Note.—From a book whose interesting defence of the Socratic ethic from the standpoint of psychoanalysis was brought to the writer’s attention after the completion of the foregoing essay: “The Freudian ethics is a literal and concrete justification of the Socratic teaching. Truth is the sole moral sanction, and discrimination of hitherto unrealized facts is the one way out of every moral dilemma.... Virtue is wisdom.” Practical morality is “the establishment, through discrimination, of consistent, and not contradictory (mutually suppressive), courses of action toward phenomena. The moral sanction lies always in facts presented by the phenomena; morality in the discrimination of those facts.” Moral development is “the progressive, lifelong integration of experience.”—The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, by Edwin B. Holt, New York, 1915, pp. 141, 145, 148.
Note.—From a book whose interesting defence of the Socratic ethic from the standpoint of psychoanalysis was brought to the writer’s attention after the completion of the foregoing essay: “The Freudian ethics is a literal and concrete justification of the Socratic teaching. Truth is the sole moral sanction, and discrimination of hitherto unrealized facts is the one way out of every moral dilemma.... Virtue is wisdom.” Practical morality is “the establishment, through discrimination, of consistent, and not contradictory (mutually suppressive), courses of action toward phenomena. The moral sanction lies always in facts presented by the phenomena; morality in the discrimination of those facts.” Moral development is “the progressive, lifelong integration of experience.”—The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, by Edwin B. Holt, New York, 1915, pp. 141, 145, 148.
WHYdo we love Plato? Perhaps because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the sweet intoxication of dialectical revelry, full of passion for the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wildly nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the errors he has made. But above all we love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation, but for the remoulding, of the world. He speaks of himself, through Socrates, as “almost the onlyAthenian living who sets his hand to the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time.”[17]Philosophy was for him a study of human possibilities in the light of human realities and limitations; his daily food consisted of the problems of human relations and endeavors: problems of libertyversusorder; of sex relations and the family; of ideals of character and citizenship, and the educational approaches to those ideals; problems of the control of population, of heredity and environment, of art and morals. With all his liking for the poetry of mysticism, philosophy none the less was to him preëminently an adventure in this world; and unlike ourselves, who follow one or another of his many leads, he sailed virginal seas. Every reader in every age has called him modern; but what age can there be to which Plato will not still be modern?
Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates died;[18]and though he was not present at the drinking of the hemlock, yet the passing of the master must have been a tragic blow to him. It brought him face to face with death, the mother of metaphysics. Proudest of all philosophers, he did not hide his sense of debt to Socrates: “I thank the gods,” he said, “that I was born freeman, not slave; Greek, not barbarian; man, not woman; but above all that I was born in the time of Socrates.” The old philosopher gone, Athens becamefor a time intolerable to Plato (some say, Plato to Athens); and the young philosopher sailed off to see foreign shores and take nourishment of other cultures. He liked the peaceful orderliness and aged dignity with which a long dominant priesthood had invested Egypt; beside this mellow civilization, he was willing to be told, the culture of his native Athens was but a precarious ethnological sport. He liked the Pythagoreans of southern Italy, with their aristocratic approach to the problem of social construction and their communal devotion to plain living and high thinking; above all he liked their emphasis on harmony as the fundamental pervasive relation of all things and as the ideal in which our human discords might be made to resolve themselves had men artistry enough. Other lands he saw and learnt from: stories tell how he risked his handsome head to build an ideal state in Syracuse; how he was sold into slavery and redeemed by a friend; and how he passed down through Palestine even to India, absorbing the culture of their peoples with a kind of osmotic genius. And at last, after twelve years of wandering, he heard again the call of Athens, and went home, stored with experience and ripe with thought.
Arrived now at the mid-point of his life, he turned to the task of self-expression. Should he join one of the political parties and try to make the government of Athens a picture of his thought?Perhaps he felt that his thought was not yet definite enough for that; politics requires answers in Yes or No, and philosophy deals only in Yes-and-No. He hesitated to join a party or pledge himself to a dogma; and was prepared to be hated by all parties alike for this hesitation.[19]Aristocracy was in his blood, and he would not stoop to conquer by a plebiscite. He thought of turning to the stage, as Euripides had done, and teaching through the mask; in his youth he had written plays, and smiled now to think how he had hoped to rival Aristophanes. But there were too many limitations here, of religious subject and dramatic form; Plato’s philosophy was a thing of ever broadening borders, and could not be cramped into a ceremony. But neither was his philosophy an arid academic affair, to be written down as one places in order the bones of a skeleton; it was vibrantly alive, it was itself a drama and a religion. Why should there not be a drama of idea as well as of action?—Had not the play of thought its tragedies and comedies?—Was not philosophy, after all, a matter of life and death?
In such a juncture of desires came that fusion of drama and philosophy which we know as Plato’s dialogues,—assuredly the finest production in all the history of philosophy. Here was just the instrument for a man whose thought had not congealed into dogmas and a system. All geniusis heterogeneous; a great man is a sum of many men;—let the soul give itsselvesa voice, and it will speak in dialogue.[20]Just instrument, too, for a man who wished to play with the varied possibilities of speculation, who cared to clarify his own mind rather than to give forth finalities where life itself was so blind and inconclusive. A conclusion is too often but the point at which thought has lost its wind; being not so much a solution of the problem as a dissolution of thought. Hence the riotous play of the imagination in Plato; lively game of trial and error, merry-go-round of thought; here is imagery squandered with lordly abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern philosophers; here is no system but all systems;[21]here is one abounding fountain-head of European thought; here is prose strong and beautiful as the great temples where Greek joy disported itself in marble; here literary prose is born,—and born adult.
TOunderstand Plato one must remember the Pythagoreanmotif:harmonyis the heart ofPlato’s metaphysics, of his psychological and educational theory, of his ethics and his politics. To feel such harmony as there is, and to make such harmony as may be,—that to Plato is the meaning of philosophy.
We observe this at the outset in the more-mystified-than mystifying theory of ideas. Obviously, the theory of ideas belongs to Socrates; the Platonic element is a theory not of ideas so much as of ideals. Socrates wants truth, but Plato wants beauty, harmony. Socrates is bent on argument, and points you to a concept; Plato is a poet with a vision, and points you to the picture that he sees. Understanding, says Plato, is of the earth earthly; but poetic vision is divine.[22]Hence the maze of quibbling in the dialogues; it is Plato and not Socrates who is culprit here. Reasoning was an alien art to Plato; try as he might to become a mathematician he remained always a poet,—and perhaps most so when he dealt with numbers. Dialectic was in Plato’s day a recent invention; he plays with it like a youth in the breakers, letting it now raise him to heights of ecstatic vision and now bury him in the deadliest logic-chopping. But—let us not doubt it—he knows when he is logic-chopping; he goes on, partly that he may paint his picture, partly for the mere joy of parrying pros and cons; this new game, he feels, is a sport for the gods.
Let us smile at the heavy seriousness of thosewho suppose that this man meant everything he said. No one does, but least of all men Plato, who hardly taught except in parables. What is the “heaven” of the ideas but a poet’s way of saying that the constancies observable in the relations among things are not identical with the things themselves, but have a reality and permanence of their own? So we phrase it in our own distinguished verbiage; but Plato prefers, as ever, to draw a picture. And notice, in this picture, the ever present reference to social needs. What is a concept, after all, but a scheme for the conservation of mental resources, an instrument of prediction, a method of control? Without the power to form concepts we could never turn experience to use, it would slip between our fingers; we should be like the maidens condemned to carry water in a sieve. Theideaof anything is the sum of its observed constancies of behavior; hence the medium of our adaptation and control. To haveideasof things is to know the map or plan of things; it is to see tendencies, directions, and results; it is to know how tousethings. That is why knowledge is power; every idea is a tool with which to bend the world to serve our will. And that too is why the Ideas are real: they have power, and “anything which possesses any sort of power is real.”[23]
All this, as was said, is but an embellishment of the Socratic doctrine that salvation lies in brains.But Plato rushes on. Not only may everything be brought under a concept, an Idea, but it may be brought under a perfect Form, an Ideal. Things are not what they might be. Men are not such as men might be, states are often sorry states, beds might be more ideal beds, even dirt could be more perfectly dirt. To all things that are, there correspond perfect Ideals of what they might be, in a thoroughly harmonious world. To say that these Ideals are real, that they exist, is only to claim for them that they are operative, and get results. Whether his supernaturalism was only part of his political theory, others may dispute; let it suffice us at present that Plato believed that the Ideals could and did operate through human agency. The distinctive thing about man is that perceiving the thing that is, he can conceive the thing that might be. He is the forward-looking, ideal-making animal; through him, if he but will it, proceeds creation. The brute may be a thinker, but man may be also an artist. Out of the abundance of the sexual instinct (as Plato implies in theSymposium) emerges this ideal-seeking and -making quality; from which come art and ethics and religion. William Morris looks at a slum and conceives Utopia; and forthwith begins to make for Utopia even though the road lead him through a jail. Is it that William Morris loves “humanity”? Not at all; he loves beauty and his dream; he is uncomfortable with all this dirt and despairbefore him; it is his fortune or misfortune that he cannot see these slums without falling thrall to a vision of better things. So with most of us “reformers”: we wish to change things, not because we love our fellows much more than “conservatives” do, nor because we believe that happiness varies with income; but because we hear the call of the beautiful, and see in the mind’s eye another form wherein the world might come more pleasingly to sight.
What we have to do, says Plato, is to make people conceive a better world, so that they may see this world as ugly, and may strive to reshape it. We must conceive the perfect Forms of things, and batter this poor world till it reform itself and take these perfect shapes. To learn to see—and seeing learn to make—these perfect Forms: that is the task of philosophers. To make philosophers: that is the social problem.
ITis simple, isn’t it? Give us enough philosophers, and the beautiful city will walk out of the picture into the fact. But how make philosophers? And perhaps there is a perfect Form for philosophers, too? How shall we “see—and seeing learn to make”—the perfect philosopher?
Let us not worry about this little matter of dialectics, says Plato; we know quite well someof the things we must do in order that we may have more and greater philosophers. It is quite clear that one thing we must do is to give our best brains to education.
Is that trite? Not at all. Do we give our best brains to education? Do we offer more to our ministers or commissioners of education than to our presidents, or governors, or mayors, or bank presidents, or pugilists? Or do we honor them more? When Plato says that the office of minister of education is “of all the great offices of state the greatest,” and that the citizens should elect their very best man to this office,[24]he is not pronouncing a platitude, he is making a radical, a revolutionary proposition. It has never been done, and it will not soon be done; for men, naturally enough, are more interested in making money than in making philosophers. And yet, says Plato, gently but resolutely, we may as well understand that until we give our best brains to the problem of making philosophers our much-ado about social ills will amount to noise and wind, and nothing more. “How charming people are!” he writes, drawing an analogy between the individual and the body politic; “they are always doctoring—and thereby increasing and complicating—their disorders, fancying they will be cured by some nostrum which somebody advises them to try,—never getting better but always growing worse.... Are they not as good as aplay, trying their hand at legislation, and imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind, not knowing that they are in reality cutting away at the heads of a hydra?”[25]
Notice that the aim of the educational process is, for Plato, not so much the general spread of intelligence as the discovery and development of the superior man. (This conception of the task of the educator appears again and again in later thought: we hear it in the nineteenth century, for example, in Carlyle’s “hero,” Schopenhauer’s “genius,” and Nietzsche’s “superman.”) It is very naïve, thinks Plato, to look to the masses as the source and hope of social improvement; the proper function of the masses is to toil as cheerfully as may be for the development and support of the genius who will make them happy—so far as they are capable of happiness. To aim directly at the elevation of all is to open the door to mediocrity and futility; to find and nurse the potential genius,—that is an end worthy the educator’s subtle art.
Now if you are going to discover genius in the bud you must above all things handle your material, at the outset at least, with tender care. You must not overflow with prohibitions, or indulge yourself too much in the luxury of punishments. “Mother and father and nurse and tutor set to quarrelling about the improvement of thechild as soon as ever he is able to understand them: he cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that unjust, this honorable and that dishonorable, this holy and that unholy, do this and don’t do that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood.”[26]Suppress here, and you get expression there;—often enough, abnormal expression. Better have no hard mould of uniformity and conformity wherein to crush and deform each differently aspiring soul. Think twice before forcing your’ismsand’ologiesupon the child; his own desires will be your best curriculum. “The elements of instruction,” writes Plato, in a too-little-noticed passage, “should be presented to the mind in childhood, but without any notion of forcing them. For a freeman ought to be a freeman in the acquisition of knowledge. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; that will better enable you to find out the natural bent.”[27]There is a stroke of Plato’s genius here: it is a point which we laggards are coming to after some two thousand three hundred years. “To find out the natural bent,” to catch the spark of divine fire before conformitycan put it out; that is the beginning and yet the summit of the educator’s task,—theinitium dimidium facti.
In this search for genius all souls shall be tried. Education must be universal and compulsory; children belong not to parents but to the state and to the future.[28]And education cannot begin too early. Cleinias, asking whether education should begin at birth, is astonished to be answered, “No, before”; and if Plato could have his way, no doubt there would be a realization of Dr. Holmes’ suggestion that a man’s education should begin two thousand years before he is born. The chief concern at the outset will be to develop the body, and not to fill the soul with letters; let the child be taught his letters at ten, but not before.[29]Music will share with gymnastics the task of rounded development. The boy who tells his teacher that the athletic field is as important and necessary a part of education as the lecture-room is right. “How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?”[30]Music mixed with athletics will do it. “I am quite aware that your mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him.”[31]There is a determination here that even the genius shall be healthy; Plato will not tolerate the notion that to be a genius one needs to be sick:let the genius have his say, but let him, too, be reminded that he is no disembodied spirit. And let art take care lest its vaunted purgation be a purgation of our strength and manhood; poetry and soft music may make men slaves. No man shall bother with music after the age of sixteen.[32]
At twenty a general test will weed out those who give indication that further educative labor will be wasted on them; the others will go on for another decade, and a second test will eliminate those who will in the meantime have reached the limit of their capacities for development. The final survivors will then—and not before—be introduced to philosophy. “They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is a thing especially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, like puppy-dogs that delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.... And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence not only they, but philosophy generally, have a bad name with the rest of the world.”[33]
Five happy years are given to the study ofphilosophy. Gradually, the student learns to see the universal behind the particular, to judge the part by relating it to the whole; the fragments of his experience fall into a harmonious philosophy of life. The sciences which he has learned are now united as a consistent application of intelligence to life; indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focussing them on the central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true philosopher.[34]But involved in this is a certain practical quality, a sense for realities and limitations. One must study books—and men; one should read much, but live more. So Plato legislates that his new philosophers shall spend the years from thirty-five to fifty in the busy din of practical life; they must, in his immortal image, go back into the cave. The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one’s own resources, to butter one’s own bread for a while,—that is an almost indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar is the mark of a lesson learned.
And now here are our philosophers, ripe and fifty, hardened by the tests of learning and of life. What shall we do with them? Put them away in a lecture-room and pay no further attentionto them? Give them, as their life-work, the problem of finding how Spinoza deduces, or fails to deduce, the Many from the One? Have them fill learned esoteric journals with unintelligible jargon about the finite and the infinite, or space and time, or the immateriality of roast beef? No, says Plato; let them govern the state.
Did Plato mean it? Was he so enraged at the state-murder of the most beloved of philosophers that he forearmed himself against such acontretempsin his Utopia by making the philosophers supreme?—Was it only his magnificent journalistic revenge? Was it merely his reaction to the observed cramping and mediocritization of superior intellects in a democracy? Was it but Plato’s dramatic way of emphasizing the Socratic plea for intelligence as the basis of morals and social life? Perhaps all this; but much more. It was his sober judgment; it was the influence of the Egyptian priesthood and the Pythagorean brotherhood coming to the surface in him; it was the long-accumulated deposit of the stream of his personal experience.
We have to remember here that byphilosopherPlato does not mean Immanuel Kant. He means a living being, a man like Seneca or Francis Bacon, a man in whom knowledge is fused with action, and keen perception joins with steady hand; a man who has had not only the teaching of books but the discipline of hard experience; a man who has learned with equal readiness to obey and tocommand; a man whose thought is coördinated by application to the vital problems of human society. “Inasmuch as philosophers alone are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the two kinds should be rulers of our state?”[35]Well, then, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”[36]
That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.
LETus get back to the circumference and approach this same point by another route.
I grant you, says Plato, that to have rulers at all is very disagreeable. And indeed we should not need to have them were it not for a regrettable but real porcine element in us. My own Utopia is not an aristocracy nor a democracy, nor any kind of an’ocracy; it is what some of you would call an anarchist communism. I have described it very clearly in the second book of myRepublic, but nobody cares to notice it, except to repeatmy brother’s gibe about it.[37]But instead of this Utopia of mine being a “City of Pigs,” it is just because we are pigs that I had to give up painting this picture and turn to describing “not only a state, but a luxurious state.” I am still “of opinion that the true state, which may be said to be a healthy constitution, is the one which I have described,” and not the “inflamed constitution” to which I devoted the rest of my book, and which in my opinion is much more a “City of Pigs” than the other. It is because people want “to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and havedainties and dessert in the modern fashion, ... and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, and gold, and ivory, ... hunters and actors, ... musicians, players, dancers, ... tutors, ... servants ... nurses wet and dry, ... barbers, confectioners and cooks, ... and hosts of animals (if people are to eat animals), ... and physicians; ... then a slice of neighbor’s land ... and then war,”[38]—in short, it is because people are pigs that you must have soldiers and rulers and laws.
But if you must have them, why not train your best men for the work, just as you train some to be doctors, and others to be lawyers, and others to be engineers? Think of taking a man’s pills just because he can show a count of noses in his favor! Think of letting a man build the world’s greatest bridge because he is popular! You accuse me of plagiarizing from Pythagoras, but in truth, you who believe in democracy are the Pythagoreans of politics,—you believe in number as your god. Your equality is the equality of the unequal, and is all a matter of words and never of reality; your liberty is anarchy, it is the congenital sickness wherein your democracy was conceived and delivered, and whereof it inevitably dies; your freedom of speech is a license to lie; your elections are a contest in flattery and prevarication. Your democracy is a theatrocracy; and woe to the genius who falls into your hands.Perhaps you like democracy because you are like democracy: all your desires are on a level; that you should respect some of them and discipline others is an idea that never enters your heads. It has never occurred to you that it takes more time and training to make a statesman than it does to make a bootblack. But statesmanship is something that can never be conferred by plebiscite; it must be pursued through the years, and must find the privilege of office without submitting to a vote. Wisdom is too subtle a thing to be felt by the coarsened senses of the mob. Your industry is wonderful because it is shot through with specialization and training; but because you reject specialization and training in filling the offices of your government the wordpoliticshas become dishonored in your mouths. And just because you will let any one be your leader no real man ever submits himself to your choice.
THEREis much exaggeration here, of course, as might be expected of one whose material and social concerns were bound up with the oligarchical party at Athens, whose friends and relatives had died in battle against the armies of the democracy; whose early years had seen the democratic mismanagement of the Peloponnesian war and the growth of a disorderly individualism in Athens.But there are also lessons here for those who are strong enough to learn even from their enemies.[39]To press home these lessons at this point would take us too far afield; our plan for the moment is to follow Plato’s guidance until he has led us out into a clear view of his position.
We shall suppose such a scheme of education as Plato desires; we shall suppose that a moderate number of those who entered the lists at birth have survived test after test, have “tasted the dear delight” of philosophy for five years, and have passed safely through the ordeal of practical affairs; these men (and women, as we shall see) now automatically become the rulers of the Platonic state: let us observe them in their work and in their lives.
To the guardians it is a matter of first principles that the function of the state—and therefore their function—is a positive function; they are to lead the people, and not merely to serve as an umpire of disputes. They are the protagonists of a social evolution that has at last become conscious; they are resolved that henceforth social organization shall be a far-seeing plan and not a haphazard flux of expediencies of control. They know that they are asked to be experts in foresight and coördination; they will legislateaccordingly, and will no more think of asking the people what laws should be passed than a physician would ask the people what measures should be taken to preserve the public health.
And first of all they will control population; they will consider this to be the indispensable prerequisite to a planned development. The state must not be larger than is consistent with unity and with the efficacy of central control. People may mate as they will,—that is their own concern; but they must understand quite clearly that procreation is an affair of the state. Children must be born not of love but of science; marriage will be a temporary relation, allowing frequent remating for the sake of beautiful offspring. Men shall not have children before thirty, nor after forty. Deformed or incurably diseased children will be exposed to die. Children must leave their mothers at birth, and be brought up by the state. Women must be freed from bondage to their children, if women are to be real citizens, interested in the public weal, and loving not a narrow family but the great community.
For women are to be citizens; it would be foolish to let half the people be withdrawn from interest in and service to the state. Women will receive all the educational advantages offered to men; they will even wrestle with them, naked, in the games. If any of them—and surely some of them will—pass all the tests, they shall be guardians, too. People are to be divided, forpolitical purposes, not by difference of sex, but by difference of capacity. Some women may be fit not for housekeeping but for ruling,—let them rule; some men may be fit not for ruling but for housekeeping,—let them keep house.
Without family, and without clearly ascertainable relationship between any man and any child, there can be no individual inheritance of property; the guardians will have all things in common, and without Tertullian’s exception.[40]Shut off from the possibility of personal bequests or of “founding a family,” the guardians will have no stimulus to laying up a hoard of material goods; nay, they will not be moved to such hoarding by fear of the morrow, for a modest but sufficient maintenance will be supplied them by the working classes. There will be no money in use among them; they will live a hard simple life, devoted to the problems of communal defence and development. Freed from family ties, from private property and luxury, from violence and litigation, and all distinctions of Mine and Thine, they will have no reason to oppress the workers in order to lay up stores for themselves; they will be happy in the exercise of their high responsibilities and powers. They will not be tempted to legislate for the good of their own class rather than for the good of the community; their joy will lie in the creation of a prosperous and harmonious state.
Under their direction will be the soldiers, also specially selected and trained, and supported by the workers. But these workers?
They will be those who have been eliminated in the tests. The demands of specialization will have condemned them to labor for those who have the gift of guidance. They shall have no voice in the direction of the state; that, as said, is a reward for demonstrated capacity, and not a “natural right.”[41]Frankly, there are some people who are not fit to be other than slaves; and to varnish that fact with oratory about “the dignity of labor” is merely to give an instance of the indignities to which a democratic politician will descend. These workers are incapable of a subtler happiness than that of knowing that they are doing what they are fit to do, and are contributing to the maintenance of communal prosperity. Such as they are, these workers, like the other members of the state, will find their highest possibilities of development in such an organized society. And to make sure that they will not rebel, they will have been taught by “royal lies” that their position and function in the state have been ordained by the gods. There is no sense in shivering at this quite judicious juggling with the facts; there are times when truth is a barrierto content, and must be set aside. Physicians have been known to cure ailments with a timely lie. Labor stimulated by such deception may be slavery, if you wish to call it so; but it is the inevitable condition of order, and order is the inevitable condition of culture and communal success.
BUTis it just?—some one asks. Perhaps there are other things than order to be considered. Perhaps this hunger for order is a disease, like the monistic hunger for unity; perhaps it is a corollary to theà prioritype of mind; perhaps it is part of the philosopher’s general inability to face a possibly irrational reality. Here for order’s sake the greater part of the people must work in silence: they shall not utter their desires. Here for order’s sake are sacrificed that communal plasticity, that freedom of variety, that happy looseness and changeability of structure, in which lie all the suggestion and potency of social reconstruction. If there is any lesson which shines out through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. “Law and order in astate are”not“the cause of every good”;[42]they are the security of goods attained, but they may be also the hindrance of goods conceived. A state without freedom of criticism and variation is like a sail-boat in a calm; it stands but it cannot move. Such a state is a geometrical diagram, a perfect syllogism evolved out of impossible premises; and its own perfection is its refutation. In such a state there could be no Plato, with a penchant for conceiving Utopias; much less a Socrates, holding that a life uncriticised is unworthy of a man. It would be a state not for philosophers but for priests: very truly its basis would not be dialectical clarity but royal lies. Here is the supreme pessimism, the ultimate atheism, of the aristocrat, that he does not believe in the final wholesomeness of truth. And surely something can be said for democracy. Granted that democracy is not a problem solved but a problem added; it is at least a problem that time may help to clarify. Granted that men used to slavery cannot turn and wisely rule themselves; what is better than that they should, by inevitable trial and error, learn?Errando discimus.Granted that physicians do not consult us in their prescriptions; but neither do they come to us before they are chosen and called. “That the guardian should require another guardian to guard him is ridiculous indeed.”[43]But he would!Power corrupts unless it is shared by all. “Cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts.”[44]To build your culture on the backs of slaves is to found your city on Vesuvius. Men will not be lied to forever,—at least with the same lies! And to end with such a Utopia,—what is it but to yield to Thrasymachus, to arrange all things at last in the interest of the stronger? Is it just?
BUTwhat is justice?—asks Plato. Don’t you see that our notion of justice is the very crux of the whole business? Is justice merely a matter of telling the truth? Nonsense; it may be well to have our children believe that; but those who are not children know that if a lie is a better instrument of achievement than the truth in some given juncture of events, then a lie is justified. Truth is a social value, and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there of social value, then untruth is just.[45]The confusion of justice with some absolute eternal law comes of a separation of ethics from politics, and an attempt to arrive at a definition of justice from the studyof individuals. But morals grow out of politics; justice is essentially a political relation. And taking the state as a whole, it is clear that nothing is “good” unless it works; that it would be absurd to say that justice demands of a state that it should be ordered in such a way as to make for its own decay. Social organization must be effective, and lies and class-divisions are justified if they make for the effectiveness of a political order. Surely social effectiveness forbids that men fit to legislate should live out their lives as cobblers, or that men should rule whose natural aptitude is for digging ditches. Justice means, for politics at least, that each member of society is minding his natural business, is doing that for which he is fitted by his own natural capacity. Injustice is the encroachment of one part on another; justice is the efficient functioning of each part. Justice, then, is social coördination and harmony. It is not “the interest of the stronger,” it is the harmony of the whole. So in the individual, justice is the harmonious operation of a unified personality; each element in one’s nature doing that which it is fitted to do; again it is not mere strength or forcefulness, but harmonious, organized strength; it is effective order. And effective order demands a class division. You may mouth as you please the delusive delicacies of democracy; but classes you will have, for men will always be some of gold and some of silver and some of brass. And the brass must not passitself off as silver, nor the silver as gold. Give the brass all the time and opportunity in the world, and it will still be brass. Of course brass will not believe that it is brass, but we had better make it understand once for all that it is so, even if we have to tell a thousand lies to get the truth believed.
And as for variation and plasticity, remember that these too are valueless except as they make for a better society. They assuredly make for change; but change is not betterment. History is a chaos of variations; without some organ for their control they cancel one another and terminate inevitably in futility. Our problem is not how to change, but how to set our best brains to controlling change for the sake of a finer life.
THEREareaperçushere, and a bewildering wealth of suggestions, which one is tempted to pursue to their ultimate present significance. But to do that would be to encroach too much on the subjects of later chapters. The vital thing here is not to accept or refute any special element in Plato’s political philosophy; it is rather to see how inextricably politics and philosophy were bound together in his mind as two sides of fundamentally one endeavor. Here is the passion to remould things; here is the seeing of perfectionand the will to make perfection; here speaks out for the first time in European history the courage of the intellect that not only will perceive but will remake. Here is a man; no dead academic cobweb-weaver, but a masterful, kingly soul, mixed up in warm intimacy with the complex flow of the life about him. He paints Utopia; but at the same time he takes his own counsel anent the importance of an educational approach to the social problem, and founds the most famous and influential university the world has ever seen. Picture him in the gardens and lecture-halls of his Academy, arranging and supervising and coördinating, and turning out men to whom nations looked—and not in vain—for statesmen. Not merely to lift men up to the beatific vision of unities and perfections, but to teach them the art of creation, to fire them with the ardor of a new artistry; this he aimed to do, and did. “The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after the death of the mortal men who planted them.”[46]So grew theRepublic, and the Academy.
To catch in a chapter the deep yet subtle spirit and meaning of this “finest product of antiquity,”[47]—it is not easy. In Plato’s Utopia there would no doubt have been a law against writing so briefly on so vast a phenomenon,—with, in this case, the inevitably consequent derangement of the Platonic perspective, and theimpossibility, within such compass, of focussing Plato in the political and philosophical meaning of his time. One’s feeling here is of having desecrated with small talk the Parthenon of philosophy. Perhaps as we go on we shall be able to see more clearly the still-living value of Plato’s thought: in almost everything that we shall hereinafter discuss his voice will be heard, even though unnamed. To-day, at last, he comes again into his own—as in Renaissance days—after centuries dominated by the influence of his first misinterpreter; and generations bred on the throned lukewarmness of theNicomachean Ethicsyield to a generation that is learning to feel the hot constructive passion of theRepublic. Dead these two thousand and some hundred years, Plato belongs to the future.
“As I read Plato,” writes Professor Dewey, “philosophy began with some sense of its essentially political basis and mission—a recognition that its problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.”[48]Plato and Aristotle are thecrura cerebriof Europe. But in Aristotle, along with a wealth of acute observation of men and institutions, we find a diminishing interest in reconstruction; the Stagirite spent too much of his time in card-cataloguing Plato, and allowed his imagination to become suffocated with logic. With the Stoics and Epicureans begin that alienation of ethics from politics, and that subordination of philosophy to religious needs, which it is part of the task of present thinking to undo. Alexander had conquered the Orient, only to haveOrientalism conquer Greece. Under Scholasticism it was the fate of great minds to retrace worn paths in the cage of a system of conclusions determined by external authority; and the obligation to uphold the established precluded any practical recognition of the reconstructive function of thought. With the Renaissance—that Indian summer of Greek culture—the dream of a remoulded world found voice again. Campanella, through the darkness of his prison cell, achieved the vision of a communist utopia; and other students of the rediscovered Plato painted similar pictures. Indeed this reawakening of Plato’s influence gave to the men of the Renaissance an inspiriting sense of the wonders that lay potential in organized intelligence. Again men faced the task of replacing with a natural ethic the falling authoritarian sanctions of supernatural religion; and for a time one might have hoped that the thought of Socrates was to find at last its due fruition. But again men lost themselves in the notion of a cultured class moving leisurely over the backs of slaves; and perhaps it was well that the whole movement was halted by the more Puritan but also more democratic outburst of the Reformation. What the world needed was a method which offered hope for the redemption not of a class, but of all. Galileo and Roger Bacon opened the way to meeting this need by their emphasis on the value of hypothesis and experiment, and the necessity of combining inductionwith deduction; it remained for Francis Bacon to lay out the road for the organized employment of these new methods, and to inspire all Europe with his warm vision of their social possibilities.
IFyou would understand Bacon, you must see him as not so much a philosopher as an administrator. You find him a man of great practical ability: he remoulds philosophy with one hand and rules part of England with the other; not to speak of writing Shakespeare’s plays between times! He rises brilliantly from youthful penury to the political pinnacle; and meanwhile he runs over the whole realm of human knowledge, scattering praise and censure with lordly hand. Did we not know the fact as part of the history of England we should never suspect that the detailed and varied learning of this man was the incidental accomplishment of a life busied with political intrigue.Bene vixit qui bene latuit: surely here is a man who has lived widely, and in no merely physical sense has made the world his home. Life is no “brief candle” to him, nor men “such stuff as dreams are made of”; life is a glorious gift, big with blessing for him who will but assist at the delivery. There is nothing of the timid ascetic about him; like Socrates, he knows thatthere is a sort of cowardice in shunning pleasure;[49]best of all, there is so much work to be done, so many opportunities for the man of unnarrowed soul. He feels the exhilaration of one who has burst free from the shackles of intellectual authority: he sees before him an uncharted future, raw material for hands that dare to mould it; and he dares. All his life long he is mixed up with the heart of things; every day is an adventure. Exiled from politics he plunges gladly into the field of scientific reconstruction; he does not forget that he is an administrator, any more than Plato could forget that he was a dramatist; he finds the world of thought a chaos, and bequeaths it a planful process for the coördination of human life; all Europe responds to his call for the “enlarging of the bounds of human empire.” He works joyfully and buoyantly to the very last, and dies as he has wished, “in an earnest pursuit, which is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt.”
CONSIDERthe reaction of an experienced statesman who leaves the service of a king to enter the service of truth. He has left a field wherein all workers moved in subordination to one head and one focal purpose; he enters a field in which eachworker is working by himself, with no division of labor, no organization of endeavor, no correlation of ends. There he has found administration, here he finds a naïvelaissez-faire; there order, here anarchy; there some sense of common end and effort, here none. He understands at once the low repute of philosophy among men of affairs. “For the people are very apt to contemn truth, upon account of the controversies raised about it; and so think those all in a wrong way, who never meet.”[50]He understands at once why it is that the world has been so little changed by speculation and research. He is a man whose consciousness of pervasive human misery is too sharp for comfort;[51]and he sees no hope of remedy for this in isolated guerilla attacks waged upon the merest outposts of truth, each attack with its jealously peculiar strategy, its own dislocated, almost irrelevant end. And yet if there is no remedy for men’s ills in this nascent science and renascent philosophy, in what other quarter, then, shall men look for hope and cure?
There is no other, Bacon feels; unless victory is first won in the laboratory and the study it will never be won in political assemblies; no plebiscite or royal edict, but only truth, can make men free. Man’s hope lies in the reorganization of the processes of discovery and interpretation.Unless philosophy and science be born again of social aims and social needs they cannot have life in them. A new spirit must enter.
But first old spirits must be exorcised. Speculation and research must bring out a declaration of independence against theology. “The corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is ... widely spread, and does the greatest harm.”[52]The search for final causes, for design in nature, must be left to theologians; the function of science is not to interpret the purposes of nature, but to discover the connections of cause and effect in nature. Dogma must be set aside: “if a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.”[53]Dogma must be set aside, too, because it necessitates deduction as a basic method; and deduction as a basic method is disastrous.
But that is not all; there is much more in the way of preliminaries: there must be a general “expurgation of the intellect.” The mind is full (some would say made up) of prejudices, wild fancies, “idols,” or imaginings of things that are not so: if you are to think correctly, usefully, all these must go. Try, then, to get as little of yourself as possible in the way of the thing you wish to see. Beware of the very general tendency to put order and regularity in the world and thento suppose that they are native to the structure of things; or to force all facts into the unyielding mould of a preconceived opinion, carefully neglecting all contrary instances; or to give too credulous an ear to that which flatters the wish. Look into yourself and see the forest of prejudices that has grown up within you: through your temperamental attitudes; through your education; through your friends (friendship is so often an agreement in prejudices); through your favorite authors and authorities. If you find yourself seizing and dwelling on anything with particular satisfaction, hold it in suspicion. Beware of words, for they are imposed according to the apprehension of the crowd; make sure that you do not take abstractions for things. And remind yourself occasionally that you are not the measure of all things, but their distorting mirror.
So much by way of clearing the forest. Comes then induction as the fount and origin of all truth: patient induction, obedient to the call of fact, and with watchful eye for, above all things, the little unwelcome instance that contradicts. Not that induction is everything; it includes experiment, of course, and is punctuated by hypothesis.[54](More, it is clearly but the servant of deduction, since the aim of all science is to predict by deduction from generalizations formed by induction; but just as clear is it that the efficacy of the whole business lies grounded in the faithfulnessof the induction: induction is servant, but it has all men at its mercy.) And to formulate methods of induction, to surround the process by mechanical guards, to protect it from the premature flights of young generalizations,—that is a matter of life and death to science.
ANDnow, armed with these methods of procedure, we stand face to face with nature. What shall we ask her?Prudens questio dimidium scientiæ: to know what to ask is half of every science.
You must ask for laws,—or, to use a Platonic term, forms. In every process there is matter and there is form: the matter being the seat of the process or operation, and the form its method or law. “Though in nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure individual acts, according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy the very law, and the investigation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law, with its clauses, that I mean when I speak of Forms.”[55]Not so much what a “thing” is, but how it behaves;—that is the question. And what is more, if you will examine your conception of a “thing,” you will see that it is really aconception of how the “thing” behaves; everyWhatis at last aHow. Every “thing” is a machine, whose essence or meaning is to be found not by a mere description of its parts, but by an account of how it operates. “How does it work?” asks the boy before a machine; see to it that you ask the same question of nature.
For observe, if you know how a thing works, you are on the way to managing and controlling it. Indeed, a Form can be defined as those elements in a process which must be known before the process can be controlled. Here we see the meaning of science; it is an effort to discover the laws which must be known in order “that the mind may exercise her power over the nature of things.”[56]Science is the formulation of control; knowledge is power. The object of science is not merely to know, but to rebuild; every science longs to be an art. The quest for knowledge, then, is not a matter of curiosity, it is a fight for power. We “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness” against herself. Where this conception reigns, logic-chopping is out of court. “The end of our new logic is to find not arguments but arts; ... not probable reasons but plans and designs of works; ... to overcome not an adversary in argument but nature in action.”[57]
But there is logic-chopping in other things than logic. All strife of men with men, of group withgroup, if it leaves no result beyond the victory and passing supremacy of the individual or group, is logic-chopping. Such victories pass from side to side, and cancel themselves into final nullity. Real achievement is victory, not over other men but with them. “It will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds, and as it were grades, of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country; which kind is vulgar and degenerate. The second is of those who labor to extend the power of their country and its dominion among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the universe, his ambition is without doubt both a more wholesome thing and a more noble than the other two. The empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.”[58]
Natura non vincitur nisi parendo.“I accept the universe,” says Margaret Fuller. “Gad! you’d better!” says Carlyle. I accept it, says Bacon, but only as raw material. We will listen to nature, but only that we may learnwhat language she understands. We stoop to conquer.
There is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so. “By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and the undertaking of new tasks ... is found in this, that men despair and think things impossible.... If therefore any one believes or promises more, they think this comes of an ungoverned and unripened mind.”[59]There is nothing that we may not do, if wewill, but we must will; and must will the means as well as the end. Would we have an empire of man over nature? Very well: organize the arts and sciences.
“Consider what may be expected from men abounding in leisure, and from association of labors, and from successions of ages; the rather because it is not a way over which only one man can pass at a time (as is the case with that of reasoning), but within which the labors and industries of men (especially as regards the collecting of experience) may with the best effort be distributed and then combined. For then only will men begin to know their strength when instead of great numbers doing all the same things, one shall take charge of one thing and another of another.”[60]There should be more coöperation, less chaotic rivalry, in research. And the coöperation should be international; the various universitiesof the world, so far as they engage in research, should be like the different buildings of a great manufacturing plant, each with its own particular specialty and quest. Is it not remarkable how “little sympathy and correspondence exists between colleges and universities, as well throughout Europe as in the same state and kingdom?”[61]Why cannot all the research in the world be coördinated into one unified advance? Perhaps the truth-seekers would be unwilling; but has that been shown? And is the number of willing coöperators too small to warrant further effort? How can we know without the trial? Grant that the genius would balk at some external central direction; but research after all is seldom a matter of genius. “The course I propose ... is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on the level.”[62]Let scope and freedom be amply provided for the genius; it is the work of following up theaperçusof genius that most sorely needs coördination. Organization of research means really the liberation of genius: liberation from the halting necessities of mechanical repetition in experiment. Nor is coördination regimentation; let each man follow his hobby to whatever university has been assigned to the investigation of that particular item. Liberty is futility unless it is organized.
It is a plan, you see, for the socialization of science. It is a large and royal vision; to make it real involves “indeedopera basilica,” it is the business of a king, “towards which the endeavors of one man can be but as the sign on a cross-road, which points out the way but cannot tread it.”[63]It will need such legislative appropriations as are now granted only to the business of competitive destruction on land and sea. “As the secretaries and spies of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spies and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills if you would not be ignorant of many things worthy to be known. And if Alexander placed so large a treasure at Aristotle’s command for the support of hunters, fowlers, fishers and the like, in much more need do they stand of this beneficence who unfold the labyrinths of nature.”[64]
SUCHan organization of science is Bacon’s notion of Utopia. He gives us inThe New Atlantis, in plain strong prose, a picture of a state in which this organization has reached the national stage. It is a state nominally ruled by a king (Bacon never forgets that he is a loyal subject and counsellor of James I); but “preëminentamongst the excellent acts of the king ... was the erection and institution of an Order or Society which we call Solomon’s House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the nature of all things.”[65]Every twelve years this Order sends out to all parts of the world “merchants of light”; men who remain abroad for twelve years, gather information and suggestions in every field of art and science, and then (the next expedition having brought men to replace them) return home laden with books, instruments, inventions, and ideas. “Thus, you see, we maintain a trade not for gold, silver or jewels; nor for silk; nor for spices; nor for any other commodity or matter; but only for God’s first creation, which was Light.”[66]Meanwhile at home there is a busy army filling many laboratories, experimenting in zoölogy, medicine, dietetics, chemistry, botany, physics, and other fields; there are, in addition to these men, “three that collect the experiments in all the books; ... three that try new experiments”; three that tabulate the results of the experimenters; “three that look into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use ... for man’s life; ... three that direct new experiments”; three that from the results draw up “observations, axioms, andaphorisms.”[67]“We imitate also the flights of birds; we have some degree of flying in the air; we have ships and boats for going under water.”[68]And the purpose of it all, he says, with fine Baconian ring, is “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”[69]
THISis the voice of the Renaissance, speaking with some method to its music. It is the voice of Erasmus rather than that of Luther; but it is the voice of a larger and less class-bound vision than that which moved the polite encomiast of folly. Such minds as were not lost in the religious turmoil of the time responded to Bacon’s call for a new beginning; a “sense of liberation, ... of new destinies, pulsates in that generation at Bacon’s touch.”[70]Bacon says, and with justice, that he “rang the bell which called the wits together.”[71]When, in 1660, a group of London savants formed the Royal Society, it was from Bacon that they took their inspiration, and from the “House of Solomon” part of their plan oforganization. Diderot and D’Alembert acknowledged the impetus given by their reading of Bacon to the adventurous enterprise which completed and distributed theEncyclopédiedespite the prohibition of the king. To-day, after two hundred years of Cartesian futility about mind and body and the problem of knowledge, the Baconian emphasis on the socially-reconstructive function of thought renews its power and appeal. The world returns to Socrates, to Plato, and to Bacon.
But with some measure of wholesome disillusionment. These last two centuries have told us that science, unaided, cannot solve our social problem. We have invented, invented, invented, invented; and with what result? The gap between class and class has so widened during these inventive years that there are now not classes but castes. Social harmony is a matter of brief interludes in a drama more violent than any ever mimicked on the stage. Men trained and accomplished in science, like Prince Kropotkin, abandon it on the score that it has turned its back on the purpose that gave it vitality and worth.[72]
What is the purpose of science? What do scientists consider to be the purpose of science? The laboratories are crowded with men who have no inkling of any other than a purely material reconstruction as the function of their growingknowledge. Specialization has so divided science that hardly any sense of the whole survives. The ghosts of scholasticism—of a pursuit of knowledge divorced from its social end—hover about the microscopes and test-tubes of the scientific world; and the upshot of it all is that to them who have, more is given. Let Bacon speak here: “There is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress, which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright, when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.”[73]Sciences with obvious social functions have languished through lapse of all sense of direction, all feeling of focus; psychology, for example, is but now reviving under the stimulus of men who dared to “stir the earth a little about the roots of this science,”[74]because they had perceived its purpose and meaning in the drama of reconstruction. The blunt truth is that unless a scientist is also a philosopher, with some capacity to see thingssub specie totius,—unless he can come out of his hole into the open,—he is not fit to direct his own research. “As no perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or level, neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to ahigher science.”[75]Before it can be of real service to life, science must be enlightened by some discrimination of values, some consideration and fitting together of human ends: without philosophy as its eye piece, science is but the traditional child who has taken apart the traditional watch, with none but the traditional results.
There is more to this indictment. Science has been organized, though very imperfectly, for research; it has been organized hardly at all for social application and control. The notion that science can be used in conserving the vital elements of order and at the same time facilitating experimental and progressive change, is but beginning to walk about. Indeed, the employment and direction of scientific ability in the business of government is still looked upon as a doubtful procedure; to say that the administration of municipal affairs, for example, is to be given over to men trained in the social sciences rather than to men artful in trapping votes with oratorical molasses, is still a venture into the loneliness of heresy. Again let Bacon speak, who was administrator and philosopher in one. “It is wrong to trust the natural body to empirics who commonly have a few receipts whereon they rely, but who know neither the causes of the disease, nor the constitution of patients, nor the danger of accidents, nor the true methods of cure. And so it must needs be dangerous to have the civil body of states managed by empirical statesmen, unlesswell mixed with others who are grounded in learning. On the contrary it is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.”[76]
Plato over again, you say. Yes; just as “Greek philosophy is the dough with which modern philosophers have baked their bread, kneading it over and over again,”[77]so this vital doctrine of the application of the best available intelligence to the problem of social order and development must be restated in every generation until at last the world may see its truth and merit exemption from its repetition.
BUTthe place of Bacon in the continuum of history is hardly stated by connecting him with Plato. Conceive of him rather as a new protagonist in the long epic of intelligence; another blow struck in the seemingly endless war between magic and science, between supernaturalism and naturalism, between the spirit of worship and the spirit of control. Primitive man—and he lives everywhere under the name of legion—looks out upon nature as something to be feared and obeyed, something to be cajoled by ritual and sacrifice and prayer. In ages of great social disorder, such asthe millennium inaugurated in Western Europe by the barbarian invasions, the primitive elements in the mental make-up of men emerge through the falling cultural surface; and cults rich in ritual and steeped in emotional luxury grow in rank abundance. It is in the character of man to worship power: if he feels the power without him more intensely than the power within, he worships nature with a humble fear, and leans on magic and supernatural rewards; if he feels the power within him more intensely than the power without, he sees divinity in himself and other centres of remoulding activity, and thinks not of worshipping and obeying nature, but of controlling and commanding her. The second attitude comes, of course, with knowledge, and action that expresses knowledge; it is quite human that nature should not be worshipped once she has been known. A man is primitive, then, when he worships nature and makes no effort to control her; he is mature when he stops worshipping and begins to control,—when he understands that “Nature is not a temple but a workshop,”[78]not a barrier to divinity, but the raw material of Utopia.