The Matrix of Humanism

The conception of human nature as developing behavior is, of course, accepted by all modern psychologists. If they study the child they are bound to consider him as potentially an adult. If they study the adult they are bound to regard him as originally a child. Abnormal psychology makes sense only insofar as it can be understood as an abnormal development of the personality, regardless of whether that abnormality is traceable to prenatal variations, to organic disease, or to functional disturbance. Folk psychology, whether or not one accepts the interesting but speculative hypothesis that there is a parallel between the development of the individual and the development of the race, is another mode of investigating the evolution of behavior. The concept of development is thoroughly established in psychology as the major clue to the understanding of human nature.

The moralist, since he is concerned with human nature, is compelled to employ this concept. But he employs it somewhat differently than the scientist. Being a moralist, he is interested in understanding the principles of behavior in order that he may understand the principles of right behavior. The psychologist, as such, is interested in the development of behavior, regardless of whether that development leads to misery or to happiness. He studies the various processes no matter where they lead. For in science the concept of development implies no judgment as to whether there is a good or a bad development. The development of an idiot and of a genius are on the same footing, and are theoretically of equal interest. But to the moralist the study of development is focused on the effort to discover those processes of development which can be made to produce right relationships between the individual and his environment, and by a right relationship he is bound to mean one in which there is an harmonious adjustment between desires and the objects of desire. How often, and how nearly, it is possible for human beings to approximate such perfection is an unanswerable question. The proof of that pudding lies in the eating of it, and it is not the function of the moralist under humanism to guarantee the outcome. His function is to point out as clearly as it is possible to do so the path which presumably leads toward the good life.

In describing that path he is bound to depend upon the best available insight into the processes by which good and bad adjustments are made. In the present state of our knowledge this means that he must rely to a very large degree upon his own intuitions, commonsense, and sense of life. Great progress has been made in scientific psychology within the last generation, enough progress, I think, to supplement in important ways our own unanalyzed and intuitive wisdom about life. But it would be idle to suppose that the science of psychology is in a stage where it can be used as a substitute for experienced and penetrating imaginative insight. We can be confident that on the whole a good meteorologist can tell us more about the weather than even the most weather-wise old sea captain. But we cannot have that kind of confidence in even the best of psychologists. Indeed, an acquaintance with psychologists will, I think, compel anyone to admit that, if they are good psychologists, they are almost certain to possess a gift of insight which is unaccounted for by their technical apparatus. Doubtless it is true that in all the sciences the difference between a good scientist and a poor one comes down at last, after all the technical and theoretical procedure has been learned, to some sort of residual flair for the realities of that subject. But in the study of human nature that residual flair, which seems to be composed of intuition, commonsense, and unconsciously deposited experience, plays a much greater role than it does in the more advanced sciences.

The uses of psychology to the moralist are, therefore, in confirming and correcting, in broadening and organizing, his insight into human nature. He is confronted, of course, with a great deal of confusion. There is, to begin with, no agreed terminology, and therefore it is often almost using the same word mean the same thing. Anyone who has stumbled about amidst words like instinct, impulse, consciousness, the unconscious, will know how confusing it all is. Psychologists are still using a literary language in which the connotations of words tend to overwhelm their precise signification. To make the confusion greater there is the elaborate system-making, the headstrong generalizing, and the fierce dogmatism which have produced the psychological sects. But all of this is characteristic of a young science, and if that is borne in mind, there is nothing disconcerting about it. The Eighteenth Century in dealing with the Newtonian physics, and the Nineteenth in dealing with the Darwinian biology, went through a hullabaloo similar to that which we are now going through in connection with behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and the so-called gestalt-theorie. Our only concern here is to ask whether underneath all the controversy there is not some trustworthy common ground on which the moralist can stand.

I have already said that there was common ground in the concept of development. We can go further than that, however, and say, I think, that with the help of psychology we are in position now to construct reliable and useful pictures, which confirm and correct our own intuitive understanding, of the infantile and of the mature approach to experience. We can, as it were, fix these two poles and regard the history of each soul as the history of its progress from infantilism to maturity. We are by no means able as yet to describe all the phases of development between these two poles; we know that progress is often temporarily interrupted, often completely arrested, and sometimes turned into a rout. But insofar as we are able to realize clearly what a fully matured character is like, the word progress has a meaning because we know what we mean by the goal of moral effort. That goal is maturity. If we knew all the stages in the development to maturity, and how to control them, we should have an adequate science of education, we could deal successfully with functional disorders, we should have a very great mastery of the art of life. For the problems of education are at bottom problems in how to lead the child from one stage of development to another until at last he becomes an harmonious and autonomous personality; the functional disorders of the character are problems in the fixations and repressions on the path to maturity; the art of living is to pass gracefully from youth to old age, and, at last, as Montaigne said, to learn to die.

It is this progress which we have to understand and imaginatively to conceive. For in conceiving it we conceive the matrix of humanism. In this conception is to be found, I believe, the substitute for that conception of divine government which gives shape and form to the theocratic culture. To replace the conception of man as the subject of a heavenly king, which dominates the whole ancestral order of life, humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity.