The new cosmos—a complex of matter and forces proceeding mechanically from spiral nebula to everlasting ice—took such a firm hold on the imagination of Europe that labels like spiritualism, spiritualist, spiritualistic[65] were employed to describe those who believed it was anything more, and even Vitalism and Vitalist to distinguish those who held that life, as such, had any purpose or significance. It is a curious remark that the erection within men’s imaginations of this severely mechanical framework for themselves was accompanied by, and may have been partly responsible for, an increase in their sense of self-consciousness. The more automatic the cosmos, apparently, the more the vital ego must needs feel itself detached. At any rate, we find upwards of forty words hyphened with self created in the nineteenth century, and of these only about six (self-acting, self-regulating, ...) are mechanical. Nor was it only the material world from which men felt themselves more aloof. Herbert Spencer remarked on the recent extension of the meaning of the word phenomenon to cover the thoughts of human beings—a point of view which suggests an increased degree of detachment even from thought itself; and an enormous number of words with terminations such as -ism, -ist, -ite, -ology, -arian, are indications of a more contemplative attitude to all that we ourselves do and feel and think. What a difference between being feminine and being a feminist, between hope and optimism, romance and romanticism, between Christianity and Christology, between liking vegetables and being a vegetarian! We are hardly conscious at all of being human, more of being humane, more still of being humanitarian, and very conscious indeed of being humanitarianists.

Detachment, however, spells freedom; and words are not wanting to remind us of that enhanced sense of the value of individual liberty which now found expression in the writings of the great Romantics and of men like John Stuart Mill. Autonomy had not been applied to individuals, but only to states and societies, until the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century the adjective autonomous was introduced. We may compare liberalism and liberal-minded with the old libertine; authoritarian implies a feeling in him who uses the word that all authority, as such, is bad; the nineteenth century also saw the distinction between broad-minded and narrow-minded, and between obscurantism and enlightenment—a word which met with some opposition, according to FitzEdward Hall, who records in his Modern English (1873) that:

Enlightenment is, to this day, always used by a certain class of English writers with a manifest sneer. The writers referred to are those who would rather have been born under the rule of the barons than under the inchoate rule of reason, and would gladly exchange the age of science for the ages of faith and folly. Those who object to the word will ordinarily be found to object to all that it stands for.

Since the sense of freedom often appeared at its strongest in imaginations which were most possessed with the mechanical view of the universe, the paradox was not infrequent—especially in Germany—of philosophers and scientists insisting fiercely on the freedom of thought and using it to deny the possibility of any freedom at all! Such thinkers found the word Determinism useful to express the mechanical part of the old predestination without the latter’s theological assumptions.

Other words which seem to be connected with the same trend of thought are those that confine themselves to expressing a sense of the worth and dignity of man, as man, and irrespective of his cosmic connections. Such are humanism,[66] humanitarian,[66] humanitarianism, individualism, individualist, individualistic, and many of the self words, such as Carlyle’s self-help, or the semantic change of self-respect, which is first recorded as used with a praiseworthy meaning in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Now the consciousness of the absolute value and infinite potentiality of each human soul is revealed, as we saw, by the words in which it first began to take verbal form, as having been essentially an attribute of Christianity. Yet how differently these nineteenth-century words sound from the Christian vocabulary of the human and social virtues—charity, lovingkindness, mercy, pity, and the like! The modern words seem to be related to these glowing old Christian terms as the unemphasized, because unquestioned, mutual affection of a happy couple is related to the voluble ardours of courting. They preserve, we may say—they have even greatly developed—that divine sense of the value and autonomy of each individual human soul. But it is now more of a political autonomy. It is as though they respected it rather from a manly sense of obligation, and the sense of obligation is even extended, as we see in the later semantic development of humane, humanity, and humanitarian, to the brutes.

Thus, if the one outlook is indeed a lineal descendant of the other, we are constrained to ask a little sadly what had become of a certain sunny element, a suppressed poetic energy, a wonder and a wild surprise, which lurks in the former words, but somehow—with all our respect for them—not in the latter. And for light upon this question we must turn to yet another group of words—small, yet of such far-reaching implications as to demand a final chapter to themselves.

CHAPTER XI
IMAGINATION

Art. Fiction. Creative. Genius. Romantic. Fancy. Imagination. Dream.