Types of Thought

In the last two chapters I have discussed certain mental habits and expedients which may be deliberately acquired by individual thinkers for the purpose of increasing the fertility and energy of their thoughts. In this chapter, I shall discuss a few of those mental habits which are characteristic of nations, or professions, or other groups of men.

Some of these mental habits were in their origin half-conscious results of the conditions under which men earn their livelihood. No one, for instance, consciously invented the legal type of thought (with its tendency to treat words as identical with things), or the military, or clerical, or bureaucratic, or academic type; nor need one search for an inventor to explain why the Bradford type of thought is different from the Exeter type, or why a Roumanian peasant thinks differently from a Viennese merchant. On the other hand, a type of thought sometimes follows a pattern that was first created by the conscious effort of a single thinker, Anaxagoras, or Aquinas, or Descartes, or Hegel, and was afterwards spread by teaching and imitation. The prevalence of a type of thought is often due to a combination of conscious invention and the less-conscious influence of circumstances. Some one invents a new type of thought, and, either at the time or later, a new fact appears in a national or group environment which makes the new type widely acceptable. In that way, types of thought, like the words and word-meanings by which they are often indicated, may be invented and neglected or superseded in one country, and be afterwards enthusiastically adopted in another country whose environment suits them better.[1] One can see why Rousseauism, for instance, as interpreted by Jefferson, “caught on” in America after the Declaration of Independence; or why a crude “Darwinismus” spread in Germany as the German Empire began to extend beyond Europe; or why, in the same decade, the Hegelian dialectic fitted the needs of troubled Oxford religious thinkers. The type of thought painfully worked out by Locke and his friends from 1670 to 1690 went to France in 1729 to justify the liberal opposition to Louis XV: Bentham’s a priori deduction of social machinery from primitive instinct suited the conditions of the South and Central American colonies after their separation from Spain: Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy suited Japan after her sudden adoption of western applied science. Sometimes, though with much hesitation, one may ascribe the spread of a particular type of thought to innate racial factors—the victory, for instance, of Mohammedanism over Christianity among the stronger African tribes, and possibly the greater success of Buddhism in the eastern than in the western half of the Eurasian continent.

In examining such types of thought we have constantly to remember that there never exists a body of people all of whom are equally possessed of any type-quality. In interpreting nineteenth-century English political history, we may usefully speak of Conservative or Liberal types of thought as dominant at this or that moment, and yet one must never forget, not only that a Liberal or Conservative Government may be supported by a bare majority, or even a minority of the voters, but that every Liberal or Conservative voter or minister differs from every other, and that no one can ever be truthfully described as being politically a Liberal or Conservative and nothing else. In the same way, we may fairly speak of a national English or a French type of political thought, and yet remember that the fact behind our statement may be that a way of thinking which is characteristic of sixty per cent. of active French politicians is only equally characteristic of forty per cent. of active English politicians. This warning is specially needful when international friction arises from the prevalence of different types of thought among different nations; but the international policy of a modern nation at any given moment is for its neighbours a unity, and Englishmen and Frenchmen have therefore to recognize and try to understand the types of thought actually prevalent in the two countries without exaggerating either the universality or the permanence of the type in each case.

A type of thought characteristic, in that sense, of English politicians (though, owing to differences of political, educational, and religious history, not equally characteristic of Scotland and Wales), is often indicated by the English use of the expression “muddling through,” as a term of approval. That use went out of fashion, for obvious reasons, during the war; but, now that the English people intensely desire a return to peace and the ways of peace, it is reappearing. Canon Barnes (now Bishop of Birmingham) wrote, for instance, in 1922, while discussing certain educational proposals, that: “Administrative difficulties we are rapidly solving by our national genius for ‘muddling through.’ In more respectful and more accurate language, we are finding the path to success by experiment, and we remain indifferent as to whether a logically perfect scheme will result.” Lord Selborne, in 1924, spoke of “the glorious incapacity for clear thought which is one of the distinguishing marks of our race. It is the cause of our greatest difficulties and has been the secret of some of our greatest successes.” Mr. Lytton Strachey in his Queen Victoria (pp. 150 and 152), declared that “Lord Palmerston was English through and through,” and explained this by saying that “he lived by instinct—by a quick eye and a strong hand, a dexterous management of every crisis as it arose, a half-unconscious sense of the vital elements in a situation.” And Mr. Austen Chamberlain was cheered by his party in Parliament when he said (March 24, 1925), “I profoundly distrust logic when applied to politics, and all English history justifies me.”

On the other hand, French writers who have concerned themselves with the comparison between French and English mental habits, emphasize the “classic,” or “logical,” or “mathematical” character of typical French thinking. Taine, when writing as an opponent of that type of thought, declared that the French Revolution was the work of “the classic spirit’ and defined it as follows: “to follow out in every inquiry, with complete confidence, and without either reserve or precaution, the method of mathematics; to abstract, define, and isolate certain very simple and very general ideas; and then, without reference to experience, to compare and combine them, and from the artificial synthesis so created to deduce by pure logic all the consequences which it involves. This is the characteristic method of the classic spirit” (L’ Ancien Régime, 1876, p. 262). And in his Notes on England (1872), Pp. 306, Taine says that “the interior of an English head may not unaptly be likened to one of Murray’s handbooks, which contains many facts but few ideas.” E. Boutmy (Psychologie politique du peuple anglais, 1901, p. 27) quotes a sentence of the French writer Royer-Collard, “I despise a fact,” and compares it with a saying of Edmund Burke about abstract ideas, “I hate the very sound of them.” A. Fouillée, in his Psychologie du peuple francais (1898), goes into greater detail while describing the French type of thought: “The strong point of our intelligence lies less in apprehending real things than in discovering connections between possible or necessary things. In other words, ours is a logical and combining imagination, which delights in that which has been called the abstract pattern of life’ (p. 185), and, speaking of French political thought, he says, “We believe that we can carry out principles merely by proclaiming them, and that if we change our constitution by a stroke of the pen we thereby transform our laws and customs” (p. 204).

It is possible, but, I believe, wholly misleading, to explain the difference indicated in these quotations in terms of racial biology. Although the greater part of England and the greater part of France contain almost exactly the same racial admixture, writers have invented a “Latin race,” which is biologically less “sentimental” and “more passionate,” or less “phlegmatic” and more “restless” than the equally imaginary “Anglo- Saxon race.” Or one can ascribe the difference wholly to education; one can represent the typical French politician as having received a thorough training in logic and the use of language, and the typical English politician as a golf-playing barbarian; or, on the other hand, one can ascribe the difference to the training in “character” of the English “public schools” as compared to the “intellectualism” of French education. I myself believe that the difference which exists, and which (owing in part to the difficulty of observing our own mental habits) it is so hard either to describe or to explain, is mainly due to a difference of intellectual tradition, transmitted partly by education, and partly by political catchwords and legal institutions, and strengthened by differences in the political and international history of the two countries. I do not know of any evidence that this particular difference of intellectual tradition was noticed before the French Revolution. Voltaire’s Letters on the English (1730), for instance, and Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois (1748) imply that the English, rather than the French, are the consistent followers of logic. But, in any case, the Revolution, and the twenty years of “war against armed ideas which followed the Revolution, fixed and emphasized the acceptance of Reason as the republican ideal in France, and opposition to Reason, in the French sense, as the ideal of the English governing class. It is, perhaps, unfortunate that we have never invented a single easily-personified word for our own ideal in this respect. It would be difficult for the leaders of the most successful English Revolution to set up, in imitation of the French “Goddess of Reason,” a temple in London to “Our national Genius for Muddling Through,” or to “Our Glorious Incapacity for Clear Thought.”

This difference can, however, be stated in terms of the analysis of the thought-process which I have been attempting in this book. We can say that English tradition has produced a greater emphasis on the less-conscious stage of Intimation and Illumination, and that French tradition has produced a greater emphasis on the more-conscious stages of Preparation and Verification. I have already quoted Mr. Lytton Strachey’s statement that Lord Palmerston lived politically by “a half-unconscious sense of the vital elements in a situation.” One gets a still better illustration of what I mean in the exchange of letters towards the end of 1885 between Lord Spencer and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (who, though Scotch, was in many ways a typical Englishman) after Gladstone had begun to show himself a Home Ruler on the Irish question. Lord Spencer (Dec. 13, 1885) said that he himself was “uneasy at the drift of my thoughts and inclination.” Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman answered: “I confess that I find my opinions moving about like a quicksand. . . . It is a great comfort and relief to me to hear that you are so much bothered and complexed. It shows that my disease is in the air and is not peculiar to myself.”[1] M. Fouillée might have taken this as a typical instance of English thinking, and might have compared this apparently passive waiting upon the drift of one’s thoughts with the rigorous application of definite political principles to a new problem at which M. Clemenceau would have aimed in the same circumstances.

Our English habit of thought leads us easily to change our minds when we find that we feel differently about a situation. I have been told that, during one of Lord Salisbury’s attempts to reach an Anglo-German understanding, a young official from the German Colonial Office was placed temporarily in the African section of our Colonial Office, and that he was astonished at the “illogical” character of our dealings with the native tribes. A native chief would give us every possible justification for sending a punitive expedition against him, and we would not do so unless we somehow felt that it was at the moment worth while; and a young French official might have made the same observation. Both national habits involve, of course, their own special dangers. In war, for instance, our national ideal of “muddling through” is not only apt to make our intellectual methods slow under circumstances where speed is essential, but also may lead, and has led British generals to avoid the severe effort of collecting and arranging all available knowledge and of testing all hypotheses by the most rigorous rules of consistency. English experience, again, shows that statesmen who accept our ideal of intellectual and emotional expectancy, should be very careful before committing their country to binding engagements with other countries. They may find themselves promising something this year because they feel inclined to do so, and next year putting aside their promise if their feeling has changed. The fact, for instance, that in 1917, during the stress of the war, we promised equal treatment of Hindoos and Whites in Africa, and that in 1923, when the stress was over, we refused, for reasons that then seemed good, to carry out our promise in the Crown Colony of Kenya, may prove a very serious element in the future relations of Great Britain and India. The typically English statesman is especially likely to exasperate the other parties to a contract if he permits himself to indulge in a glow of moral self-satisfaction over a change of policy which not only expresses his new feelings, but also clearly corresponds to the economic interests of his nation. On the other hand, the “muddling through” type of thought, with its allowance for subconscious mental changes, makes it easy for us to adapt our policy to new facts in our environment. We can under the new conditions either consciously recognize in ourselves new emotional factors, such as pity, or hope, or doubt, or, even if these factors remain below the level of full consciousness, can allow them to influence our half-conscious decisions.

In the working of Parliamentary government—the system by which a Cabinet, overburdened with detailed information, is dependent on the vague feelings and impressions of facts which produce votes in the House of Commons, and on the still vaguer feelings and impressions of the electorate—our “muddling through” tradition, with its frank motto of “wait and see,” has enabled us to avoid certain dangers which have destroyed the whole system of Parliamentary government in some other countries. The British House of Commons, for instance, while discussing the machinery of representation, is able to give weight in a somewhat inarticulate way to the psychological processes by which political opinions are formed, as well as to the mathematical processes by which votes are recorded and compared. The great French mathematician, M. Henri Poincaré, to whose vivid account of the psychological processes of mathematical discovery I have already referred, once wrote a preface to a book on Proportional Representation by G. Lachapelle (1913). Henri Poincaré there said that the electors should recognize “that they are voting not for persons but for ideas. . . . It will be, under the proposed system, to the interest of the political parties to place on their electoral lists the names of no candidates who do not give pledges against changing their minds (que des candidats qui leur présentent des garanties contre les palinodies). It will be to the interest of the elected members to remain loyal to the party which has secured their election, and whose support will be necessary for their re-election. M. H. Poincaré even carried his logical consistency to the point of proposing that it should be made illegal for any elector to vote for candidates drawn from more than one party list.[1] There are in the British House of Commons a not inconsiderable number of members who in this respect have what I have called the French habit of mind, and it will be interesting to observe whether, in the presence of admitted defects in our existing voting arrangements and the difficulty of inventing new remedies, they will in the end secure a majority for a scheme of Proportional Representation based on multi-membered constituencies, and securing, as it seems to me, mathematical precision in the counting of votes by ignoring the psychological conditions of wise voting.

In all countries political direction is largely in the hands of lawyers, and the difference between the English and French political habits of mind may be connected with the difference between the conditions which produced English and French law. English Common Law, with its defects and virtues, has been avowedly built up by the decisions of judges, who in deciding particular cases seldom asked themselves what was the origin of the impulses which in fact played a part in their decisions. A French lawyer is encouraged to believe, even against his daily experience, that he is following a completely logical Civil Code, in the application of which personal feeling and impulse can play no part at all.

In literature, the habit of energetic intellectual opportunism, though it has led to much confused and ineffective work, helped us, even before we adopted it as a political ideal, to produce Shakespeare and Fielding, just as the same habit helped the French to produce Montaigne and Rabelais before they adopted the “classic spirit” as their literary ideal. And we have done rather more than our share of the world’s work in those scientific discoveries which require a readiness to depart from established dogma and established forms of proof. Darwin, whose methods Huxley once compared with those of “a miraculous dog,” and Harvey, and Faraday, were in this respect typical Englishmen.

As I write, the divergence between the French and English types of political thought is increased by the European situation. The French secured our signature to the Treaty of Versailles, and are made anxious by signs that we are tending towards a “palinodie” on some of the clauses in that Treaty. As long as M. Raymond Poincaré (who seemed to us as typical a Frenchman as Palmerston was a typical Englishman) was in power, he gave us a series of Sunday sermons on the duty of consistency and sincerity, combined with the perfectly logical argument of building hangars for an enormous air-fleet as near as possible to London. The English find it less easy to formulate, even to themselves, their own less conscious and less logical position as regards the Treaty of Versailles. We want to keep our promises, but feel vaguely that the Treaty was based upon a false view of the facts and was largely inspired by emotions of which we are now ashamed. Those French statesmen who argue that all discussion must start from the French interpretation of the letter of the Treaty, seem to us to be deliberately inhibiting in themselves the “still small voice” which might prove to be the “Intimation” of new doubts or new humanitarian motives; and we try to express our meaning by saying that the French have carried over the “war mind” into peace. We are afraid that if we treat, as M. R. Poincaré did, any doubt as to the wisdom of a single phrase in the Treaty, or any pity for the future of any European people outside the circle of France and her present allies, not as a psychological factor in a problem of human conduct, but as a blunder introduced into a legal or mathematical proof, we shall crystallize the passions of November, 1918, into the unchanging premises of a series of “practical syllogisms,” which can only end in the destruction of European civilization. Meanwhile the years run on, and the simple logic of the Treaty of Versailles is being reinforced by the equally simple logic of the French Realpolitiken who control the Comité des Forges, of the ecclesiastics who calculate the number of square miles of ex-Russian or ex-German territory which can be kept by force under the control of the Catholic Church, and of the peasant holders of French Rente. Even in September, 1925, when France and England made their great attempt, at the Assembly of the League of Nations, to arrive at an understanding which should lead to permanent European peace, M. Painlevé and Mr. Chamberlain found it necessary to explain to the whole world that their disagreements in the past had been caused by this difference of national mental habits, M. Painlevé said (Official Report of the Proceedings, Sept. 7, 1925): “It is to these differences of mental outlook that the resistance to the Protocol [of 1924] is mainly due. The Protocol’s universality, the severe and unbending logic of its obligations, were framed to please the Latin mentality, which delights in starting from abstract principles and passing from generalities to details. The Anglo-Saxon mentality, on the other hand, prefers to proceed from individual concrete cases to generalizations.” Mr. Chamberlain replied (ibid., Sept. 10, 1925) by describing the ‘Anglo- Saxon mind.” . . . “We are prone to eschew the general, we are fearful of these logical conclusions pushed to the extreme, because, in fact, human nature being what it is, logic plays but a small part in our everyday life. We are actuated by tradition, by affection, by prejudice, by moments of emotion and sentiment. In the face of any great problem we are seldom really guided by the stern logic of the philosopher or the historian who, removed from all the turmoil of daily life, works in the studious calm of his surroundings.”

It is, of course, true that, for the moment, this sharp opposition between the “illogical” position of the typical English politician, with its tendency towards a lazy neglect of the logical consequences of his own past acts and words, and the “logic” of the typical French politician, which seems to require him to suppress all but the simplest and most selfish of his own motives, is in large part due to the difference in the military and economic position of the two nations. But the contrast is also, I believe, due, in part, to a mere clumsy accident of tradition; and I find myself hoping that some day an art of thought may prevail—perhaps after the horrors of a new Thirty Years’ War—in which the psychological truths implied in both types of thinking may be recognized and combined, and the errors of both may in some measure be avoided. If the psychologists ever create such an art, it may be that, a century hence, in gratitude for escape from some world disaster which had seemed to be “logically” inevitable, a statue will be set up in New York or Paris or Pekin, not to the Goddess of Reason, but to “Psyche,” the goddess who presides over the wise direction of the whole thinking organism. And then, even those “philosophers and historians,” whose professional mental habits Mr. Chamberlain described with no appearance of irony, may cease, in the “studious calm” of their libraries, to ignore most of the conditions of their problem.

Sometimes I hope that an art of thought which makes full use of every factor in the human organism may first be developed in America. When I try to imagine my ideal of a twentieth-century intellectual worker I find myself remembering certain Americans I have known, of whom, omitting those who are still alive, I will first name the late Professor William James. These men attained a high simplicity of mind, an accessibility to the feelings of kindness and humour, an amused humility in watching their own mental processes, an absence of the rigidity either of class or profession or nation, which may some day indicate to mankind many of the most important means for guiding human life by human thought. Would any man of learning who was not a modern American have been likely to write, as James wrote after opening (in 1885) the first psychological laboratory at Harvard, “I try to spend two hours a day in a laboratory for psychophysics which I started last year, but of which I fear the fruits will be slow in ripening, as my experimental aptitude is but small. But I am convinced that one must guard in some such way against the growing tendency to subjectivism in one’s thinking as life goes on.”

In one of the letters, again, of W. H. Page, there is a passage which certainly would not have been written by Lord Curzon, or Kameneff, or Mussolini, or Raymond Poincaré. “One day I said to Anderson... Of course nobody is infallible, least of all we. Is it possible we are mistaken? . . . May there not be some important element in the problem that we do not see? Summon and nurse every doubt that you can possibly muster up of the correctness of our view, put yourself on the defensive, recall every mood you may have had of the slightest hesitation, and tell me tomorrow of every possible weak place there may be in our judgment and conclusions.” No intellectual method is infallible, and Mr. Page’s own final conclusions may have been right or wrong. But here at least one has a type of thought more hopeful, I believe, than either the mere passive waiting on psychological events which often characterizes the English habit of “muddling through,” or the mechanical logic of M. R. Poincaré.

It would not, however, be easy to argue either that William James’s and W. H. Page’s type of thought represents the intellectual habit of a sufficient number of Americans to be called the American national type, or that a clearly recognizable and generally accepted national intellectual type is to be found in America. America is the oldest of the great existing democracies, and, though American journalists often complain of the political inertia of their fellow-citizens, a larger proportion of the American population than perhaps of any other civilized nation are able to influence the political, social and religious decisions of their communities. The many millions of men and women whose thought helps to create American opinion are the descendants of emigrants from every part of Europe. Each stock brought its own habits and ideals, and those habits and ideals have not yet been fused even in the enormous melting-pot of American-written and spoken discussion. The mental outlook of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence seems to a foreign observer of America mainly to survive in much public oratory, and in the widespread impatience of legal coercion which sometimes clashes oddly with Andrew Jackson’s doctrine of the unlimited coercive right of a voting majority. American politics, again, are largely influenced by the vigour and gusto with which the Roman Catholic Irish-Americans make use of the machinery of democracy, but the Catholic tradition seems to have contributed less in America than elsewhere to any general stream of national thought. ? Perhaps the type of thought which could, at present, make the strongest claim to be dominant in the United States is that which Americans call the ‘pioneer mind.” This type represents a combination between the Evangelical Protestant tradition, which sees life on this world as infinitely unimportant when compared with the rewards and punishments of another world, and the intellectual habits arising from the facts of daily life among the pioneer farmers who on the westward-moving frontier tamed the forests and prairies by a toil that would have been unendurable unless their minds had been set on distant results rather than present enjoyment.

Among the descriptions of the pioneer mind that I have met with the best is that given by Dr. Frank Crane (whose short daily editorials are said to be read by five million Americans) in the American magazine Current Opinion for June, 1922. It is called, with a reference to Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s novel, The Little Church on Main Street. It is, in form, a hymn of triumph on the adoption of the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but it contains a description of the forces that carried the Amendment which raises wider issues. Dr. Crane points out that “the Press, Society, the Intellectuals, the Church, the Politicians, including the political parties and the Labour organizations .. . ignored or ridiculed” the prohibition movement. What carried that movement to success was Main Street and its little church. “The United States may not have a homogeneous population, but it has the most homogeneous spirit of any nation in the world.” — “The people of the United States are essentially pioneers, and the children of pioneers. They have the conscience of pioneers.” —“Here is the grim remnant of Puritanism, the deposit from the evangelical wave of the eighteenth century. Here is that deep feeling that man is first of all a moral creature, with a context in eternity, and that every question is primarily a moral question . . . that a human being is first of all an immortal soul, and that nothing shall be allowed to persist which imperils that soul.” —“The United States is bourgeois to the backbone . . . and what makes the United States bourgeois is that its people are almost entirely engaged in business. That is to say, they are all occupied in trying to accomplish something. The keyword to America is Achievement, the keyword to Europe is Enjoyment. The American conceives of life in terms of doing some task . . . the European conceives himself as born to enjoy life, and he only works enough to enable himself to have the means for this enjoyment. That is why the United States is enormously efficient.”

No pioneer-minded American is, of course, exactly like any other pioneer-minded American, and no American exists whose habits of thought are wholly and exclusively of the pioneer type; but the test of successive elections has shown how powerful that type still is. To a foreign observer, however, the pioneer type seems likely to lose much of its power in the near future. Mr. Bryan saw, for instance, that everything which weakens the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible weakens the pioneer type, of which he was the most conspicuous example, and he therefore devoted the last years of his life to the Fundamentalist agitation. But every intelligent boy or girl who reads the first chapters of Wells’s Outline of History, or a few extracts from a translation of the Babylonian text of the Deluge story in the Gilgamish Epic, or sees a photograph of the Neanderthal and Piltdown skulls, is in danger of being lost to the Fundamentalist cause; and with Fundamentalism may go the old clear conviction of the utter insignificance of this life when compared with the life after death. Every change, again, in the direction of further industrialization either in American town life or American agriculture tends to weaken the pioneer type of thought. The man who sees daily before him his own newly reclaimed farm, which his sons and grandsons will inherit, may be content that in his own life he “never is, but always to be blest.” The trade-unionist miner, or factory hand, or engine-driver, or the clerk or schoolmaster serving at a fixed salary some huge public or private corporation, is certain, sooner or later, to ask for a measure of blessedness here and now.

To me it also seems likely that the dissolution of the pioneer type of thought in the United States may be greatly quickened by the spread of knowledge as to human psychology. There are at this moment some thousands of professors and instructors of psychology in the American universities and colleges. Almost every one of the half-million school teachers in the United States has received lectures on psychology, and soon almost every entrant to schools and colleges will have been submitted to psychological tests. There must also be a thousand or two of those practising Freudian psycho-analysts, who in America, as elsewhere, are exposed to the combined intellectual dangers of a rigid sect and of a lucrative profession. American newspapers and magazines use, therefore, technical psychological terms such as “reaction,” “complex,” “sublimation,” “intelligence quotient,” etc., with a confidence, which would not be felt in Europe, that the ordinary reader will understand them.

All this knowledge of psychology, has, it is true, had little effect at present upon general American habits of thought, except in reviving the barren metaphysical controversy of free-will and determinism. But knowledge is a very active yeast when once it has started to spread in dough of the right temperature; and at any moment the psychological ferment may begin to act in America. One indication of the way in which this may happen is the success of Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s later novel Babbitt. Babbitt is a man of natural mental and esthetic sensitiveness, who has started as a real-estate agent in a great city with the uncriticized intellectual traditions of the pioneer. He accepts as the purpose of his life “achievement” in Dr. Crane’s sense, which means to him the making of as much money as possible for other people to spend; though the social good resulting from his achievement in taking away business from other “realtors” is not so clear as that which resulted from his grandfather’s achievement in breaking up his acres of prairie. But Babbitt, like his pioneer ancestors, is tormented by vague impulses tending towards something other than “achievement.” There are occasional stirrings in him towards what Dr. Crane calls “enjoyment.” One danger of the pioneer tradition has always been that it looks on all impulses towards “enjoyments” which are not “achievements” as being equally “temptations”; a man is “tempted” alike to get drunk, or go after light women, or play poker, or to take a walk which will not earn money, or go to a theatre, or read a novel, or sit day-dreaming by a lake-side. Flesh is weak; one surrenders from time to time to temptation, and because all surrenders are sinful it was the cruder and more urgent temptations which on the western frontier two generations ago were most likely to win. In a modern commercial city the more subtle forms of enjoyment are apt to seem even more distant and unreal, and Babbitt’s vague impulses push him, unwilling and unhappy and bewildered, to drink and women and repentance.

And since action and thought are part of the same primitive psychological cycle, Babbitt’s impulses also push him towards opinions which are inconsistent with full devotion to the pioneer ideal of “achievement.” He feels uncomfortable stirrings after talking to the friend who has weakened in his devotion to pecuniary success and who has followed the strange gods of liberalism and intellectual enjoyment. But Babbitt’s discomfort soon passes away, and we leave him still loyal to the pioneer mind and only occasionally envious of his son who has finally abandoned it. Babbitt in the novel is helpless because he does not know what is happening to him. But a Babbitt who has read Babbitt, and has there recognized his own type, may be affected as powerfully as a friend of mine was when he recognized himself as Broadbent in Mr. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, and went straight out of the theatre to write a letter resigning his parliamentary candidature. He may learn to distinguish between his longing for poetry or for some type of thought more penetrating than his party slogan, and his longing for “hooch” or for the widow in the ‘Cavendish Apartments.” He may learn how to wait expectantly till his vague “Intimations” develop into clear thought and clear decisions.

The spread of psychological knowledge may even create, here and there, exceptions to the naive way in which the pioneer mind when transplanted to the city thinks and feels about competitive games. Games in America are apt to be, in Dr. Crane’s terms, matters of “achievement” and not of “enjoyment,” and American “tremendous efficiency” is fast imposing that habit of mind on the rest of the world. I went a few years ago to a great “sports shop” in London under orders to buy a board on which ping-pong could be played. I asked the shop-assistant what was the standard size, and was told, “I am sorry to say, sir, that there is now no standard size. Ping-pong has ceased to be a game, and has become a pastime.” Some boy Babbitt, ten years hence, in Cincinnati may sit waiting until the “still small voice” that whispers the question why football or even baseball may not sometimes be a pastime makes its meaning clear, and his doubts may penetrate across the Atlantic to the football districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

But the most important effect of the spread of psychology in America may ultimately be found in its influence on the accepted standard of intellectual energy. At present the causes seem largely accidental which bring about in this or that American art or science the highest degree of creative energy. When first, for instance, I visited America in 1896, contemporary American architecture seemed to show a singular slackness in artistic creation. It was, in Mr. Drinkwater’s phrase, the work of “chisels governed by no heat of the brain”; and tended to result in the style which builders call “Carpenter’s Gothic.” Since 1896, at successive visits, I have seen American architecture become the supreme creative world-force in the art of building. One is told that the change started when Mr. Charles McKim went to Paris about 1870 to study. But the essential secret which he and other young architects learnt in Paris was not, apparently, how to draw certain forms, but how to evoke in themselves certain intense activities of the imagination. Henry James, in his admirable life of William Wetmore Story, has described the mental habits of the American painters and sculptors forty or fifty years earlier than my first visit to the States, the men whose works are now being edged out of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York, and the poets who are now dropping into the less conspicuous parts of the school anthologies. They went to Rome, bought velvet jackets, worked endless hours, were good friends and good men. But somehow they never learnt how to make that elusive effort of the whole being by which the energy necessary for great art may be produced.

Sometimes, by a divine accident, an American thinker has learnt the “stroke” which enables him to bring his whole force upon some form of creative work, not from watching other creators in Paris or elsewhere; but by himself and for himself. Some American psychologist ought to make a careful study of the psychological process which turned the Walter Whitman of 1846, the writer of intolerable edifying verse and more intolerable edifying novels, into the Walt Whitman who wrote “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.” Walt Whitman would perhaps have said that he “let himself go free.’ But what was that “self,” and how was it that what seemed in memory like a relaxation of tension was really an “energy of the soul,” an activity of the whole being whose intensity would have been unimaginable to the Whitman of 1846?

Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has written, in his Ordeal of Mark Twain, an extraordinarily illuminating study of the mental history of a man whose inborn creative genius was even greater than that of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, once or twice in his life, owing to some accident of subject or matter or memory, “let himself go,” and wrote Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, or Life on the Mississippi. The rest of his work consists either of fun which will be remembered only as fun, or of serious writings (such as his What is Man?) which is already forgotten. While doing that work Mark Twain, like Babbitt in his real-estate office, had moments and even years of vaguely agonizing discontent; but he never attained the great artist’s control over his purpose and his powers, because he never had a reliable working knowledge of the mental “stroke” necessary for the initiation of that control. Mr. Brooks gives many reasons for this; Mark Twain’s acceptance, for instance, of false social and economic standards in his personal life, and the intellectual and social timidity of his Boston patrons. To me one of the main causes of so great a loss to mankind is the fact that Mark Twain not only never permanently understood the kind of energy which great art requires, but also bedevilled his mind by a crudely determinist metaphysic, which, because it forced him to deny that Free Will in the old theological sense existed, forced him also to believe that no artist could or ought consciously to bring his will to bear upon the methods or purposes of his work. “The influences,” he says, “create [man’s] preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He creates none of these things for himself.” His mental machine goes “racing from subject to subject—a drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views, manufactured by my mind without any help from me.” ‘Man originates nothing, not even a thought. . .. Shakespeare could not create. He was a machine, and machines do not create.’

Meanwhile, I have noticed, in my successive visits to America since 1896, how, with small help from the psychologists, the secret of creative energy has spread to painting and sculpture, to dramatic production, to the writing of history, and to certain of the natural sciences; and many other new accessions of creative energy must have occurred of which I am ignorant. But the coming of the great period of intellectual and artistic production in America for which I hope, still seems to me to require, not only a wider and more accurate understanding of the nature of intellectual energy than is at present common in America, but also an increase of American sympathy with intellectual effort in its severest and most disinterested forms. From time to time, in the history of mankind, individual creative artists and thinkers have carried through their lifework in an atmosphere of almost universal contempt. But great periods of creation have generally been accompanied by a considerable measure of understanding and sympathy for the creator’s work among those who will benefit from it; and it has been one of the main hindrances to human progress that the pioneer type of mind hates and despises and yet fears the creative type. Aristophanes, in The Clouds, interprets for us the feelings with which the free-born farmers who crowded into the theatre of Dionysus from the valleys near Athens thought of Socrates. Everything about Socrates, his detachment from their interests and prejudices, his indifference to the solid satisfactions of good clothes and proper food and regular hours, the perpetual suspicion that he was laughing at them, all went to strengthen their fear that the freedom and intensity of his thought might destroy the whole structure of society and the state. Exactly the same feelings may now, I am told, be found among the Australian followers of Mr. William Hughes, the South African followers of General Hertzog, and those peasants of Central Europe whose political tendencies have been called the “Green International,” and whose type Mr. Belloc desires to establish as the governing force of the world.

In America the pioneer, whether he is a farmer from Nebraska or Indiana or Tennessee, or a simple-minded devotee of finance in Wall Street, or the New York Union Club, or the Chicago Wheat Pit, or the Rotarian brotherhood, reveals his type by employing the word “highbrow” as a term of contempt. Plato and Dante, Spinoza and Descartes, Locke and Darwin and Bentham, would if they were now living Americans all be “highbrows” to the pioneer mind. My American friends assure me that it will be neither a short nor an easy task to change this attitude. Change, when it comes, will be the slow result of many causes. Already, if a man makes much money (or enables others to make much money) by his ideas, he may be as absent-minded and ironical as he likes, and not even Senator Lusk at Albany will call him a “highbrow.” If, again, the fame of an American creator is sufficiently world-wide to reach the American newspapers from abroad, he is not likely to be called a highbrow. If Einstein had been born an American, and had succeeded in finding opportunities both of doing his work and of making it known, no American would now call him a highbrow. When the great American music composers of the future are acclaimed in the opera-houses of Berlin and Milan, no one in Nebraska will call them highbrows. No one even now, apart from the fact that he has made money from his plays, calls Mr. Eugene O'Neill a highbrow.

The one justification of the contempt of the American pioneer type for the highbrow, is the existence of fraudulent or self-deceiving imitators of the creative type. My American friends tell me that in America, with its colossal system of book-education, there are more young men and women than elsewhere who are attracted by the idea of intellectual creation, without either possessing the necessary natural powers, or acquiring the secret of stimulating and maintaining the necessary intensity of energy. Even in Ancient Greece there were, as the proverb said, many who carried the thyrsus and few who were inspired by the god. A recognition that an art of thought exists with standards of its own may diminish this proportion in America, both by helping the young genius to discover the kind of effort he is called on to make, and by helping his neighbours to distinguish between the real artist and the false. Progress in American intellectual creation may also be quickened by an extension of the conception of morality so as to include not only family, sexual, dietary, and business conduct, but also the conduct of the intellect. Dr. Crane tells us that to the pioneer mind “every question is primarily a moral question.” Any one who has been in the habit of reading American newspapers and hearing American speeches, both before and during and after the war, will have noticed that the habit of thinking of every problem as primarily one of choice between right and wrong prevails in America much more largely than in any other country except perhaps China. At present the idea of morality is associated in America with the Christian religious tradition, and Mr. Bryan in his Fundamentalist preaching seemed to me to be using the prestige of that tradition to inculcate every method of thinking which is most likely to prevent human beings from discovering truth or creating beauty. Sometimes the conscious idea, or the half-conscious “censorship,” of morality aims in America at the purely negative virtue of so preventing oneself from thinking freely, as to maintain certain social conventions. Eighteen years ago William James complained that “We all know persons who are models of excellence, but who belong to the extreme philistine type of mind. So deadly is their intellectual respectability that we can’t converse about certain subjects at all, can’t let our minds play over them, can’t even mention them in their presence. I have numbered amongst my dearest friends persons thus inhibited intellectually, with whom I would gladly have been able to talk freely about certain interests of mine, certain authors, say, as Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, but it wouldn’t do, it made them too uncomfortable, they wouldn’t play. I had to be silent. An intellect thus tied down by literality and decorum makes on one the same sort of an impression that an able-bodied man would who should habituate himself to do his work with only one of his fingers, locking up the rest of his organism and leaving it unused.” Fifty years hence words with the connotation of moral judgment, “integrity,” “open-mindedness,” “courage,” “patience,” “thoroughness,” “humility,” and the like, may have come to be widely used in America of those methods which the leaders of American thought shall have shown to be most efficient in the employment of the mind. Already there is a hint of moral judgment in Mr. W. H. Page’s statement, during his difficult relations as ambassador with Mr. Bryan as Secretary of State, that “a certain orderliness of mind and conduct seems essential for safety in this short life.”

Perhaps, however, the main hope for the future of American creative thought lies in an extension of the American sense of need. We do not despise the intellectual creator who gives us something that we ourselves really desire; and to an increasing extent the desires of the great average population of America, may turn towards values that cannot be expressed in terms of money. No one now makes money by looking at the glorious marble buildings in Washington, or the hall of the Union Railway Station in New York, or the painted corridors of the Boston Free Library, or the pictures and statues and biological collections that attract scores of thousands of eager visitors to the Metropolitan Museums of Fine Art and Science. And fifty years hence the great-grandsons of the American pioneers may feel not only moral sympathy but spontaneous gratitude for that kind of effort by which alone the weak and imperfect human brain can add to its scanty store of knowledge and beauty.

Notes

1See Tract XVII of the Society for Pure English, quoted above, p. 125.

“The Problem of Religious Education,” Canon Barnes (a paper read to the Association of University Women Teachers, Jan. 5, 1922). 2 Church Times, June 20, 1924.

1See also Rignano, The Psychology of Reasoning, p. 276.

1 Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, by J. A. Spender, Vol. I, pp. 90–1.

1 La Répresentation Proportionelle, by G. Lachapelle, 1913; preface by H. Poincaré, pp. v, vi, xi.

1 Letters of William James, Vol. I, p. 249, to Carl Stumpf, Jan. 1, 1886.

1 Life and Letters of W. H. Page (1922), Vol. I, p. 386.

* Curiously few widely read novelists, poets, dramatists or historians in America seem either to be Roman Catholic or to have been influenced by Roman Catholic thought. Of philosophers who are read outside the Catholic fence I can only think of Mr. Santayana as showing (though not himself a Catholic) the influence of the Catholic tradition.

1See above, p. 153:

1 What is Man? quoted by Brooks, pp. 263 and 259.

1W. James, Selected Papers on Philosophy (Everyman Series), p. 57. 2 Life, Vol. II, p. 10.