The Half-way House of Humanism

...It is not too much to say, then, that Irving Babbitt himself conceives humanism as a half-way house on the road to the mountain top of the spiritual life...

...Humanism, no more than religion, can be opposed to genuine science since the three are but so many means of recovering truth...

...With their undermining by naturalism, the ethical values themselves are in danger of being swept away in the everlasting flux...

...It will be apparent that Professor Mercier is a more enthusiastic advocate of the humanist program than the editors of The Cmmonweal themselves have been...

...Well, Babbitt and More have answered that question hundreds of times...

...in fact the Catholic college would seem to be the only institution left specially devoted to this task today, and the culture and mansuetude of many a Catholic prelate and humbler priest is most evidently humanistic as well as Christian...

...Of course, it will take at least another generation before the haze of prejudices which still make the word mediaeval stand for darkness, can be generally dissipated...

...Even the behaviorist then can contribute something to our knowledge of man's activity...

...And in his essay in Humanism and America, he has written: "The Catholic Church can scarcely fail to recognize that the position of the positive and critical humanist is sound as far as it goes...

...They are experimental as long as they deal with data of the senses, but they cease to be experimental as soon as they are confronted with the immediate data of consciousness which transcend sense experience...

...It is true humanism is made to look negative because it harps on the maxim "Nothing too much," because it calls for measure and proportion...

...The reception of the movement in France was no less characteristic in its own way...

...They must henceforth be fully taken into consideration by all who would seriously attempt to speak about the end of individual and social progress and of their furtherance and expression through the arts...

...Simply to be of the surrender to all the urges of nature, believed, truly experimental, to base one's philosophy not only on the contrary, that man was man only in so far as on the data of experience, but to base it on the whole he used his power to canalize these urges...

...Not good enough, the Christian will say, and of course he is right if man is much more than even the humanist makes him out to be, if a personal God is his end, and morality is in terms of that end, if, moreover, man is called to the supernatural life of grace even in this world...

...The humanist so understood is the true positivist and the true experimentalist...

...It is not surprising that several humanists have already done so, and in so doing it, might be added, they remained in the historical tradition of humanism...

...Consequently: It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world that has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap...

...Again the accusation comes: Humanism scorns whole provinces of human activity, science for instance...

...that character which is the fruit of good instruction, even of good heredity, which has reached standards of honor, standards worthy of man, lifted as he is, above Now, fundamentally, what both Irving Babbitt and the level of his animal self, by his capacity to acquire Paul Elmer More have done is to recall our attention to the fact, a fact as indubitable as any material fact, that, as an immediate datum of consciousness, we perceive in ourselves the existence of a certain quality of will, a power of vital control capable of acting on our and to follow such standards...

...Still it is true that the poor humanist trudging upward on the slope of spirituality without a clear belief in the grace of God, and without the help of the sacraments, must look rather pitiful to the Catholic, and hard to distinguish from the Stoic...

...You are a humanist, then, and you have the right impressions and emotions and expansive desires, and to call yourself such, if, but only if, you believe that 96 THE COMMONWEAL May 28, 1930 there is in man a capacity to distinguish and to choose between the superior and the inferior in all domains, a capacity which implies duties and responsibilities and consequently the need of an education of the intelligence and of the will, of the intelligence since it must help to determine values, of the will since it must learn to choose the highest habitually...

...May 28, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 95 THE HALF-WAY HOUSE OF HUMANISM By LOUIS J. A. MERCIER WHEN, little more than a year ago, I published Le Mouvement Humaniste aux EtatsUnis, to help acquaint the French public with the work of W. C. Brownell, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, I was told by several American reviewers that the word "movement "applied to humanism was premature...

...An abundance of past experiments, which Babbitt and More have recorded in their books, show that, under this conception, man feeling himself the plaything of natural forces, will sink into naturalistic pessimism or, else, idyllically conceiving himself as naturally good, naturally fraternal and altruistic, will give free play to all his instincts, and, in blind pride, fall into romantic excesses, until, violently disillusioned by inexorable reality, and again imagining himself the plaything of natural forces, he will nurse his head and heartaches throughout a new period of pessimism...

...Consequently Babbitt admits that "the question remains whether the most crying need just now is for positive and ethical humanism or for positive and critical religion...

...The combining of the two he recognizes as "one of the most obscure that the thinker has to face...

...To the humanist you may say: "Fais ce que voudras," but only because he is already disciplined to the human, because he is "bien instruit," because he has the honor of a man...

...Humanism asks the individual to work upon himself that he may be ready to work for the world...

...It asks the reformer to reform himself before he attempts to reform others...

...His "Fais ce que voudras" was addressed only to "well-born, well-instructed people who have by nature an instinct which they call honor and which leads to virtue and keeps them from vice...

...Nature" here means precisely data of experience available...

...Irving Babbitt evidently would not expect him to be...

...A fatal mistake was thus made in the transition from the middle-ages to the modern age...

...The submission of the members to the law of the spirit, the humanist holds as his primary task, but, in this, he is at one with the Christian...

...and completely moderns...

...But even for those who thus realize that whatever truth there is in humanism is there because humanism itself is in the axis of religious truth, the half-way house of humanism may well remain or become a meeting place...

...Today, no names are of directing them to higher ends, thus making us captains of ourselves, enabling us to develop our inner life, a genuine individualism, a really human character...

...That datum of consciousness—call it what you please, the higher will, the higher nature, vital control, the true voice of man's higher self— is what makes us human and what separates us, partly at least, from the rest of nature, what makes us capable therefore of ethical development, of true progress, through setting us above the flux of impressions and emotions, instead of leaving us immersed and helpless in this flux, as all modernistic and monistic schools do...

...The New York sky-line is proportionate to the gateway of a continent, the mediaeval cathedral is proportionate to the dynamism of the ages of faith...

...The naturalists failed to learn how to have standards after refusing to be immured in dogma...

...There is then no difference in kind between the humanist and the Christian even if there is one of degree...

...As opposed to spiritual indolence, it is a constant striving to rise from a lower to a higher range of satisfactions up the slope of spirituality...

...It asks the artist to develop his self that he may do more than afflict the world with a worthless self-expression...

...Sir Thomas More was both humanistic and saintly and even Rabelais makes Gargantua entreat his son to remember that "knowledge without conscience is but ruin of the soul and that this life is transitory, but that the word of God lives on eternally...

...Now, here is where the readers of The Commonweal, the Catholic and those who, though non-Catholic, recognize the historical Church, will step in and say: Yes, man has at times secured genuine progress but, in modern times at least, the causes of his progress cannot be dissociated from the action of the principles of Christianity...

...At any rate, from the half-way house of humanism, we may at least gain the perspective of the disorder on the naturalistic plain below and make a beginning toward the restoration of order...

...You are a humanist if you believe that there is in man such a principle, and if you rid yourself of the preconceptions which may blind you to the immediate data of your consciousness, you will readily experience the presence and the action in you of such a principle...

...Unless I am mistaken, the teaching system of her religious orders, uniting as it does the study of the Latin and Greek classics to that of Christianity, aims, in part at least, to produce Christian humanists...

...It follows, he even adds, "that the Catholic and the non-Catholic should be able to cooperate on the humanistic level and that a like cooperation should be possible between the humanist and the members of other Christian communions who have not as yet succumbed entirely to humanitarianism...

...What is wrong...

...If man is merely matter, if he is not essentially set by a supernaturalistic element in him above the rest of nature, then you will get behavior, individual, social, national, international and artistic of a certain kind...

...Here were American authors who spoke their own language, who were fully alive to all the traditions, who faced squarely the problem of the nature of man, in the light of all these traditions, and who brought a formula for a twentieth-century approach to a common reexamination of all the data involved...

...Babbitt and More have not been working in vain for twenty years, patiently collecting the data on the experience of the race both oriental and occidental, and they cannot be easily dismissed...

...My argument," writes Babbitt, "is addressed to those who are mere modernists at a time Humanism continues to find America an interested audience...

...However the present widespread interest in humanism shows that there has been no little advance made since Babbitt set out some twenty years ago "to work out a point of view so truly modern that compared with it, that of our smart young radicals would seem antediluvian...

...The honest thinker, whatever his own preference, must begin by admitting that though religion can get along without humanism, humanism cannot get along without religion," because, as Burke pointed out, "the whole ethical life of man has its root in humility, as humility diminishes, conceit or vain imagining rushes in almost automatically to take its place...

...However, the challenging sentences of Babbitt must now be taken into account: May 28, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 97 We have been enlightened by the Christian experience above all and the great new principle it brought into the Occident, namely, the separation of the temporal and spiritual powers, and all the consequences that flow from this principle either directly or indirectly, especially the idea of individual liberty that ultimately rests on this distinction, and of which neither Aristotle nor Plato has any adequate conception...

...In fact, Babbitt actually pleads for the cooperation of all genuinely religious men in his battle for civilization: The preference I have expressed for a positive and critical humanism I wish to be regarded as very tentative...

...Far from being negative, then, humanism "as far as it goes," to its own half-way house, is a call to effort, and to a much more strenuous effort indeed than is involved in the surrender to the mere expansiveness of the emotions or of the will to power...

...But, on the other hand, Babbitt deserves to have his claims for humanism fully brought out...

...They are modest enough in spite of the arrogance that has been attributed to him...

...The Christian can certainly establish his moral standards much more easily than the humanist, but Christians, and Catholics in particular, must perforce recognize that such a conception of man rests on a faith which the very vagaries of pseudomodern thought that Babbitt so frequently denounces, have made very difficult of approach...

...One of the most startling consequences of the work of Babbitt and More precisely because it was so objective, has been the reestablishment of the perspective of history and the consequent reappearance in its true light of the social value of mediaeval Christianity...

...Theirs were truly negative doctrines...

...This is the essence of humanism and there is evidently nothing recondite about the doctrine...

...What ties exist between it and the domains of religion and knowledge...

...What does it mean to be Even Rabelais, who is always quoted as an apostle truly "modern" according to Babbitt...

...That is, who still preach selfreform before social reform...

...Well, Irving Babbitt himself and Paul Elmer More even more, have fully recognized the value of Christianity, even for the organization of this life...

...And then, too, it should be understood that this humanism is not the negative doctrine which some of its critics would make it out to be...

...The long inquiries of Babbitt and More enable us to evaluate objectively, by a wholly critical and experimental method, the fruits of the naturalistic level...

...The essence of the challenge of humanism, as developed in particular in the works of Babbitt, is that the time has come when we should try to become truly "moderns...

...That Babbitt himself recognizes that it only goes so far is ample proof that humanism, as he undertands it, has no pretensions to be a substitute for religion, as T. S. Eliot and G. K. Chesterton seemed to fear...

...It is no wonder either that the representatives of purely materialistic doctrines are being marshaled in a counterattack...

...As Babbitt puts it: "Humanistic mediation and religious meditation are after all only different stages in the same ascending path and should not be arbitrarily separated...

...The dissolution of civilization with which we are threatened on account of this is likely to be worse in some respects than that of Greece and Rome...

...Simply that man has made a fundamental mistake about his own nature, that not recognizing in himself the principle by the exercise of which he can achieve at least some measure of orderly life, and consequently genuine progress, he has either felt that he could not shape his destiny by the exercise of his power of discrimination and choice, or else, that being naturally good, he did not need to work ethically to achieve order either in himself or in his environment...

...But Aristotle defined happiness itself as a kind of working, and in this kind of working which at least makes him into a man, the humanist may well find some consolation...

...It should be evident then, how, from the half-way house of humanism it is easy and logical to ascend higher up the slope of spirituality...

...It must be admitted that Irving Babbitt often lays himself open needlessly to such accusations...

...But, on the other hand, it is equally clear on the basis of historical experiments, that whenever and in so far as man has worked ethically, he has known a genuine progress...

...On the contrary, the humanist is both positive and humble: positive, because he would grow through more and more patiently worked for contact with the abiding...

...the true positivist because he will not reject the data of consciousness testifying to the existence in him of a power to choose...

...The kingdom may not be of this world, but it is to be gained in this world, and we have been enjoined to pray: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...

...His contribution is nevertheless one which we are unusually happy to publish.—The Editors...

...Thus, literature will pass from the record of his romantic intoxication to that of his naturalistic disenchantment...

...What is humanism ready to do for the world...

...What we need is not humanism but a revival of Christian influence...

...It will evidently take our pseudoprogressives a long time to digest this...

...It is for instance most easy to discern, in the light of humanistic criticism, that what the so-called advanced naturalistic writers of America are offering us today, under the guise of modernity, are but the warmed-over remnants of the French naturalism of a half-century ago which itself reached back ultimately to the materialism of the dawn of our occidental thought, so that our most advanced radicals are really as Babbitt averred, antediluvian...

...more often mentioned in American literary circles than those of Babbitt and More, and humanism is recognized not only as a movement but as one aggressive enough to call for the concerted counter-attack of all the upholders of naturalism...

...The reason is that at last they are being met on their own ground...

...From all this it becomes easily clear that the socalled "modern age" is most egregiously misnamed, that the only philosophy that is modern is the Christian, and that so-called modern thought is but a conglomerate of pantheism and materialism, the poorer brands of the most ancient thought...

...It should be at least clear that humanism, far from being opposed to religion or to historical Christianity, is its best ally "as far as it goes...

...He is not only a man of will but a man of good-will, a man who seeks to make his will conformable with what religion calls the will of God...

...He is an experimentalist not only in terms of the present but of the past...

...Both spirit and members make up man...

...This is precisely what the various naturalistic schools do not do...

...It is a doctrine which also implies humility, since it teaches that man must discipline himself and consequently recognize a law superior to many of his natural instincts, and that, to recognize it, he must carefully study the experiences of the race, which means that he must know, or at least that his leaders must know, all the traditions...

...Then too as Babbitt reminds us, the history of Christianity has often been defaced by unchristian excesses and humanism may be, and in fact has been, actually utilized to advantage by Christians and by the Catholic Church in particular...

...In fact Babbitt has gone so far as to say that "under certain conditions that are already partly in sight, the Catholic Church may perhaps be the only institution left in the Occident that can be counted on to uphold civilized standards...

...In politics and sociology he will likewise oscillate between idyllic dreams of fraternity and Nietzschean spells of scorn and ruthlessness, between visions of Utopia and Bolshevistic terror, while in international intercourse, he will dream of perpetual peace only to wake up in the midst of another world war...

...Therein precisely the humanist sets himself off from both the stoic and the Epicurean who pridefully or carefully refrained from such excesses as would make them suffer...

...For another of the facts to which Babbitt and More have given prominence is that all the questions pertaining to individual and social progress are indissolubly linked, because, in the last analysis, they all depend on the conception man has of his own nature...

...It asks all to become acquainted with what has been done in the past before they try to do something new for the world, because otherwise they are in danger of giving the world ineptitudes long since experimented with and found wanting...

...And holding fast thus to the principle that makes you specifically human, you have a right to call yourself a humanist, both in the psychological sense and in the historical sense of the word, because the humanists of the renaissance did when there is a supreme need of being thoroughly believe in such a specifically human principle in man...

...Not only did it attract the attention of the French Academy but representatives of numerous groups commented upon it most sympathetically from Catholic papers to the Action Franchise and the Mercure de France, from the Abbe Bremond to Baron Seilliere...

...But precisely what is it...

...It does establish experimentally that man is not an irresponsible being at the mercy of materialistic determinism, but that on the contrary, there is in him a principle which distinguishes him from the rest of nature and which makes him a man...

...Is it not already tremendous to have called us all, as Babbitt and More have done, to the half-way house of their humanism...

...The "frein vital," the vital control of the humanist is not repressive but selective...

...But nothing too much, measure and proportion, the subordination of the parts to the whole, appropriateness, apply as well to a skyscraper as to a wrist watch, to the Divine Comedy as to a Shakespearean sonnet...

...The humanists find nothing too much in Notre Dame of Paris even though they 98 THE COMMONWEAL May 28, 1930 most certainly would in a Gothic gasoline filling station...

...As for science in general, it is only in so far as it pretends to the monopoly of truth that Babbitt opposes it as pseudoscience...

...All the ethical values of civilization have been associated with the fixed beliefs of religion...

...Nobody could be better qualified to explain than the author of a French book which remains by all odds the best treatment of the subject—Le Mouvement Humaniste aux Etats-Unis...

...He would "set out to be a good humanist, which means merely to be moderate and sensible and decent before attempting to be superhuman...

...If such is the fundamental doctrine of Babbitt and More, it is no wonder that, now that it has been brought to the attention of the general public, not only in France, but lately in the United States through the manifesto, Humanism and America, recently reviewed in The Commonweal by George N Shuster, humanism is attracting overnight national attention...

...In fact Babbitt has stated it categorically: "What is specifically human in man and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will that is felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain...

...the true experimentalist because he is not naive enough to believe that before this day and age, the race had not been constantly making experiments or that these experiments have no value...

...humble, because he feels that this abiding is ultimately part of the order of the universe and points to its Author...

...All he would claim for it is that, at least, it is far up from the plain of materialism The Catholic, as George N. Shuster reminded him in his review of Humanism and America, may not be satisfied with it...

...In the dark situation that is growing up in the Occident, all genuine humanism and religion, whether on a traditional or a critical basis, should be welcome...

...Let us note carefully that, although Babbitt often refers to Emerson, he recognizes that he finds the best expression of the dual quality of man's nature in the famous words of Saint Paul about the law of the spirit and the law of the members warring in the heart of man...

...It is unfortunate that he has harped so often on the "law for man" distinct from "the law for thing," even though they are distinct, because, as he has himself repeatedly stated, "no small part of human life itself comes under natural law...

...It does not pretend to explain the whole mystery of life...

...If he is an enemy of the law of the spirit, he can at least perhaps find out something about the laws of the members...

...Indeed we may say more...

...ask the Lippmans and the Edmund Wilsons...

...The higher will Babbitt finds in man as a primary datum of consciousness, being the power to distinguish, with the help of analytical reason, the abiding value in the flux of phenomena, the ethical and aesthetic truth in the midst of the manifold solicitations of the senses and emotions, does not only set man off from the rest of nature but points to the divine...