CHAPTER XV.
THE TWO AGES OF REASON.
The eighteenth century—it has been often said—was a rationalising, unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared to be par excellence the founder and the patron of the historical method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian, pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training. To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was the task of enlightenment in dealing with all institutions. To remove all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to facilitate the right to pursue happiness[1], was the chief watchword of this movement. Its questions were—Is religion, Is art and science, Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well cling to the happiness of the barbarian.
That these are important questions, and that the purposes above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims, there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class, already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life. Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation, they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and what their understandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all else was a survival from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body: and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes all sorts of people to make a world: but each class—and the order of literature and intelligence is no exception—tends to set itself up as the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class, the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly complementary. Such a class, again—though there are of course conspicuous exceptions—is, by the stress of special interests, removed from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main may be styled an artificial life.
When such a class asked what were the benefits of art or religion, it thought first of itself; and it looked upon art and religion—and the same would be true of philosophy and science, or of political sanctions—as merely objective and outward entities, foreign to the individual, yet by some mechanical influences brought into connexion with him,—as one might apply to him a drug or a viand. But clearly to a person of practical aims, bent on conveying information and enlightenment, bent on making all men as like each other as possible in the medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable, the utility of some of these things is questionable and limited. It is only a little modicum of religion, of art and of science, which can be justified by its obvious pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point the thesis against enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that has followed the steps of art, and to the lives wasted in the zeal for increasing knowledge. In his ideal of human life such a practical reformer will tend to suppress all that bears too clear a trace of natural, infra-rational, non-intelligent kindred,—all that ties us too closely to mother earth and universal nature.
But if this was the dominant tone of the literary teachers who had chief audience from the public ear, there was no lack of dissentient voices who appealed to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment and imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the knee to the great idols of enlightened middle-class utilitarianism. Even in the leaders of the enlightening host—amongst the chiefs of the Aufklärung—there is a breadth and a depth of human interest which sets them far above their average followers, and which should prevent us from joining without discrimination in the depreciatory judgments so often passed on the eighteenth century. The pioneers in the great emancipatory movement of modern times should not be allowed to suffer from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar imitators—still less refused the meed of gratitude we owe them. But when their ideas were violently translated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling process was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of their theories were made to show even greater than they were: and inevitable reaction set in. Even the revolutionist himself has come to admit that fraternity at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty and equality[2]. But these drawbacks were accentuated when the cosmopolitan reform-movement, by its haste and intolerance, awakened the spirit of national jealousy. The deeper instincts of life rose in protest against the supposed superiority of intellect: the heart claimed its rights against the head: the man of nature and feeling was roused up to meet the man of reasoning and criticism. The spirit of war evoked those energies of human nature—some of them not its least valuable—which had slumbered in times of easy-going peace. The days of adversity and humiliation taught men that the march of literary culture is not the all-in-all of life and history.
It was made apparent, practically at least, that intelligence, with its hard and fast formulae, its logical principles, its keen analysis, was not deep enough or wide enough to justify its claim to the august title of reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive, patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to prove the claim to mere intelligence. To be intelligent is to seize the right means to execute a given or accepted end—it is to be quick and correct in the practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been determined on in general. Understanding plays upon the surface of life and deals with the momentary case: and its greatest praise is to be fleet in the application of principles, apt to detect the point on which to direct action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clearsighted, prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue in a given sphere: but the sphere must be given, and its end constituted in the measured round of practical life, its system complete: or, understanding is bewildered before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is—the improvident cynic might say—a certain animal-like sagacity—(such cynical philosophers were perhaps Hobbes and Schopenhauer[3])—a mere power of carrying out a given rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so, perhaps, through a long chain of intermediate links and means.
But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in the philosophy of the logical intellect. The subtilitas naturae[4] far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this century called reason[5]. It is in life as much as in our mind. It comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition by which man had treated nature as a mere world of objects—things to be used and to minister to his pleasure—but always alien to him, always mere matter to be manipulated ab extra. Yet even to get full use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only something analogous to sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere emotional operation. The imagination in question is the 'scientific' imagination—the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a fact—a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection, but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.