INDEX

Footnotes

[1]. See, for instance, Turner’s Samoa, chap. 1. Usually, however, in the Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more genuinely evolutionary manner, by a long series of progressive generations.

[2]. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. I, book III, chap. VI.

[3]. I have here mainly followed Gomperz (Greek Thinkers, vol. I, pp. 430-34); there is not now, however, much controversy over the position of Hippias, which there is now, indeed, rather a tendency to exaggerate, considering how small is the basis of knowledge we possess. Thus Dupréel (La Légende Socratique, p. 432), regarding him as the most misunderstood of the great Sophists, declares that Hippias is “the thinker who conceived the universality of science, just as Prodicus caught glimpses of the synthesis of the social sciences. Hippias is the philosopher of science, the Great Logician, just as Prodicus is the Great Moralist.” He compares him to Pico della Mirandola as a Humanist and to Leibnitz in power of wide synthesis.

[4]. Strictly speaking, in the technical sense of that much-abused word, this is “decadence.” (I refer to the sense in which I defined “decadence” many years ago in Affirmations, pp. 175-87.) So that while the minor arts have sometimes been classic and sometimes decadent, the major art of living during the last two thousand years, although one can think of great men who have maintained the larger classic ideal, has mainly been decadent.

[5]. Emma Hadfield, Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group. 1920. It would no doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the Fijians rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust and accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture has receded into the past,—and the same may be said of the Marquesans of whom Melville left, in Typee, a famous and delightful picture which other records confirm,—while that of the Lifuans is still recent.

[6]. G. Lowes Dickinson, An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China, and Japan (1914), p. 47. No doubt there are shades to be added to this picture. They may be found in a book, published two years earlier, China as it Really Is, by “a Resident in Peking” who claims to have been born in China. Chinese culture has receded, in part swamped by over-population, and concerning a land where to-day, it has lately been said, “magnificence, crudity, delicacy, fetidity, and fragrance are blended,” it is easy for Westerners to show violent difference of opinion.

[7]. See, for instance, the chapter on games in Professor E. H. Parker’s China: Past and Present. Reference may be made to the same author’s important and impartial larger work, China: Its History, with a discriminating chapter on Chinese personal characteristics. Perhaps, the most penetrating study of Chinese psychology is, however, Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics.

[8]. His ideas have been studied by Madame Alexandra David, Le Philosophe Meh-ti et l’Idée de Solidarité. London, 1907.

[9]. Eugène Simon, La Cité Chinoise.

[10]. E. Hovelaque, La Chine (Paris, 1920), p. 47.

[11]. This point has not escaped the more acute students of Chinese civilisation. Thus Dr. John Steele, in his edition of the I-Li, remarks that “ceremonial was far from being a series of observances, empty and unprofitable, such as it degenerated into in later time. It was meant to inculcate that habit of self-control and ordered action which was the expression of a mind fully instructed in the inner meaning of things, and sensitive to every impression.” Still more clearly, Reginald Farrer wrote, in On the Eaves of the World, that “the philosophic calm that the Chinese deliberately cultivate is their necessary armour to protect the excessive susceptibility to emotion. The Chinese would be for ever the victims of their nerves had they not for four thousand years pursued reason and self-control with self-protective enthusiasm.”

[12]. It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has suggested (Zoölogist, December, 1901) that the nest may first have arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.

[13]. “Not the epic song, but the dance,” Wundt says (Völkerpsychologie, 3d ed. 1911, Bd. 1, Teil 1, p. 277), “accompanied by a monotonous and often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive, and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art. Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.”

[14]. See an interesting essay in The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.

[15]. This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has become almost a commonplace since.

[16]. See a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, “The Art of Dancing in Japan,” Fortnightly Review, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which has played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into religion from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not adapted to secular purposes until the sixteenth century.

[17]. I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead, “The Sacred Dance of Jesus,” The Quest, October, 1910.

[18]. The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is evidently of great antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course that we do not hear of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day, in opposition to the Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the King was finally obtained permitting it, provided it was performed only by men, so that evidently, before that date, girls as well as boys took part in it. Rev. John Morris, “Dancing in Churches,” The Month, December, 1892; also a valuable article on the Seises by J. B. Trend, in Music and Letters, January, 1921.

[19]. See, for references, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. III; Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, pp. 29, etc.; and Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, vol. I, chap. XIII, p. 470.

[20]. At an earlier period, however, the dance of Salome was understood much more freely and often more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out, on a capital in the twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a kind of castanets in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the western portals of Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, she is dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is really executing the morisco, the “danse du ventre.”

[21]. For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded by modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, Women of India, chap. VII, “The Dancing Girl,” 1922.

[22]. I may hazard the suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have acquired their rather unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much because they had passed through Egypt, the reason which is generally suggested,—for they must have passed through many countries,—but because of their proficiency in dances of the recognised Egyptian type.

[23]. It is interesting to observe that Egypt still retains, almost unchanged through fifty centuries, its traditions, technique, and skill in dancing, while, as in ancient Egyptian dancing, the garment forms an almost or quite negligible element in the art. Loret remarks that a charming Egyptian dancer of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose picture in her transparent gauze he reproduces, is an exact portrait of a charming Almeh of to-day whom he has seen dancing in Thebes with the same figure, the same dressing of the hair, the same jewels. I hear from a physician, a gynæcologist now practising in Egypt, that a dancing-girl can lie on her back, and with a full glass of water standing on one side of her abdomen and an empty glass on the other, can by the contraction of the muscles on the side supporting the full glass, project the water from it, so as to fill the empty glass. This, of course, is not strictly dancing, but it is part of the technique which underlies classic dancing and it witnesses to the thoroughness with which the technical side of Egyptian dancing is still cultivated.

[24]. “We must learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance form,” says G. Warre Cornish in an interesting article on “Greek Drama and the Dance” (Fortnightly Review, February, 1913), “a musical symphonic dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the soul of man are portrayed.”

[25]. It should perhaps be remarked that in recent times it has been denied that the old ballads were built up on dance songs. Miss Pound, for instance, in a book on the subject, argues that they were of aristocratic and not communal origin, which may well be, though the absence of the dance element does not seem to follow.

[26]. It would not appear that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance of the twentieth century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this matter. Einstein would certainly not, and many apostles of physical science to-day (see, e.g., Professor Smithells, From a Modern University: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science) insist on the æsthetic, imaginative, and other “art” qualities of science.

[27]. C. Singer. “What is Science?” British Medical Journal, 25th June, 1921. Singer refuses the name of “science” in the strict sense to fields of completely organised knowledge which have ceased growing, like human anatomy (though, of course, the anatomist still remains a man of science by working outwards into adjoining related fields), preferring to term any such field of completed knowledge a discipline. This seems convenient and I should like to regard it as sound. It is not, however, compatible with the old doctrine of Mill and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it excludes from the field of science exactly what they regarded as most typically science, and some one might possibly ask whether in other departments, like Hellenic sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art ceases to be art.

[28]. It has often been pointed out that the imaginative application of science—artistic ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the flying-machine heavier than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and many others—were even at the moment of their being achieved, elaborately shown to be “impossible” by men who had been too hastily hoisted up to positions of “scientific” eminence.

[29]. J. B. Baillie, Studies in Human Nature (1921), p. 221. This point has become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost epoch-marking work, The History of Materialism, which has made so deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger; it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from experience) by any one who read it in youth.

[30]. G. Wallas, The Great Society, p. 107.

[31]. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. I, chap. III, where will be found an attractive account of Pythagoras’ career and position.

[32]. Always, it may perhaps be noted in passing, it seems to have been difficult for the sober and solemn Northerner, especially of England, to enter into the Greek spirit, all the more since that spirit was only the spirit of a sprinkling of people amid a hostile mass about as unlike anything we conventionally call “Greek” as could well be imagined, so that, as Élie Faure, the historian of art, has lately remarked, Greek art is a biological “monstrosity.” (Yet, I would ask, might we not say the same of France or of England?) That is why it is usually so irritating to read books written about the Greeks by barbarians; they slur over or ignore what they do not like and, one suspects, they instinctively misinterpret what they think they do like. Better even the most imperfect knowledge of a few original texts, better even only a few days on the Acropolis, than the second-hand opinions of other people. And if we must have a book about the Greeks, there is always Athenæus, much nearer to them in time and in spirit, with all his gossip, than any Northern barbarian, and an everlasting delight.

[33]. Along another line it should have been clear that the dialogues of the philosophers were drama and not history. It would appear (Croiset, Littérature Grecque, vol. III, pp. 448 et seq.) that with Epicharmus of Cos, who was settled in Megara at the beginning of the fifth century, philosophic comedy flourished brilliantly at Syracuse, and indeed fragments of his formal philosophic dialogue survive. Thus it is suggested that Athenian comedy and sophistic prose dialogues may be regarded as two branches drawn from the ancient prototype of such Syracusan comedy, itself ultimately derived from Ionian philosophy. It is worth noting, I might add, that when we first hear of the Platonic dialogues they were being grouped in trilogies and tetralogies like the Greek dramas; that indicates, at all events, what their earliest editors thought about them. It is also interesting to note that the writer of, at the present moment, the latest handbook to Plato, Professor A. E. Taylor (Plato, 1922, pp. 32-33), regards the “Socrates” of Plato as no historical figure, not even a mask of Plato himself, but simply “the hero of the Platonic drama,” of which we have to approach in much the same way as the work of “a great dramatist or novelist.”

[34]. He had often been bidden in dreams to make music, said the Platonic Socrates in Phædo, and he had imagined that that was meant to encourage him in the pursuit of philosophy, “which is the noblest and best of music.”

[35]. In discussing Socrates I have made some use of Professor Dupréel’s remarkable book, La Légende Socratique (1922). Dupréel himself, with a little touch of irony, recommends a careful perusal of the beautiful and monumental works erected by Zeller and Grote and Gomperz to the honour of Socrates.

[36]. Count Hermann Keyserling, Philosophie als Kunst (1920), p. 2. He associates this with the need for a philosophy to possess a subjective personal character, without which it can have no value, indeed no content at all.

[37]. Croce, Problemi d’ Estetica, p. 15. I have to admit, for myself, that, while admiring the calm breadth of Croce’s wide outlook, it is sometimes my misfortune, in spite of myself, when I go to his works, to play the part of a Balaam à rebours. I go forth to bless: and, somehow, I curse.

[38]. James Hinton, a pioneer in so many fields, clearly saw that thinking is really an art fifty years ago. “Thinking is no mere mechanical process,” he wrote (Chapters on the Art of Thinking, pp. 43 et seq.), “it is a great Art, the chief of all the Arts.... Those only can be called thinkers who have a native gift, a special endowment for the work, and have been trained, besides, by assiduous culture. And though we continually assume that every one is capable of thinking, do we not all feel that there is somehow a fallacy in this assumption? Do we not feel that what people set up as their ‘reasons’ for disbelieving or believing are often nothing of the sort?... The Art faculty is Imagination, the power of seeing the unseen, the power also of putting ourselves out of the centre, of reducing ourselves to our true proportions, of truly using our own impressions. And is not this in reality the chief element in the work of the thinker?... Science is poetry.”

[39]. So far, indeed, as I am aware, I was responsible for the first English account of his work (outside philosophical journals); it appeared in the London Nation and Athenæum a few years ago, and is partly embodied in the present chapter.

[40]. I have based this sketch on an attractive and illuminating account of his own development written by Professor Vaihinger for Dr. Raymund Schmidt’s highly valuable series, Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (1921), vol. II.

[41]. “Most workers on the problem of atomic constitution,” remarks Sir Ernest Rutherford (Nature, 5th August, 1922), “take as a working hypothesis that the atoms of matter are purely electrical structures, and that ultimately it is hoped to explain all the properties of atoms as a result of certain combinations of the two fundamental units of positive and negative electricity, the proton and electron.”

[42]. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. I.

[43]. Otto Rank, Der Künstler: Ansätze zu einer Sexual Psychologie.

[44]. The sexual strain in the symbolism of language is touched on in my Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. V, and similar traits in primitive legends have been emphasised—many would say over-emphasised—by Freud and Jung.

[45]. Einstein, in conversation with Moszkowski, expressed doubt as to the reality of Leonardo’s previsions of modern science. But it scarcely appeared that he had investigated the matter, while the definite testimony of the experts in many fields who have done so cannot be put aside.

[46]. For the Italian reader of Leonardo the fat little volume of Frammenti, edited by Dr. Solmi and published by Barbèra, is a precious and inexhaustible pocket companion. For the English reader Mr. MacCurdy’s larger but much less extensive volume of extracts from the Note-Books, or the still further abridged Thoughts, must suffice. Herbert Horne’s annotated version of Vasari’s Life is excellent for Leonardo’s personality and career.

[47]. Morley Roberts, who might be regarded as a pupil in the school of Leonardo and trained like him in the field of art, has in various places of his suggestive book, Warfare in the Human Body, sprinkled irony over the examples he has come across of ignorant specialists claiming to be men of “science.”

[48]. Needless to say, I do not mention this to belittle Galton. A careful attention to words, which in its extreme form becomes pedantry, is by no means necessarily associated with a careful attention to things. Until recent times English writers, even the greatest, were always negligent in spelling; it would be foolish to suppose they were therefore negligent in thinking.

[49]. Darwin even overestimated the æsthetic element in his theory of sexual selection, and (I have had occasion elsewhere to point out) unnecessarily prejudiced that theory by sometimes unwarily assuming a conscious æsthetic element.

[50]. It is probable that the reason why it is often difficult to trace the imaginative artist in great men of supposedly abstract science is the paucity of intimate information about them. Even their scientific friends have rarely had the patience, or even perhaps the intelligence, to observe them reverently and to record their observations. We know almost nothing that is intimately personal about Newton. As regards Einstein, we are fortunate in possessing the book of Moszkowski, Einstein (translated into English under the title of Einstein the Searcher), which contains many instructive conversations and observations by a highly intelligent and appreciative admirer, who has set them down in a Boswellian spirit that faintly recalls Eckermann’s book on Goethe (which, indeed, Moszkowski had in mind), though falling far short of that supreme achievement. The statements in the text are mainly gleaned from Moszkowski.

[51]. Spengler holds (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. X, p. 329) that the development of music throughout its various stages in our European culture really has been closely related with the stages of the development of mathematics.

[52]. I would here refer to a searching investigation, “Goethe und die mathematische Physik: Eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie,” in Ernst Cassirer’s Idee und Gestalt (1921). It is here shown that in some respects Goethe pointed the way along which mathematical physics, by following its own paths, has since travelled, and that even when most non-mathematical Goethe’s scientific attitude was justifiable.

[53]. See the remarkable essay, “De la Cinéplastique,” in Élie Faure’s L’Arbre d’Éden (1922). It is, however, a future and regenerated cinema for which Élie Faure looks, “to become the art of the crowd, the powerful centre of communion in which new symphonic forms will be born in the tumult of passions and utilized for fine and elevating æsthetic ends.”

[54]. O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. I, p. 576.

[55]. It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of the expert (as in C. T. Onions, Advanced English Syntax) is entirely reasonable.

[56]. It is interesting to note that another aristocratic master of speech had also made just the same observation. Landor puts into the mouth of Horne Tooke the words: “No expression can become a vulgarism which has not a broad foundation. The language of the vulgar hath its source in physics: in known, comprehended, and operative things.” At the same time Landor was as stern a judge as Baudelaire of the random use of clichés.

[57]. Speaking as a writer who has been much quoted,—it ought to be a satisfaction, but I have had my doubts,—I may say that I have observed that those who quote belong mostly to two classes, one consisting of good, or at all events indifferent, writers, and the other of bad writers. Those of the first class quote with fair precision and due acknowledgement, those of the second with no precision, and only the vaguest intimation, or none at all, that they are quoting. This would seem to indicate that the good writer is more honest than the bad writer, but that conclusion may be unjust to the bad writer. The fact is that, having little thought or knowledge of his own, he is not fully conscious of what he is doing. He is like a greedy child who, seeing food in front of him, snatches it at random, without being able to recognise whether or not it is his own. There is, however, a third class of those who cannot resist the temptation of deliberately putting forth the painfully achieved thought or knowledge of others as their own, sometimes, perhaps, seeking to gloss over the lapse with: “As every one knows—”

[58]. Croce, who is no doubt the most instructive literary critic of our time, has, in his own way, insisted on this essential fact. As he would put it, there are no objective standards of judgment; we cannot approach a work of art with our laws and categories. We have to comprehend the artist’s own values, and only then are we fit to pronounce any judgment on his work. The task of the literary critic is thus immensely more difficult than it is vulgarly supposed to be. The same holds good, I would add, of criticism in the fields of art, not excluding the art of love and the arts of living in general.

[59]. “This search is the art of all great thinkers, of all great artists, indeed of all those who, even without attaining expression, desire to live deeply. If the dance brings us so near to God, it is, I believe, because it symbolizes for us the movement of this gesture.” (Élie Faure, L’Arbre d’Éden, p. 318.)

[60]. This is that “divine malice” which Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, speaking of Heine (“one day Heine and I will be regarded as by far the greatest artists of the German language,” he says rather egotistically, but perhaps truly) considered essential to perfection. “I estimate the value of men and of races,” he added, “by their need to identify their God with a satyr,” a hard saying, no doubt, to the modern man, but it has its meaning.

[61]. Since this was written I have found that Laycock, whose subtle observation pioneered so many later ideas, long ago noted (“Some Organic Laws of Memory,” Journal of Mental Science, July, 1875) reversion to ancestral modes of handwriting.

[62]. This was written fifteen years ago, and as Carlyle has of late been unduly depreciated I would add that, while strictly to the present point, it is not put forward as an estimate of Carlyle’s genius. That I seem to have attempted twenty-five years earlier in a private letter (to my friend the late Reverend Angus Mackay) I may here perhaps be allowed to quote. It was in 1883, soon after the publication of Carlyle’s Reminiscences: “This is not Carlylese, but it is finer. The popular judgment is hopelessly wrong. We can never understand Carlyle till we get rid of the ‘great prophet’ notion. Carlyle is not (as we were once taught) a ‘great moral teacher,’ but, in the high sense, a great comedian. His books are wonderful comedies. He is the Scotch Aristophanes, as Rabelais is the French and Heine the German Aristophanes—of course, with the intense northern imagination, more clumsy, more imperfect, more profound than the Greek. But, at a long distance, there is a close resemblance to Aristophanes with the same mixture of audacity in method and conservatism in spirit. Carlyle’s account of Lamb seems in the true sense Aristophanic. His humour is, too, as broad as he dares (some curious resemblances there, too). In his lyrical outbursts, again, he follows Aristophanes, and again at a distance. Of course he cannot be compared as an artist. He has not, like Rabelais, created a world to play with, but, like Aristophanes generally, he sports with the things that are.” That youthful estimate was alien to popular opinion then because Carlyle was idolised; it is now, no doubt, equally alien for an opposite reason. It is only on extremes that the indolent popular mind can rest.

[63]. J. Beddoe, The Races of Britain, p. 254.

[64]. I once studied, as an example, colour-words in various writers, finding that every poet has his own colour formula. Variations in length of sentence and peculiarities of usage in metre have often been studied. Reference is made to some of these studies by A. Niceforo, “Metodo Statistico e Documenti Litterari,” Revista d’Italia, August, 1917.

[65]. “The Muses are the daughters of Memory,” Paul Morand tells us that Proust would say; “there is no art without recollection,” and certainly it is supremely true of Proust’s art. It is that element of art which imparts at once both atmosphere and poignant intimacy, external farness with internal nearness. The lyrics of Thomas Hardy owe their intimacy of appeal to the dominance in them of recollection (in Late Lyrics and Earlier one might say it is never absent), and that is why they can scarcely be fully appreciated save by those who are no longer very young.

[66]. The Oxford University Press publishes a little volume of Rules for Compositors and Readers in which this uniform is set forth. It is a useful and interesting manual, but one wonders how many unnecessary and even undesirable usages—including that morbid desire to cling to the ize termination (charming as an eccentricity but hideous as a rule) when ise would suffice—are hereby fostered. Even when we leave out of consideration the great historical tradition of variety in this matter, it is doubtful, when we consider them comprehensively, whether the advantages of encouraging every one to spell like his fellows overbalances the advantages of encouraging every one to spell unlike his fellows. When I was a teacher in the Australian bush I derived far less enjoyment from the more or less “correctly” spelt exercises of my pupils than from the occasional notes I received from their parents who, never having been taught to spell, were able to spell in the grand manner. We are wilfully throwing away an endless source of delight.

[67]. Le Monde Nouveau, 15th December, 1922.

[68]. Ferris Greenslet (in his study of Joseph Glanvill, p. 183), referring to the Cartesian influence on English prose style, quotes from Sprat’s History of the Royal Society that the Society “exacted from its members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematic plainness as they can.” The Society passed a resolution to reject “all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style.”

[69]. If it is asked why I take examples of a quality in art that is universal from literary personalities that to many are questionable, even morbid or perverse, rather than from some more normal and unquestioned figure, Thomas Hardy, for example, I would reply that I have always regarded it as more helpful and instructive to take examples that are still questionable rather than to fall back on the unquestionable that all will accept tamely without thought. Forty years ago, when Hardy’s genius was scarcely at all recognised, it seemed worth while to me to set forth the quality of his genius. To-day, when that quality is unquestioned, and Hardy receives general love and reverence, it would seem idle and unprofitable to do so.

[70]. It is scarcely necessary to remark that if we choose to give to “mysticism” a definition incompatible with “science,” the opposition cannot be removed. This is, for example, done by Croce, who yet recognises as highly important a process of “conversion” which is nothing else but mysticism as here understood. (See, e.g., Piccoli, Benedetto Croce, p. 184.) Only he has left himself no name to apply to it.

[71]. “The endeavour of the human mind to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the highest,” which is Pringle Pattison’s widely accepted definition of mysticism, I prefer not to use because it is ambiguous. The “endeavour,” while it indicates that we are concerned with an art, also suggests its strained pathological forms, while “actual communion” lends itself to ontological interpretations.

[72]. The Threshold of Religion (1914), p. 48.

[73]. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (1911), p. 272.

[74]. Golden Bough, “Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, pp. 304-05.

[75]. Farnell even asserts (in his Greek Hero Cults) that “it is impossible to quote a single example of any one of the higher world-religions working in harmony with the development of physical science.” He finds a “special and unique” exception in the cult of Asclepios at Cos and Epidauros and Pergamon, where, after the fourth century B.C., were physicians, practising a rational medical science, who were also official priests of the Asclepios temples.

[76]. Sir Oliver Lodge, Reason and Belief, p. 19.

[77]. It is scarcely necessary to point out that a differentiation of function has to be made sooner or later, and sometimes it is made soon. This was so among the Todas of India. “Certain Todas,” says Dr. Rivers (The Todas, 1906, p. 249), “have the power of divination, others are sorcerers, and others again have the power of curing diseases by means of spells and rites, while all three functions are quite separate from those of the priest or sharman. The Todas have advanced some way towards civilisation of function in this respect, and have as separate members of the community their prophets, their magicians, and their medicine-men in addition to their priests.”

[78]. Joël, Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Romantik (1903); Nietzsche und die Romantik (1905). But I am here quoting from Professor Joël’s account of his own philosophical development in Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, vol. I (1921).

[79]. In connection with this scheme, it may be interesting to note, I prepared, in 1879, a questionnaire on “conversion,” on the lines of the investigations which some years later began to be so fruitfully carried out by the psychologists of religion in America.

[80]. It must be remembered that for science the mechanistic assumption always remains; it is, as Vaihinger would say, a necessary fiction. To abandon it is to abandon science. Driesch, the most prominent vitalist of our time, has realised this, and in his account of his own mental development (Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, vol. I, 1921) he shows how, beginning as a pupil of Haeckel and working at zoölogy for many years, after adopting the theory of vitalism he abandoned all zoölogical work and became a professor of philosophy. When the religious spectator, or the æsthetic spectator (as is well illustrated in the French review L’Esprit Nouveau), sees the “machinery” as something else than machinery he is legitimately going outside the sphere of science, but he is not thereby destroying the basic assumption of science.

[81]. Long ago Edith Simcox (in a passage of her Natural Law which chanced to strike my attention very soon after the episode above narrated) well described “conversion” as a “spiritual revolution,” not based on any single rational consideration, but due to the “cumulative evidence of cognate impressions” resulting, at a particular moment, not in a change of belief, but in a total rearrangement and recolouring of beliefs and impressions, with the supreme result that the order of the universe is apprehended no longer as hostile, but as friendly. This is the fundamental fact of “conversion,” which is the gate of mysticism.

[82]. How we are to analyse the conception of “universe”—apart from its personal emotional tone, which is what mainly concerns us—is, of course, a matter that must be left altogether open and free. Sir James Frazer at the end of his Golden Bough (“Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, p. 306) finds that the “universe” is an “ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought,” or, he adds, suddenly shifting to a less idealistic and more realistic standpoint, “shadows on the screen.” That is a literary artist’s metaphysical way of describing the matter and could not occur to any one who was not familiar with the magic lantern which has now developed into the cinema, beloved of philosophers for its symbolic significance. Mr. Bertrand Russell, a more abstract artist, who would reject any such “imaginative admixture” as he would find in Frazer’s view, once severely refused to recognise any such thing as a “universe,” but has since less austerely admitted that there is, after all, a “set of appearances,” which may fairly be labelled “reality,” so long as we do not assume “a mysterious Thing-in-Itself behind the appearances.” (Nation, 6th January, 1923.) But there are always some people who think that an “appearance” must be an appearance of Something, and that when a “shadow” is cast on the screen of our sensory apparatus it must be cast by Something. So every one defines the “universe” in his own way, and no two people—not even the same person long—can define it in the same way. We have to recognise that even the humblest of us is entitled to his own “universe.”

[83]. The simple and essential outlines of “conversion” have been obscured because chiefly studied in the Churches among people whose prepossessions and superstitions have rendered it a highly complex process, and mixed up with questions of right and wrong living which, important as they are, properly form no part of religion. The man who waits to lead a decent life until he has “saved his soul” is not likely to possess a soul that is worth saving. How much ignorance prevails in regard to “conversion,” even among the leaders of religious opinion, and what violent contrasts of opinion—in which sometimes both the opposing parties are mistaken—was well illustrated by a discussion on the subject at the Church Congress at Sheffield in 1922. A distinguished Churchman well defined “conversion” as a unification of character, involving the whole man,—will, intellect, and emotion,—by which a “new self” was achieved; but he also thought that this great revolutionary process consisted usually in giving up some “definite bad habit,” very much doubted whether sudden conversion was a normal phenomenon at all, and made no attempt to distinguish between that kind of “conversion” which is merely the result of suggestion and auto-suggestion, after a kind of hysterical attack produced by feverish emotional appeals, and that which is spontaneous and of lifelong effect. Another speaker went to the opposite extreme by asserting that “conversion” is an absolutely necessary process, and an Archbishop finally swept away “conversion” altogether by declaring that the whole of the religious life (and the whole of the irreligious life?) is a process of conversion. (The Times, 12th October, 1922.) It may be a satisfaction to some to realise that this is a matter on which it is vain to go to the Churches for light.

[84]. Dean Inge (Philosophy of Plotinus, vol. II, p. 165) has some remarks on Plotinus in relation to asceticism.

[85]. Jules de Gaultier (La Philosophie officielle et la Philosophie, p. 150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was contained in one syllable: Om. But those monks, he adds, belonged to “the only philosophic race that ever existed” and by the aid of their pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset, all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian tradition are but as fairy-tales told to children.

[86]. We must always remember that “Church” and “religion,” though often confused, are far from being interchangeable terms. “Religion” is a natural impulse, “Church” is a social institution. The confusion is unfortunate. Thus Freud (Group Psychology, p. 51) speaks of the probability of religion disappearing and Socialism taking its place. He means not “religion,” but a “Church.” We cannot speak of a natural impulse disappearing, an institution easily may.

[87]. It must be remembered that “intuition” is a word with all sorts of philosophical meanings, in addition to its psychological meanings (which were studied some years ago by Dearborn in the Psychological Review). For the ancient philosophic writers, from the Neo-Platonists on, it was usually a sort of special organ for coming in contact with supernatural realities; for Bergson it is at once a method superior to the intellect for obtaining knowledge and a method of æsthetic contemplation; for Croce it is solely æsthetic, and art is at once “intuition” and “expression” (by which he means the formation of internal images). For Croce, when the mind “intuits” by “expressing,” the result is art. There is no “religion” for Croce except philosophy.

[88]. The modern literature of the Mysteries, especially of Eleusis, is very extensive and elaborate in many languages. I will only mention here a small and not very recent book, Cheetham’s Hulsean Lectures on The Mysteries Pagan and Christian (1897) as for ordinary readers sufficiently indicating the general significance of the Mysteries. There is, yet briefer, a more modern discussion of the matter in the Chapter on “Religion” by Dr. W. R. Inge in R. W. Livingstone’s useful collection of essays, The Legacy of Greece (1921).

[89]. What we call crime is, at the beginning, usually an effort to get, or to pretend to get, into step, but, being a violent or miscalculated effort, it is liable to fail, and the criminal falls to the rear of the social army. “I believe that most murders are really committed by Mrs. Grundy,” a woman writes to me, and, with the due qualification, the saying is worthy of meditation. That is why justice is impotent to prevent or even to punish murder, for Mrs. Grundy is within all of us, being a part of the social discipline, and cannot be hanged.

[90]. Herbert Spencer, writing to a correspondent, once well expressed the harmlessness—if we choose so to regard it—of moral teaching: “After nearly two thousand years’ preaching of the religion of amity, the religion of enmity remains predominant, and Europe is peopled by two hundred million pagans, masquerading as Christians, who revile those who wish them to act on the principles they profess.”

[91]. But later asceticism was strictly the outcome of a Greek tendency, to be traced in Plato, developed through Antisthenes, through Zeno, through Epictetus, who all desired to liberate the soul from the bonds of matter. The Neo-Platonists carried this tendency further, for in their time, the prevailing anarchy and confusion rendered the world and society less than ever a fitting haven for the soul. It was not Christianity that made the world ascetic (and there were elements of hedonism in the teaching of Jesus), but the world that made Christianity ascetic, and it was easy for a Christian to become a Neo-Platonist, for they were both being moulded by the same forces.

[92]. Maurice Croiset devotes a few luminous critical pages to Plotinus in the Croisets’ Histoire de la Littérature Grecque, vol. V, pp. 820-31. As an extended account of Plotinus, from a more enthusiastically sympathetic standpoint, there are Dr. Inge’s well-known Gifford Lectures, The Philosophy of Plotinus (1918); I may also mention a careful scholastic study, L’Esthétique de Plotin (1913), by Cochez, of Louvain, who regards Plotinus as the climax of the objective æsthetics of antiquity and the beginning of the road to modern subjective æsthetics.

[93]. Ennead, bk. III, chap. VI. I have mostly followed the translation of Stephen McKenna.

[94]. St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk. IV, chap. XXI.

[95]. Kant was habitually cold and calm. But he was very fond of dried fruits and used to have them specially imported for him by his friend Motherby. “At one time he was eagerly expecting a vessel with French fruits which he had ordered, and he had already invited some friends to a dinner at which they were to be served. The vessel was, however, delayed a number of days by a storm. When it arrived, Kant was informed that the provisions had become short on account of the delay, and that the crew had eaten his fruit. Kant was so angry that he declared they ought rather to have starved than to have touched it. Surprised at this irritation, Motherby said, ‘Professor, you cannot be in earnest.’ Kant answered, ‘I am really in earnest,’ and went away. Afterwards he was sorry.” (Quoted by Stuckenberg, The Life of Kant, p. 138.) But still it was quite in accordance with Kantian morality that the sailors should have starved.

[96]. Georg von Gizycki, Die Ethik David Hume’s, p. 11.

[97]. F. C. Sharp, Mind (1912), p. 388.

[98]. Shaftesbury held that Locke swept away too much and failed to allow for inborn instincts (or “senses,” as he sometimes called them) developing naturally. We now see that he was right.

[99]. There is no need to refer to the value of salt, and therefore the appreciation of the flavour of salt, to primitive people. Still to-day, in Spain, sal (salt) is popularly used for a more or less intellectual and moral quality which is highly admired.

[100]. Dr. C. S. Myers has touched on this point in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. II, part II, chap. IV; also “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples,” British Journal of Psychology, June, 1904.

[101]. Dr. Georg von Gizycki, Die Philosophie Shaftesbury’s (1876); and the same author’s Die Ethik David Hume’s (1878).

[102]. It should be added that Croce is himself moving in this direction, and in, for instance, Il Carattere di Totalità della Espressione Artistica (1917), he recognises the universality of art.

[103]. Stanley Hall remarks in criticising Kant’s moral æsthetics: “The beauty of virtue is only seen in contemplating it and the act of doing it has no beauty to the doer at the moment.” (G. Stanley Hall, “Why Kant is Passing,” American Journal of Psychology, July, 1912.)

[104]. See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in Mind, April, 1899.

[105]. See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” American Journal of Psychology, May-October, 1901.

[106]. We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s Social Psychology, even though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.

[107]. See W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy. (1900.)

[108]. It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book on The Art of Life, designed to show that just as the sculptor works with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”

[109]. “They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”

[110]. Der Wille zur Macht, p. 358.

[111]. Mrs. Havelock Ellis, James Hinton, 1918.

[112]. This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (La Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs, p. 340), “elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone, avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their existence.”

[113]. Alfred Niceforo, Les Indices Numériques de la Civilisation et du Progrès. Paris, 1921.

[114]. Professor Bury, in his admirable history of the idea of progress (J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, 1920), never defines the meaning of “progress.” As regards the meaning of “civilisation” see essay on “Civilisation,” Havelock Ellis, The Philosophy of Conflict (1919), pp. 14-22.

[115]. Quetelet, Physique Sociale. (1869.)

[116]. See e.g., Maurice Parmelee’s Criminology, the sanest and most comprehensive manual on the subject we have in English.

[117]. Élie Faure, with his usual incisive insight, has set out the real characters of the “Greek Spirit” (“Reflexions sur le Génie Grec,” Monde Nouveau, December, 1922).

[118]. This tendency, on which Herbert Spencer long ago insisted, is in its larger aspects quite clear. E. C. Pell (The Law of Births and Deaths, 1921) has argued that it holds good of civilised man to-day, and that our decreasing birth rate with civilisation is quite independent of any effort on Man’s part to attain that evolutionary end.

[119]. Professor McDougall refers to the high birth-rate of the lower stratum as more “normal.” If that were so, civilisation would certainly be doomed. All high evolution normally involves a low birth-rate. Strange how difficult it is even for those most concerned with these questions to see the facts simply and clearly!

[120]. A. M. Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem: A Study in Human Evolution (1922), pp. 457, 472.

[121]. Dupréel, La Légende Socratique (1922), p. 428. Dupréel considers (p. 431) that the Protagorean spirit was marked by the idea of explaining the things of thought, and life in general, by the meeting, opposition, and harmony of individual activities, leading up to the sociological notion of convention, and behind it, of relativity. Nietzsche was a pioneer in restoring the Sophists to their rightful place in Greek thought. The Greek culture of the Sophists grew out of all the Greek instincts, he says (The Will to Power, section 428): “And it has ultimately shown itself to be right. Our modern attitude of mind is, to a great extent, Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean. To say that it is Protagorean is even sufficient, because Protagoras was himself a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus.” The Sophists, by realizing that many supposed objective ideas were really subjective, have often been viewed with suspicion as content with a mere egotistically individualistic conception of life. The same has happened to Nietzsche. It was probably an error as regards the greatest Sophists, and is certainly an error, though even still commonly committed, as regards Nietzsche; see the convincing discussion of Nietzsche’s moral aim in Salter, Nietzsche the Thinker, chap. XXIV.

[122]. I may here, perhaps, remark that in the General Preface to my Studies in the Psychology of Sex I suggested that we now have to lay the foundation of a new casuistry, no longer theological and Christian, but naturalistic and scientific.

[123]. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. I (1918); vol. II (1922).

[124]. In an interesting pamphlet, Pessimismus? Spengler has since pointed out that he does not regard his argument as pessimistic. The end of a civilisation is its fulfilment, and there is still much to be achieved (though not, he thinks, along the line of art) before our own civilisation is fulfilled. With Spengler’s conception of that fulfilment we may, however, fail to sympathise.

[125]. See, for instance, W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 201, and S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 119.

[126]. Beauty is a dangerous conception to deal with, and the remembrance of this great saying may, perhaps, help to save us from the degrading notion that beauty merely inheres in objects, or has anything to do with the prim and smooth conventions which make prettiness. Even in the fine art of painting it is more reasonable to regard prettiness as the negation of beauty. It is possible to find beauty in Degas and Cézanne, but not in Bouguereau or Cabanel. The path of beauty is not soft and smooth, but full of harshness and asperity. It is a rose that grows only on a bush covered with thorns. As of goodness and of truth, men talk too lightly of Beauty. Only to the bravest and skilfullest is it given to break through the briers of her palace and kiss at last her enchanted lips.

[127]. Ruskin was what Spinoza has been called, a God-intoxicated man; he had a gift of divine rhapsody, which reached at times to inspiration. But it is not enough to be God-intoxicated, for into him whose mind is disorderly and ignorant and ill-disciplined the Gods pour their wine in vain. Spinoza’s mind was not of that kind, Ruskin’s too often was, so that Ruskin can never be, like Spinoza, a permanent force in the world of thought. His interest is outside that field, mainly perhaps psychological in the precise notation of a particular kind of æsthetic sensibility. The admiration of Ruskin cherished by Proust, himself a supreme master in this field, is significant.

[128]. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, chap. V, “Art and Morals.” Aristotle could have accepted the almost Freudian view of Croce that art is the deliverer, the process through which we overcome the stress of inner experiences by objectifying them (Æsthetics as Science of Expression, p. 35). But Plato could not accept Croce, still less Freud.

[129]. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1859), vol. II, p. 442. For a careful and detailed study of Schopenhauer’s conception of art, see A. Fauconnet, L’Esthétique de Schopenhauer (1913).

[130]. I find that I have here negligently ascribed to Bergson a metaphor which belongs to Croce, who at this point says the same thing as Bergson, though he gives it a different name. In Æsthetics as Science of Expression (English translation, p. 66) we read: “The world of which as a rule we have intuition [Bergson could not have used that word here] is a small thing.... ‘Here is a man, here is a horse, this is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me,’ etc. It is a medley of light and colour, which could not pictorially attain to any more sincere expression than a haphazard splash of colour, from among which would with difficulty stand out a few special distinctive traits. This and nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels tied to things take the place of things themselves.”

[131]. H. Bergson, Le Rire. For a clear, concise, and sympathetic exposition of Bergson’s standpoint, though without special reference to art, see Karin Stephen, The Misuse of Mind.

[132]. This may seem to cast a critical reflection on Croce. Let me, therefore, hasten to add that it is merely the personal impression that Croce, for all his virtuous aspirations after the concrete, tends to fall into verbal abstraction. He so often reminds one of that old lady who used to find (for she died during the Great War) such spiritual consolation in “that blessed word Mesopotamia.” This refers, however, to the earlier more than to the later Croce.

[133]. H. Rickert, System der Philosophie, vol. I (1921).

[134]. Before Baumgarten this distinction seems to have been recognised, though too vaguely and inconsistently, by Hutcheson, who is so often regarded as the real founder of modern æsthetics. W. R. Scott (Francis Hutcheson, p. 216) points out these two principles in Hutcheson’s work, “the Internal Senses, as derived from Reflection, representing the attitude of the ‘Spectator’ or observer in a picture gallery while, on the other hand, as deduced from εὐέργεια find a parallel in the artist’s own consciousness of success in his work, thus the former might be called static and the latter dynamic consciousness, or, in the special case of Morality, the first applies primarily to approval of the acts of others, the second to each individual’s approval of his own conduct.”

[135]. This would probably be recognised even by those moralists who, like Hutcheson, in their anxiety to make clear an important relationship, have spoken ambiguously. “Probably Hutcheson’s real thought,” remarks F. C. Sharp (Mind, 1921, p. 42), “is that the moral emotion, while possessing many important affinities with the æsthetic, is in the last resort different in content.”

[136]. Schopenhauer long ago pointed out that a picture should be looked at as a royal personage is approached, in silence, until the moment it pleases to speak to you, for, if you speak first (and how many critics one knows who “speak first”!), you expose yourself to hear nothing but the sound of your own voice. In other words, it is a spontaneous and “mystical” experience.

[137]. It is through Plotinus, also, that we realise how æsthetics is on the same plane, if not one, with mysticism. For by his insistence on Contemplation, which is æsthetics, we learn to understand what is meant when it is said, as it often is, that mysticism is Contemplation. (On this point, and on the early evolutions of Christian Mysticism, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism (1922).)

[138]. Really, however, Plotinus was here a Neo-Aristotelian rather than a Neo-Platonist, for Aristotle (Ethics, book X, chap. 6) had put the claim of the Contemplative life higher even than Plato and almost forestalled Plotinus. But as Aristotle was himself here a Platonist that does not much matter.

[139]. See Inge, Philosophy of Plotinus, p. 179. In a fine passage (quoted by Bridges in his Spirit of Man) Plotinus represents contemplation as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and bright vision. This “metaphysical Narcissism,” as Palante might call it, accords with the conception of various later thinkers, like Schopenhauer, and like Gaultier, who however, seldom refers to Plotinus.

[140]. R. Schmidt, Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (1921), vol. II.

[141]. E. Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Nietzsches, vol. II, p. 99.

[142]. W. M. Salter in his Nietzsche the Thinker—probably the best and most exact study of Nietzsche’s thought we possess—summarises Nietzsche’s “æsthetic metaphysics,” as he terms it (pp. 46-48), in words which apply almost exactly to Gaultier.

[143]. See especially his book Über den Nervösen Charakter (1912). It has been translated into English.

[144]. Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme, and various other of his works. Georges Palante has lucidly and concisely expounded the idea of Bovarism in a small volume, La Philosophie du Bovarysme (Mercure de France).

[145]. Gaultier has luminously discussed the relations of War, Civilisation, and Art in the Monde Nouveau, August, 1920, and February, 1921.

[146]. These are problems concerning which innocent people might imagine that the wise refrained from speculating, but, as a matter of fact, the various groups of philosophic devotees may be divided into those termed “Idealists” and those termed “Realists,” each assured of the superiority of his own way of viewing thought. Roughly speaking, for the idealist thought means the creation of the world, for the realist its discovery. But here (as in many differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee for which men have slain one another these thousands of years) there seem to be superiorities on both sides. Each looks at thought in a different aspect. But the idealist could hardly create the world with nothing there to make it from, nor the realist discover it save through creating it afresh. We cannot, so to put it, express in a single formula of three dimensions what only exists as a unity in four dimensions.

[147]. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), p. 235.

[148]. I may here be allowed to refer to another discussion of this point, Havelock Ellis, The Philosophy of Conflict, and Other Essays, pp. 57-68.

[149]. I may remark that Plato had long before attributed the same observation to the Pythagorean Timæus in the sublime and amusing dialogue that goes under that name: “Sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heavens, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolution of the years, have created Number, and have given us a conception of Time, and the powers of inquiring about the Nature of the Universe, and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.”

[150]. Jules de Gaultier, “La Guerre et les Destinées de l’Art,” Monde Nouveau, August, 1920.

[151]. Thus Einstein, like every true man of science, holds that cultural developments are not to be measured in terms of utilitarian technical advances, much as he has himself been concerned with such advances, but that, like the devotee of “Art for Art’s sake,” the man of science must proclaim the maxim, “Science for Science’s sake.”

[152]. In the foregoing paragraphs I have, in my own way, reproduced the thought, occasionally the words, of Jules de Gaultier, more especially in “La Moralité Esthétique” (Mercure de France, 15th December, 1921), probably the finest short statement of this distinguished thinker’s reflections on the matter in question.

[153]. Guyau, L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique, p. 163.

[154]. This diffused æsthetic sense is correlated with a diffused artistic instinct, based on craftsmanship, which the Greeks were afraid to recognise because they looked down with contempt on the handicrafts as vulgar. William Morris was a pioneer in asserting this association. As a distinguished English writer, Mr. Charles Marriott, the novelist and critic, clearly puts the modern doctrine: “The first step is to absorb, or re-absorb, the ‘Artist’ into the craftsman.... Once agree that the same æsthetic considerations which apply to painting a picture apply, though in a different degree, to painting a door, and you have emancipated labour without any prejudice to the highest meaning of art.... A good surface of paint on a door is as truly an emotional or æsthetic consideration as ‘significant form,’ indeed it is ‘significant form.’” (Nation and Athenæum, 1st July, 1922.) Professor Santayana has spoken in the same sense: “In a thoroughly humanised society everything—clothes, speech, manners, government—is a work of art.” (The Dial, June, 1922, p. 563.) It is, indeed, the general tendency to-day and is traceable in Croce’s later writings.

[155]. Thus it has often been pointed out that the Papuans are artists in design of the first rank, with a finer taste in some matters than the most highly civilised races of Europe. Professor R. Semon, who has some remarks to this effect (Correspondenzblatt of the German Anthropological Society, March, 1902), adds that their unfailing artistic sense is spread throughout the whole population and shown in every object of daily use.

[156]. The presence of a small minority of abnormal or perverse persons—there will be such, we may be sure, in every possible society—affords no excuse for restricting the liberty of the many to the standard of the few. The general prevalence of an æsthetic morality in classic times failed to prevent occasional outbursts of morbid sexual impulse in the presence of objects of art, even in temples. We find records of Pygmalionism and allied perversities in Lucian, Athenæus, Pliny, Valerius Maximus. Yet supposing that the Greeks had listened to the proposals of some strayed Puritan visitor, from Britain or New England, to abolish nude statues, or suppose that Plato, who wished to do away with imaginative literature as liable to demoralise, had possessed the influence he desired, how infinite the loss to all mankind! In modern Europe we not only propose such legal abolition; we actually, however in vain, carry it out. We seek to reduce all human existence to absurdity. It is, at the best, unnecessary, for we may be sure that, in spite of our efforts, a certain amount of absurdity will always remain.

[157]. A. M. Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem: A Study in Human Evolution (Oxford Press, 1922).

[158]. J. de Gaultier, “Art et Civilisation,” Monde Nouveau, February, 1921.