Modern Communion

But, you will say, granted that the breakdown of authority in a complicated world has left men spiritually homeless, and made their souls uneasy; granted that it may be possible to exorcise many of the bogeys which haunt them, and to cultivate a natural worldliness in which economic and sexual terror will have been reduced; granted that women are tending to create a new environment for the child in which the property sense will not be stimulated morbidly, and where cooperation will become as obvious as obedience and isolation were in the past; suppose too, that an expanding civilization gives such varied resources that man will live more fully, and rely less on the compensations of thwarted desire; suppose that the spirit of science pervades his daily work, not as a mutilated specialty, but as a rich interest in the world with a vivid desire to shape it,—suppose all that, would there not be lacking the one supreme virtue of the older creeds, their capacity for binding the world together?

There would be justice in such a criticism. There is a terrible loneliness that comes to men when they realize their feebleness before a brutally uninterested universe. In his own life-work, say as a teacher, a person may be making some one class-room more serviceable to a few children. But he will feel, as the more imaginative teachers do, that his work is like that of Sisyphus, he no sooner achieves a thing than it is undone. How can he educate a child for a few hours a day, when the home, the streets, the newspapers, the movies, the shop, are all busy miseducating? Wherever there is a constructive man at work you are likely to find this same complaint, that he is working alone, tie may be heartwhole and eager, without bogeys or unnecessary fears. He may be free of the weaknesses that have reared so many faiths, and yet he seeks assurance in a communion with something outside himself, at the most perhaps, in a common purpose, at least, in a fellowship effort.

Religions have placed human action in a large and friendly setting. They have enabled men to play their little role by making it essential to the drama of eternity. 'God needs me, Christ died for me, after all I may be a poor creature, but I'm indispensable.’ And, as if by feeling themselves part of greatness, men have added to their stature. So even the meekest freshman in a grandstand is a more exalted person because his college team has captured the front page of the newspapers. He may be merely one in thousands who cheered for the eleven heroes, yet somehow he has partaken of their heroism. He is like the cockney who talks of 'our Empire,’ like the Irish immigrants who tell how we licked the British at Yorktown, like the crank whose society of eight people is entitled 'Association for Advancing the Human Race.’ It is well known that in a strike it matters enormously whether the men are fighting for a 'fair day's wage’ or for 'the emancipation of labor.’

The history of martyrs is the history of people who expanded to their faith. Indeed, men have shaken destiny because they felt they embodied it. Patriotism, the Cause, Humanity, Perfection, Righteousness, Liberty,—all of them large and windy abstractions to outsiders, are more powerful than dynamite to those who feel them. 'My country is the world,’ said Garrison, while Boston hated him. 'I fight for women,’ says Mrs. Pankhurst. 'I am a fate,’ said Nietzsche. 'This is the true joy in life,’ says Bernard Shaw, 'the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.’

It is no idle question then to ask what there is in the outlook of a modern man to bind his world together. Well, if he is looking for absolute assurance, an infallible refuge in weakness and terror, we have to answer that there is no such certainty. He may learn that while there is no promise of ultimate salvation, there is at least no fear of ultimate damnation; that in the modern world things are not so irremediable, and he may meet a large charity in its endless variety. He can find some understanding, an assurance perhaps of life's resiliency, he may come to know that nothing is so final as he thought it was, that the future is not staked on one enterprise, that life rises out of its own ashes, and renews its own opportunities. But if he demands personal guarantees, he may have to lie in order to get them.

Almost all men do require something to focus their interest in order to sustain it. A great idea like Socialism has done that for millions. But Socialism simply as a great passion can easily produce its superstitions and its barbarisms. What men need in their specialties in order to enable them to cooperate is not alone a binding passion, but a common discipline. Science, I believe, implies such a discipline. It is the fact that scientists approach the world with an understood method that enables them to give and take from each other whether they live in Calcutta or in San Francisco. The scientific world is the best example we have to-day of how specialists can cooperate. Of course there are profound disagreements, intrigues, racial and national prejudices, even among scientific men, for a common method will not wipe out the older cleavages, and it is not a perfectly cohesive force. But for the kind of civilization we are entering it is as yet the best we know.

There are undoubtedly beginnings of such a common method in public affairs. We read English books for help in dealing with American conditions. Social legislation is to-day a world-wide interest, so that reformers in Oregon may draw upon Australasian experiment. The labor movement has international organization with the result that its experience becomes available for use. There is no need to multiply examples. Instruments of a cooperative mind are being forged, be it the world-wide moving picture or some immense generalization of natural science.

This work has aroused in many men the old sense of cosmic wonder, and called forth devotion to impersonal ends. Nor can it be denied that in the study of institutions, in laboratories of research, there have appeared the same loyalty and courage to which the old religions could point as to their finest flower. Moreover, these devotions which science can show, come in the main redeemed from barbarism and pointed to civilized use. There is, to be sure, a certain raw novelty in modern forms of devotion, as there is in uninhabited houses, in new clothes and in new wine—they have hardly felt the mellowing of human contact, that saturation of brute things with the qualities of their users, which makes men love the old, the inadequate, the foolish, as against what is sane and clean, but unfamiliar. Science, too, is a concrete and essentially humble enterprise; spiritually sufficient it may be, to-day, only for the more robust. But the release from economic want, the emancipation from manufactured bogeys, the franker acceptance of normal desire, should tend to make men surer of themselves. And so most of them may not find it necessary to believe the impossible, but will reach their satisfaction in contemplating reality, in decorating it, shaping it, and conquering it.

They may find, as Santayana suggests, that 'to see better what we now see, to see by anticipation what we should actually see under other conditions, is wonderfully to satisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientific thinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does. It summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fatal direction upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeed absorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow, have to be satisfied by dramatic myths .... All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts from the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross and basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opens through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps, we recognize that in science we are surveying all it concerns us to know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be.’

For the discipline of science is the only one which gives any assurance that from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the same conclusion. And as the modern world can be civilized only by the effort of innumerable people we have a right to call science the discipline of democracy. No omnipotent ruler can deal with our world, nor the scattered anarchy of individual temperaments. Mastery is inevitably a matter of cooperation, which means that a great variety of people working in different ways must find some order in their specialties. They will find it, I think, in a common discipline which distinguishes between fact and fancy, and works always with the implied resolution to make the best out of what is possible.

For behind this development of common method there are profound desires at work. As yet they are vaguely humanitarian. But they can be enriched by withdrawing them from vague fantasy in order to center them on a conception of what human life might be. This is what morality meant to the Greeks in their best period, an estimate of what was valuable, not a code of what should be forbidden. It is this task that morality must resume, for with the reappearance of a deliberate worldliness, it means again a searching for the sources of earthly happiness.

In some men this quest may lead to luminous passion. 'the state-making dream,’ Wells calls it, and he speaks of those who 'have imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms of harbors and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with Passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly everyone who reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering response.’ And then with careful truth he adds, 'But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.’

We begin to recognize a vague spirit which may suggest a common purpose. We live in a fellowship with scientists whose books we cannot read, with educators whose work we do not understand. Conservative critics laugh at what they call the futurist habit of mind. It is very easy to point out how blind and unintelligent is the enthusiasm of liberal people, how eager they are to accept Bergson, Montessori, Freud and the Cubists. But there is something fundamentally dull in these sneers. For granted the faddishness of modern people, there is yet more than faddishness in being friendly to novelty in a novel environment. It is the glimmer of intention, the absurd, human contradictory sign of faith. Men call it by different names—progress, the welfare of the race—-it is perhaps not ready for precise formulation in a neat and inspiring slogan. But nevertheless, it is the business of critics to understand these beginnings, for they are already a great practical force. They enable men to share their hopes with strangers, to travel about and talk to people of widely different professions and origin, yet to find the assurance that they are part of a great undertaking.