It will be useful to consider certain features of dialectical materialism in more detail. Its fundamental characteristic is shared with unitary thought: the attempt to discover in the story of social development one general process to which the mind of the individual necessarily conforms in accordance with his own situation. Marx and Engels, in transforming the Hegelian method, were certainly trying to think in unitary process terms. But they could not escape the quantitative-capitalist conceptions of their time. To the capitalist, money-power was a conscious aim, the deliberate purpose of his activity. Marx turned this round and made money the material cause of human action, and economic onditions the determining factor in social history. This was a great advance; it transformed the conscious aim of the capitalist subject into the much broader, and often unconscious, causation of the various economic interests. Moreover the increasing pressure of quantity, the struggle of the masses for their standard of living, could result in a change of quality, a new order of society.

But here again the limitation of a process method of thought to unduly narrow economic concepts restricted its power. Marxism is a theory of economic man in the quantity age. It offers no adequate explanation of the manner in which new ideas or social forms come into existence, or of the way in which the conflicts of the economic process can suddenly be resolved in the final achievement of a classless society, or of the processes by which the hierarchy of power changes its character. Increasing economic equality is possible, but on the condition that a new component takes over the hierarchy of power. In a limited sense a society without economic classes is possible, but Marxism is powerless to explain how or why, because it does not recognize the other forms of the hierarchy of power.

The overcoming of the subjective conception of man and the substitution of a more comprehensive objectivity threatened positions which had been established since the origin of European man. This is most clearly evident in the attack on subjective attitudes by dialectical materialism. Marx challenged the most powerful combination of vested interests: the passionately held conviction of the subject in the independence of his mind, and the vigorously defended privileges of those whose proper development had been distorted into the lust for security and money power. Idealist aspiration and inhuman greed, representing respectively the free and the thwarted expressions of dissociated man, had built vast institutions, temples in which the techniques of idealism dissociated from the organic and social background, and of egoism blind to social need, were practiced by the hierarchies of the devoted. Marx attacked both, for he denied their common presuppositions. His assault was deadlier than any theoretical criticism, for it suggested to the masses that in the course of fulfilling their historic mission they would necessarily sweep away these temples of abstract thought and material privilege.

But this was not the only such challenge to subjective idealism. During the seventy years between the Communist Manifesto and the Russian Revolution another movement developed, expressing the same basic tendency but providing an objective conception of man as a part of organic nature rather than as an element in the economic process. Within the limitations of the ancient mind the idea of the evolution of species had been accepted and formulated by Lucretius, and after a long interval of digestion it was reformulated in modern form in several European countries during the last decade of the eighteenth century. By 1858 the world of thought was ripe for the formulation of the theory of natural selection as the method of evolution, which took shape simultaneously in the minds of Darwin and Wallace. Thus during the first half of the nineteenth century European thought was beginning to approach the view that the physical frame of man and its history could only be understood as part of the general order of organic nature.

But the movement had gone further than that. Spinoza and Goethe had already prepared the ground for the further step of denying that even human consciousness represented an independent form of reality, and of seeking the interpretation of human thought and behavior as a type of natural process like any other. The West had already begun to recover itself and to return to the emphasis on the unity of process which had marked early Greek, Chinese, and Indian thought. In 1840, when Marx was studying Hegel's identification of the entire historical process with the development of the spirit, a biologist, Carus, had come to the conclusion that the "key to the understanding of the conscious life of the soul lies in the unconscious." Here we see two aspects of the theme that has preoccupied Western thought during the last hundred years: the discovery of the true relation of thought to material processes. By transforming Hegelian thought from a subjective to an objective content, Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels developed one of these aspects for Lenin and Stalin to mature in the active re-forming of society. The other aspect, the interpretation of individual experience and behavior in terms of the unconscious, has provided the distinguishing characteristic of the modern schools of psychology which are in course of proving themselves by the re-forming of the individual.

The progress of physiology, neurology, and observational psychology during the second half of the last century had underlined what appeared, in dualistic thought, as an intimate parallelism of mind and body. But until the end of the century the new sciences had not explicitly challenged the autonomy of the conscious mind by denying its supremacy even within its own field, the realm of thought. Now the time had come when the issue which Marx had opened in relation to the history of society had also to be raised in respect of the life of the individual.

The story of the development of modern psychology is complex, but Freud may be selected as a representative of the general tendency. Just as Marx had claimed that his interpretation of the historical process proved that the conclusions of the class mind expressed its economic needs, so Freud asserted that his therapeutic technique revealed the distortion of conscious thought by sexual desires. Marx taught that the renunciation of the subjective idealism of individual thought and the acceptance of the inevitability of the economic process as a guide to action would bring nearer the ultimate redemption of society. Freud taught that if the maladapted individual would submit himself to a psychoanalytical critique, conflict could be removed. If Freud had extended his concept of the libido to include all organic tendencies, or if Marx had not tended to restrict his theory to the productive relations in society, the two systems might together have provided a more comprehensive interpretation of man. But even this combined picture would have been inadequate since neither theory recognizes the part played by the formative tendencies of the individual mind.

Here we touch the fundamental aspect of the parallel between the schools of dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis. Though these two theories drew their power from the fact that they sought to apply an objective historical approach to society and to the individual, and so to offer man some degree of scientific self-knowledge, they nevertheless both limited their scope by denying the constructive tendencies of the mind. It was no chance that the two great advances of thought concerning man which were made after the middle of the nineteenth century emphasized respectively the economic and the narrowly sexual aspects of life and neglected the formative and co-ordinating role of mental processes.

We saw that in the course of the development of the intellect it is the constant or permanent aspects of phenomena which are first mastered; only when these have been exhausted can the intellect pass on to the subtler task of identifying the forms of process and development. It was therefore inevitable that the first scientific conceptions to be developed in relation to the organic world represented factors making for the permanence or preservation of life, just as in relation to the inanimate world the first general ideas were concerned with the conservation of matter and energy. Physical conservation and the tendency to mate, reproduce, and preserve the life of the species are simpler ideas, more readily clarified into scientific concepts, than the idea of a formative or developmental process. Thus when the time was ripe for scientific thought to be applied to man, the only conceptions available were concerned with the permanence of the species, economic survival, and reproduction. Those who felt the need for a conception of growth or development which could be applied to man could obtain no aid from scientific thought and were forced to fall back on vague vitalistic ideas lacking any constructive value. The formative aspect of the organic processes was necessarily neglected by Marx, Freud, and every other thinker who attempted to apply objective methods to the study of man, because the scientific mind had not yet recognized the formative processes either in elementary physical systems or in organisms.

The intensity of the reaction from the humanistic faith in the individual mind must not be regarded as due to the activities of these two schools, which are themselves expressions of the more general transformation which was in progress. The separation of subject and object was fading, and the subject was yielding its supremacy to the object. But this change tended to paralyze individual initiative and so to destroy the tradition because, as we have seen, the formative processes in nature, which find their most highly facilitated form in the mental processes of the individual, had not yet been identified by science. The subject had accepted a conception of nature in which his own formative faculties had no place. Man had recognized certain components of his own nature in the conceptions of dialectical materialism and of psychoanalysis (with its kindred schools) but he found nothing in their conceptions of man to correspond to his personal faculty for constructive thought and action. There was no place for the organizing will of the individual in either Marxist or Freudian man. For a time the concentration of attention on the economic and sexual tendencies actually extended the dominance of these tendencies, and the influence of each of these theories was temporarily such as to make men more like the abstract man which they portrayed.

The last consequence of subjective humanism was thus to lead man to deny himself. Those who had a full sense of the significance of the European tradition were paralyzed by its decay. They lost their power of initiative, their spontaneity, and their confidence, intimidated by the alien world of material necessity which dominated the new form of the tradition. Genius felt itself frustrated, and failed to guide. The long-foretold disaster was at hand. Europe passed into the hands of those who had deliberately renounced the influence of the old tradition and had thus escaped the paralysis of its decay.

The subjective tradition of Europe restricted further development, and its decay was inevitable. The isolated subject had to die before being reborn as part of nature. This meant agony for countless individuals all the world over, who experienced the dissolution of values in their own and their children's lives. The death of such a grand tradition was bound to lead any high genius who experienced it to visions of unequaled and intolerable intensity. This was Nietzsche's situation. He is still too close for objective interpretation. He experienced, I believe, so much of the universal situation that is here described that a general acceptance of his place in European thought will only be possible after unitary thought has become commonplace. His arrow to the farther shore can only be followed by those who can stand outside their own failure. Europe cannot accept Nietzsche because he represents the death of the European tradition. He is the last despairing cry of the European subject, humanistic individualism outreaching itself in an isolated and dissociated genius, forerunner of the rage with which Europe would turn its sadism on itself, his man-god as much an illusion as the god-man he rightly repudiated. Until European man had expressed his despairing rebellion in this ultimate challenge, the resources of dissociated subjective thought had not been exhausted.

Nietzsche's dangerous vision is for those who can absorb it without damage, and these must still be few. His main error was the consequence of his role as the last genius of the subjective tradition: to see himself as the divine dynamite that would destroy the world and the divine intuition that would create it anew. The dynamite and the creative intuition were certainly at work in him, as he believed. But he was only one, though perhaps the most representative, of countless carriers of the contemporary transformation. Never again after Nietzsche will it be appropriate for the single individual to take on himself the burden of human destiny. After Nietzsche not merely God, but messianism itself was dead. Sub specie aeternitatis it may be said that he died that all after him might be saved from the illusion of a god either outside, or more dangerously, inside the subject. He identified history with himself, not himself with one component of history, as did Lenin. Nietzsche was the last European genius with philosophic vision. Until unitary man is established he must be hated, for he symbolizes the transition which has been so painful to twentieth century man.




VII

The Twentieth Century

Science is the image we form of the continuity of nature, and history our image of our own past. In static thought these two are separate, but in unitary thought they become one. Human history is a part of natural history, but a part in which the method of approach has a special importance. The view of natural process given in the second chapter led immediately to a view of man and of the history of European man, and these in turn lead to a view of man's present situation.

To those who have experienced life throughout this century it must appear a long journey from the fin de si�cle to the "forties." In each decade "the twentieth century" has stood for a different outlook, and the swift changes of this period offer a nice problem for unitary thought. The interpretation of this half century has many pitfalls for any method that is not well rooted in the historical trend. An able historian appeared to be sure of his judgment when he wrote at the end of the last century, perhaps at the moment when Nietzsche was dying: "the turbulent energy of these new forces (generated in the 15th and 16th centuries) had not yet found the well-regulated paths in which it flows today in such a well-disciplined manner." Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from that example is that any interpretation should be made so definite that if, like his, it does not prove right, at least it may be as clearly wrong.

In every recent century there must have been decades in which men believed they were experiencing unusually rapid social changes. Behind these decades of instability there have been longer periods marked by major historical transformations, such as the transitions from antiquity to the Middle Ages between 200 and 600 A.D., from medieval to modern times in the Renaissance and Reformation, and from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era, and the Industrial Bevolution. These transitional periods are in turn set within the background of overriding changes in the biology of human development, which though potentially universal found their most decisive expression in Europe. The most important of these are: first, the development of universal empires, ideas, and gods, accompanied by self-consciousness; second, the discovery in 1600 of the first heuristic method, the method of quantity; and third, the contemporary transition to an age justifying a new heuristic method, the unitary method, in all fields: in the process unity of nature, in the social unity of man, and in the potential unity of every man. In the 1940s the experience of change is abnormal because this decade is not only likely to prove the one marked by the greatest instability within this century, but also marks the coming to man's attention of that third change in the biological development of man from the quantitative to the unitary age.

It is impossible today to escape the need for a general awareness of the phasing of the historical process. In the past great cultures could be created unconsciously, the organic processes forming the new patterns without man's attention being drawn to their wider significance. But the unconscious phase of history is now past. The acceleration of social change which has resulted from the attention paid to specialized techniques can only be controlled by paying attention also to the general formative processes which in earlier times were unconscious. Consciousness of specialized technical methods must be balanced by consciousness of general developing forms. After a certain point in history every people involved in a time of transition may flatter itself with a great destiny. There is no harm and indeed great advantage in that if it implies the acceptance of the path of development proper to man and does not obscure the vision of facts as they are. I do not see how to escape the conclusion which arises from the unitary image of the past and the experience of the present: mankind is at the greatest opportunity of its history since the Jewish prophets proclaimed the ethic of monotheism and the Greek thinkers established the universal idea. The species can now, through the full acceptance of process, realize unity without loss of diversity or differentiation.

The greater the reorganization the greater the pain before it becomes possible. The reverse is not always true, or we could infer from the agony of three decades the grandeur of the world of tomorrow. For thirty years the human mind has suffered confusion, myriads of lives have suffered premature disaster, and the necessities of war still dominate life and thought. Yet this half century has not been a monotone of evil, but a black and white confusion, bewilderingly paradoxical until beneath its contrasts the underlying transformation is recognized. On the one hand there has been the progressive release from the distorting inhibitions and idealisms of an age-old dissociation, bringing a tremendous sense of new opportunities of functional fulfillment, of material security, of personal readjustment, of love relieved from fear -- a sense of the possibility of a development as far-reaching as any that already lie in the human past. On the other hand there have been the complementary disasters in the subjective and objective worlds, the failure of personal initiative, lacking a principle of integration and intimidated by the knowledge that thought is conditioned by hunger and desire, and the external anarchy of a society ravaged by the expansive virulence of quantity.

This paradox of emancipating release accompanied by a frustrating disorder is the sign of a transformation from one order to another. The ancient dissociation becomes unstable and the suppressed passions exploit the techniques of the age to wreak their vengeance on the old ideals. At the same time the dimly sensed opportunity of a new integration of life and technique sustains a non-rational hope. The old and the new do not co-operate as a dyarchy in which different aspects of society are reorganized in turn. The old order, already dying under the cancer of quantity, may turn into reaction and angrily seek to retain its hold, while the new steadily shapes itself within the patterns of a society that has not yet become aware of the form of its destiny. The changeover follows no step-by-step logic accessible to analytical reason, but an organic or unitary logic in which the new social organs are developed in the course of their struggle against the resistance of the vested interests, spiritual and material, of the dissociated past. Science, in the form of quantitative technique, creates closer frictions but does not unify. The idea or concept is the instrument of social integration in human communities and until the uniting idea has been passed around, technical knowledge can only intensify the struggle.

This process is no respecter of beauty or persons. The contrast of the old and the new escapes the categories of good and evil, and of better and worse. The scene is dominated by challenge, tension, and development, and in this tension of transition a multitude of distorted forms appear. The second, third, and fourth decades of the twentieth century represent this field of distortion between the last phases of an old and the emergence of a new community. This is the moment of potential anarchy when the community lacks any explicit principle of order which can be effective under the conditions of the time. This is the night of violent and bestial release, the opportunity of the inhibited perversions which can now ally themselves with technical power. The dominance of the dissociated idealisms is over, and the two remaining active principles, sadistic vitality and technical power, join forces in a brief period of dominance. This short reign of Antichrist depends on the fusion of two principles which are both vicious because they represent only a part of European or western human nature: instinctive vitality distorted into sadism, and differentiating human vitality distorted into quantitative expansion.

Unprejudiced by the illusions of a past age and appearing to the exhausted humanist to possess a strangely objective vision, the distorted man knows that his brief opportunity of power has come, for he alone can be as ruthless as the occasion demands. It seems almost as though a formless world at such a moment would accept the impress of any arbitrary will. But even a ruthless maniac can only enter the records of history if he is the instrument of a general process. Whoever at any moment achieves power must use the symbols which at that moment facilitate the organization of human action. As the distorted man pursues his lust for power he increases the general tension, and thereby hastens the decay of the old. But a new order is in course of development; he must use some of its forms to achieve his own power, and his violence serves to prepare the soil and scatter the seeds. He wields power because he has lost the illusory ideals of the past, and can therefore recognize the technical skeleton which for the time being is the only valid instrument of social organization. This figure of the distorted man is no aesthetically acceptable Mephistopheles, offering man experience at the price of his soul, willing evil but achieving good. It is the spirit of frustration breaking out as lust for power, wrecking an old world and preparing the way for another not better or worse, but different from the old. History cannot be understood if it is sentimentalized as a necessary progress towards better things. No future is necessary unless we are such as to make it, and if we do make it and it satisfies us, this will be because it is appropriate to our condition, not because it is better or worse than what came before.

A human type unprejudiced by old illusions may easily dominate a disordered society, but that alone is not an adequate explanation of the ascendancy of the distorted man of the twentieth century. The gangster and racketeer get away with it in their limited fields and the Nazis dominate Europe, because by discarding certain illusions they have acquired a positive strength lacking in other contemporary types. This arises from the fact that they have rejected humanism without adopting in its place any other variant of the European dissociated tradition. The distorted man rejects the entire ethical and moral content of the European tradition, and with it the European mode of organizing the life of the individual and the community. His ascendancy expresses this overcoming of the European dissociation. In this he is in no mean sense a man. He stands firmly on his own ground and in the vigor of his action displays without shame that the past means nothing to him. He builds with the materials at hand for a purpose that is unquestionably his own. This vitality has its attraction for those to whom ideals have ceased to be real and culture become a tradition separated from life. It is courageous, honest in its dishonesty, and adventurous. The idealist, innocent of the deeper ranges of experience, may fail to recognize its significance. But there are moments in the history of individuals and of communities when the catharsis of blind and sensual action must precede the restoration of a proper rhythm.

In the early 1920s it was already evident to some that such a moment had arrived in the history of Europe. The situation in Germany contained features which defied interpretation in ethical or political terms, and implied, if they were maintained, a radical transformation of social life. This impetus might express itself in socialist or nationalist action, but beneath this superficial antithesis lay a common discontent. In destroying the old Germany the Allies had made sure that the new, when it appeared, would not accept traditional European criteria. Beneath such criminal activities as the murder of Rathenau lay the general discontent with a spurious liberalism that no longer had meaning.

In the conflict of vitality and an effete tradition, the gods of history never hesitate. In such a conflict there may come a terrible moment when those who are moved by the immediate historical trend, but fail to see its further implications, are inspired by a religious nihilism that hesitates at nothing. Merely to condemn Nazism implies an appeal to ideals that neither they nor history recognize. One can only condemn with insight what one has recognized in oneself. The Nazi is a symbol of a distortion universal to contemporary European and western man. He has taken on himself the radical struggle with a human disease that might be universal. In the final crucifixion of the Nazi, which must certainly come, Europe will symbolically destroy its own fanaticism. The end of the Nazi system can mean the beginning of unitary Europe and a unitary world, and only the firm establishment of that new world will enable mankind to look back without prejudice to the role of Germany in this great transformation.

It is not long since the madman was thought to be possessed of an evil spirit, and we still can consider a community as inspired by evil. Yet just as madness is the expression of frustrated vitality, so a community thought mad by others may express a formative process in which the new destroys the old. Such a time is of necessity cruel; and unitary man, having outgrown the need to condemn the inevitable facts of a particular phase in history, seeks only to ease the development of the new. But for this, two mutually dependent conditions are necessary: he must have outgrown the European dissociation and he must understand his own time.

I shall return in a moment to analyze the phasing of the history of this century. But for two decades, from 1920 to 1940, this situation remained unresolved: the ascendancy of the ruthless and the silence of the others for whom neither humanism nor Marxism was adequate. The crisis had been long anticipated in the world of thought. The failure of humanism had been clear to Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche; the new temper had been evident in the changing quality of socialist thought from Robert Owen to Marx, and from Marx to Sorel; the rationalism of Comte had given place to the vital intuition of Bergson. After the first war it was clear that the principles of the European tradition were losing their grip on men's minds; Marxism had narrowed itself to a form appropriate only to Russia; Europe was looking beyond industrialism for a new motive; for the moment the vacuum of ideas was filled by the irrational leadership of the distorted man. Fascism was ascendant, the others silent. The leaders of world thought scarcely seemed to be aware of the peculiar features of the new situation. Some saw aspects of the situation but all lacked a unitary view. Wells's vision, like that of most liberals, was prejudiced by utilitarian assumptions. Rathenau, Unamuno, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset, Berdyaev, Murry, Whitehead, and many others recognized the moral crisis but spoke. in the old language. Marxism claimed a monopoly of process thought and thereby misled young enthusiasm. A generation suffered violence in the world of action and silence in the world of thought.

The strength of the Fascist and the paralysis of the man of goodwill were both due to the collapse of the European dissociation. This had consisted, as we have seen, in the separation of two partial modes of behavior: the socially dominant system of deliberate responses based on static concepts and ideals, and the system of spontaneous, usually instinctive responses to immediate stimuli. The strength of the Fascist arose from the fact that in the breakdown of the dissociation, the released tension led to a movement in which action tended to dominate thought, experience was valued more than knowledge, and the instinctive and other vital passions overcame the civilized control of differentiated behavior. Technique became the instrument of the released tendencies rather than of any ideal system of control. The European system had rested broadly on the claim of mind to dominate being; now being -- at first in the narrower sense of action -- was to dominate mind.

This division of human life into pairs of contrasted aspects: action and thought, experience and knowledge, instinct and intellect, being and mind, is itself an expression of the dissociation. The fact that the Fascist still had to think in these dualistic terms, though he was himself in process of overcoming the dissociation, arose from the fact that the movement of release carried the emphasis too far from thought to action, the Fascist finding his opportunity precisely in the absence of any general integrating principle. The distorted man of the twentieth century seizes the moment of potential chaos and imposes on it not the developing order of a valid organizing principle, but the local and temporary order of a personal, national, or racial will. In the absence of the new conception which can coordinate the actions of men of goodwill, the Fascist imposes on the social system a form which expresses the resultant of the released passions and of the technical tendencies of the time. More accurately, it is these tendencies and passions which allow the Fascist for one brief generation to hold the instruments of power.

The new philosophies of activism were not an expression of healthy vitality; they betrayed in their ruthlessness a pathological element which could only arise from a denial of some component of contemporary human nature. The Communist Party's will to power was stronger than its desire to aid the men and women who make up the working classes. The appeal of the ultimate millennium of working class power blinded the party to practical tasks at hand, except in the one country where it had already achieved power. The end was more important than the means, humanity more important than individuals here and now. Here again the Communist was a true European, lost in the dualism of means and end, of fact and idea. It is appropriate that it should be Russia's task to translate a European theory into Asiatic reality. Marx pretends to renounce idealism but retains the idea of humanity or the State as more important than the men who actually constitute it, so that the end which is the good of humanity -- justifies the means -- which is the present denial of a part of human nature. Apart from Germany, the most unbalanced European country, where Communism might have been achieved, this doctrine could only suit Asia, since there it coincides with the ancient emphasis on a single hierarchy in contrast to the European division of social life into balancing components promoting individual variety. Russia adopted the western doctrine of progress and technical methods, and molded a new developing society appropriate to her own vast collectivity. Such denial of individual variety as this involved was alien to the European, but not to the Asiatic tradition.

But in Europe the new activism lacked the adaptability of a long-term historical movement and displayed instead the fierce will of perverted leadership in a disordered society. If an individual is deeply dissatisfied with himself, he must seek confirmation of his own rightness in a forced relation to the community. He must either deliberately hide himself by conforming to the amorphous mass and so become material for tyranny, or else impose himself on others and become the tyrant. The will to power and the need to conform to the mass through loss of personality appear together, as twin signs of the despair of the individual in a society lacking any order which might permit him to develop his own life.

Tyranny is the result, not the cause, of the collapse of order. The machine gun has power over those whose measure is their own life in the narrow present, and that is all that the isolated individual possesses. But if the individual is not isolated, but part of a true community, the richness of his life will lead him to defy death. In such circumstances the bullet may not be fired, for though it can destroy single individuals it cannot terrorize a vital community. The power of a tyranny cannot rest ultimately on its machine guns, since at one time the tyrant group were unarmed. Society hands the guns over to them because the unreality of the existing order is realized and the masses demand at least a personal symbol of order and call for the leader who will dominate them. When a true order becomes possible they throw him away as suddenly.

The organizing mental processes do not tolerate a vacuum. The formative processes always tend to establish symbols for organizing behavior. The most efficient of these are general ideas, but when ideas fail the community returns to the personal symbol of the father, the magic man, the group leader, the hero. No one can escape this need. In those deeper affairs where no philosophy can offer guidance, even the strongest mind finds peace and the bravest will stability in recalling the great figures of history, the heroes of his innermost thought. But the community always needs symbols, and when the tradition fails it, only the personal symbol remains.

This reaction from civilized tradition to personal tyranny took different forms in different areas. Germany had lacked the balancing influences and long development which the southern, western, and northern ocean-faring peoples had enjoyed. More recently war, blockade, and inflation had undermined the remnants of European idealism. Just as the dominant classes in Germany had been in turn more intensely individualist, protestant, imperialistic, rationalistic, and scientific than any other European people, so now they became more ruthlessly totalitarian. Germany has over and over again given her soul to some one element of the European tradition, but has never been loyal to the tradition itself or experienced the balance of its varied components. The situation of the German people today is not the result of astute propaganda. The lie is only effective when society itself is felt to be founded on a lie and no general truth is recognized. The strength of the German nation in the second war has been due to this: behind the unscrupulousness which is so misleading to their opponents, the people have devoted themselves to one supreme task, the total application of technique in the interest of one overriding national purpose.

Here we reach the essence of the totalitarian system as seen in Germany and to a lesser degree in Italy. The European differentiation of independent institutions is discarded and all the activities of the community are centrally controlled in a hierarchy devoted to one major purpose. This co-ordination of effort means that a new criterion of validity is applied to every aspect of society. The economic laws of earlier societies are neglected, quantity symbols are operated only in the interest of the single aim, and reason itself is socially recognized only as the instrument of the community will. The totalitarian society is active and hierarchical, and its stability depends on propaganda to maintain some correspondence between the community desires and the processes already set in motion by the ruling group. But the aim of the European totalitarian state, in contrast to that of Russia, is military, expansive, and anti-rational. The consequence is that such a state can only survive while the community as a whole is ready to support its expansive aims, or such transformed aims as its leaders may devise to meet new situations. Totalitarian tyranny is vulnerable, for though it expresses certain features of the time it lacks any central idea which can provide stability when its initial momentum is exhausted.

We have now traced the course up to the present day of the main components of the transformation: the final collapse of humanism, the development of quantitative anarchy, the growth of a new objective view of man, the gradual dissolution of the European dissociation, and the appearance of totalitarian tyranny. But if we are to diagnose the exact stage reached in the early forties, and the prospects for the future, we must examine more closely the phasing of these component processes and the present state of the underlying trend.

In assigning dates to the different phases of these processes we have to bear in mind the acceleration shown by all social processes during the last few decades. The rate of scientific discovery, of its practical applications, and of the consequent social changes has increased steadily since the last decade of the nineteenth century. This acceleration is a result of the self-developing characteristic of scientific thought, which as it develops facilitates to an ever-increasing degree its own development. The importance of this property during the last fifty years has been accentuated by two facts: the finiteness of the earth, and the existence of a limit to the fine-structure of nature. The first has permitted a concentration of effort and mutual facilitation between different groups of scientific workers that was not possible while the world remained to be explored, and could not exist in an infinitely extended community. The second fact, the finiteness of the accessible fine-structure of nature (which here means the restricted number of chemical elements, crystal types, organic species, etc.), has meant that new discoveries in one region immediately throw light on neighboring regions, new facts growing easier to discover as more and more facts are fitted into place.

These two facts express a single situation: the human community is in process of adapting to an effectively finite environment, and as the process continues the pace grows faster. In 1890 the world still appeared boundless, while in 1940 man is experiencing its finitude at every step. The outlook of the western mind has undergone this change during the last few decades, but no corresponding change has as yet been made in its fundamental concepts. The acceleration may be expected to continue until the conceptions and the form of society appropriate to the new conditions have been established. In approaching the phasing of these decades we must therefore bear in mind that while in European history as a whole ten generations could see fundamental changes and one generation represent a critical transition, we are now concerned with an unstable state which might settle into a new characteristic form in the course of a single decade.

We must now pass from these broader vistas to the details of a time of rapid transition and it will be convenient to fix certain dates by noting some of the events that closed each decade. In 1910 Lenin was in Zurich, Lloyd George was creating the new demagogy, Bl�riot had flown the English Channel, Bohr was at work on the quantum theory, Proust was recalling his past, Bergson was in fashion, Freud still to be discovered, Wells an unquestioning optimist, Shaw already 54, Mussolini 27, and Hitler 21. These names are evidence that the final challenge to traditional Europe was already in preparation. By 1920 Lenin was in Petrograd, Wilson back in Washington, Zaharoff had founded a chair at Oxford, Freud had become popular, Joyce was at work on "Ulysses," and Hitler had conceived his mission. The first challenge had been delivered.

For many Europe had died in the valley of the Somme, its beauty enhanced in retrospect but its corruption final. Beside the horror of an ancient civilization destroying its young, the daily life of family, religion, and career, inspired by the old ideals, had become a macabre jest, recognized only by the surrealists. Hitler, and others with him, knew that the corpses of Flanders were more real than a society that had not yet admitted the death of its soul. A league of anachronisms inspired by Genevan piety only served to draw a curtain between man and the horrid truth. But daring to look deep into himself the surrealist saw that European man had lost his community, and therefore also his unity, and was obsessed by the obscene symbols of sub-human vitality. Only Russia, safe outside the European cordon, escaped the decay and set its eyes on the future.

By 1930 Mussolini and Stalin were in power, Hitler was awaiting his chance, radio and the mass-man had established their dominance, the liberal economic system was displaying its cycle of indifference, for the first and last time on a world-wide scale. In a vast conspiracy of pretense, the vested interests of old money and old ideas continued their frivolous rituals, and left it to the distorted men of unsatisfied peoples to announce that the game was over.

By 1940 Europe had disappeared, and the English-speaking world was at bay in defense of its inheritance. -- Such was the crude structure of these decades, against which we must now identify the successive phases of the underlying transformation.

In the previous chapter we traced the progressive decay of humanism and there remains only the task of considering how far European society was aware of this process at different dates during this century. Anxiety for the future of civilization, that is, for their children's future, had already been shown by the masses of Europe, for about the turn of the century, three hundred years of rapid expansion of the European population came suddenly to an end. The anarchy of quantitative competition had created a profound sense of unease, but few had given expression to this vague presentiment. Even as late as 1905-10, minds fully competent to deal with superficial historical events could still remain blind to the general trend. But by 1916-18 it was evident to many that technical war had exposed the folly of further confidence in the efficacy of humanistic ideals. Since those years, when Europe first flung its youth to a mass-death, the whole of western literature has been occupied either in getting to grips with this problem, or in offering an escape from it. Only the dense unimaginativeness of the prosperous concealed it from the "fortunate" sections of European society. The literature, art, and music of Europe evidenced its despair. The life of Berlin openly challenged the ideals of the tradition, Paris maintained a mere pretense, and London its insular indifference. Against these fundamental factors the few desperate attempts to save the liberal polity were poultices concealing the need for the knife.

The next component which we have to consider is the development of the quantitative method. The present status of the quantity principle is a matter of importance since this principle has determined the chief characteristics of the last two centuries. The extension of quantitative methods to new fields of exact science has recently come to an end. It is as though three centuries of increasingly intense application of the quantitative method had exhausted its guarantee of the progressive improvement of thought, because the regions where the method is adequate have already been explored. In experimental physics the attempt to establish quantitative space-time co-ordinates in very small regions has led to the discovery of a limiting uncertainty. If we attempt to pursue quantitative exactitude beyond this limit, we find ourselves left with a form which cannot be localized. In biological problems, such as chemical embryology and the study of the functions of the cerebral cortex, the attempt to split the process into spatially localized factors has failed to yield satisfactory results. The quantitative method of exact space-time localization has also failed to provide a suitable calculus for describing the subtly interrelated hierarchical balance of the nervous and glandular systems. In psychology the theory of the gestalt or form has been developed to compensate excessive analysis. It is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that a new method is now necessary to supplement the method of quantitative analysis.

A similar exhaustion of the elementary quantitative method is apparent in many other fields. The analysis of materials is no longer regarded as adequately covered by a global statement of the percentages of the different elements present, and this must be supplemented by a description of the electrochemical and aggregated condition, i.e. of the whole arrangement of the atomic and molecular groups, expressed in activation energies and selective forces serving to attract and orient structures of specific form. The developing pattern is what counts; an elementary quantitative analysis determines only certain basic components of the pattern, and may miss the most important.

The same situation is found in the application of number and quantity of the organization of society. The operation of the quantity symbols merely to increase production is no longer adequate, the essential task being now the organization of distribution to meet known human needs rather than an apparent demand indicated by the quantity symbols of the market. The failure of the financial quantity symbols is far-going. Units of currency change their nature with a change of ownership. The money symbols no longer guarantee their "owner" a claim on a determinate measure of goods or services, but are limited by permits and coupons, and sometimes even withheld as treasure for a heavenly future like food buried in an Egyptian tomb. Capital in the sense of quantity of credit can no longer operate in the manner that gave it its original meaning; the state limits all its activities: investment, speculation, inheritance, exchange, and control of production are all restricted. Ownership of the quantity symbols of money has lost much of its meaning.

These examples show that the quantity concepts and their symbols are no longer performing what was once their function: to describe nature with increasing exactness, to organize production, to balance supply and demand, and to preserve value. The simultaneous appearance of this situation in so many fields might be no more than a multiple coincidence, but it suggests that the intense exploitation of the quantitative method during recent decades has exhausted the regions to which it is suited. While the known world was expanding, on the globe, in space, and in the atom, the elementary quantity symbols continued to extend their domain. But if the limits of this expansion have now been reached, it may be that these symbols no longer constitute the appropriate instrument for the further organization and application of knowledge. A complementary non-quantitative technique may be necessary to control the ordering of finite patterns in a finite world, which is the task now before the race.

The power of quantity is already in decline and the emphasis is shifting to a new system of ideas: symmetry, pattern, organization, function, development. The recent rate of extension of quantitative technique has been so rapid that various new fields of application have been exhausted within a single decade, instead of being slowly exploited one after another over centuries, as they might have been had the rate been less. The culmination of the age of quantity can be placed in the 1920s. In 1925 Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle of atomic physics which recognized the existence of limits set to space-time measurement in small regions. In 1929 the concentration of credit in single hands reached the maximum for all time: the New York slump of that year was the collapse of a symbolic fiction of credit circulating in the market but unsupported by production.

There is no longer any magic in quantity; physical quantities are what we can measure, finance a calculus to serve human wills. The autonomy of the symbols is challenged; number and quantity no longer exist in their own right as an independent order of reality. Just as thought is recognized as acquiring its significance only as a component of the processes in man, so the quantity symbols are now understood to be valuable only as a means of organizing whatever can be measured or counted. When the quantity symbols fail, either because they are misused or because the things with which we are concerned are not measurable, then they lose their status and must be supplemented by other methods. For this reason physics has resorted to the non-quantitative calculus of groups to describe the atomic patterns, and the emphasis of economic thought has shifted back from the money symbols to the economic processes and goods which they originally represented. It is evident that lack of finance capital does not of itself set any limit to the possible achievements of a community, and that the flow of goods between nations can proceed without the usual consequences of current bookkeeping. The obsession with the quantity symbols is at an end. Thought has penetrated behind the symbols to the process of which they only represent one aspect. Man has measured the limits of measurement, and credit is discredited. The passion for quantity achieved the expansion for which it craved, but at the price of its own exhaustion.

How rapidly the mood of thought can change within a small community may be seen by looking back on some British prejudices of the 1920s. It was then shocking to common sense to suggest that in every situation there is some factor which can override the influence of quantity: "Nothing can be done without adequate finance." "The quantities of economics are beyond the control of individuals." "The individual life is too short; men of goodwill too few." "The subject matter of exact science consists of pointer-readings." These pathetic fallacies, which read into nature man's passing obsession, have already lost their power to impose on the average mind.

So long as quantity was given an absolute status and nature regarded as being essentially quantitative in structure, it was not possible for the mind to find its place in nature. Though the concept of quantity is a typical product of the mind, representing the ideal of static permanence, yet the forms of mental processes cannot be expressed in terms of quantity. The prestige of quantity thus helped to maintain the dualistic separation of mind and nature. The present recognition of the limitations of the quantitative method leaves the way open for the unitary method in which mental processes are identified as a special form of the universal formative process.

This leads us to consider the point reached in the next component process: the development of an objective view of man. Here generalization is less reliable, and the evidence of recent trends might at any moment be reversed by new events. Nevertheless certain conclusions will probably stand. On the one hand the progress of biological and psychological science is steadily bringing the field of established knowledge closer to the central problems not only of the physiology of man but also of his character, temperament, and modes of thought. On the other hand the dogmatic views of the orthodox Marxist and Freudian schools appear to have lost their first revolutionary appeal. Between 1920 and 1940, the influence of the relatively small groups that accepted either of these doctrines as an adequate science of man reached its zenith and began to wane. The more society was influenced by these doctrines the less tenable became the view that either of them was adequate. Narrow dogmatic views can only be maintained in opposition to an established tradition; the process of discovering their limitations goes parallel with their absorption into the community tradition. Economic man and sexual man are useful abstractions, but even in combination they fail to describe contemporary men and women.

The development of the objective picture of man had at the outbreak of the second world war reached the stage at which these two abstractions could be widely recognized as relevant to components of human nature but as neglecting some essential element. We have already seen that unitary thought interprets this situation by showing that the fundamentally static thought of the recent period has emphasized the conservative or life-maintaining components of human activity, while neglecting the formative or developmental component. On this interpretation, an objective conception of man has now been sufficiently developed to prepare the community for the identification of the formative tendency which dominates and co-ordinates all the component processes in human nature. Since an objective conception of man based on this principle would necessarily include all the valid elements of the earlier subjective conception, the present phase may also be regarded as the prelude to a synthesis of the subjective and objective methods of approach to man.

One of the most striking features of western thought during the last two decades has been the clash between idealism and materialism, in the sense of the partial views of man offered by subjective religion and humanist ethics on the one hand, and by dialectical materialism and certain recent psychological theories on the other hand. This clash of two partially valid conceptions, neither of which western man could honestly reject as false, is the final expression of the European dissociation. Each aspect of divided western man provides apparent evidence of the truth of the corresponding doctrine and yet the two views are contradictory. Too much is already known of human nature for either view to be rejected in favor of the other. The individual therefore oscillates from a materialistic to an idealistic emphasis, just as the physicist does from particle to wave representations of the electron, both being forced into the dualistic dilemma by the failure to use process concepts. Thus the materialistic and idealistic attitudes, with their common vested interest in the ancient static methods of thought, become allies in delaying the needed synthesis, as Communist and pacifist at one time joined forces in attempting to frustrate the defensive instinct of the average Englishman. But the steadily increasing scientific knowledge of natural processes will, if the unitary view is correct, shortly impose on the tradition a definitive unitary reorganization. The materialist and the idealist will then become anachronistic reminders of the age before the unitary process was recognized.

This recognition of the unitary truth will come about as one aspect of the unitary process operating in man and above all in his mental processes. The formative tendency in thought expresses itself in the tendency to think and act in parallel, to develop action in accordance with thought, and thought on the basis of past action. This tendency to establish the conformity of thought and action may be arrested in a dissociated individual or civilization, but it is an aspect of normal organic integration in a thinking organism, and is known subjectively as the persisting latent desire for honesty in thought and action and for knowledge concerning man. As a consequence of the ascendancy of scientific truth, this impulse towards integrity of thought and action has acquired a new importance in recent decades. What Nietzsche foresaw more than fifty years ago has now come true: "Perhaps this coming generation will on the whole seem more evil than the present one -- for in evil as in good it will be more straightforward."

This leads us to consider how far the general process, of which these special tendencies are components, has developed during the recent decades. This transformation consists in the disappearance of the European dissociation and the substitution of a unitary organization. What do the last thirty years show in this regard? As the appropriate unitary language is not yet sufficiently developed, it will be convenient to consider this central question from the three interrelated aspects of emotion, thought, and behavior. How far have the emotions, thoughts, and actions of the western peoples displayed the breakdown of the traditional dualistic form during this recent period?

The prevailing relativity of moral standards leaves the field clear for a new criterion in the emotional life. The only criterion which can be accepted today as determining the status of an emotion is its genuineness, the extent to which it can express the whole nature. But the mere recognition of this fact does not imply the disappearance of the dissociation. Indeed it is just this desire for emotional honesty which prevents the rejection of either the materialistic or the idealistic view of man -- until a more comprehensive substitute is in sight because each is felt to contain an element of the truth. Yet this unstable dual consciousness, this general awareness of an equal degree of validity in man's material and spiritual needs, shows that the dissociation has lost its justification. For the dissociation expressed the social recognition of the spiritual as more legitimate than the sensual appetites. But in his new straightforwardness man denies such biased discrimination, and seeks only the integration proper to his nature at his own stage of development.

The two dissociated components are now locked in a final unstable clash and this means that the provisional integration of the European system has gone, the latent duality become patent, and the tradition no longer offering to the maturing generations a possible method of organization. The dissociation was often painful but usually tolerable. The condition which results from its collapse is intolerable because it leaves man without even the pretense of the single control which is necessary to every organism. If unitary thought is valid, this condition must result either in rapid regression and the loss of all civilization, or in an equally swift establishment of a new unitary organization expressing a unity in man transcending and co-ordinating his varied emotions. Since we are concerned here only with the tradition and its influence on the individuals of each generation, this does not imply the disappearance of conflict in every individual but only the offering by the reorganized tradition of assistance to every individual in organizing his life, in place of its present dualistic distortion of his potential harmony. In its demand for emotional honesty this century has prepared man for the far-going reorganization appropriate to his present condition.

If this interpretation is correct we must find the same situation displayed in the intellectual component of the tradition. We have already noted that the analytical method of thought, based on the use of static concepts and culminating in the calculus of quantity, appears to have passed its zenith. In many branches of thought, the historical method, or the tracing of development, offers the only promising guide through the overwhelming complexity of detail. Exact thought is in a condition of confused suspense; the duality latent in the basis of European and western thought has come to the surface. Time and space, function and structure, purpose and quantity, freedom and necessity -- each concept refuses to yield primacy to its partner. Their disharmony now lies open, and frustrates the proper role of thought, for these dualisms fail to express the returning unity of experience. The same intellectual dualism reappears as the conflict of individual and community, and this, like the others, remains irresolvable within the logic of static concepts. The barrier of this dualism can only be overcome by retracing the development of the intellect and discarding the primitive and misleading static system in favor of a process system of thought.

Finally a parallel situation is evident in the behavior of the community. The relaxation of the inhibitions on the instinctive life, which maintained the dissociation without the substitution of any adequate novel co-ordination expressing the integrity appropriate to human nature, has resulted in a new emphasis on the animal needs of man. A vast sensual demagogy, threatening civilization with its technical apparatus of standardized pleasures, is one of the many aspects of the collapse of the dissociation. Sensual man challenges the ascendancy of spiritual man, not merely in an instinctive rebellion of vitality against restraint, but as the expression of a new honesty. Yet within the challenge of sensual man to a spirituality which he scorns, there lies also a deeper latent rebellion against sensual pleasures which bring no contentment, and hence even from the favored countries men go willingly to war.

It is no wonder that in such a situation the old conceptions should fail as guides. Utilitarian thought, whether liberal or socialist, wrote on its banner, "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue," and under the sign of organic man this could not be refuted. Sixty years ago, Dostoevsky recognized that this was the issue, and that organic man could not represent the whole of man. Yet it was not till the 1930s that this issue was decided on a scale for all to read. Britain in the nineteenth century had denied itself current consumption and so built up its great productive capital, but this was a consequence of the operation of the quantity symbols in the interests of the owners of industry, a process to which the masses paid no attention. But in the third decade of the twentieth century Russia and Germany repeated this achievement with the support of the majority of the active sections of their people, Russia to defend the first socialist society, Germany to dominate the world.

The Russian and German peoples, in willingly denying themselves bread to achieve the guns of defense and offense, proved that the utilitarian age was at an end. It is no longer possible to think that men put bread before virtue, if virtue is interpreted, without moral implications, as the co-ordination and control of the instincts by an overriding tendency. Man abhors the absence of integration. He demands integration, and will create religions, achieve heroic self-sacrifice, pursue mad ambitions, or follow the ecstasy of danger, rather than live without. If society refuses him this satisfaction in a constructive form, he will seize a destructive principle to which he can devote himself and will take revenge on the society that thought his only demand was pleasure. Vice, in this sense, shares the integrating power of virtue, of which it is merely the negative form. The mass-man readily rejected the utilitarian philosophy which had created him and accepted in its place the new mass-religion of national suicide. This has not been understood by the fortunate Anglo-Saxon, who, still retaining habits from the earlier dissociated state, has failed to realize that the utilitarian age is over. The German disease is an intensification of a general situation. The decay of European ideals had left no path of virtue, and the restless German therefore turned to vice. For the moment the entire race finds glory in the vice of war. But a species which places vice above bread may at another time prefer virtue to bread, and then be able to share the loaf in peace. This is a historical possibility, but for that very reason not a moral advance, unless it is moral to display order in a time of order, and immoral to suffer disorder in a time of disorder.

Nothing is easier than to undergo obsession by an idea and to substitute for fact the satisfying pattern of an abstract principle. It is, I find, possible to interpret the contemporary scene as the prelude to a unitary reorganization. In such a matter there can be no proof, and the outline of an interpretation which I have given here can only serve as support for a personal assertion. The purpose of this analysis of the recent decades has been to permit a conclusion regarding the phase now reached in the general transformation and hence to bring the apparent dualism of history and prophecy within one unitary form.

The conclusion to which this analysis has led is that there is no evidence of such a fundamental lack of adaptability of homo sapiens as must lead to a reversal of the secular trend of development which has persisted through the earlier local civilizations and has now become general to man. There is no evidence of any lack of potency in the hereditary constitution to permit the further parallel development of the tradition and the individual. The faculty of differentiation shows no sign of exhaustion, though the emphasis may pass from accelerated differentiation to reorganization, adjustment, and a more complete co-ordination of finite systems. Mankind is now ready for the first step in this reorganization: the recognition of the limitations of the European and western tradition and the explicit formulation of the unitary principle.




VIII

Nine Thinkers

HERACLITUS, PLATO, PAUL, KEPLER, DESCARTES

As the story passes from past to future, its form must change. Up to this point, the test of unitary thought has been its power to interpret history; that the reader may judge here and now. But the anticipation of the future must be measured by the power of unitary thought to facilitate the development which it foretells. In passing through the present, the story loses its contemplative character and becomes an instrument to facilitate action. It is therefore appropriate that the continuity of the story should be interrupted as it reaches the contemporary scene in the fifth decade of the twentieth century.

In the next two chapters we shall take another even more swift retrospect of the history of European thought. The previous chapters have suffered from neglect of the individual. This is inherent in any philosophy of history, and for those who believe that general ideas constitute a higher reality than individual historical facts, it may be no disadvantage. But to the unitary thinker, ideas are components of individual lives and lose their meaning when divorced from them. Moreover while the historical trend in the past may be viewed with detachment, the future trend must be experienced, by some individuals at least, as the passion and inspiration of their lives. Certain aspects of the future can only be developed by the facilitation which results from conscious attention to the task. For example, the intellectual tradition can only be reorganized by attentive thought, and unitary thought cannot be established unless the trend seizes individuals and makes them its conscious instruments. If any individual develops a personal conviction of the contemporary trend, that implies not only that he recognizes it intellectually but that he experiences in his will and ambition whatever components of the trend are appropriate to his personal temperament. The unitary interpretation of the past is therefore incomplete until we have seen how the past trend, in its different phases, became the inspiration of individual lives.

It is not possible here to follow out the structure of the formative process in the complex patterns of daily human life at different periods of history. But every great transformation of the tradition has found its supreme symbolic figure. It is in these representative individuals that the formative processes of history can be most directly seen; in them the dialectic of dualistic tension and the resolution of discord within new characteristic forms are displayed in the life and thought of a single person. The philosophy of history, normally a generalization from countless individual lives, becomes concrete in the thought processes of such representative figures.

A group of nine leading thinkers has been selected and an attempt made to epitomize the story of the preceding chapters in terms of their thought. They have been chosen solely for their fitness to represent the changing form of the organization of European life, as evidenced in the changing forms of thought. In each we shall discover some European prejudice or some aspects of a universal truth. But these thumb-nail sketches are neither complete nor objective in the sense of lacking any presupposition. They start by assuming that the majority of these nine made certain fundamental mistakes, perhaps inevitable at the time, but none the less now seen to be mistakes. Each sketch is an estimate in terms of unitary thought of the essential structure of the individual's mental processes, and hence of his reliability as a guide in this unitary world.

In tracing this changing form of the organization of life and thought we can largely neglect the explicit or literal content of each individual's thought, and pay attention mainly to its formal structure. This is a great advantage since it is impossible, for example in the case of Paul, to know the implications of a Greek, Latin, or Aramaic phrase for a person living at the opening of the Christian era. Words derive their meaning from their context, which is the entire matrix of social life within which each word gradually emerged as the symbol of a particular situation. Yet the implications which give each word its meaning are linked by the thread of a common structure, or formal similarity, which guides the processes of memory and association. A process word recalls similar processes; a static word rouses thoughts of permanence; what is single is associated with other singleness; symbols of conflict recall similar conflicts. It is this formal structure, common to all that is implied in an idea, with which we are concerned. A particular structure is common to all the dominant ideas of any stable tradition, and characterizes it. When this structure undergoes a general modification, we say that one tradition has disappeared and been replaced by another. But this cannot occur without a far-going social transformation.

Though this changing organization is most clearly expressed in the ideas of such representative individuals, we are not dealing with isolated mental processes, but with historical persons, each intoxicated with his own vision of the significance of experience. The temperament of such a person is closely related to the formal structure of his thought. A man's thought may either express or compensate his personal life; there is no necessary identity between the forms of the personal life and the forms of thought. But at the deepest level, where only the most general characteristics of form operate, there is a general correlation. The temperament and passion of a static dualist is never that of a unitary process thinker; their responses to God and to woman, to eternity and time, express the same continuity of form as does their thought. In this ultimate sense the individuals can be taken to represent stages in the development of Europe in their personality as well as in their thought.

Since we are primarily concerned with the systematic structure of a changing tradition rather than with personality there are certain supreme figures which, though of symbolic importance, lie outside the scope of this analysis: Socrates, Jesus, Goethe, Nietzsche. These men did not help to create systems but represented certain universal attitudes in their lives, their works, and their deaths. Of these four, I have only included Goethe, whom I require to throw light, by contrast, on the limitations of the European form. The other three set the limits to the story of Europe. What appeared in Socrates and Jesus, the spiritual consciousness of the individual subject, was exhausted in Nietzsche. The searcher and the god-man led of necessity to the man-god, and to disaster for the tradition. The attitude of these three to the divine and to woman reveals the grandeur and the limitations of the European dissociation. Only after the closing of that cycle of experience and the final collapse of the European tradition is it possible for man to recognize objectively the universal source of his own formative genius. It would appear that no true European could help misunderstanding Goethe, whose real contemporaries are to be found either before Plato or in the present century. Yet he was also marked by his time and can lend a part of himself to throw light on the dissociated forms of life which he repudiated.

Jesus proclaimed the rediscovery of undifferentiated innocence; Socrates sought a differentiation of thought which would restore and protect man's integrity; Nietzsche dreamed of the integrity of a new race of men who would overcome the failure of the Christian-Socratic differentiation. This is the frame of our story. The European experiment in differentiation is an episode in the biology of man's social development and the attempt to interpret it must employ the broad vistas of a philosophical anthropology. Man set out on a two-thousand-year trial of a particular method of differentiation, adapting the structure of his mental processes, conscious and unconscious, to a certain general form.

We need consider only the most general characteristics of this form, and for the purposes of this analysis, these reduce to two. Thought may be either unitary or dualistic (since other pluralistic forms may be neglected), and it may be either process or static. These two pairs produce four combinations or types of thought: unitary-process, unitary-static, dualistic-process, and dualistic-static. The first and last are the most stable and common types; the unitary-static and dualistic-process forms are less frequent and may be regarded as anomalous forms appearing at times of transition.

The analysis into these sharp categories of a field as subtle and complex as thought is no more and no less reliable than any other method of classifying the forms of process. Such discrete classifications can throw light on the nature of thought just as the mental separation of male and female types represents a real divergence of two complementary types within the general diversity of human individuals. But just as a trace of the contrary hormone may set the antagonistic process at work and destroy the sexual balance of the male or female type, so each of those four fundamental types of thought may be disturbed by the influence of a form alien to its own. If we were considering a static scheme of human potentialities it would be enough to choose four representatives, one of each type. But to portray the developing sequence of a process which leads from undifferentiated unitary-process thought through the trial differentiation of dualistic-static forms to differentiated unitary-process thought, we require at least twice that number. No individual is ever a pure representative of his type. Each develops amidst the inheritance of his past and the impress of his environment, and forms his own resolution of these varied influences. Each displays the tension of the process, the antithesis of contrary elements from which one general pattern tends to emerge. Yet these representative figures have been chosen to display certain definite stages in the development of the form of the mental process in man, as revealed partly in temperament but more clearly in the spoken and written word.



At the dawn of European thought there stands a dark oracular figure, Heraclitus (540-475 B.C.), whose vision is at once more ancient and more universal than the European. Aristocratic, lonely, and pessimistic, his dogmatic fragments provide a contrast to the subsequent development of thought. Europe neglected him for twenty-three centuries, and it is only now that his stature can be recognized. Heraclitus links the European tradition with the process thought of the early Asiatic civilizations.

In the earlier Milesian and Pythagorean schools, Greek thinkers had already begun the attempt to see nature and experience as a rational whole. From the study of harmony in music and in geometrical forms, Pythagoras had come to believe that number was the key to reality. Heraclitus dismissed this view: "Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practiced investigation most of all men, and having chosen out these treatises, he made a wisdom of his own, much learning and bad art." To Heraclitus all was strife and change, and harmony was not to be regarded as static, but as lying in a developing relation between opposites. Change was universal, but there was one pervasive order within it. Man was a part of that order, and subject to its transformations. The unity of nature was to be found in its variety, and in the continuity of the transformation by which life became death, and night day. The harmony of opposites was seen in process of their interplay, and all values were relative.

Though the Heraclitean fragments are sometimes obscure and are not expressed as a system of thought, the emphasis is unitary and the basic conception is one of process. There are no fundamental dualisms in the pervading order; opposed elements are harmonized through their mutual relations, and perhaps also by the process which transforms each thing into its opposite. These are the formal characteristics of unitary process thought, and they are unmistakable in Heraclitus:

"It is wise for those who hear, not me, but the universal reason, to confess that all things are one. -- This world, the same for all, neither any of the gods nor any man has made, but it always was, and is, and shall be, an ever-living fire, kindled in due measure and in due measure extinguished. -- Into the same river you could not step twice, for other waters are flowing. -- In change is rest. -- Craving and satiety. -- God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, plenty and want. -- For men to have whatever they wish, would not be well. Sickness makes health pleasant and good; hunger, satiety; weariness, rest. -- War is the father and king of all. -- It is hard to contend with passion, for whatever it craves it buys with its life. -- [Heraclitus blamed the poet who said, 'Would that strife were destroyed from among gods and men.' For there could be no harmony without sharps and flats, nor living beings without male and female, which are contraries. The harmony of the world is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and the lyre. The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.] -- Good and evil are the same. -- Unite whole and part, agreement and disagreement, accordant and discordant: from all comes one, and from one all. To me one is ten thousand if he be the best. -- A man's character is his daemon. -- Wisdom is to speak truth and consciously to act according to nature."

In these fragments we recognize Heraclitus as the father of process thought, as have others to whom we shall refer later. He is the representative of undifferentiated unitary process thought, thought before it separated itself from nature and set out on the search for analytical rarity. I have given these quotations at length because they provide a vivid contrast to the main trend of European thought. Their meaning and content do not call for comment here, but their general form is clear: in place of dualism, there is the opposition of complementaries; in place of static substance, there is the rhythm and strife of process. Heraclitus is aware of himself as different from others, but he is pantheistic, lyrical, and intuitive, not self-critical or analytical. He is subtle and dogmatic, but he does not moralize in the hope of improving. He feels the same rhythm in himself as he observes in nature; the gift of thought enables him to criticize his senses, but it does not separate him from nature. Most men may be blind and life may be tragic, but man, as Heraclitus sees him, is not a problem to himself. In Heraclitus there is something of the early Greek sense of unity and balance, which was later lost in Greece and was rejected by Europe. Yet if the fancy be permitted, we can imagine that Heraclitus might have understood the two thousand years of error as a stage in the process of history, for "we all work together to one end, some consciously and with purpose, others unconsciously. Just as indeed Heraclitus, I think, says that the sleeping are co-workers and fabricators of the things that happen in the world." (M. Antonius.) To the unitary mind it is as though the achievements of Europe had been a brilliant dream in the long sleep of static thought, when man was unaware of his unity.



It is one of the strangest features of history that there are brief periods, and even individual lives, in which the developments of many centuries are epitomized. A few generations of Greek history appear to summarize the history of Europe, and the thought of one Greek philosopher to carry within it the fertile seed from which has grown the European soul. To understand Plato (427-347 B.C.) is to understand Europe, for if we look deep enough we can see in him not only the separation of thought from the world of phenomena which it is the task of science to overcome, but also the disillusionment which gave Christianity its opportunity. Plato expresses more completely than any other thinker the tension which set Europe its task and was at the same time its prime mover. The disparity of the ideal and the real created the phenomenon Europe, and in the philosophical realm Plato is its symbol.

But here we can only consider the most general aspects of Plato's historical situation and personal achievement, and no attempt will be made to refer to his special doctrines, whether in philosophy, ethics, or politics. Plato has been quoted enough. His words have a spurious clarity. For more than two thousand years they have hypnotized men with their treacherous lucidity, promising the Socratic path to knowledge but leaving the soul bemused on a transcendental and wholly fantastical journey. Moreover it would be dishonest to cite phrases in support of my interpretation, since such passages must either be torn from a Socratic dialectic of enquiry where the method, not the conclusion is essential, or from a Platonic doctrine which changes from dialogue to dialogue, much as Europe did from century to century, and, like Europe, ends in a bitter intolerance which repudiates its earlier ideals. The tension in Plato and in Europe gave neither any rest; however grand their achievement their common failure proves a deep maladjustment which vitality must sooner or later repudiate.

Plato is the symbol of Europe because he is the expression of the human demand for permanence in a universe of process. This antithesis, which is the most general characteristic of the European tradition, may be identified in every component of the process, in the biological and physiological processes, in the origins of thought, in social and political movements, and in the structure of philosophy. Plato is great because his thought so completely represented both the typical situation of a man at that period and his own personal situation as pupil, lover, citizen, and idealist, through the different phases of his life. This means that we can find this characteristic antithesis represented in every component of his life and thought, but most clearly of all, because he is foremost a lover of truth, in his thought.

To Plato the thinker, the world of process and the demand for permanence are represented respectively by the Heraclitean flux and the Socratic search for moral and intellectual certainty. As Aristotle explains, Plato was the result of the interaction of the Heraclitean doctrine and the Socratic demand for a universal ethic. Plato was true to his time and also a true European in accepting the validity of the Heraclitean view as regards the world of the senses, while denying that world reality in favor of a transcendental world of permanent ideas. That was the attitude which the tradition impressed on each maturing generation. Plato sees straight to the roots of the human situation at the time, and emphasizes the inescapable dualism between the process of the senses and the permanence of timeless ideas. This honesty is the source of his power, and his position has for long been beyond challenge. But he went on to interpret the dualism in a special manner. It was an essential and permanent dualism, and since to him only what was permanent could be granted real existence, the persisting harmony of the ideal world was reality and the confusion of the world of process was illusion. In expressing this antithesis of permanence and process and in granting prior reality to the permanent, Plato speaks for European tradition. This attitude was superimposed on the normal adaptive vitality of the species. Most Europeans continued to believe in the reality of the world of the senses, and to take comfort in the Platonic doctrine only when the facts of process became unbearable at times of frustration, illness, or approaching death.

But why did Plato make this choice? He lived only two or three generations after Heraclitus, yet he represents a different type of man. The transformation of the social tradition at the opening of the third period, which we analyzed in a previous chapter, is concentrated and thrown into high relief by the contrast between these two thinkers. The problems which have preoccupied the modern mind did not exist for Heraclitus, but they are most of them in the Dialogues. In Plato there is scarcely a trace left of the ancient undifferentiated unitary man, while most features of the dissociated theoretical mind are already present. These two, in certain respects typical of ancient and modern, appear to be separated by an abyss, and yet they are linked by the continuity of the Heraclitean transformation which led from one to the other. Because Heraclitus accepted process and represents a more universal mode of being, it is conceivable that for once the more ancient type might have understood, while pitying, the later.

If they have all met meantime in other regions, I have no doubt that Plato has conceived a heavenly dialogue between Heraclitus and Socrates in which the Heraclitean process and the Socratic dialectic carry the argument from the original antithesis to a joint recognition that the unitary method must now supersede the Socratic. But that dialogue could not be honestly recorded, for Heraclitus would angrily have repudiated its possibility and quite properly thereafter have remained silent, knowing that torn from his historical context he, Heraclitus, could no longer exist. He might think to himself that the whole affair of these Socratic dialogues was an overrated intellectualist fantasy, never leading either to conviction or to action, but he would not trouble to assert what he would know that Socrates could not recognize. So Plato could record no dialogue but only the smiling faith of Socrates, justified by the Europe that drew its inspiration so largely from him, and the grave air of Heraclitus, who, having seen the deeper truth, would certainly be indifferent to the knowledge that, when Europe failed, the world would after all look back to him. The day had not come for a philosopher who would proclaim the joyful wisdom of the acceptance of process, and Plato, after Socrates' death, could not have understood such an attitude.

These two represent the ancient and modern types, the primitive undifferentiated and the European dissociated man, as far as is possible for men who were so close to one another in time, and both pre-eminently thinkers. Why did one choose one form of thought and the other the alternative? What change in social conditions provided the stimulus to a new development in the later of the two? The unthinking acceptance of the forms of ancient life had been disturbed by an upheaval in which both the contrast between one social system and another and the instability of all such systems had been forced on man's attention in the Eastern Mediterranean and particularly in Greece. Social disturbance had unsettled men's minds and the early Greek thinkers were expressing a social need in seeking to recover stability through the discovery of a rational and universal principle of order. We have seen that in the early stages of the evolution of thought, the requirement of clarity implies the use of static ideas, and the later and more systematic and logical Greek thinkers of necessity turned to static conceptions. Heraclitus had not been intimidated by the processes of life and the mercilessness of change, but that aristocratic attitude could not be maintained. The common experience was one of discomfort and anxiety; while the old order was no longer respected, the anarchy and relativity of the offered alternatives were equally unsatisfying; a general demand for system arose, and with it the opportunity for developing static concepts.

The Socratic method is the subjective and introspective form of what later became the heuristic principle of quantity. Socrates made his life the search for truth regarding the ideal life; intellectual clarity and ethical truth were inseparable, and man should use his mind to seek the truth. Plato took on himself to fulfill this teaching, but it was not enough for him to remain, like his teacher, a humble seeker of truth. Life had disappointed him, Socrates was gone, and he required some established certainty on which he could lean. There were more general physiological and social conditions which facilitated his choice, but in the man Plato, it was the evil cruelty of men that compelled his choice. He could not remain with Heraclitus and Socrates in the world of the senses; he refused to accept the ultimate reality of a world which could condemn to death the very prophet of truth; he joined the ranks of those who sought to escape the distress of the actual world in the static harmony of thought. Parmenides had already emphasized the static character of real existence, and Anaxagoras had found this reality in a transcendental world. Socrates, in deadly earnest in his search for truth, had been more cautious. But Plato was impatient for certainty, and the Socratic road to knowledge became the Platonic view of reality: "In the beginning was the Word."

This was the response of an individual to the general social transformation in progress at the time, and it resulted in the establishment of the explicit marks of the European dissociation. But this unitary situation and its results can be identified in the different components of the process: in the physiology of the mental processes, which facilitated the prior development of static concepts; in the social instability which stimulated the compensatory development of systematic thought; and in the bitter personal experience which led Plato to reject the world of process. Platonic thought facilitated a general tendency. In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid ruthlessness and the emancipation of the spirit within its own realm of permanent intellectual clarity and harmony. The ancient, aristocratic, tragic consciousness disappears; man sets out to console his spirit and protect his body by the exploitation of static ideas.

The Pythagorean view of musical harmony had not separated music from life, or number from nature. But Plato appears at some stage in his life to have revolted from sensuous and sensual pleasure; in place of the beauty of nature he came to see only the ugliness of man, and the Socratic method lent itself easily to the separation of the divine music of the soul from the sordid materiality of flesh and blood. With this division man becomes self-conscious, subjective, moralistic, analytical, and critical. Each of these characteristics expresses a static element in Platonic thought. The subjective quality expresses the emphasis on the individual as a persisting entity separated from the processes of the environment; the moralizing tendency expresses the distrust of the processes of organic vitality; and the critical and analytical intellect expresses the impulse to master nature through the application of static ideas. These complementary aspects may be brought together in one observation: the Platonic attitude represented the partial displacement of consciousness or attention from its proper role of the facilitation of development to the vain attempt to modify the real world to conform to the ideal.

The high generality of this interpretation of Plato does not imply any vagueness or speculative uncertainty. It is, I believe, merely the consequence of applying the Socratic method to the Platonic doctrine. An analysis of the logic of many of Plato's arguments, using the radical methods of mathematical logic would inevitably show that Plato's unspoken criterion of certainty, reality, and truth is always and only persistence and permanence. His arguments for immortality show this most clearly, but the same basis is fundamental to his entire thought. This is the sort of man he is; he can think in no other way.

The Socratic method can lead anywhere; it is the machine tool which can make any kind of tool. In the hands of dissociated European man it leads to dissociated theories, but applied by unitary man to the dethronement of the abstract noun it finally opens the way to proper process thought. Socrates represents the revolt of the human spirit from the relativity of the ancient world, the intellectual search for a supreme sanction in the existence of which man must believe if he is to survive. Unitary thought is the comparable revolt from modern relativity, the search by man for the form of his unity with nature, a unity which his European reason tells him must exist, since life and thought exist.

But in separating consciousness from the material world, Plato has to ascribe the formative faculty of the mind to consciousness, whereas the formative processes of the human system are largely unconscious, that is, they operate below the dominant processes of the human hierarchy and only come to attention at special moments. This confusion is inevitable in dualistic-static thought, because the formative element cannot belong to the material world, the criterion of which is mere permanence. It appears, for example, in the Platonic treatment of Eros. There is physiological and philosophical truth in the imagery of the ascent of love from particular and transient beauty to more general and lasting beauty. The nervous system itself is a hierarchy which passes the residues of particular stimuli up to the higher ganglia which respond to more general situations. So thought builds itself up from the particular to the general, and so also man grows from the immediacy of instinct to the broader human vision. Above all in love, which can move the whole man, the formative impulses pass up the hierarchy, potentially creative at every level. But in the Platonic image, Eros has no home; the god belongs neither to the flesh nor to the spirit and can only generate in beauty, somewhere between the ideal and the real. Love is no longer a process, with all the power and limitations of a process, but has become an unsubstantial idea. But in truth Eros does not belong to the Platonic system; by his existence he refutes it, and only by denying him proper fulfillment could Plato become so far-going a European. To Heraclitus and the ancient world, the experience of beauty was a component of the variety and necessity of natural processes; to Plato and the complete Europeans, beauty became a moral idea. The failure of the instinctive integration had made this necessary. Moral ideals were the compensating structures developed by the formative process to sustain a long period of differentiation and dissociation. But ideals are only temporary structures, since their static and universal character denies the diversity of individuals each on his own course of development. Ideals are thus temporary compensations for ignorance of the actual nature of man and of the form of his proper development. Plato and Europe were supreme -- during the period when man remained ignorant of the form of his unity with nature.

Plato symbolizes the intellectual, and Paul (?-A.D. 64) the religious self-consciousness. Socrates had developed an intellectual method by his personal example in using the spoken word, and Plato in recording the Socratic conversations had made this method the basis of an intellectual system. In a similar manner Paul's mission was to spread the spoken parables and personal example of Jesus as the inspiration of a widespread ethical community, which was to be developed by his missionary travels and his letters. Socrates and Jesus were lit by a completeness that was only for heroes; few could follow the simple assurance of their gospels. But Plato and Paul, each in his own way a dualistic man denying a part of life, were at once inspired by their respective leaders and touched by common mortality; it was the task of each to spread the knowledge of a noble and tragic life, and to dilute the heady gospel into a socially tolerable ethic. The parallel is valid in so far as it expresses the isolation of primary genius and the role of the inspired but dissociated teacher who alone can convey the new message to the people, but its limits are reached in the different conditions of the two cases. Plato's personal denial was further-reaching than Paul's and he deserted the Socratic ideal to develop fanciful theories; though they alike sought to fulfill their mission in the life of their community, Plato's life ended in practical failure, while Paul created the basis for a universal church and in his own person paid the full price.

From a social point of view Paul is the most characteristic of all European figures. His life and thought spring from a soil in which Semitic, Greek, and Roman elements, partly springing from earlier Egyptian sources, were again combined. While the Jewish tradition was national and separatist, Paul is universally human: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for all are one in Christ Jesus." Moreover Paul is an individual in the European sense; his mysticism was not loss of personality in a passive identification with God, but the sense of a compelling mission, driving him to an active life of preaching, strongly marked by the qualities and limitations of his own person, a form which reappears in the assertive dogmatism of Luther. This European energy sprang from an also characteristically European dichotomy; he did not accept himself, he was not at ease with himself, the necessity was laid on him, woe to him if he did not fulfill it. His combination of strength and weakness, of gentleness and anger, of intoxication and despair, of self-confidence and humility, is a typical sign of the European dissociation. This division is only partially concealed by the longing for unity and permanence symbolized in the monotheistic god of love who brings the assurance of eternal life. But the harmony is incomplete, the unsatisfactory structure of the person speaks through his words, and he is continually disturbed by the sense of failure or inadequacy which so often accompanies good works.

Before we can go deeper into the formal structure of Paul's person and thought we must consider his historical significance. For him there were four historical ages. First, the period from Adam to Abraham, when sin is unconscious, since no right and wrong are recognized. This is the period of primitive man. Second, from Abraham to Moses, when sin is recognized but standards are not defined. Third, from Moses to Christ, the period of the Law. This is the period which we have already discussed, when increasing technical skill and developing awareness enable man to satisfy his instinctive desires, not as necessities for life, but as sources of pleasure. This loss of innocence led to the exploitation not only of pleasure but also of pain, and man became bestial when uncontrolled by social standards. The Law expressed the need and desire of the community to stabilize and order the animal life of man in an ethical system which would control and limit the new lusts. The existence of the Law was thus to Paul a result and an admission of the fact of sin. The Law did not attempt to change man's nature, but only to control it through fear of the Lord.

Paul had experienced bitterly the curse of the Law: man had been innocent until the Law had arisen, the Law had produced the knowledge of sin, but man's sinful nature could not conform to the Law, and was left in a hopeless state of conflict and shame. "Nay I had not known sin, but by the Law; for I had not known lust, except the Law had said, thou shall not covet. -- Cursed is everyone that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the Law to do them. -- For by the Law is the knowledge of sin." The breakdown of the modes of life of the ancient civilizations had resulted in uncertainty, license, and bestiality. In the Hebrew community this had been met by the establishment of the Law, but at the price of an inescapable dualism in man's conception of himself. The conflict which man thus forced on himself left him unable to recognize any integrating tendency which he could accept as representing his true nature. "For what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do. -- Now then it is no more that I do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. -- So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin." The dualism is absolute, and man can only make one choice. "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life. -- For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." There is no doubt what is implied in the choice: "And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts."

But those to whom the shame of this conflict has become unbearable, and who have the advantage of the personal example of a new form of life, can be purged of their conscious sinful desires and achieve a new partial integration. This is the role of Jesus in social history. A personal example become a myth serves to transform an exhausting conflict within consciousness into a harmony. But this harmony of consciousness is achieved by a process of suppression which results from the acceptance of a new organizing conviction: the divinity of Jesus come to take the burden of sin from us. The strain of conflict is lightened by the sense of forgiveness, and a new partial co-ordination is achieved, attention being directed to religious sublimations of the instinctive desires and away from the desires themselves. Open conflict is converted into inner dissociation. This apparent victory over sin is the aim of union with the Messiah. As in all sadism, the flesh of another crucified is our own flesh crucified, and the battle is won for us: "Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforward we should not serve sin. -- For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace. -- But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit."

Here in the accepted interpretation of the origins of Pauline Christianity we can trace one aspect of the process which led to the European dissociation. The growing complexity of life unsettles the primitive and ancient innocence; man becomes aware of the need for a new order and new standards: these standards render evident the divergence from them of his own nature, and conflict, sin, and shame are experienced; finally a new harmony is established through the relative suppression of certain components of human nature. Another aspect of the same process is seen in the development of the Platonic ethical dualism which separates the real world of ideas from the inferior realm of material phenomena.

It would appear that Paul's thought had been influenced by Platonic ideas, but the whole trend of Mediterranean thought was moving in the same direction and it is impossible to separate its different components. This essential conformity of the intellectual and religious trends becomes evident when we observe that the basic structure of Paul's thought was dualistic and static. The dualism is unmistakable. Even the grace which comes to the believer does not emancipate him from the curse of his divided nature: "I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" The answer is that redemption comes only with the resurrection: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. -- O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

Yet even this vision of final redemption is disturbed by the dim knowledge of the dissociation and of the repressed and distorted components whose eruption is symbolized in Antichrist: "For that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. -- Even him, whose coming is often the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders. -- And for this cause God shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie." The instability of the dissociation was evident even then, and the emergence of Antichrist, the distorted bestial man whose lies dominate the time of transition, is foretold two millennia before he appeared.

Beneath the poetry we see the desire for a permanent static harmony. Death is the wages of sin and is the worst punishment; immortality is the reward of faith. Nature is corruption; there is no true development; a trumpet destroys the illusion of time.

A doctrine that has played so great a role cannot be damaged by honesty, if it still has anything to offer. What does this static dualism of orthodox Christianity amount to? It expresses man's failure fully to integrate his progressively differentiating capacities, his sense of frustration, and the consequent compelling demand for the promise of fulfillment in another world. This is psychologically inescapable: if continuity of development is frustrated, continuity of permanence is sought in its place; the ego separates itself from the whole and demands immortality. Those who are frustrated by life or weakened by illness tend to desire their own permanence, but those who enjoy health and fulfillment are free to accept process and to proclaim their less prejudiced view. There is no static permanence. The only lasting feature is continuity of development and when a particular system can develop no further, it can only await its end. Pauline religion was one of many variants of the static dualism of the European dissociation which for long remained the most effective partial integration that the differentiating European had achieved. But it was dualistic and static, and therefore passing.

Yet Paul leaves as a permanent treasure his expression of the brotherhood of man : -- "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. -- And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."



Kepler (A.D. 1571-1630) stands with Galileo at the watershed of the medieval and modern worlds. In Kepler the two most powerful ideas in the history of thought were fused: God is revealed in measured numbers, the numerical harmonies of the planetary motions are an expression of the divine nature. The Pythagoreans had held a similar view two thousand years before, but not with Kepler's reverent loyalty to the facts of the heavens. Greek religious thought was more pantheistic, and Greek interest in number was limited to the harmonic proportions of static figures. Kepler's intense adoration of the one God sustained his long search for the concealed numerical harmony that must, he felt, lie hidden beneath the apparent irregularities of the motions of the heavenly bodies. His passionate monotheism was coupled with respect for detailed fact. He could not doubt that the divine harmony was all-pervasive and would ultimately yield its secret to the searcher, provided that his patience and his loyalty to the facts were both inexhaustible. He announced to the world his self-appointed task, and struggled for twenty years to reveal, to the greater glory of God, a simple numerical rule concealed in the movements of the planets.

The two great agencies of the medieval and the modern world, the Christian God and measured quantity, achieved in Kepler their unique synthesis. The glory of his unwavering search brought him to the final fulfillment which transcended his dreams and he broke into triumphant song:

"That which I suspected twenty-two years ago, before I had discovered the relation of the five regular bodies to the paths of the planets; of which my mind was convinced even before I had seen the 'Harmony' of Ptolemy; which I had promised to my friends in the title of this Fifth Book, before I was quite certain of it; which I published sixteen years ago as my task; for which I have devoted the last part of my life to the study of the heavens, for which I came to Tycho Brahe and settled in Prag -- that have I now at last brought into the light of day and established more clearly than I had any right to hope . . . through the power of God, who fascinated me, inflamed my spirit with an inexhaustible yearning, and nourished my body and mind through the generosity of two princes who gave me the means."

Kepler goes on to describe how delighted he had been to find the same conception of the harmony of the heavens in Ptolemy's work written 1500 years before, and then confesses the rapture of discovery: "Nature had revealed herself through interpreters separated by many centuries; in the language of the Hebrews, it was the finger of God that allowed the same picture of the structure of the world to grow in the souls of two men who had given themselves up to the study of nature, though neither had influenced the other. But now, since eighteen months ago the first light dawned, since three moons the full day, and since a few days the sunshine of the most marvelous clarity -- now nothing holds me back: now I may give in to this holy rapture. Let the children of men scorn my daring confession: Yes! I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build from them a temple for my God, far from the borders of Egypt. If you forgive me, I am glad; if you are angry, I must bear it. So -- here I throw the dice and write a book, for today or for posterity, I do not care. Should it wait a hundred years for a reader, well, God himself has waited six thousand years for a man to read his work."

Kepler's passion is single. To the western mind it may appear as a fusion of religious enthusiasm and the exact scientist's passion for numerical discovery. But it was something simpler. Kepler lived at the one moment in history when the religious and scientific passions could be identical. This is not hyperbole. At its root religion is an expression of man's search for unity; so also is science. Before Kepler, the subjective element was predominant and there was no exact science. In Kepler the two were balanced; the subjective did not confuse the objective; religious enthusiasm assisted the scientific aim, and the aim of the discovery was a religious offering. But this dual language obscures the true situation; Kepler's passionate belief in a harmony unifying diversity flowed at once into religious emotion and into the scientific organization of fact. After Kepler, the objective quantitative element predominated, and the subjective religious passion, divorced from the real world of exact science, faded into the background. Objective number is essentially alien to the human spirit and its gods; only at Kepler's time was the state of knowledge such as to bring the two into balance and to conceal their antithesis.

Never before or since has any man searched twenty years for a truth so new as that which Kepler sought and found. Kepler's life symbolizes the process of discovery; a process of long preparation and swift fulfillment; expressing unconscious tendencies, yet subject to the critique of consciousness; using capacities which are neither consciously rational nor irrational, but formative and organic. The formative process in Kepler's mind led him to search for a simple harmony; it was historical circumstance only that gave his subjective experience the form of devotion to a personal god. Indeed in opening a new field to the formative tendencies of the mind, the field of dynamical motions, Kepler and Galileo were doing much to eliminate the psychological necessity for religious faith. Thereafter the formative tendency of the mind increasingly expressed itself in shaping the quantitative picture of nature, and was directed less and less into religious conviction. The harmony which for Kepler was an expression of God soon became a substitute for God.

Yet Kepler's passion for unity was limited in its scope; only through the limitation of its aim could it be effective. Kepler sought a transcendent and eternal harmony, and found it by neglecting the personal life and the world of change. His impulse was, like that of all exact scientists after him, to escape the apparent arbitrariness, confusion, and ceaseless process of the world around into a divine peace and harmony. The dualism of his temperament is concealed, because his emotion and his work are concentrated on the ideal world with the result that he displayed little interest in the world of human process. It has been said that the study of astronomy trained the human mind to understand nature. That is only true for the static aspects of nature and for motions which are stationary in the sense that they display no irreversible change or cumulative development. Kepler never conceived that the solar system might have a history; it had been created once and for all in the image of God, with even the axes of the various planetary orbits in permanent harmonic ratios. Kepler's discoveries contained as much illusion as truth, but in failing to distinguish between them he was true to himself, for his aim was to find the simplest possible reason for the permanent forms of nature being as they were. This emphasis on permanence corresponded to the fact that, as far as he could, he lived in the ideal world. But he believed that in his discovery he had united the real and the ideal, and that illusion made him great.



The supreme moment of Kepler's life was the fulfillment of twenty years of humble search in the final ecstasy of discovery; the comparable moment for Descartes (1596-1650) was an evening early in his life when he determined to set out on the search for truth by doubting everything. Kepler's search was guided by a sense of certainty because he felt himself to be the instrument of God, Descartes' by the conviction that amidst the uncertainty of prevalent opinions, truth could only be found by the deliberate processes of the conscious mind. Kepler felt that he was guided by the finger of God; Descartes proclaimed the complete autonomy of conscious reason. In a few decades, Kepler's temple, so reverently built by him for his god, had been occupied by the human mind.

Descartes determined to take nothing on trust, to sweep away his previous opinions, and to accept only those that could survive the scrutiny of reason:

"When I considered that the very same thoughts which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, 'I think, hence I am,' was so certain and of such evidence, that no grounds of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search."

If Descartes were right, and the value of thought depended on the degree to which it expresses the conscious perception of absolute truth, it would be hard to understand the success of his method. It led to results of the greatest utility to exact science though his first achievement, the assertion of consciousness as a primary, substantial reality, was an error. The religious veil had fallen; man had begun to discover the true forms of nature. He could not fail sooner or later to believe in the independence of his own mind and the supreme fertility of his own consciousness. Nor could Descartes that evening in November, 1619. He represented man torn from his roots, over-traveled, over-sceptical, over-lonely, over-conscious of himself. He sat alone and pondered: man, as conscious object, alone with the problem of truth, and therefore seeking an absolute philosophic truth separated from the practical life of the senses; man as subject, without conviction, or love, or action; alone with his doubts. The result was inevitable: an exaggerated emphasis on consciousness, and the overcoming of doubt by the new dogmatism of a precise deductive system of abstract necessity. Just as Descartes fled his doubts into a dogmatic system of clear ideas, Cartesian man-machine has compensated his inner uncertainty in a ruthless exploitation of mechanical technique.

To Descartes the consciousness of the self, from which he began, implied knowledge of one's own imperfect nature, and this in turn implied knowledge of a perfect being or god, the idea of whom enabled us to be aware of our own limitations. Kepler's spontaneous conviction of God had already become a scepticism which seeks to still itself with rational arguments for the existence of God, and doubt rather than faith become the means to attain knowledge. Yet Descartes, the sceptic, displays an innocent trust in his own mind. Man could discover the truth, for if he had a clear and definite idea of anything that was evidence of its existence. Since man found himself in possession of two clear ideas, the idea of consciousness or thought, and the idea of spatial extension, these were two realities: mind or consciousness without extension, and matter or extension without consciousness, behind which pair the idea of God was necessary to harmonize the dualism.

The dualistic-static form of thought which marks the European tradition attains its most radical expression in Descartes. Whatever lip service we pay to other ideas, and however certain we are of its falsity, after three centuries we still behave as if we lived in a Cartesian world. The static clarity of Cartesian thought inevitably fascinated and imposed on beings who were so badly in need of harmony and so ready to deny process in the search for it. The very clarity of the method exposes its own errors, but we are accustomed to them and like them, for they satisfy our vanity. It has been evident for a century that unity is necessary to thought, and that process is inherent in nature, but western man has preferred to perish in his dualism rather than give up the proud autonomy of reason and risk losing his identity in the universal process.

If the clarity of an idea is the criterion of its reality, then the real must be static, since static ideas are the clearest, or at least appear so to European man. Descartes does not say, "I am aware of the intermittent processes of thought in myself, born of the changing relations to the environment which make up my transient life." His demand for clarity leads him to isolate not a component of process, but an existent entity "I" -- I think, therefore I am -- and so to establish the dualism of mind and matter. Beneath the aim of clarity is the demand for permanent entities, substances which in themselves do not change. The immature intellect, being unable as yet to cope with process, creates these persisting entities for its own convenience. The Cartesian mind was satisfied with a spurious subjective clarity in the form of its ideas and neglected to consider how ideas develop, or what their relation is to nature.

The procedure developed by Descartes is the analytical method which assumes that thought must pass from simple, clear, and local facts to the general and complex. This method would be adequate in a world of changeless entities possessing motion but no history, and contemplated by a static mind endowed once and for all with the necessary clear ideas. In Descartes' thought there is no duration, no history, and no approach to an understanding either of the development of form in nature or of the origin of ideas in the mind. Analytical clarity is a comforting illusion, but a dangerous one because it obscures the profound limitations of static dualistic thought. European hopes were ultimately frustrated because a civilization built on static dualistic rationalism could not control its own development. Descartes reduced form to quantity, and opened the way to the anarchy of mechanism and the decay of culture. Unitary man by recognizing that form is prior and quantity one aspect of form can facilitate the recovery of ordered development.




IX

Nine Thinkers (continued)

SPINOZA, GOETHE, MARX, FREUD

In Kepler, the desire for unity had expressed itself in a passion that was both religious and scientific, but was limited to a special field. Spinoza (1632-77) displays the same desire in a more general and philosophic form. His passion for unity, at once intellectual and emotional, was so intense that it carried him in certain respects outside the European tradition, beyond the limitations of Judaism, Christianity, and contemporary dualistic science. This was inevitable; Spinoza's intellectual consciousness could not accept a dissociated tradition. His transcendental desire for unity expressed itself in a form that had the superficial appearance both of religion and of theoretical science. But the fifty years since Kepler had broadened the human mind, and Spinoza's demand for a universal unity took him beyond religion and science into the unitary realm. The unity of God was not to be revealed merely in external nature but in the perfection of a complete intellectual system, within which all phenomena, including man, would lose their apparent arbitrariness and be recognized as necessary, components in the whole. Within this single order there could be no fundamental dualism; there was therefore no sin in the eyes of God, and there should be no separation of mind and matter in the mind of man. Spinoza thus denied the essential tenets of Christianity and of dualistic science; for him Plato and Paul had betrayed the unity of the divine truth. Yet Spinoza remained relatively infertile, and must be considered as European rather than universal, because his single vision was static, and subject to the limitations of intellectual idealism. For Spinoza the emotional and intellectual consciousness was supreme, and prior to life and action.

Spinoza's aim was the same as that of Socrates: the therapy of man through the divine truth. He sought to reveal the necessary order of nature, and in particular the interrelations of human emotions, thought, and action, so that man could live the life proper to him. The aim of science, the discovery of the natural order, and the aim of ethics, the realization of the life proper to man, were here combined in a conviction of the unity in nature and man, which being recognized must lead man towards the permanent harmony which was God. Spinoza's devotion to this aim resulted in what is perhaps the highest expression of idealism in the world's literature. Europe does not lack its symbolic figures: Descartes is the sceptical analytical rationalist, and Spinoza the fervent intellectual idealist. Yet however sublime Spinoza's enthusiasm, his reading of nature and of human nature was wrong. It was rounded morally on a doctrine of self-knowledge which he could not apply to himself, and intellectually on a timeless concept of God-substance-nature which reveals his ignorance of nature and his lack of self-knowledge.

To desire honesty with all one's heart is not enough to ensure its realization, for honesty in thought can only exist beside integrity in life. Spinoza loved his dream world, his vision of God, the blessing of a calm transcendent truth, the emancipation from disturbing emotions -- he loved these things too much to be able to confess to himself that the external conflicts which he sought to escape still remained reflected in his own heart. He had renounced the traditional, sectarian superstitions of Jewish orthodoxy, received their curse of banishment, and discovered a universal truth and compassion which was more generous even than the Christian. Like Jesus and Paul he had revolted from the arbitrary rigidity of the Jewish Law. That was wholly positive. But he had also renounced the world of men and women to pursue a lonely harmony. Being drunk with God, he certainly had no choice. Yet if we are to estimate Spinoza sub specie aeternitatis -- and he himself would accept no other approach -- his god was only a part of the whole; his conception of nature of limited validity; his technique inadequate; and his emotion, thought, and life a special form that we can now interpret from a broader and more secure foundation.

In his concept of God-substance he denied process; in his life he avoided relations with others; in his heart he failed to maintain that transcendent aesthetic comprehension in which all things are pure because necessary. Here nature and life are merciless; whoever aspires far, necessarily reveals his limitations. Excellence is indeed difficult and rare. All forms of intellectual idealism express the very human desire for a lasting harmony, and the intensity of one special form of idealism arises from a deep-lying emotional disharmony. In one sentence which stands out as alien to the rest of his entire work Spinoza confesses to us what he dared not admit to himself, a clue to the source of his denial of woman, and with her of the fuller life of man. He is discussing "jealousy":

"This situation occurs principally in the case of love of woman; since whoever imagines that the woman whom he loves has given herself to another, will be sad not merely because his own desire is thwarted, but because he will feel disgust with it, being compelled to connect his image of the beloved person with the privy parts and excreta of the other."