CHAPTER
XII
The Office
and Limitations of the Reason
IF THE reason is not the sovereign master of our being nor
even intended to be more than an intermediary or minister, it cannot succeed in
giving a perfect law to the other estates of the realm, although it may impose
on them a temporary and imperfect order as a passage to a higher perfection.
The rational or intellectual man is not the last and highest ideal of manhood,
nor would a rational society be the last and highest expression of the
possibilities of an aggregate human life, -
unless indeed we give to the
word, reason, a wider meaning than it now possesses and include in it the
combined wisdom of all our powers of knowledge, those which stand below and
above the understanding and logical mind as well as this strictly rational part
of our nature. The Spirit that manifests itself in man and dominates secretly
the phases of his development, is greater and profounder than his intellect and
drives towards a perfection that cannot be shut in by the arbitrary
constructions of the human reason.
Meanwhile, the intellect performs its
function; it leads man to the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places
him with unbandaged eyes on that wide threshold where
a more luminous Angel has to take him by the hand. It takes first the lower
powers of his existence, each absorbed in its own urge, each striving with a
blind self-sufficiency towards the fulfilment of its own instincts and primary impulses;
it teaches them to understand themselves and to look through the reflecting
eyes of the intelligence on the laws of their own action. It enables them to
discern intelligently the high in themselves from the low, the pure from the
impure and out of a crude confusion to arrive at more and more luminous
formulas of their possibilities. It gives them self-knowledge and is a guide,
teacher, purifier, liberator. For
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it enables them also to look beyond themselves and at each other and to
draw upon each other for fresh motives and a richer working. It strengthens and
purifies the hedonistic and the aesthetic activities and softens their quarrel
with the ethical mind and instinct; it gives them solidity and seriousness,
brings them to the support of the practical and dynamic powers and allies them
more closely to the strong actualities of life. It sweetens the ethical will by
infusing into it psychic, hedonistic and aesthetic elements and ennobles by all
these separately or together the practical, dynamic and utilitarian temperament
of the human being. At the same time it plays the part of a judge and
legislator, seeks to fix rules, provide systems and regularised combinations
which shall enable the powers of the human soul to walk by a settled path and
act according to a sure law, an ascertained measure and in a balanced rhythm.
Here it finds after a time that its legislative action becomes a force for
limitation and turns into a bondage and that the regularised system which it
has imposed in the interests of order and conservation becomes a cause of
petrifaction and the sealing up of the fountains of life. It has to bring in
its own saving faculty of doubt. Under the impulse of the intelligence warned
by the obscure revolt of the oppressed springs of life, ethics, aesthetics, the
social, political, economic rule begin to question themselves and, if this at
first brings in again some confusion, disorder and uncertainty, yet it awakens
new movements of imagination, insight, self-knowledge and self. realisation by
which old systems and formulas are transformed or disappear, new experiments
are made and in the end larger potentialities and combinations are brought into
play. By this double action of the intelligence, affirming and imposing what it
has seen and again in due season questioning what has been accomplished in
order to make a new affirmation, fixing a rule and order and liberating from
rule and order, the progress of the race is assured, however uncertain may seem
its steps and stages.
But the action of the intelligence is not
only turned downward and outward upon our subjective and external life to
understand it and determine the law and order of its present movement and its
future potentialities. It has also an upward and inward eye and a more luminous
functioning by which it accepts
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divinations from the hidden eternities. It is opened in this power of
vision to a Truth above it from which it derives, however imperfectly and as
from behind a veil, an indirect knowledge of the universal principles of our
existence and its possibilities; it receives and turns what it can seize of
them into intellectual forms and these provide us with large governing ideas by
which our efforts can be shaped and around which they can be concentrated or massed;
it defines the ideals which we seek to accomplish. It provides us with the
great ideas that are forces (idees
forces),
ideas
which in their own strength impose themselves upon our life and compel it
into their moulds. Only the forms we give these ideas are intellectual; they
themselves descend from a plane of truth of being where knowledge and force are
one, the idea and the power of self-fulfilment in the idea are inseparable.
Unfortunately, when translated into the forms of our intelligence which acts
only by a separating and combining analysis and synthesis and into the effort
of our life which advances by a sort of experimental and empirical seeking,
these powers become disparate and conflicting ideals which we have all the
difficulty in the world to bring into any kind of satisfactory harmony. Such
are the primary principles of liberty and order, good, beauty and truth, the
ideal of power and the ideal of love, individualism and collectivism, self-
denial and self-fulfilment and a hundred others. In each sphere of human life,
in each part of our being and our action the intellect presents us with the
opposition of a number of such master ideas and such conflicting principles. It
finds each to be a truth to which something essential in our being responds, - in our higher nature a law, in
our lower nature an instinct.
It
seeks
to fulfil each in turn, builds a system of action
round
it
and goes from one to the other and back again to what it has left. Or it tries
to combine them but is contented with none of the combinations it has made
because none brings about their perfect reconciliation or their satisfied
oneness. That indeed belongs to a larger and higher consciousness, not yet
attained by mankind, where these opposites are ever harmonised and even unified
because in their origin they are eternally one. But still every enlarged
attempt of the intelligence thus dealing with
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our inner and outer life increases the width and wealth of our nature,
opens it to larger possibilities of self-knowledge and self-realisation and
brings us nearer to our awakening into that greater consciousness.
The individual and social progress of
man has been thus a double movement of self-illumination and self-harmonising
with the intelligence and the intelligent will as the intermediaries between
his soul and its works. He has had to bring out numberless possibilities of
self-understanding, self-mastery, self- formation out of his first crude life
of instincts and impulses; he has been constantly impelled to convert that
lower animal or half-animal existence with its imperfect self-conscience into
the stuff of intelligent being, instincts into ideas, impulses into ordered
movements of an intelligent will. But as he has to proceed out of ignorance
into knowledge by a slow labour of self-recognition and mastery of his
surroundings and his material and his intelligence is incapable of seizing
comprehensively the whole of himself in knowledge, unable to work out
comprehensively the mass of his possibilities in action, he has had to proceed
piecemeal, by partial experiments, by creation of different types, by a
constant swinging backward and forward between the various possibilities before
him and the different elements he has to harmonise.
It is not only that he has to contrive
continually some new harmony between the various elements of his being,
physical, vitalistic, practical and dynamic,
aesthetic, emotional and hedonistic, ethical, intellectual, but each of them
again has to arrive at some order of its own disparate materials. In his ethics
he is divided by different moral tendencies, justice and charity, self-help and
altruism, self-increase and self-abnegation, the tendencies of strength and the
tendencies of love, the moral rule of activism and the moral rule of quietism.
His emotions are necessary to his development and their indulgence essential to
the outtlowering of his rich humanity; yet is he
constantly called upon to coerce and deny them, nor is there any sure rule to
guide him in the perplexity of this twofold need. His hedonistic impulse is
called many ways by different fields, objects, ideals of self-satisfaction. His
aesthetic enjoyment, his aesthetic
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creation forms for itself under the stress of the intelligence different
laws and forms; each seeks to impose itself as the best and the standard, yet
each, if its claim were allowed, would by its unjust victory impoverish and
imprison his faculty and his felicity in its exercise. His politics and society
are a series of adventures and experiments among various possibilities of
autocracy, monarchism, military aristocracy, mercantile oligarchy, open or
veiled plutocracy, pseudo-democracy of various kinds, bourgeois or proletarian,
individualistic or collectivist or bureaucratic, socialism awaiting him,
anarchism looming beyond it: and all these correspond to some truth of his
social being, some need of his complex social nature, some instinct of force in
it which demands that form for its effectuation. Mankind works out these
difficulties under the stress of the spirit within it by throwing out a
constant variation of types, types of character and temperament, types of
practical activity, aesthetic creation, polity, society, ethical order,
intellectual system, which vary from the pure to the mixed, from the simple
harmony to the complex; each and all of these are so many experiments of
individual and collective self-formation in the light of a progressive and
increasing knowledge. That knowledge is governed by a number of conflicting
ideas and ideals around which these experiments group themselves: each of them
is gradually pushed as far as possible in its purity and again mixed and
combined as much as possible with others so that there may be a more complex
form and an enriched action. Each type has to be broken in turn to yield place
to new types and each combination has to give way to the possibility of a new
combination. Through it all there is growing an accumulating stock of
self-experience and self-actualisation of which the ordinary man accepts some
current formulation conventionally as if it were an absolute law and truth, -
often
enough
he even thinks it to be that, - but which the more developed
human being seeks always either to break or to enlarge and make more profound
or subtle in order to increase or make room for an increase of human capacity,
perfectibility, happiness.
This view of human life and
of the process of our develop-
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ment, to which subjectivism
readily leads us, gives us a truer vision of the place of the intellect in the
human movement. We have seen that the ,intellect has a double working,
dispassionate and interested, self-centred or subservient to movements not its
own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake of Truth and of
knowledge for the sake of Knowledge without any ulterior motive, with every
consideration put away except the rule of keeping the eye on the object, on the
fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its law. The other
is coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern life by the truth
discovered or the fascination of an idea which we labour to establish as the
sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that this is the
superiority of reason over the other faculties of man that it is not confined
to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the others,
discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them and
even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also their ends and arrives at a
catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its
widest sense is his principal preoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its
utility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge.
But it is precisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that
the human intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which pursues
all human action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is
nothing to be said: the reason is performing its natural function; it is
exercising securely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the
scientist, the savant labouring to add something to the stock of our
ascertainable knowledge, there is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in
that of the poet and artist creating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight
of the race. Whatever individual error and limitation there may be, does not
matter; for the collective and progressive knowledge of the race has gained the
truth that has been discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error.
It is when it tries to apply ideas to life that the human intellect
stumbles and finds itself at fault.
Ordinarily, this is because in
concerning itself with action
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the intelligence of man becomes at once partial and passionate and makes
itself the servant of something other than the pure truth. But even if the
intellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as possible, -
and altogether impartial,
altogether disinterested
the human intellect cannot be unless it is content to arrive at an entire
divorce from practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism,
eclecticism or sceptical curiosity, - still the truths it discovers or the
ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are applied to life, the plaything
of forces over which the reason has little control. Science pursuing its cold
and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side a practical
humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual
destruction; it has made possible a gigantic efficiency of organisation which
has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the
nations and on the other for turning each into a colossal battering- ram of
aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a large
rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a
godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and
success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same
time crushed it with the burden of a monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due,
as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of
idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers
of good and evil and provided an intellectual conviction both for reaction and
for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded
men to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression.
The truth is that upon which we
are now insisting, that reason is in its nature an imperfect light with a large
but still restricted mission and that once it applies itself to life and action
it becomes subject to what it studies and the servant and counsellor of the
forces in whose obscure and ill-understood struggle it intervenes. It can in
its nature be used and has always been used to justify any idea, theory of
life, system of society or government, ideal of individual or collective action
to which the will of man attaches itself for the moment or through the
centuries In philosophy it gives equally good
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reason monism and pluralism or for any halting-place between them, for
the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism,
for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism
and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else. In
aesthetics it supplies the basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an
idealistic, religious or mystic theory of art or for the most earthy realism.
It can with equal power base austerely a strict and narrow moralism
or prove triumphantly the thesis of the antinomian. It has been the sufficient
and convincing prophet of every kind of autocracy or oligarchy and of every
species of democracy; it supplies excellent and satisfying reasons for
competitive individualism and equally excellent and satisfying reasons for
communism or against communism and for State socialism or for one variety of
socialism against another. It can place itself with equal effectivity at the
service of utilitarianism, economism, hedonism,
aestheticism, sensualism, ethicism,
ideal- ism or any other essential need or activity of man and build around it a
philosophy, a political and social system, a theory of conduct and life. Ask it
not to lean to one idea alone, but to make an eclectic combination or a
synthetic harmony and it will satisfy you; only, there being any number of
possible combinations or harmonies, it will equally well justify the one or the
other and set up or throw down anyone of them according as the spirit in man is
attracted to or withdraws from it. For it is really that which decides and the
reason is only a brilliant servant and minister of this veiled and secret
sovereign.
This truth is hidden from the
rationalist because he is supported by two constant articles of faith, first
that his own reason is right and the reason of others who differ from him is
wrong, and secondly that whatever may be the present deficiencies of the human
intellect, the collective human reason will eventually arrive at purity and be
able to found human thought and life securely on a clear rational basis
entirely satisfying to the intelligence. His first article of faith is no doubt
the common expression of our egoism and arrogant fallibility, but it is also
something more; it expresses this truth that it is the legitimate function of
the reason to justify to man his action and his hope and the
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faith that is in him and to
give him that idea and knowledge,
however
restricted,
and that dynamic conviction, however narrow
and intolerant, which he needs in order that he may live, act and grow in the
highest light available to him. The reason cannot grasp all truth in its
embrace because truth is too infinite for it; but still it does grasp the
something of it which we immediately need, and its insufficiency does not
detract from the value of its work, but is rather the measure of its value. For
man is not intended to grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but to move
towards it through a succession of experiences and a constant, though not by
any means perfectly continuous self-enlargement. The first business of reason
then is to justify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him
faith and conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings.
It justifies to him now this, now that, the experiences of the moment, the
receding light of the past, the half-seen vision of the future. Its
inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining opposite
views are the whole secret of its value. It would not do indeed for it to
support too conflicting views in the same individual, except at moments of
awakening and transition, but in the collective body of men and in the
successions of Time that is its whole business. For so man moves towards the
infinity of the Truth by the experience of its variety; so his reason helps him
to build, change, destroy what he has built and prepare a new construction, in
a word, to progress, grow, enlarge himself in his self-knowledge and
world-knowledge and their works.
The second article of faith of the believer in
reason is also an error and yet contains a truth. The reason cannot arrive at
any final truth because it can neither get to the root of things nor embrace
the totality of their secrets; it deals with the finite, the separate, the
limited aggregate, and has no measure for the all and the infinite. Nor can
reason found a perfect life for man or a perfect society. A purely rational
human life would be a life baulked and deprived of its most powerful dynamic
sources; it would be a substitution of the minister for the sovereign. A purely
rational society could not come into being and, if it could be born, either
could not live or would sterilise and petrify human existence. The root powers
of human life, its intimate causes
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are below, irrational, and they are above, suprarational. But this is
true that by constant enlargement, purification, openness the reason of man is
bound to arrive at an intelligent sense even of that which is hidden from it, a
power of passive yet sympathetic reflection of the Light that surpasses it. Its
limit is reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, "There
is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is
his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been,
slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until
there is only my own luminous veil between you and him. Remove that and make
the soul of man one in fact and nature with this Divine; then you will know
yourself, discover the highest and widest law of your being, become the
possessors or at least the receivers and instruments of a higher will and
knowledge than mine and lay hold at last on the true secret and the whole sense
of a human and yet divine living."
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