Freedom of the mind in history 1923

Front matter

FREEDOM OF THE MIND IN HISTORY

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limirep

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Chapter I Pager

CONSIDERATIONS . : ; F : 1

I. Theme and Method . : : f 1

II. The Plastic Environment ; ; . 3

Ill. Compulsions from Within . : é 11

IV. The Freedom of the Mind . ; 15

V. The Criterion of the Whole Man Y : 25

VI. The Hypothesis of God in Human History . 30

VII. Progress toward Freedom : vy 38 CHAPTER II

THE PARTLY FREE AND PARTLY DETERMINED GROWTH

oF Po.iricaL INsTITUTIONS ‘ , L 43

I. Primitive Stages . ‘ . 43

If. The Example of the Greek Ciba tain, Peg ed |

III. Roman Jurisprudence. : : Mea

IV. Retrogression and Change. : vy fA

CHAPTER III THE FREER Course oF RELIGION, hate AND

Science: THe oLtper WorLp . + ee I. Parallels and Divergencies of Thought “Ot Il. Egypt, ane and India : sfanuraags III. Israel . : ; yA AS IV. Greece . ; 6 OZ V. Hellenism and the Gaapel : " Raat 8 VI. The Middle Ages ; ; : PE Pye

Xl xii FREEDOM OF THE MIND

Chapter I Considerations

I THEME AND METHOD

In the perturbed and shaken world in which we move to-day, one may steady himself by contemplating the pointings of history. Antecedent courses of events bear upon the present social and political situation, and carry prophecies touching the prospects of mankind. The historical material is complex and voluminous. Its mass would tax encyclopaedias. Its diversity, its mottled hue, its dissidence and contrariety, its way of seething when constrained, and boiling over when compressed, embarrass the attempt to draw its total pertinency within the meshes of an argument. The entire significance of history will not be harnessed to the proof of any definite thesis. The day of such attempts has passed by, or is not yet.

Still I have a theme, if not a thesis. Realizing the insufficiency of my argument and the incon- ‘elusiveness of my proofs, I propose to supplement

B

2 FREEDOM OF THE MIND cuap.

one and the other with pointed illustrations from the quiver of history, in the hope of serving the time-honoured opinion which I hold, and which makes my theme. It is this: I conceive progress, by which I mean the increase of human well-being, to be the achievement of human faculty and the divine power. It seems to me to issue from the unfolding of the free energies of the human mind empowered and sustained by the creative and loving mind of God. Long lines of suggestive evidence, indeed I think the general course of history, may be adduced in favour of the human side of this proposition, which will form our main topic. Yet to many of us the human agency is unsatisfactory unless supplemented by some cooperative, or rather primordial, divine efficiency. The providence of God does not lend itself nowadays to demonstration. If real to us, it is so because we realize it religiously and have faith. This faith appears to be supported by broad inferences or inductions, which, however, are hard to make irrefutable.

Accordingly, with constant regard to the human part of our theme, I would refer first.to the physical environment and animal antecedents of our race. The early manifestations of human faculties are next spoken of, all very briefly; and then we are arrested by the troublesome question of the mind’s free power. From this we endeavour to extricate ourselves as historians, leaving the physicists to

I THE PLASTIC ENVIRONMENT 3 whatever conclusions may be open to them. But thereupon, although no Samsons, we are caught in the toils of the equally impenetrable problem of the divine providence touching man. As to this, I can but give reasons for my own position, while at the same time pointing out the need to listen to the evidence of the chorus of human faculties, and admit the testimony of the whole man to our deliberation.

From these fundamental considerations we turn to the réles of various peoples and great individuals in the drama of mankind’s advance. Our search is for salient examples of the free action of the mind. No field is closed to us. Illustration may be sought in man’s religious attitudes, or in the provinces of civil effort or intellectual creation. Political institutions and jurisprudence, art, philosophy, science, may be tapped at our discretion or indiscretion. It is better to look far and wide, since varied illustrations throw the broader light.

II THE PLAstic ENVIRONMENT

To-day all branches of science co-operate in the study of the character and behaviour of the physical world, and the stages through which it has reached its present state. Man is treated as part and parcel of this moving web. Science has drawn our gaze into novel vistas; it has expanded to the infinite

Ay FREEDOM OF THE MIND CHAP.

our thoughts of the labyrinthine universe of matter, energy, and life, whatever each of these may prove to be ; and close to us on every hand it has disclosed the unfathomable complexity of the infinitesimal. Withal, it has disciplined our minds. It has disposed us to recognize the course of natural law throughout our world, and indeed throughout the whole sidereal universe, which likewise appears to have reached its present state through natural or physical law. Such law means order and regularity of sequence, continuity indeed, as, for example, in the successive stages through which plants and animals have attained the forms which prevail at present. Our mind harnesses and dovetails these regularities of sequence, while our mental needs force us to clothe and energize them with some conception of causation. We try to analyze the specifically acting causes, and assign its effect to each ; or we may prefer to look to mutually enabling conditions, which appear to exercise efficiency or coercion.

So the whole world seems to move onward under law, possibly under necessity. Its laws are deemed to be inherent in matter, and in the natures of living organisms and the relations among them. Like other organisms, man seems the product of natural law—physical, chemical, biological, economic, even psychological and spiritual.

How or when organic life began is absolute mystery. The hypotheses still limp that would

I THE PLASTIC ENVIRONMENT 5 find its origin in some action of the inorganic elements. Yet the direct relationships are legion. Apparently some of the simplest and most abundant organisms, like the plankton or diatoms of the ocean, and to a large extent the world of plants, draw their nutriment directly from inorganic elements. The higher or more complex animal organisms require the inorganic air and water for their life and sustenance ; while for their more palpable food they prey upon other organisms, vegetable or animal, and thus draw indirectly upon the elements of the inorganic world.

Science has conjured up an astounding vision of the history of our earth, with its gaseous, molten formations, its changes, its inscrutable engendering of life’s beginnings, and the ever marvellous progression of organisms, from amoebae and trilobites, through uncounted ages, through fishes, reptiles, monstrous dinosaurs, still through countless ages, to cleverer, more highly organized birds and mammals. Somewhere, or everywhere, in this progression of life, instinct and thought were obscurely dawning. It was a long, slow dawn, perhaps, until toward the hither end of this infinite record appeared animals nearing the shape of man. The record of _ the slow evolution of this organic form amounts only to suggestive fragments here and there.

Dependent on their physical environment, all . living organisms are held within its enabling forces and controlling conditions. Their dependent and needful natures are fastened to their opportunities. The physical environment is the source from which these primarily animal needs must be satisfied. Very fundamentally, with consummated adaptability, the stability of the earth and the qualities of its inorganic elements—chief among them hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and their lifeensuring compounds, water and carbonic acid— permit the existence and make for the sustenance of life, make for its mobility and its complexity of development.+

Organism and environment: they seem distinct. Who would not distinguish the antelope from the grass it feeds on and the air it breathes ? Or even those blades of grass from the soil and atmosphere which furnish the elements of their growth ?

But it is not so clear. Our growing chemical and biological knowledge discloses the organism partaking of its environment and the environment interpenetrating the organism and becoming part of it: becoming not merely elementary material of its sustenance and growth, but part and parcel of its living substance—of its life. The oxygen of the air when breathed into an animal may still remain detectable as oxygen; but, incorporated into the animal, its previous inorganic action seems transformed into a factor in the behaviour of a

1 See L. J. Henderson, The Fiiness of the Environment (New York, 1913); ibid. The Order of Nature (Harvard Univ. Press, 1917). .

I THE PLASTIC ENVIRONMENT .

living organism. So the proteins of the palpable food-substances which are eaten. Once incorporate in the organism, their action changes and transcends the explanations of sheer physics or sheer chemistry.

The channels of interpenetration and transmuting of organism and environment are still unnumbered. Is not our weight part of the gravitation of the earth? Organisms cannot be accounted for or described in terms of the physical laws applicable to the inorganic world. They are alive. Yet they cannot be separated without change from all that surrounds and penetrates and sustains them.

Besides, the individual animal or plant is not simply itself, but a handing on, a continuance, of the species ; and the species is one long and vanishing recessional into a not merely cradling and sustaining, but a constantly insinuating and reciprocating environment. The species lives and functions in the individual. Individual, species, environment are and always have been in and of each other.

1 “There is no sharp line of demarcation between a living organism and its environment. The persistence of the internal environment and its activities is, in fact, as evident as that of the more central parts of an organism; and a similar persistence, becoming less and less detailed, extends outwards into the external environment. An organism and its environment are one, just as the parts and activities of the organism are one, in the sense that, though we can distinguish them, we cannot separate them unaltered, and consequently cannot understand or investigate one apart from the rest”? (J. S. Haldane, Organism and Environment, eic. (1917), p. 98).

As with the species and the outstanding individual, so with the living parts of the organic whole. Every cell lives and moves in a living and commingling medium or environment of the total organism, the milieu wntérieur. The life of the cell is a metabolism—a living taking from its living and homogeneous environment, a transforming appropriation, and a rendering or reproduction in return—with a breaking down and casting off of that which is. exhausted. Each cell shares in the metabolic activity of the whole organism. Together they form a community of life. The behaviour of each is dependent on the behaviour of the rest ; and the lives of all are mutually regulated by each other.

Thus metabolism is the keynote of cell-life. One is tempted to apply the word metaphorically to the inter-relations and commingling of organism and environment. The organism absorbs, transforms, and excretes parts of its environment; and what it throws off is absorbed and transformed by the environment in turn. Strict mutuality may be lacking, since the environment can scarcely be regarded as organic or in all respects alive; and often, apparently without imparting of its substance, it affects the organism.

The universal business of all organisms is to get food and propagate their species. Their food and their own organic means of getting and assimilating it may be the main factor in the evolution of the myriad species of organisms with their varied

I THE PLASTIC ENVIRONMENT 9 faculties, from the grass of the fields to the elephants who devour it, and even man.

Still more broadly speaking, the sustaining, conditioning, permeating environment, and _ the reactions of the organism upon it, control the evolution of all organisms. Every organism fits its environment; and the evolution of species in the past must have held to the grooves of a like fitness, which are channels of possibility. Assuredly, as we find them, fishes cannot breathe in the air, nor land-animals beneath the water. The musk-ox and the polar bear seem to have developed their shaggy coats to meet arctic inclemencies, and would die if suddenly transferred to the equator. Such growths or evolutions, which are supposed to have gone on through uncounted millenniums, are understood inferentially. But that the coercions and opportunities of their environment, while obtaining food and shelter and keeping themselves from being eaten, mould the habits and develop the faculties of every animal, is a daily fact patent to any observer.

Of this coercive development, man, the human animal, was to afford complex illustration in the economic laws which spring in the first instance from his physical environment. Doubtless the means by which men obtain life’s necessities go far to shape their institutions and the forms of their social development, as we may note hereafter. Neither the necessities nor the means of satisfying them are stationary; but together expand and multiply with the advance of society. From the hunting of savages for food and skins, on through more settled agricultural stages, to the furthest and most complicated states of industrialism, such as we labour under to-day—throughout this whole social advance the expanding physical needs of men, and the methods used to satisfy them, do not cease to affect the development of social laws and political institutions. Expanding needs work upon society in correspondence with the machinery and means through which these needs are satisfied. Industrial progress moulds itself to the conditions of environment. Advance is made along the lines of the preponderance of impulse or compulsion, which may operate through the pressure of class on class, or evince itself in riots, industrial strikes, and the application of police or military force. Through this kind of progress or arrest, the logic of fact, the possibilities of a situation, shake out into some coherent, demonstrative result. Social and political theorizing may help to clarify men’s minds, may exert influence, or contribute to explosions ; but, whether through explosions or less violent action, they will prove constructive only when agreeing with the faculties and dispositions of men and the possibilities of their environment. This power of fact, this necessity of the actual situation, works onward, altering social relations, building cohesive human institutions and destroy-

I COMPULSIONS FROM WITHIN ll ing them; thus working constant change, and itself changing with changing conditions which it has done so much to bring about. Individual genius assists by suggesting outlets and escapements, improved mechanical devices, or a better adjustment of human relations, making for social peace and welfare.

III COMPULSIONS FROM WITHIN

These constraints which seem to make their impact upon man from without, are linked to the compulsions arising from the physical nature of man, and from his disposition, his inherited, possibly cell-born character. The genus homo is thought to have attained human form through the working of the same factors which promoted the evolution of lower or prior organisms.

But perhaps in the case of man their relative importance may have changed. It is not maintained that evolution takes place, or has taken place, at the same rate, or at any constant rate, with all plants and animals. Certain kinds of ants, for example, appear to have remained static for millions of years. Apparently the evolution of species is no more universal or invariable throughout the organic world than progress is among the races of mankind. Some human races have never, to our knowledge, made discernible progress, whatever may have been their course before they swam into our historic ken. There have been times of retrogression even with progressive peoples. The so-called civilized world threatens to retrograde to-day. So we seem entitled to suppose that in the presumptive evolution of genus homo, the intelligence and social instincts of this animal may have played a larger réle than with other animal forms. But of this intelligence hereafter.

Turning from the species to the individual, the opinion is that the determinants of individual growth lie inscrutably and implicitly in the egg and in the sperm, the germ-cells of the mature individual.t As the molluse or the starfish, so the adult ape, or the human individual, lies implicit in its germ cells. Upon their conjunction, to wit, upon the fertilization of the egg, the man or woman is started on a career of individual growth and action which never shall shake loose from the inherent or inherited qualities of the original germinating cells—the true birth cells. And behind those birth cells, what hundred-handed animality, what hosts of bestial ancestors—likewise in the egg. And all endowed with life and impulse !

The race is in the individual, and the individual may sum up the race and be enchained by it. Nay, the individual is still part of the ancestral cave, the

1 As to their infinite and living complexity, see Edmund B. Wilson, The Physical Basis of Life (‘The Yale Press, 1923).

I COMPULSIONS FROM WITHIN 13 many ancestral caves, from which the race has issued.1

But an individual is biologically a community. Its life, its physiology, is made up of the functioning, one might almost say, the lives, of organic parts. Among these there is co-ordination ; they constitute a living order of mutual enablement and regulation, and even competition.

This association of organic parts, this individual, makes one of a larger society of organisms or individuals like himself. The functional co-ordination within him is the biological analogue to his membership in this larger order. His social instincts and sense of kind press to an outward manifestation reflecting his physiological constitution. In himself the individual is a symbol of the social state.

Accordingly, like the lives of the parts within him, the individual’s life shows two closely related sides. Each part within, each cell, takes its sustenance from its cognate and homogeneous environment, while at the same time contributing to the co-ordinated life of the whole organism, in which it lives and moves and has its being, severed from which it quickly dies. So the life of the whole organism, that is, the individual, appears twofold. He gets his food as he may, even through violence

1 “In a living organism the past lives on in the present, and the stored adaptations of the race live on from generation to generation, waking up into response when the appropriate stimulus comes, just as conscious memory is awakened” (J. S. Haldane, o.c, p. 98).

to others; and will fight fiercely for the charice to propagate. But his instinct of kind and his, or rather her, passion of parenthood, draw this him or her toward their like, and lead them to co-operate with their kin in mutual aid and protection. Sometimes, indeed, the dependence of individuals upon the rest of the community may almost approach the dependence of a body-cell. Many species of ants and bees are so elaborately organized in mutual dependence and for mutual aid and supplementing of function, that they could not sustain themselves as solitaries ; and the whole community, according to the equipment of its several divisions, is devoted to the care and protection of the young. Throughout the animal kingdom, including man, we may follow these varied aspects of the individual’s apparently twofold life. But this life in reality is not dual, but one. It is a manifestation of that which can exist and live only as united in co-ordination. Every animal is a whole and entire organism. His or her life is not two but one throughout all its varied impulses, needs, and actions. He or she presses for food ; sex is vibrant and seeks its satisfaction. Parenthood and _ its devotions are another manifestation of this life ; and the broader communal instincts move toward

1 Cf. W. M. Wheeler, Anis, their Structure, etc., and his Lowell Lectures on “ The Social Life of Insects,” printed in the Scientific Monthly in June 1922 and following numbers. Also Prince Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution (London, 1910).

its fulfilment. They also are in and of this individual life, germane to it, and make for its enrichment as well as for its protection.

The constituents of the human animal are infinite. Myriad are the factors entering his life, striking upon it, moulding it, limiting and conditioning, and again becoming very part of it. They appear as influences and compulsions from without, and as determining inheritances, impulses, not to say. compulsions, from within.

Thought of in terms of evolution, fathomless depths of elemental potencies and animal impulse lie behind and within the animal nature of man. The instincts of the animal kingdom are our instincts and move our social life. We seem to have had no hand in their making, any more than in the making of the environment which enfolds, sustains, and enters into us.

Yet out of these driven and determined impulses, out of these animal instincts and perhaps animal thoughts, obscure, suggested, and confused, the qualities of the human mind apparently emerge, and the intellectual powers of judgement and selection.

. IV THE FREEDOM OF THE MIND

With this entrance on the contested province of free intelligence and will, acting with conscious repulsion, preference, and selection, we touch the hem of distinctive human progress, and enter upon our proper theme. Until the entry of this factor of the free intelligence, whatever advance has taken place in life has been but as the growth or evolution of plant and animal organisms, which themselves possibly have contributed to their development through some dumb self-directing. But man’s endeavours to advance his life are more conscious and articulate; their essence lies in the articulate consciousness of the attempt.

It is here, moreover, that we sense a seeming antinomy, as we enter on the true human history of mankind. We have been moving in the realm of natural law, apparently determined in its conditions and its sequences. But now we seem to touch a counter-principle of no-law, of choice, rejection, or denial. And as we advance from the obscurities of savagery, and its impelled existence, to the doings of more civilized, historic humanity, this counter-principle becomes more palpable and active.

The time-honoured question of human freedom has, in the past, been chained to the wheels of religious controversy. More recently it has become interwoven with the changing questions and solutions of many-sided scientific inquiry. It involves the constitution and significance of the universe, at least so far as concerns us men.

Conceptions of growth, of development, of evolution, of progress, dominate thought to-day.

Why not give these conceptions rein? Doubtless the earth has undergone catastrophes enough; and we still see cyclone and earthquake, and, in the world of man, tempestuous revolutions. Yet nature makes no leap. Events are led up to and finally occasioned by antecedents, themselves as regular in their course as in their consequences. Catastrophes do not occur uncaused. We could predict them if we knew enough. So we imagine; and are even more certain that every living being is a process of growth and, next, of apparent disintegration and transformation into something else. Our convictions extend further—from individuals in their succeeding generations to the race or species, which likewise we conceive as a slower product of change and development, in fine, as an evolution. Whether or not these thoughts are doomed to future modification, they relate at present to every phase of energy and life, mechanical, chemical, biological, physiological, and psychological.

This being so, we are impelled to find subtly creative action within these processes of growth and evolution. Since life, as we know it, is possible only within conditions which the earth has not always afforded, there was a time when life was not. Therefore life must somehow through the aeons have become. Though an initial instant be inconceivable, nevertheless invisible beginnings, inscrutable becomings, lie behind the anatomies and the physiological functions of plants and animals.

Cc

Intangible are the origins of their somehow generated instincts; and subtle the commencement of the further and more distinctive mentality which seems to evince itself in the higher animals, and unmistakably in homo sapiens. Hence, our best present knowledge and analysis point to a practical creativeness throughout these universal processes of growth and evolution. Indeed fragmentarily glimpsed vistas of an infinite past disclose to us an evolution fulfilling the functions of divine creation. It may be all divine: life may be God immanent. Creation need not spring from a loud fiat, nor yet be catastrophic. It may proceed through inscrutable gradation.

Moreover, through evolution, just as well as through original or interposed creation, a series of organisms may change beyond direct recognition, and slough off all similitude to far-off ancestral antecedents. If this be true of the visible structure and physiology of plants and animals, why should it not hold in the evolution of instinct and mentality ? In either case, nature, or God, or evolution, makes no leap, yet reaches something as utterly different as if it had leapt.

Primitive instincts may change in the course of time, and show themselves in modes complex, advanced, and hardly recognizable. Somehow inscrutably, mentality begins to function in the higher animals, and manifests itself in man. The human mind develops; its range deepens and enlarges, gaining in richness and complexity. It evolves faculties of deliberation and choice. It becomes capable of freedom. Henceforth it must seek its goal in a more perfect intellectual and moral freedom.

Many are the arguments, and portentous is the logic, brought against human freedom. Yet freedom of choice, freedom of attention and volition, are of the essence of the discriminating mind. Arguments against free will make also against mind, against the valid existence and functioning of mind. If it be held that a free human will introduces a new force, disturbs the assumed constancy of energy in nature, the argument drives against the essential functioning of mind itself.

Herein mind seems to separate from matter and physical force. Assume that force as well as matter is constant in the universe. Has any one applied this principle convincingly to organic life growing in intricacy through the successive stages of the world? Apparently it is not true of mind and its manifestations. Look far back over the geologic record, and will it not appear that the amount of mental efficiency increased between the age of trilobites and the age of mammals? Does not the record of the latter age show that the stupider mammals preceded the cleverer ones, and disappeared before them? And was there not still more mind in homo incipiens and homo sapiens when he came ?

So throughout articulate human history mental vigour seems to have increased, or to have waned occasionally. So far as may be observed, the sum total of mental energy, of knowledge or mental fact, of the apprehension and application of what is true for man, continually increases or diminishes. We note this not merely throughout history, but even more incontestably in ourselves and in our effect upon our fellows and theirs upon us. Exert your muscles, and force and heat are spent, and must be restored through food taken from without. And if you give a cupful of your blood, it is gone from you.

Not so if you give of your thought. Your thought, your own sum of knowledge, is not diminished, but may be added to in the imparting, as all teachers know. A man gives his intellectual, spiritual, moral self, and thereby augments the same, while increasing, as he may hope, like spiritual elements in others. It is a spiritual rather than a physical law, that by giving himself a man gains and attains himself. The same is true of a society or people.

The results of biology seem not to be opposed to mental freedom; and no special argument of modern psychology is to be relied on against our conviction of the same based on our consciousness and extended experience. The history of every science, in disclosing the fallibility of our apprehension of any series of facts and the insufficiency of our data for broad assured conclusions, justifies us in hesitating to anchor our vital convictions to any single line of scientific argument. Look into the tangle of the mind as disclosed to modern analysis, examine its conscious thinking, its unconscious trains and potencies, and then decide whether any one factor in human opinion is solely to be relied on amid this interplay or entanglement of human whims and wishes and aberrations, and possibly with an unanalysable mental person somewhere behind them all. It is the mind_ itself, desirous to know more and understand, which the new psychologies of stimuli and reflexes do not explain. The search for knowledge cannot be put in terms of mechanics, or chemistry, or tropisms. All such may help us to understand the pit from which we have been digged, and by God’s grace have striven to dig ourselves. But they do not reach the heights on which we try to stand, nor our sublime aspirations—themselves not utterly void of guidance for our convictions and our conduct.

Alas! the freedom of the mind is a problem large and vague; the horns of its dilemmas enclose the universe. Though usually conscious of our freedom, our convictions may waver with our arguments. If as physicists or chemists, or perhaps as biologists, we draw near the question through the course and routine of physical antecedent and consequent, it is difficult to escape from the determined sequence, or find place for the undetermined action of volition.