The making of the modern mind : a survey of the intellectual background of the present age

Front matter

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| THE MAKING a OF THE “MODERN MIND

A SURVEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND OF THE PRESENT AGE

Foreword

Tuts book aims, by entering sympathetically into the spirit of the past, to make the thought of the present more intelligible. Covering so vast a field, it can of course lay little claim to originality; but it does rest, so far as possible, upon a first-hand acquaintance with the words of those who have expressed the intellectual currents of their times. This explains the abundance of quotation, in which the men of the past themselves give voice to their beliefs; for it has seemed best to try to look at the development of thought with the eyes of those who participated in it.

I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation above all to Dean F, J. E. Woodbridge, of Columbia University, whose wisdom and insight have been my key to the understanding both of history and of philosophy; to Professor John Dewey, who has done so much to place the development of modern philosophy in its proper perspective; and to Professor John J. Coss, of Columbia University, to whose suggestion and sympathetic encouragement this work owes its existence. Special thanks are due to those who have furnished helpful advice and criticism. Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, of Smith College, has given unstintingly of his vast store of information and his refreshingly original points of view; Professor Sterling P. Lamprecht, of the University of Illinois, and Dr. Horace L. Friess, of Columbia University, have been fertile with valuable suggestions; Dr. Felix Adler, Mr. James Gutmann, of New York, and Professor Morris Cohen, of the College of the City of New York, have read the manuscript and furnished helpful criticism. Professor Austen P. Evans, of Columbia University, has given the first book the benefit of his knowledge of the Middle Ages. Professor Edwin A. Burtt, of the University of Chicago, has contributed much to my understanding of the rise of modern science. The staff of the course in Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University have checked the work by their teaching experience. The intellectual companionship of my father, John Herman Randall, has meant more to me than I can ever hope to express. It is impossible to put into words my debt to my wife. nS Sd Se fe

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Contents

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Boox I

THE INTELLECTUAL OUTLOOK OF MEDIEVAL CHRISTENDOM

CHAPTER I. Toe ComiInG oF AGE OF THE WESTERN PEOPLES

History a human achievement — The historical setting of Western civilization — The twelfth-century renaissance.

CHApTER IJ. THz WORLD AS THE SCENE OF THE DRAMA OF SALVA- TION: ..

The epee epic yer its aobteh a —- ~ The aries lakes ara the average man — The world of the common man — The unseen world — The ordered universe of Thomas and Dante — The divine governance of the world.

CxHapter III. Toe Carer END or Man — THE ENJOYMENT OF ETERNAL LIFE The richness of the Dean Peitnon — Wee Path ee — Gospel love — Hellenistic love of wisdom — Platonism — Oriental religious asceticism — The medieval system — Medieval virtues and vices — Life eternal.

CHapter IV. Toe Empopiment— Tue CirtyorGop . .

The functional ideal of society — The organization of religious society — The saintly ideal — The monastic life —-- Saint Bernard, the Monk — Saint Francis, the Mendicant Friar — The church as the City of God and the Body of Christ — The ideal of organized spiritual power.

CuHapTer V. THe EMpopimMent — LAy Society . 2 BS Feudal society — The knightly ideal — The peasant’ The economic ideals of the guild system — The vocation of the scholar — The method of scholastic science — The scientific ideal of the Aristotelian-Thomistic system — The ideal of a unified Christendom — Dante’s universal monarchy.

Boox II THe New WORLD OF THE RENAISSANCE

CuapTer VI. Toe New INTERESTS OF THE MODERN AGE — THE NaturaL Man

The gradual growth of His Binianistte vais — ‘Hiuitahienta in nthe Middle Ages — The discovery of the humanity of the classics — The heritage of Rome and Greece — The revolt from the Christian ethic — The humanistic spirit — The diverging streams of humanism — The modernity and the tragedy of Erasmus — The ideal of the gentleman — The new ethic of industry and thrift.

vill CONTENTS

CuapTer VII. Tor Reticious Reaction — THE REVOLT FROM THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH The compromise of the Beteration — "The ani of sent in ae Middle Ages — The religious revolt — The gospel of Luther — The Calvinistic system— The Catholic reformation — The moral revolt — The Puritan life — The Puritan spirit and industrialism — The political revolt —'The Reformation and the Renaissance — The outcome of the Reformation.

Cuapter VIII. THe Revoit rrom FEUDALISM AND A UNIFIED CHRISTENDOM yun Oe bas The rise of national peste a a lene — The emergence of centralized national states — The birth of modern political theory — The theory of absolute monarchy — The emergence of middle-class constitutionalism — The theory of mercantilism, paternalistic nationalism in economics — Irresponsible national sovereignty — The restraining force of international law.

CuapTer IX. Tar New INTERESTS oF THE MoperRN AGE — THE Wor.pD or NATURE : ; Medieval interest in nature — The expansion of ee — The discovery of Arabian science — Natural science in the thirteenth century — The anti-scientific bias of humanism — The attack on the barrenness and irrelevance of scholasticism — The revival of Alexandrian mathematical science — The direct appeal to nature

— The new method — The Baconian spirit.

Cuaprer X. THe New Scene or Human Lirp . . . The Copernican revolution — The Pythagorean faith in vara and simplicity — The appeal to the observation of Nature — The Cartesian revolution— The foundation of dynamics — The mechanical interpretation of Nature — The infinite worlds — The reign of law.

Boox III

. 148

. 203

. 226

THE ORDER OF NatTurRE — THE DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT

IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

CuHapTerR XI. Tore NEwTrontan Worup-MAcHINE

The success of the mathematical interpretation of Nature — The mathematical synthesis of Newton — The method of Newtonian science — The rise of the experimental method — The problem of knowledge and the new ideal of science — The empiricists’ attack on tradition — The scientific ideals of the age of reason.

CuarpTerR XII. Tot RELIGION of REASON... ;

The spread of the humanistic spirit — The eo of rehingne rationalism — The Religion of Reason, or Natural Religion — The place of Revelation — The Deistic attack on Revelation — The critique of prophecy and miracles — The rationalistic attack on Deism — The arguments of natural theology — Skepticism and atheism.

. 253

CONTENTS 1X

CHapter XIII. THz Screnck or Man— THE SCIENCES OF Human NATURE AND OF BUSINESS... . 308 The creation of the social sciences — The dediietive: neatianeéal method — The science of human nature — The omnipotence of environment — The science of society — Political economy — Social physics and latsser-faire — Adam Smith and commerce — The dismal science of the factory system.

CuHaprer XIV. Toe ScreNcE or Man — THE ScIENCE OF Gov- ERNMENT. . . : . 334

The decline of aMabhute = — The Ancor of abeo hitters founded on reason — The theory of modern constitutionalism — The Whig apologetic of John Locke — The theory of the American Constitution — Democracy on the basis of natural rights: Rousseau — Jeffersonian democracy — Jacksonian democracy — The utilitarian method.

The rational science of Porality — The hafieniterian ideal — The argument for toleration — Cosmopolitanism and pacifism — The idea of progress.

Boox IV

Tue GRowina WorLD — THOUGHT AND ASPIRATION IN THE Last HUNDRED YEARS

Cuapter XVI. THe RoMANtTIC PROTEST AGAINST THE AGE OF REASON . ... ; . 389

The social basis of fntellectual Rainey ae hee — aa tion against the age of reason — Emphasis on the less rational side of human nature — The natural no longer equivalent to the reasonable — Tradition found truly natural — Emphasis on faith, as a support to religion — Faith as a support to revolutionary tendencies — The rational justification of faith — Emphasis on the individual personality and its expression — Nature interpreted in personal terms — The Romantic science of the individual — Interest in human history and tradition.

Cuapter XVII. Toe Conriict or Socrau IpEAts To 1848. . 423 The philosophy of conservatism — Acceptance of the Romantic protest against rationalism — The appeal to faith — The worship of tradition — The philosophy of liberalism and individualism — Utilitarianism — The worship of progress — Liberal nationalism and internationalism — The new philosophy of industrial society — Benevolent industrialism — Social democracy.

CuHapter XVIII. Tot Woritp CONCEIVED AS A PROCESS OF GROWTH AND EvoLuTion. . ; . 454 Highteenth-century ideas of progress and BeAltiiors — The idan of growth and development in human society — The spread of naturalistic uniformitarianism — The methods of mechanistic science universalized — Basic generalizations unifying the fields of phyx CONTENTS sies and chemistry — Mechanistic explanations in biology -~ Mechanistic explanations in psychology — Mechanistic interpretation applied to the origin of present forms — The development of the solar system — The development of the earth — The development of the forms of life — The effect of the notion of development on scientific ideals.

CyapTer XIX. Tue ScreNncE oF MAN IN THE GROWING WorLD . 4838

The search for an adequate method — The persistence of the eighteenth-century mechanical ideal — The historical method of the romanticists — The evolutionary and biological methods — The influence of psychology and experimentalism — The development of psychology — The problem of the elements of human behavior — The problem of the functioning of the integrated personality — Psycho-analysis — The contemporary view of human nature — The schools of sociology — The achievement of a critical method in anthropology — The creation of a realistic, genetic, and experimental economics — Investigation in jurisprudence and political science — The need for popularizing the social sciences.

CHAPTER XX. RELIGION IN THE GROWING WorR~tD . . ... 519

Causal factors in the religious development of the present — Opposition to the new world as conflicting with religious traditions — Protestant fundamentalism — Catholic opposition to modern tendencies — The reaction of Pius [IX — CathoHte modernism — Liberal Protestantism — Definite abandonment of parts of the religious tradition — The new faith of the liberals — Monistic evolutionary theologies — Aisthetic naturalism — Ethical religion and the social gospel — Effects of liberalism in religion on the churches.

CHAPTER X XI. ParitosopHic REACTIONS TO THE GROWING WORLD or MECHANISM . . . 4 se OO

The picture of the mechanistic world generalized from science — Disillusionment — Pessimism in the face of the alien world — Consolation sought in art and beauty — Promethean defiance of the mechanistic world — Escape from the alien world into philosophic idealism — Glorification of the growing world — Faith in the inevitability of progress — Confidence in creative evolution — A new evolutionary ethics — Worship of the future — Naturalism, Greek and Baconian.

CHAPTER XXII. SoctaL IDEALS IN THE GROWING WorLD .. .. 594

Contrasting types of social ideal — Middle-cless ideals — The mind of the middle class — Social ideals of an individualistic industrialism — Liberal ideals of social legislation and social reform — Religious and humanitarian ideals for an industrial society — Working-class ideals — Social ideals of organized labor — Industrial democracy — Collectivistic visions and programs — Ideals of international relations — Patriotic nationalism — Cosmopolitanism — Internationalism and pacifism.

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THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIND

Introduction

Tue visitor to Rome who leaves the Corso and wanders westward toward the Tiber, through the maze of narrow streets that swarm with the youth and age of the capital of modern Italy, takes inexhaustible delight in tracing on this ever-changing palimpsest in stone the work of the successive generations of Romans whose descendants are to-day in possession of their dwellings. Leave the tram-line, dodge that big Fiat, turn a corner, and there before you is a picturesque and dilapidated pile framed in the pillars of an old amphitheater, erected in the age when this was the Campus Martius, the pleasure-ground of the subjects of Hadrian. Between the columns are walls of great blocks of travertine, quarried from some Imperial edifice, and builded here into a gloomy fortress in the days when the feudal families of the Orsini and the Colonna were at swords’ points over the election of a Leo or a Gregory as Pope. Above is a fine Renaissance cornice from the time of Bramante and Michelangelo; while here and there the stucco of the Ottocento is peeling off under the hard usage of the red shirts of Garibaldi and the black shirts of Mussolini. Cross a crowded piazza, thread that narrow way between two palaces famed in story, and there is a Fascist celebration before the tomb of Vittorio Emanuele in the church of Santa Maria Rotonda, better known as that Pantheon erected by Hadrian to commemorate the conquest by Roman legions of all the Oriental gods. For century after century the men of one age have adapted to their purposes the buildings of another, sometimes preserving them almost entire, merely altering the use, sometimes adding new stones and new forms, sometimes tearing down and building up again with the old material. And still the life goes on, teeming with new activity, oblivious of what went before, the round of birth and hope

4 INTRODUCTION and failure and death, under emperor or baron, pope, king, or dictator. Of a truth Rome is the Eternal City, eternally old in its forms and walls, eternally new in its hopes and aspirations — a fitting symbol of the humanity that has for so long looked upon it as its center.

For the history of human civilization is just such a story of labors and edifices, continually modified and enlarged and adapted to the new streams of hfe — a story of old walls outgrown, torn down, rebuilded in new forms, of the sacrilegious hands of rude barbarians clumsily laid upon ancient monuments, of old churches piously preserved by the faithful, of palaces demolished for the passage of the tram-car, of slums razed for a broad boulevard, of modern parliaments sitting in the halls of Renaissance despots, of Communist headquarters in the casinos of Roman nobles. If the persistence of the past into the present is not everywhere so palpable as in the city of the Popes, it is none the less true that the ideas and beliefs, the alms and ideals of the California fruit-grower or the Pennsylvania coal-miner, the sheep-rancher of Queensland or the cultured clubman of Buenos Aires, are just such a mosaic of bits and pieces gathered from here and there along the journey through the ages, set into new patterns to serve the needs and the taste of America or Australia. A ramble through the mind of the modern man would reveal the same juxtaposition of beliefs that have endured unchanged for centuries, with ideas gleaned from the morning paper, all put together in a structure with a shaky enough foundation and with many a makeshift to fill the gaps, yet somehow strong enough to answer the demands made on it and to give shelter until it can be improved. A man to-day will believe that the mercury atom can be changed into an atom of gold, and that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and now sits at the right hand of God, that it is glorious to die on the field of battle for one’s country, and that all disputes between nations should be settled in a world court, that the unions should be smashed and that the world should be made safe for democracy; and he will believe these things with as little sense of their origin and their meaning and their relevance to his own life as the Roman boy playing in the streets displays toward the embodied past about him.

It is fascinating to explore the mind of the present generation,

INTRODUCTION 5 to unravel the many threads that enter into its tangled fabric and trace them back to their first appearance in the loom of history, far more fascinating even than a walk through Rome. But it is more; it is of the utmost importance, for one who wishes to understand the life about him, to comprehend its intellectual forces, to discern the probable drift of the current, and perchance to take his place at the oar. Ideas are much more lasting than anything else in man’s civilization, and those which find themselves in modern minds have roots going back into the immemorial past. It is through the mind that man attaches himself to his remote predecessors, far more than through any physical persistence, even of racial stock. Especially is this true in America, which, despite its relatively new background, is as much a part of European civilization as Rome herself. To understand, appreciate, and judge the science, the religion, the art, the moral ideals of to-day, it is imperative to understand those great achievements in the past of mankind that have created the home in which man’s spirit now moves.

But the chief need for disentangling men’s beliefs and tracing their lineage is due to the fact, so overwhelmingly important and so little heeded by the vast majority, that ideas are not like the eternal gods of Olympus, unchanging and ever young; like all things human they are born and grow and mature, and may even die. Ideas are living, and all that lives has an environment in which it must exist and to which it must be adapted. Men are prone to regard the body of their beliefs as they do the hills to which they lift up their eyes, as fixed and immutable, and all departures therefrom as in the very nature of the case absurd. Or they treat them as coins of tested gold, always able to pass current in any land or age. Christianity, science, democracy, private property, these must always have been and must be destined to endure forever. The revolutionary changes which all are willing to recognize in the domain of material things, few can discern in the more intangible realm of the spirit. Not that it is difficult to comprehend that men once believed otherwise than they do to-day, but that it is almost impossible to realize that they really believed these seeming absurdities, believed them just as tenaciously and just as sincerely, and perhaps with just as little evidence, as men now hold their most cherished convictions. A tracing of the history of the birth and growth of

6 INTRODUCTION these convictions should make it easier to achieve a sense of the relevance of ideas to their setting, of their validity in the terms of the environment which developed them, and of their utility only so long as that environment still nurtures them.

If men’s minds are a mosaic or a palimpsest of belief upon belief, it is of the highest importance that they understand the life-history of those beliefs, why they are there, and whether they are justified in being there or should be discarded. What have been the great waves of thought and aspiration that have left these successive deposits? What did they mean when they were at the flood, what of value for to-day have they left, what must men seek out anew for themselves in the never-ending task of rebuilding civilization? When one has reached an understanding of what materials are furnished by the world around about him, and what resources he can hope for inside himself, it still remains for him to appraise the past as it is left to operate in the present, to understand it, to appropriate it, and to become its master.

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CHAPTER I THE COMING OF AGE OF THE WESTERN PEOPLES

History A HuMAN ACHIEVEMENT

Ir is customary to regard the course of history as a great river, with its source in some small rivulet of the distant past, taking its rise on the plains of Asia, and flowing slowly down through the ages, gathering water from new tributaries on the way, until finally in our own days it broadens majestically over the whole world. Men have even personified this flow, made of it a being that develops of its own volition, following its own laws to the achievement of some preconceived goal. ‘They have spoken of the ‘‘dialectic of ideas,’”’ and regarded men and whole civilizations as the passive instruments employed by this great Being in the working-out of its purposes. The observer not already committed to faith in such an interpretation finds it difficult to discern any such steady sweep in the course of human events, and above all he feels that to look upon humanity as a passive tool to which things are done and with which ends are accomplished, is a falsification of the cardinal fact that it is men who have made history and not history which has made men. Men have built up civilization, men have patiently and laboriously found out every way of doing things and toilingly worked out every idea that is to-day a part of our heritage from the past — men working at every turn, to be sure, under the influences of their environment and with the materials at hand, individual men and races and not even some such being as “humanity.” The complex of beliefs and ideals by which the modern world lives and with which it works is not a gift from the gods, as ancient myth had it, but an achievement of a long succession of generations.

Nor has this achievement been a steady and continuous acquisition, like the rolling-up of a great snowball. Whole nations and races have painfully worked out ideas and then disappeared, leaving little mark upon the minds of subsequent ages. What has remained has been seized upon by another group, worked over and amalgamated with the rest of its beliefs, and then taken and distorted by still further peoples. Many fresh starts have been made, much of value has been irretrievably lost, much that is worthless or even positively harmful has been preserved. It is now possible with all the sources and the indefatigable energy of modern scholarship to go back into the distant past and reconstruct much of what those early civilizations really were like, to see them as completed wholes. Such an endeavor always impresses us with the wonder that so much had been already found out, and that the Egyptians of the fourth millennium B.c. or the contemporary Babylonians were after all so much like ourselves — were, in a word, so human. But it is no part of an analysis of how men to-day come to believe as they do, to undertake any such task. Our own civilization is a composite of what our ancestors were able to glean from these vanished cultures and what they were able to add to the materials they discovered ready-made for them, and a better understanding of the whole can be gained from starting with the Western peoples and seeing just how they made their own the treasures of the past.

Tue HISTORICAL SETTING OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

When we speak to-day of civilization in a eulogistic sense, we mean that body of beliefs and practices that prevails in Europe and in those portions of the globe peopled by men of European stock. For certain purposes, this is synonymous with Christendom; for others, with those lands touched by the Industrial Revolution. This is the civilization that, thanks to the possession of applied science and hence of machine-guns and battleships, has managed to obtain a superficial hold upon the whole globe. It is very young, as civilizations go, claiming a continuous history of less than a thousand years; but in that time it has undergone more changes than any of the other civilizations of the world. Although it has been in possession of science for more than three centuries, it is only in the last hundred years that it has shown any distinctive advantages over other cultures. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, the Emperor of China saw nothing to learn from the West, and it is in many minds still an open question whether he was not then right. But this is the civilization that is our own heritage, that to which we and verhaps the whole world are committed; and before we under-

COMING OF AGE OF THE WESTERN PEOPLES 11 take to examine the circumstances of its growth, it is interesting to see it in its proper historical perspective.

Western civilization is the product of those generations of men, chiefly in northwestern Europe, who lived after the ancient Roman Empire had entered upon a social and intellectual disintegration. It represents a fusion of the ideas of the Hellenistic world with the customs and the temper of mind of the barbarian invaders of the Empire. For many and complex reasons, in which the barbarian invasions were at most but a contributory factor, and probably more a result than a cause, the material and intellectual civilization of Rome declined. The center of intellectual life shifted more and more to the East, to Greek and Hellenistic Constantinople; while in the West many factors, among which was the Moslem conquest of a large part of the Mediterranean basin, forced the center of power farther and farther north, where it seems established, by the time of Charlemagne, in France and western Germany. The population of these regions was for the most part not of that stock that had produced ancient civilization, but a mixture of the earlier Gauls whom the Romans had civilized at the opening of the Christian era and of a much smaller number of Teutonic invaders from the east. Even in Roman Italy, Spain, and southern France the newer “‘barbarians” formed an appreciable part of the inhabitants. This northward shift meant that the Western peoples, gradually emerging out of an amalgamation of these elements, were on the whole of a stock that had been introduced to civilization more recently than the Mediterranean peoples.

Moreover, they were living in a region still very sparsely settled, under social conditions still resembling those of pioneer settlers; while even in the South social life was growing more and more crude. In Italy and Spain and southern France there was probably little break in the continuity of ancient culture, although even here the economic basis suffered a period of decline; but in the North, from the days of the first Roman conquest onward, the main problem was to build up an organized social life in a comparatively undeveloped region and to assimilate as rapidly as possible the culture of the Mediterranean world. The influx of new barbarians, who captured the government, delayed a process that had advanced remarkably under Roman rule; for a time there was probably a distinct relapse. We can form some idea of the situation by comparing it to what prevailed in America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Northwestern Europe corresponded to what was then the Mississippi Valley and the western United States, Italy and the South to the Atlantic seaboard, possessing a much higher culture, and Constantinople and the East to Europe, the seat of civilized life. It is because Western Europe was essentially a pioneer society, struggling to develop a new country, and in the process having little time to devote to the things of the mind, that there lies whatever of truth exists in the term ‘‘ Dark Ages” as applied to that period. In northwestern Europe the period was “dark,” not because of any lack of energy or power in its inhabitants, not because of any lack of promise of a rich life to come, but because those lands were then, as the American frontier later, devoting their very considerable energies to tasks that had to be done before a cultivated society could there hope to exist.