toward an unknown goal?

The theory of human progress is now a dogma of world-wide acceptance. But history proves that our present course of progress is a constantly widening spiral, departing ever further from the only goal which we ought to seek: the happiness of mankind.

THREE PHILOSOPHER-PROPHETS: DEAN INGE, BERTRAND RUSSELL, GEORGE SANTAYANA

BY ARTHUR MCDOWALL

From The London Mercury, June
(LITERARY MONTHLY)

THE world has never quite decided what it means by a philosopher. It knows, of course, that there are professional or academic thinkers, and these are definitely the writers whom it does not read. It respects their privacy, not because it values their thoughts, but because it does not understand them. To call a man a philosopher seems thus to put him in the corner; and yet we inconsequently use the name as a term of highest compliment. When we talk of the philosophy of Montaigne or of Emerson, we seal the charm of those authors with a kind of impregnable dignity.

This suggests, perhaps, that while we shrink from the academic thinkers, we may not be wholly the dull fools we seem for doing so. How much of the philosophy written between Plato and Nietzsche is 'musical as is Apollo's lute'? We have a secret hope that it may be divine; but then the wisdom which it loves must be the largest wis

dom. It seeks an impersonal truth, we know, and leads into impersonal regions; but we want to feel that a person's whole virtue has been taxed to find them. That philosophy should use itself on technicalities and polemics may be a sign that it is only a by-play of the understanding.

For whatever reason, the gulf between the professed philosophers and the public is generally a wide one. Hume crossed it, and Mill; so did Spencer, thanks to the favoring wind of science. At present we are exceptionally rich in having three writers who have done the same thing, Dean Inge, Mr. Bertrand Russell, and Mr. Santayana, and the excuse for attempting a general appreciation of them is that they have enabled us to know them as men, and men of letters. Strange to say, this has not shattered their respectability as thinkers. They have their own place among the elect, and the public to some extent can under

[ocr errors]

stand it, since they all have the gift of exposition. But we read them, in general, because they are not only profound but alluring because each has a powerful individuality and is a master of expression. These qualities have drawn them irresistibly out of the narrower circle of their studies. They belong to life and letters too; we want to read Dean Inge when he chastises the age, Mr. Russell as he sketches his ideal society, and Mr. Santayana as an interpreter of poets. Their writing obviously belongs to minds which have the will to criticize experience, and it has made so much impression that they may certainly be numbered with our prophets.

In these days prophets are often indistinguishable from sages, the prophetic nuance lying chiefly in a stronger idealism or in less restraint on temper. These writers all have the stamp of intellectuals, and yet in some ways they have filled the prophetic rôle exactly. To go into a deanery is not quite the same thing as going out into the desert; but Dean Inge has known how to secure the detachment of a free speaker. He took the side of the prophets against the priests when he said that organized religion had been a failure, and that Christianity was not imagined by its Founder as an institutional religion; and it is, again, with a kind of sacred rage that he dissects our shibboleths, especially Progress and Labor. At the same time he outlines what seems to him a truer vision. So does Mr. Bertrand Russell, who, after being vowed, apparently, to mathematics and a logical philosophy, found himself involved with the world because he had proclaimed unpopular opinions. The main Tesson of the war for him, he has told us, was that it suggested a fresh view of the springs of human action; and with all his critical acuteness, but with an unexpected strength of feeling, he urges us

VOL. 310-NO. 4020

to revise the traditional beliefs about society and conduct. Some violence is needed, I own, to bring Mr. Santayana into the same category. His temper and secluded fame protest against it, yet he, too, is in his quiet way a revolutionist, offering even more clearly than the others a way of life and a refuge from illusions.

Of these three no doubt Dean Inge is the one who has been listened to most eagerly. A London deanery is an admirable place for exercising personal magnetism, as was proved by Church and Stanley. But Dean Inge's searching quality has carried further; no more incisive mind, no wit so mordant can have harbored under St. Paul's since Donne was there. He and Donne seem alike, too, in their fastidiousness of temper, which yet goes with a wide and minute curiosity; as in their metaphysical turn of mind and their demand for a faith that will satisfy intellectually. There the resemblance ends, for Donne's passionate and imaged eloquence is as remote from the present Dean's as his life, broken and then united, is from Dr. Inge's consistent development.

It has been a development, none the less. The book on Christian Mysticism which made him known is comparatively dry and meagre beside his later writing. The problem before Dean Inge, if we regard him for the moment simply as a man of letters, was whether he would manage to carry the burden of his knowledge. And part of the interest

one might almost say the excitement - of reading him comes from finding that he succeeds in doing it. The form is a student's form; it looks back to authorities and is studded with quotations. But his illustrations are really illustrations, not only making their point, but lighting up far reaches of type in thought and character. It is a pity that more readers should not attack Plotinus, though it is rather vast

and difficult. It performs the hard task of reconstructing a dim figure truly, and yet making his thought live in the present, so that he is invisibly transported from ancient Rome to London; and it is also a burning expression of the high values in the life of mind and spirit. Even this grave book sparkles with epigrams; here, for instance, is one which deserves a larger audience:"There is no hint in Plotinus that earthly beauty is a snare of the devil. . . . We may suspect that when persons hold this view the reason is, if they are women, that Cupid has left them alone, and, if they are men, that Cupid will not leave them alone.'

Dean Inge's work has come steadily nearer to life and deepened in conviction and humor. His writing scarcely reaches the point where style is an imaginative power. It is terse and exact, above all, and yet full of pungent surprises.

The value of this thought is dispatched shortly in some circles by asking if he is a mystic and replying that he is not. According to the straitest sect this may be true, and if he were a complete mystic his writings would probably be less lucid than they are. But just as Charles Lamb, in the old house of Blakesmoor, felt that he had received there the spirit of 'gentility' by adoption, so Dean Inge might be called an adopted mystic, sharing this quality by the very type of his conviction. All philosophers, as Mr. Bertrand Russell says, have a mystical and a logical strain in them. And some would add that mysticism is the essence of religion. Perhaps the mystics of philosophy attracted Dean Inge before the mystics of religion; but in Christian Platonism he has seized the two influences at their point of contact and in the form that best meets the demands of reason.

Inge's influence lies less in any great originality of doctrine than in a finely stored mind and the strength of character behind it. This gives the sense of personality, unmistakably shown in moral courage a quality so rare in opportunist days that it might be almost called original. Yet it is not entirely because the virtue has grown strange to us that Dean Inge's outspokenness suggests a problem. The vigor, not to say the violence, of so many utterances sets one musing as to their relations with the rest of his mind. Do they belong to his whole outlook, or are they an accident, or an unconscious gust of party?

Renan once said that he was not fitted for a democratic society: the omnibus conductors took him as a joke and he always got the worst place in a railway carriage. And in the future things would probably be worse instead of better. Dean Inge, though he has more stamina than Renan, is evidently haunted by the same apprehension. Under his pessimistic glance upon society there seems to lie a genuine shrinking from the multitude, which is hardly balanced by his saving faith in individuals. The last few years have certainly shown us much of the herd instincts of the crowd. But Dean Inge is an aristocrat by thought and nature as much as by experience; the trait reveals itself when he says that Christianity is never likely to be the religion of the many, or that progress is reserved for individuals. He is no faddist about individual feeling; patriotism appeals to him strongly, and he seems to object to Socialism more as a misplacement of values than as a restraint upon liberty. But his ideal liberty, one imagines, would always be supervised from above

by a Roman Senate when he thinks as a Conservative, and by Platonic 'guardians' when he thinks as a phi

But that is a restatement, and Dean losopher.

« VorigeDoorgaan »