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GENERAL SURVEY

F.S. MARVIN

We are trying in this book to give some impression of the principal changes and developments of Western thought in what might roughly be called 'the last generation', though this limit of time has been, as it must be, treated liberally. From the political point of view the two most impressive milestones, events which will always mark for the consciousness of the West the beginning and the end of a period, are no doubt the war of 1870 and the Great War which has just ended. From 1870 to 1914 would therefore be the most obvious delimitation of our study; and it is a striking illustration of human paradox, that a great stage in the growth of unity should be marked by two international tragedies and crowned by the most terrible of all.

Nearly coincident with the political divisions there are important landmarks in the history of thought. During the 'sixties, while the power of Prussia was rising to its culmination in the Franco-Prussian War, the Darwinian theory of development was gaining command in biology. To many thinkers there has appeared a clear connexion between that biological doctrine and the 'imperialism', Teutonic and other, which was so marked a feature of the time. In any case 'post-Darwinian' might well describe the scientific thought of the age we have in view.

Industrially the epoch is as clearly defined as it is in politics and science. For in 1871, the year of the Treaty of Frankfort, an act was passed after a long working-class agitation, assisted by certain eminent members of the middle class, legalizing strikes and Trade Unions. And now at the end of the war, all over the world, society is faced by the problem of reconciling the full rights, and in some cases the extreme demands, of 'labour', with democratic government and the prosperity and social union of the whole community. This is the situation discussed in our seventh and eighth chapters.

In philosophy and literature a similar dividing line appears. In the 'sixties Herbert Spencer was publishing the capital works of his system. The Principles of Psychology was published in 1872. This 'Synthetic Philosophy' has proved up to the present the last attempt of its kind, and with the vast increase of knowledge since Spencer's day it might well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind. Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had attempted before.

In literature also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, La Légende des Siècles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed. Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good men will only follow their better leading.

Here then is our period, marked in public affairs by a progress from one conflict, desperate and tragic, between two of the leading nations of the West, to another and still more terrible which swept the whole world into the maelstrom; and marked in thought by a certain dispersion and depression of mind, a falling in the barometer of temperament and imagination, but also by a grappling with realities at closer quarters. No wonder that some have seen here a 'tragedy of hope' and the 'bankruptcy of science'.

But it must be noted at once that these obvious landmarks, though striking, are in themselves superficial. They require explanation rather than give it, and in some cases an explanation, much less tragic than the symptom, is suggested by the symptom itself. We may at least fairly treat them at starting simply as beacon-hills to mark out the country we are traversing. We have to go deeper to find out the nature of the soil, and travel to the end to study the vista beyond.

In making this fuller analysis of man's recent achievement, especially in the West, the first, and perhaps ultimately the weightiest, element we have to note is the continued and unexampled growth of science. Was there ever a more fertile period than the generation which succeeded Darwin's achievement in biology and Bunsen's and Kirchhoff's with the spectroscope? Both have created revolutions, one in our view of living things, the other in our view of matter. In physics the whole realm of radio-activity has come into our ken within these years, and during the same time chemistry, both organic and inorganic, has been equally enlarged. All branches of science in fact show a similar expansion, and a new school of mathematicians claim that they have recast the foundations of the fundamental science and assimilated it to the simplest laws of all thinking. Some discussion of this will be found in the chapter on philosophy.

It may serve as tonic—an antidote to that depression of spirits of which we have spoken—to consider that such an output of mental energy, rewarded by such a harvest of truth, is without precedent in man's evolution. No single generation before ever learnt so much not only of the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at least is glorious.

And there is tonic in another thought which rises from the very nature of this recent blossoming of knowledge. It marks the growing co-operative activity of mankind. The fact that science and research of every kind have advanced so rapidly is not only, or even primarily, a proof of the continued vigour of the human intellect, but of the stability of society, the coherence of social classes and nations, the readiness of the bulk of men to allow their more immediately productive work to be used for the support of those whose labours are in a more remote and ideal sphere. Science did not begin until the ancient priesthoods were enabled to pursue disinterested inquiries without the need of earning their daily bread. Civilization, we may be assured, is not threatened in its most vital part so long as the general will permits the application of the general resources to the promotion of learning and research without a claim for immediate marketable results. Our last generation has not only permitted but has encouraged this in all Western countries, and in other countries, such as China and Japan, influenced by the West. The money thus spent is vastly greater than in any equal period before, and the United States, the land of the fullest democratic claims, is also the land of the amplest generosity for scientific and educational purposes.

The growth of knowledge is a symptom not only of the collective capacity of living man but also of the continuity of the present age with those which had laid the earlier foundations. One school of vigorous action, and still more vigorous talk, advises our generation to be done with the past and make a fresh start on more ideal lines. This is not the voice of science, which, just in proportion to its growth, has shown more and more care for its origins and its past: and this is true at every stage in the history of thought. The Greeks, fighting for freedom and establishing in the city-state a new form of political organization for the world, were yet in their scientific evolution true and grateful successors of the priests who first compiled the observations necessary for the scientific study of the heavens and founded the art of medicine. The men of the Renascence, who were burnt and imprisoned for doubting the verbal inspiration of Aristotle and the Bible, were in fact going back to an earlier impulse than that of the scholastic philosophy. The mathematics of Pappus and the mechanics of Archimedes had to be carried further before the new sciences of which Aristotle had given the first sketch could be securely founded. The pioneers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries built therefore on the past, although accused of impiety and revolution; and it must be so with any intellectual construction which is to hold its own and form the future. So far from there being any opposition in nature between history and science, the two are but different aspects of one continuous enlargement of the human spirit, which sees and lives more fully at each great moment of its progress, and, so far as it is alive, is always informed by the real achievements of the past. We illustrate this advance in the marvellous record of our fifth chapter, and its spirit is summed up in the great saying of Benedetto Croce that 'all history is contemporary history'.

But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.

The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders—the motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy. But it is not sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather than the individual capacity of man. Men had dreamt for ages of flying, but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought together and made effective. It is Humanity that flies, and not the individual man alone. The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of engineering as our own Watt and Stephenson stand in the history of the steam-engine. Wireless telegraphy offers a similar story. Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Marconi; the names are international. In 1913, before ever the League of Nations had been planned, Lord Bryce was telling an International Congress in London that 'the world is becoming one in an altogether new sense. … More than four centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the European races have gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. As the earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our disposal, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in each of its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever happens in any part of the globe has now a significance for every other part. World History is tending to become one History.'

The war, tragically as it has shaken this growing oneness of mankind, has not destroyed it. In some ways it has even stimulated growth. Against a background of blood and fire the League of Nations has been forced into actual being, and the long isolation alike of the ancient East and the youthful West has been broken down at last. Within the State, again, even allowing for all setbacks, the efforts at social solidarity have on the whole been strengthened, not weakened. This war his been an accelerator of, not, as the Napoleonic, a brake upon, reform. Many reforms, especially in England, which had been long discussed and partly attempted before the war, were carried out with dispatch at its close. This was the case with education, with the franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the industrial conditions of the people. And there is now a greater and stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.

Comte, who died in 1857 just before our period, was perhaps the clearest voice in Europe to herald both movements: the advance to international unity, and social reform within the State. It was he who, under the title of Western Republic, proclaimed the existence of a real unity of nations, whose business it was to strengthen themselves as a moral force, to act as trustees for the weaker people and lead the world. It was he who, in the phrase 'incorporation of the proletariate', summed up all those social reforms in which we are immersed, which aim at making every citizen a full member of his nation. Like all ideals it was far easier to conceive and to respect than to foresee or to secure the necessary means to put it into effect. Perhaps the perfect symmetry of the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even proved some hindrance to its rapid spread. It has seemed, like Dante's polity in the De Monarchia, to take its place rather among the utopias than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they suffered the comparative depression which we have noticed as a feature of the age.

Here indeed it would appear that we have reached one of the most serious cross-currents in recent European thought. In science, in philosophy, in politics, and in social economics, though we see the goal at least in outline, we are in some danger of being overwhelmed by the difficulties of the pursuit. Our vision is somewhat clouded and our steps hampered by the entangling details of the country between. It is substantially the same problem which faces us both in the philosophical and the practical sphere, and the analogy between the two is instructive. Spencer's synthesis, which we instanced as the last encyclopaedic attempt to present all knowledge—at least all scientific knowledge—in one system, has been riddled fore and aft by hostile shot, though in the end more of it may be found to have survived than is seen at present above water. The philosopher who in our generation has acquired the European vogue most comparable to that of Spencer is Bergson. Now Bergson has dealt some of the shrewdest blows at Spencer's system, but he does not set out to construct a rival system of his own. He is most careful to say that he is not doing this, that any such work must be done by later workers, that he is only making suggestions for a new point of view. It is interesting to note in general terms what that point of view is, as we shall have occasion later on to revert to it. It rests on a new interpretation of the nature and growth of conscious life. He is in short a semeur d'idées-force rather than an encyclopaedist or a system-maker. The difference is characteristic of the age and might be traced in the other contemporary schools, the pragmatists, the new realists, and the rest. The new Descartes is looked for but not announced. Perhaps when he arrives he will prove to be a whole army and not a single man. But if an army, it will need a better co-ordination, a more clearly defined common spirit, than is at present apparent in the philosophic hosts.

A similar perplexity in the practical sphere has a similar cause but a graver urgency. The multiplicity and contrariety of the facts are upon us as we face in practice the ideals which we have accepted from the earlier thinkers, from the century of hope. In science and philosophy we feel that the cause of unity may with some safety be left to look after itself. If the new Descartes does not appear in person, we may have confidence that plenty of inferior substitutes will be found, who, if they work together, will keep alive the great task of unifying thought. For in this region the nature of things assists our efforts and will sooner or later get the work done. The stars in their courses are fighting for us and for unity. But in the world of wills the task is tenfold more difficult and the dangers imminent. The poor and labouring millions, the oppressed and dissatisfied nations, are forcing the door, and though there is fair agreement in theory as to how they should live and work together in peace, yet the realization is by no means automatic, and the difficulties thicken as we come nearer to them.

But even here, perhaps most of all here, it is the first word of wisdom to take stock of the favourable symptoms, to see clearly the forces on which we can rely in our forward march. And they are not far to seek in all classes and in every Western land. Read any account of an English community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot's 'Milby' in the Scenes of Clerical Life. How far more humane, more enlightened, and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or Coventry of the present day! No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. We know by personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult community, the trustees of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.

But we are dealing in this volume rather with changes of thought than with the actual life of the times. Theories affecting the organization of work, the distribution of the product, and the government of society have had much to do with our present difficulties. They have arisen from the conditions of the industrial revolution and the doctrines of the political revolution which began about the same time, and they have reacted ever since on the work and wages, the life and government of the mass of Western men. They are discussed in our eighth chapter. It may be said broadly that in this sphere, as in philosophy, the old and simpliste doctrines have been criticized almost to the point of extinction, but that no new all-embracing practical synthesis has taken their place. The Marxian theory that social evolution has been due mainly to economic causes, that these have produced inevitably the present—or recent—capitalist system, which inevitably must be turned upside down in the interests of manual labour—this is no longer dominant in any Western community, though it is fighting a desperate battle in Eastern Europe. But it is equally true that the capitalist system, presented in an ideal and moralized form in the Utopias of St. Simon and Comte, is not generally accepted now as an ideal for industry. The spirit which Comte desired and believed would animate the moralized employer, acting as the providence of his workpeople, we look to find rather in a reconstituted and moralized State. We all share this hope in our degree, The Times as well as the Daily News, and we do not expect the new spirit to operate simply through the free-will and private capacity and initiative of individuals. The joint stock company has settled that.

What we are waiting and hoping for is the time when, under the aegis of a benevolent State, capital and labour may live together in many mansions and, like the monks of old, follow many rules of life. In this region our ideal of unity is more diversified than in the realm of thought, and there is no demand for a Descartes.

And here it is interesting to note that one of the most telling books on social reconstruction published since the war is by an international writer. This is Dr. Walther Rathenau, a German of Jewish descent, whose ideas have just been popularized by a Frenchman, M. Gaston Raphael[1]. He fits in well with our general argument by virtue of his double attitude, holding, on the one hand, that under the general supervision of the State, industry should be organized in various self-governing groups, 'Social Guilds' or 'professional syndicates' in which both employers and workmen would be included with representatives of the Government; while, on the other hand, he is emphatic that progress must proceed from a changed and widening mentality, and aim in turn at increasing the depth and capacity of the individual soul.

Our book has no special chapter on the League of Nations itself. The idea pervades the whole, and the subject was treated in detail in the first volume of this series (The Unity of Western Civilization, 1915). The history behind the League offers a striking analogy to the other struggles for unity of which we have spoken. There is the same advance from the idea of a unity dictated and controlled by one mind to a unity of spirit arising from the free co-operation of many diverse elements all aiming at the same general good. Down even to yesterday it seemed to many minds a necessary condition that one man, gathering in his hands the resources of one great State, should from that centre dominate the world. And in the dawn of human history it was no doubt often true, the only way in which the world could then advance. This was true for Alexander, the prototype of all the Roman conquerors, and true, conspicuously, for the Roman empire at its best. But, after the break-up of the empire, unity of this type became a delusive mirage, misleading all who, like the Holy Roman emperors, sought to enjoy it again. By the time of Napoleon it had become an anachronism of the most dangerous and reactionary kind. The world was then too vast, the freedom of men and nations too various and deeply rooted. Meanwhile a real unity, stronger than before, had been forming beneath the surface and needed fresh institutions to body it forth. This movement for unity has been, as we have seen, precipitated by the war into visible and decisive action. It had been simmering for three hundred years in 'Great Designs', 'Projects of Peace', Treaties of Arbitration, and Hague Conventions.

Among much that is doubtful in the future of the League, one thing stands out as a capital certainty. Without losing the very spirit of its being it can never become a satellite system, revolving round one dominant Power or even a dominant clique. It was formed to contradict and destroy an oppressive imperialism: it can only thrive by the free co-operation of the partners, finding their proper end in a prosperity shared by all.

Such is a short summary of some of the leading topics treated here, those perhaps in which public interest has been most keenly aroused. But nothing has been said in this introduction of Art or Music, and of Religion only a little by implication. It may be well in conclusion to attempt a still more summary impression of the main drift of the period on the spiritual side. We may in such a wider view see some common tendency in all these activities, some inspiration of religion, some link with art, some impulse to live strongly and to hope.

The present writer would find this leading thread in the increasing stress laid by recent European thought on the spiritual, or psychological, side of every problem, in the growing desire to understand the character of man's own nature and to develop all the powers of his soul.

One of the latest authorities[2] on anthropology has told us that 'to develop soul is progress', and he has followed the clue through the meagre relics of Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. So does the last science of the nineteenth century throw light on the dim recesses of the past. For unquestionably psychology is the characteristic science added to the hierarchy in our period; it has crowned biology and is exercising a profound influence on philosophy, literature, and even politics. If Aristotle was its founder, if it was Descartes who first showed its profound connexion with philosophy, it is to workers in our own day that we must look for those methods of accurate observation, comparison, and the study of causes without which it could not advance farther. And modern psychology has advanced far enough to see that we must include in its purview the 'soul' of a minnow as well as of a man. Descartes had stopped too short, for to him animal life, as distinct from human, showed only the movements of automata. But now, just as the biologist conceives man as part of one infinite order of living things, so the psychologist believes that the facts of his consciousness, the crown of life, must find their place somewhere related to the simplest movements of the amoeba. Hence the whole of animate evolution, and not only that part of which Dr. Marett spoke, may be thought of as the growth of soul.

But, the objector will inquire, does this imply the enlargement of every individual or even of the average or the typical personality? And if not, what becomes of a 'growth of the soul'?

To this we must admit the impossibility of any complete, or even approximate, answer with our present knowledge. We can only note one or two points of certainty or of confident belief. The first, that there have been individual men, an Aristotle or a Shakespeare, in the past, with whom later ages never have, and perhaps never may, compare. The second, that there are good grounds for thinking that the average man has improved in goodness and in knowledge since we first knew him dimly in the dawn of history. But more important and more certain is the fact that the collective soul of man has grown, and all the extensions of knowledge and of power of which our volume speaks bear witness to it. They are essentially social in origin and outlook, and rest on a foundation of common thought immeasurably wider than any in the more distant past.

The man of science, the statesman, even the poet, now speaks for a multitude, and out of a multitudinous consciousness, which had not gathered to support, to inspire, or to weigh down, an Aristotle, a Pericles, a Cromwell. This is a dominating fact from which it is well to take our start. Assuredly the soul of mankind has been collectively enlarged and enriched. How far the individual can share in this enlargement is still one of the problems of the future. The West has committed itself to a general policy of education which aims at making every citizen a full partaker in the advance of the race. But it cannot be said that this policy has yet been really tried. It is the acknowledged ideal to which in all Western countries partial steps have been taken, and the democracy, through their most enlightened leaders, will continue to press for its fulfilment. As this approaches, the individual may become more and more in his degree the microcosm which philosophers have proclaimed him, and the enlargement of the soul, which we know to be a fact for humanity, will become a fact for every man. Need we doubt that with the general raising in the level new eminences will appear? Do not great mountains sometimes rise from the sea and sometimes from the high plateau? We are now in the very midst of a struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished, should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind. What may not be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows? And they can only so learn by studying them. This is felt by all contemporary writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics. Poets and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the inner life.

The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes. Full of love and appreciation for the old order in England—the contentment and humours of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for religion—she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of duty. Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our knowledge of the soul. She showed us, not certainly more living types than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests in life, more mental crises. The soul, above all the woman's soul, had widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke.

Every reader will think of famous novelists who have followed the same broadening path, and their work is often really great as well as famous. The history of thought has in fact throughout the last century been a commentary on those words of Keats to which many of us have turned of late for comfort and inspiration: 'The world is not a vale of tears, but a vale of soul-making.' Tears there are in abundance, as the tears of children. But sorrow is not the leading note of children, nor should it be of humanity in growth. Soul-making—the practice and the theory—has become more and more clearly and consciously the object of human thought and endeavour. We need the greater mind to see the links in the overwhelming mass of science, in the mazes of human action and history. We need it still more to grasp and to preserve the unity of our social life. Most of all for the healing of the world is the greater soul needed, with a world-consciousness, some knowledge, some sympathy, some hope for all mankind. Without this, a league of nations would be dead before its birth.

The recent development of psychology, social as well as individual, its pursuit on scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician, the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity of the work he shares, and confident that the future will extend and make still more beneficial its results. His forward glance is more assured because the backward reveals a course of growing strength and continuous ascent. The physicist foresees unmeasured sources of energy, still untapped. He warns us of our dangers, but has no doubt that, with due foresight, we may overcome them, and make the reign of man upon the planet wider and firmer than before. The doctor knows no disease which may not in time yield to scientific treatment. The agricultural expert foresees, and can produce, new types of grain and fruit which will surpass the best yet known. And the trainer of youth, the man to whom the new science of psychology stands most in stead, is the most hopeful of them all. Dealing with human nature in its growth he puts no limits to its powers of goodness and activity. He deplores the want of wise methods in the past, and if he errs at all it is in an excess of optimism, in believing that with new methods we may make a new man.

On this enlargement of the soul, enlightened by science, we build the future. It is the crowning vision of the modern world, first sketched by Descartes, filled out and strengthened by the life and thought of three hundred years. In the interval we have lived much and learnt much, both of our own nature and of the world in which we live. In our own age a powerful stimulus has been given by a transformed biology and a new science which shows the soul itself in growth from an immemorial past, moulding the future by its own action, surmounting, while assimilating, the mechanism which surrounds it. But for this building two things are needed. One, that our souls, as builders, shall act as one with all our fellows and strive for unity as well as power. The other, that in the building the laws of growth shall be followed, which science has already revealed in part and will reveal more fully. For the spirit of science is the spirit of hope.