76.  Sir Oliver Lodge, Reason and Belief, p. 19.

77.  It is scarcely necessary to point out that a differentiation of function has to be made sooner or later, and sometimes it is made soon. This was so among the Todas of India. “Certain Todas,” says Dr. Rivers (The Todas, 1906, p. 249), “have the power of divination, others are sorcerers, and others again have the power of curing diseases by means of spells and rites, while all three functions are quite separate from those of the priest or sharman. The Todas have advanced some way towards civilisation of function in this respect, and have as separate members of the community their prophets, their magicians, and their medicine-men in addition to their priests.”

78.  Joël, Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Romantik (1903); Nietzsche und die Romantik (1905). But I am here quoting from Professor Joël’s account of his own philosophical development in Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, vol. I (1921).

79.  In connection with this scheme, it may be interesting to note, I prepared, in 1879, a questionnaire on “conversion,” on the lines of the investigations which some years later began to be so fruitfully carried out by the psychologists of religion in America.

80.  It must be remembered that for science the mechanistic assumption always remains; it is, as Vaihinger would say, a necessary fiction. To abandon it is to abandon science. Driesch, the most prominent vitalist of our time, has realised this, and in his account of his own mental development (Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, vol. I, 1921) he shows how, beginning as a pupil of Haeckel and working at zoölogy for many years, after adopting the theory of vitalism he abandoned all zoölogical work and became a professor of philosophy. When the religious spectator, or the æsthetic spectator (as is well illustrated in the French review L’Esprit Nouveau), sees the “machinery” as something else than machinery he is legitimately going outside the sphere of science, but he is not thereby destroying the basic assumption of science.

81.  Long ago Edith Simcox (in a passage of her Natural Law which chanced to strike my attention very soon after the episode above narrated) well described “conversion” as a “spiritual revolution,” not based on any single rational consideration, but due to the “cumulative evidence of cognate impressions” resulting, at a particular moment, not in a change of belief, but in a total rearrangement and recolouring of beliefs and impressions, with the supreme result that the order of the universe is apprehended no longer as hostile, but as friendly. This is the fundamental fact of “conversion,” which is the gate of mysticism.

82.  How we are to analyse the conception of “universe”—apart from its personal emotional tone, which is what mainly concerns us—is, of course, a matter that must be left altogether open and free. Sir James Frazer at the end of his Golden Bough (“Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, p. 306) finds that the “universe” is an “ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought,” or, he adds, suddenly shifting to a less idealistic and more realistic standpoint, “shadows on the screen.” That is a literary artist’s metaphysical way of describing the matter and could not occur to any one who was not familiar with the magic lantern which has now developed into the cinema, beloved of philosophers for its symbolic significance. Mr. Bertrand Russell, a more abstract artist, who would reject any such “imaginative admixture” as he would find in Frazer’s view, once severely refused to recognise any such thing as a “universe,” but has since less austerely admitted that there is, after all, a “set of appearances,” which may fairly be labelled “reality,” so long as we do not assume “a mysterious Thing-in-Itself behind the appearances.” (Nation, 6th January, 1923.) But there are always some people who think that an “appearance” must be an appearance of Something, and that when a “shadow” is cast on the screen of our sensory apparatus it must be cast by Something. So every one defines the “universe” in his own way, and no two people—not even the same person long—can define it in the same way. We have to recognise that even the humblest of us is entitled to his own “universe.”

83.  The simple and essential outlines of “conversion” have been obscured because chiefly studied in the Churches among people whose prepossessions and superstitions have rendered it a highly complex process, and mixed up with questions of right and wrong living which, important as they are, properly form no part of religion. The man who waits to lead a decent life until he has “saved his soul” is not likely to possess a soul that is worth saving. How much ignorance prevails in regard to “conversion,” even among the leaders of religious opinion, and what violent contrasts of opinion—in which sometimes both the opposing parties are mistaken—was well illustrated by a discussion on the subject at the Church Congress at Sheffield in 1922. A distinguished Churchman well defined “conversion” as a unification of character, involving the whole man,—will, intellect, and emotion,—by which a “new self” was achieved; but he also thought that this great revolutionary process consisted usually in giving up some “definite bad habit,” very much doubted whether sudden conversion was a normal phenomenon at all, and made no attempt to distinguish between that kind of “conversion” which is merely the result of suggestion and auto-suggestion, after a kind of hysterical attack produced by feverish emotional appeals, and that which is spontaneous and of lifelong effect. Another speaker went to the opposite extreme by asserting that “conversion” is an absolutely necessary process, and an Archbishop finally swept away “conversion” altogether by declaring that the whole of the religious life (and the whole of the irreligious life?) is a process of conversion. (The Times, 12th October, 1922.) It may be a satisfaction to some to realise that this is a matter on which it is vain to go to the Churches for light.

84.  Dean Inge (Philosophy of Plotinus, vol. II, p. 165) has some remarks on Plotinus in relation to asceticism.

85.  Jules de Gaultier (La Philosophie officielle et la Philosophie, p. 150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was contained in one syllable: Om. But those monks, he adds, belonged to “the only philosophic race that ever existed” and by the aid of their pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset, all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian tradition are but as fairy-tales told to children.

86.  We must always remember that “Church” and “religion,” though often confused, are far from being interchangeable terms. “Religion” is a natural impulse, “Church” is a social institution. The confusion is unfortunate. Thus Freud (Group Psychology, p. 51) speaks of the probability of religion disappearing and Socialism taking its place. He means not “religion,” but a “Church.” We cannot speak of a natural impulse disappearing, an institution easily may.

87.  It must be remembered that “intuition” is a word with all sorts of philosophical meanings, in addition to its psychological meanings (which were studied some years ago by Dearborn in the Psychological Review). For the ancient philosophic writers, from the Neo-Platonists on, it was usually a sort of special organ for coming in contact with supernatural realities; for Bergson it is at once a method superior to the intellect for obtaining knowledge and a method of æsthetic contemplation; for Croce it is solely æsthetic, and art is at once “intuition” and “expression” (by which he means the formation of internal images). For Croce, when the mind “intuits” by “expressing,” the result is art. There is no “religion” for Croce except philosophy.

88.  The modern literature of the Mysteries, especially of Eleusis, is very extensive and elaborate in many languages. I will only mention here a small and not very recent book, Cheetham’s Hulsean Lectures on The Mysteries Pagan and Christian (1897) as for ordinary readers sufficiently indicating the general significance of the Mysteries. There is, yet briefer, a more modern discussion of the matter in the Chapter on “Religion” by Dr. W. R. Inge in R. W. Livingstone’s useful collection of essays, The Legacy of Greece (1921).

89.  What we call crime is, at the beginning, usually an effort to get, or to pretend to get, into step, but, being a violent or miscalculated effort, it is liable to fail, and the criminal falls to the rear of the social army. “I believe that most murders are really committed by Mrs. Grundy,” a woman writes to me, and, with the due qualification, the saying is worthy of meditation. That is why justice is impotent to prevent or even to punish murder, for Mrs. Grundy is within all of us, being a part of the social discipline, and cannot be hanged.

90.  Herbert Spencer, writing to a correspondent, once well expressed the harmlessness—if we choose so to regard it—of moral teaching: “After nearly two thousand years’ preaching of the religion of amity, the religion of enmity remains predominant, and Europe is peopled by two hundred million pagans, masquerading as Christians, who revile those who wish them to act on the principles they profess.”

91.  But later asceticism was strictly the outcome of a Greek tendency, to be traced in Plato, developed through Antisthenes, through Zeno, through Epictetus, who all desired to liberate the soul from the bonds of matter. The Neo-Platonists carried this tendency further, for in their time, the prevailing anarchy and confusion rendered the world and society less than ever a fitting haven for the soul. It was not Christianity that made the world ascetic (and there were elements of hedonism in the teaching of Jesus), but the world that made Christianity ascetic, and it was easy for a Christian to become a Neo-Platonist, for they were both being moulded by the same forces.

92.  Maurice Croiset devotes a few luminous critical pages to Plotinus in the Croisets’ Histoire de la Littérature Grecque, vol. V, pp. 820-31. As an extended account of Plotinus, from a more enthusiastically sympathetic standpoint, there are Dr. Inge’s well-known Gifford Lectures, The Philosophy of Plotinus (1918); I may also mention a careful scholastic study, L’Esthétique de Plotin (1913), by Cochez, of Louvain, who regards Plotinus as the climax of the objective æsthetics of antiquity and the beginning of the road to modern subjective æsthetics.

93.  Ennead, bk. III, chap. VI. I have mostly followed the translation of Stephen McKenna.

94.  St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk. IV, chap. XXI.

95.  Kant was habitually cold and calm. But he was very fond of dried fruits and used to have them specially imported for him by his friend Motherby. “At one time he was eagerly expecting a vessel with French fruits which he had ordered, and he had already invited some friends to a dinner at which they were to be served. The vessel was, however, delayed a number of days by a storm. When it arrived, Kant was informed that the provisions had become short on account of the delay, and that the crew had eaten his fruit. Kant was so angry that he declared they ought rather to have starved than to have touched it. Surprised at this irritation, Motherby said, ‘Professor, you cannot be in earnest.’ Kant answered, ‘I am really in earnest,’ and went away. Afterwards he was sorry.” (Quoted by Stuckenberg, The Life of Kant, p. 138.) But still it was quite in accordance with Kantian morality that the sailors should have starved.

96.  Georg von Gizycki, Die Ethik David Hume’s, p. 11.

97.  F. C. Sharp, Mind (1912), p. 388.

98.  Shaftesbury held that Locke swept away too much and failed to allow for inborn instincts (or “senses,” as he sometimes called them) developing naturally. We now see that he was right.

99.  There is no need to refer to the value of salt, and therefore the appreciation of the flavour of salt, to primitive people. Still to-day, in Spain, sal (salt) is popularly used for a more or less intellectual and moral quality which is highly admired.

100.  Dr. C. S. Myers has touched on this point in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. II, part II, chap. IV; also “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples,” British Journal of Psychology, June, 1904.

101.  Dr. Georg von Gizycki, Die Philosophie Shaftesbury’s (1876); and the same author’s Die Ethik David Hume’s (1878).

102.  It should be added that Croce is himself moving in this direction, and in, for instance, Il Carattere di Totalità della Espressione Artistica (1917), he recognises the universality of art.

103.  Stanley Hall remarks in criticising Kant’s moral æsthetics: “The beauty of virtue is only seen in contemplating it and the act of doing it has no beauty to the doer at the moment.” (G. Stanley Hall, “Why Kant is Passing,” American Journal of Psychology, July, 1912.)

104.  See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in Mind, April, 1899.

105.  See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” American Journal of Psychology, May-October, 1901.

106.  We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s Social Psychology, even though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.

107.  See W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy. (1900.)

108.  It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book on The Art of Life, designed to show that just as the sculptor works with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”

109.  “They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”

110.  Der Wille zur Macht, p. 358.

111.  Mrs. Havelock Ellis, James Hinton, 1918.

112.  This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (La Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs, p. 340), “elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone, avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their existence.”

113.  Alfred Niceforo, Les Indices Numériques de la Civilisation et du Progrès. Paris, 1921.

114.  Professor Bury, in his admirable history of the idea of progress (J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, 1920), never defines the meaning of “progress.” As regards the meaning of “civilisation” see essay on “Civilisation,” Havelock Ellis, The Philosophy of Conflict (1919), pp. 14-22.

115.  Quetelet, Physique Sociale. (1869.)

116.  See e.g., Maurice Parmelee’s Criminology, the sanest and most comprehensive manual on the subject we have in English.

117.  Élie Faure, with his usual incisive insight, has set out the real characters of the “Greek Spirit” (“Reflexions sur le Génie Grec,” Monde Nouveau, December, 1922).

118.  This tendency, on which Herbert Spencer long ago insisted, is in its larger aspects quite clear. E. C. Pell (The Law of Births and Deaths, 1921) has argued that it holds good of civilised man to-day, and that our decreasing birth rate with civilisation is quite independent of any effort on Man’s part to attain that evolutionary end.

119.  Professor McDougall refers to the high birth-rate of the lower stratum as more “normal.” If that were so, civilisation would certainly be doomed. All high evolution normally involves a low birth-rate. Strange how difficult it is even for those most concerned with these questions to see the facts simply and clearly!

120.  A. M. Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem: A Study in Human Evolution (1922), pp. 457, 472.

121.  Dupréel, La Légende Socratique (1922), p. 428. Dupréel considers (p. 431) that the Protagorean spirit was marked by the idea of explaining the things of thought, and life in general, by the meeting, opposition, and harmony of individual activities, leading up to the sociological notion of convention, and behind it, of relativity. Nietzsche was a pioneer in restoring the Sophists to their rightful place in Greek thought. The Greek culture of the Sophists grew out of all the Greek instincts, he says (The Will to Power, section 428): “And it has ultimately shown itself to be right. Our modern attitude of mind is, to a great extent, Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean. To say that it is Protagorean is even sufficient, because Protagoras was himself a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus.” The Sophists, by realizing that many supposed objective ideas were really subjective, have often been viewed with suspicion as content with a mere egotistically individualistic conception of life. The same has happened to Nietzsche. It was probably an error as regards the greatest Sophists, and is certainly an error, though even still commonly committed, as regards Nietzsche; see the convincing discussion of Nietzsche’s moral aim in Salter, Nietzsche the Thinker, chap. XXIV.

122.  I may here, perhaps, remark that in the General Preface to my Studies in the Psychology of Sex I suggested that we now have to lay the foundation of a new casuistry, no longer theological and Christian, but naturalistic and scientific.

123.  Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. I (1918); vol. II (1922).

124.  In an interesting pamphlet, Pessimismus? Spengler has since pointed out that he does not regard his argument as pessimistic. The end of a civilisation is its fulfilment, and there is still much to be achieved (though not, he thinks, along the line of art) before our own civilisation is fulfilled. With Spengler’s conception of that fulfilment we may, however, fail to sympathise.

125.  See, for instance, W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 201, and S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 119.

126.  Beauty is a dangerous conception to deal with, and the remembrance of this great saying may, perhaps, help to save us from the degrading notion that beauty merely inheres in objects, or has anything to do with the prim and smooth conventions which make prettiness. Even in the fine art of painting it is more reasonable to regard prettiness as the negation of beauty. It is possible to find beauty in Degas and Cézanne, but not in Bouguereau or Cabanel. The path of beauty is not soft and smooth, but full of harshness and asperity. It is a rose that grows only on a bush covered with thorns. As of goodness and of truth, men talk too lightly of Beauty. Only to the bravest and skilfullest is it given to break through the briers of her palace and kiss at last her enchanted lips.

127.  Ruskin was what Spinoza has been called, a God-intoxicated man; he had a gift of divine rhapsody, which reached at times to inspiration. But it is not enough to be God-intoxicated, for into him whose mind is disorderly and ignorant and ill-disciplined the Gods pour their wine in vain. Spinoza’s mind was not of that kind, Ruskin’s too often was, so that Ruskin can never be, like Spinoza, a permanent force in the world of thought. His interest is outside that field, mainly perhaps psychological in the precise notation of a particular kind of æsthetic sensibility. The admiration of Ruskin cherished by Proust, himself a supreme master in this field, is significant.

128.  Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, chap. V, “Art and Morals.” Aristotle could have accepted the almost Freudian view of Croce that art is the deliverer, the process through which we overcome the stress of inner experiences by objectifying them (Æsthetics as Science of Expression, p. 35). But Plato could not accept Croce, still less Freud.

129.  Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1859), vol. II, p. 442. For a careful and detailed study of Schopenhauer’s conception of art, see A. Fauconnet, L’Esthétique de Schopenhauer (1913).

130.  I find that I have here negligently ascribed to Bergson a metaphor which belongs to Croce, who at this point says the same thing as Bergson, though he gives it a different name. In Æsthetics as Science of Expression (English translation, p. 66) we read: “The world of which as a rule we have intuition [Bergson could not have used that word here] is a small thing.... ‘Here is a man, here is a horse, this is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me,’ etc. It is a medley of light and colour, which could not pictorially attain to any more sincere expression than a haphazard splash of colour, from among which would with difficulty stand out a few special distinctive traits. This and nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels tied to things take the place of things themselves.”

131.  H. Bergson, Le Rire. For a clear, concise, and sympathetic exposition of Bergson’s standpoint, though without special reference to art, see Karin Stephen, The Misuse of Mind.

132.  This may seem to cast a critical reflection on Croce. Let me, therefore, hasten to add that it is merely the personal impression that Croce, for all his virtuous aspirations after the concrete, tends to fall into verbal abstraction. He so often reminds one of that old lady who used to find (for she died during the Great War) such spiritual consolation in “that blessed word Mesopotamia.” This refers, however, to the earlier more than to the later Croce.

133.  H. Rickert, System der Philosophie, vol. I (1921).

134.  Before Baumgarten this distinction seems to have been recognised, though too vaguely and inconsistently, by Hutcheson, who is so often regarded as the real founder of modern æsthetics. W. R. Scott (Francis Hutcheson, p. 216) points out these two principles in Hutcheson’s work, “the Internal Senses, as derived from Reflection, representing the attitude of the ‘Spectator’ or observer in a picture gallery while, on the other hand, as deduced from εὐέργεια find a parallel in the artist’s own consciousness of success in his work, thus the former might be called static and the latter dynamic consciousness, or, in the special case of Morality, the first applies primarily to approval of the acts of others, the second to each individual’s approval of his own conduct.”

135.  This would probably be recognised even by those moralists who, like Hutcheson, in their anxiety to make clear an important relationship, have spoken ambiguously. “Probably Hutcheson’s real thought,” remarks F. C. Sharp (Mind, 1921, p. 42), “is that the moral emotion, while possessing many important affinities with the æsthetic, is in the last resort different in content.”

136.  Schopenhauer long ago pointed out that a picture should be looked at as a royal personage is approached, in silence, until the moment it pleases to speak to you, for, if you speak first (and how many critics one knows who “speak first”!), you expose yourself to hear nothing but the sound of your own voice. In other words, it is a spontaneous and “mystical” experience.

137.  It is through Plotinus, also, that we realise how æsthetics is on the same plane, if not one, with mysticism. For by his insistence on Contemplation, which is æsthetics, we learn to understand what is meant when it is said, as it often is, that mysticism is Contemplation. (On this point, and on the early evolutions of Christian Mysticism, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism (1922).)

138.  Really, however, Plotinus was here a Neo-Aristotelian rather than a Neo-Platonist, for Aristotle (Ethics, book X, chap. 6) had put the claim of the Contemplative life higher even than Plato and almost forestalled Plotinus. But as Aristotle was himself here a Platonist that does not much matter.

139.  See Inge, Philosophy of Plotinus, p. 179. In a fine passage (quoted by Bridges in his Spirit of Man) Plotinus represents contemplation as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and bright vision. This “metaphysical Narcissism,” as Palante might call it, accords with the conception of various later thinkers, like Schopenhauer, and like Gaultier, who however, seldom refers to Plotinus.

140.  R. Schmidt, Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (1921), vol. II.

141.  E. Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Nietzsches, vol. II, p. 99.

142.  W. M. Salter in his Nietzsche the Thinker—probably the best and most exact study of Nietzsche’s thought we possess—summarises Nietzsche’s “æsthetic metaphysics,” as he terms it (pp. 46-48), in words which apply almost exactly to Gaultier.

143.  See especially his book Über den Nervösen Charakter (1912). It has been translated into English.

144.  Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme, and various other of his works. Georges Palante has lucidly and concisely expounded the idea of Bovarism in a small volume, La Philosophie du Bovarysme (Mercure de France).

145.  Gaultier has luminously discussed the relations of War, Civilisation, and Art in the Monde Nouveau, August, 1920, and February, 1921.

146.  These are problems concerning which innocent people might imagine that the wise refrained from speculating, but, as a matter of fact, the various groups of philosophic devotees may be divided into those termed “Idealists” and those termed “Realists,” each assured of the superiority of his own way of viewing thought. Roughly speaking, for the idealist thought means the creation of the world, for the realist its discovery. But here (as in many differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee for which men have slain one another these thousands of years) there seem to be superiorities on both sides. Each looks at thought in a different aspect. But the idealist could hardly create the world with nothing there to make it from, nor the realist discover it save through creating it afresh. We cannot, so to put it, express in a single formula of three dimensions what only exists as a unity in four dimensions.

147.  Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), p. 235.

148.  I may here be allowed to refer to another discussion of this point, Havelock Ellis, The Philosophy of Conflict, and Other Essays, pp. 57-68.

149.  I may remark that Plato had long before attributed the same observation to the Pythagorean Timæus in the sublime and amusing dialogue that goes under that name: “Sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heavens, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolution of the years, have created Number, and have given us a conception of Time, and the powers of inquiring about the Nature of the Universe, and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.”

150.  Jules de Gaultier, “La Guerre et les Destinées de l’Art,” Monde Nouveau, August, 1920.

151.  Thus Einstein, like every true man of science, holds that cultural developments are not to be measured in terms of utilitarian technical advances, much as he has himself been concerned with such advances, but that, like the devotee of “Art for Art’s sake,” the man of science must proclaim the maxim, “Science for Science’s sake.”