Kathleen Nott’s present essay is devoted to the current debate over humanism in Britain, a subject previously discussed in her book The Emperor’s Clothes which directed a critical searchlight at irrationalist tendencies in the work of T. S. Eliot and other modern writers.

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In the public mind, humanism is too often confused, on the one hand, with being rude to God and, on the other, with being kind to animals. Between these two flippant extremes there are a remarkable number of definitions, near-definitions, and vague assumptions which miss the most fruitful meaning that can be given to the term. To put it in a rubric, what is missing both in the popular or vague usage, and in the educated or professional usage, is the positive understanding that humanism cannot be a working philosophy unless it means in the first place a liking and concern for actual human beings: for the people one actually meets, one’s neighbors.

Having put that down as a fundamental proposition, we can now proceed to cast a glance round the world and see what kinds of people, who give the subject any public expression, describe themselves as humanists. It is a very large and varied assortment—I am constantly surprised to find how large and varied, and even opposing. Some of the contributors to the recent British symposium Declaration (whom merely for convenience I will refer to as the Angry Young Men) call themselves humanists. This collection is interesting to me here, because all the contributors are writers, concerned with the imagination rather than with the analytical intellect. The South African novelist and playwright, Miss Doris Lessing, who is a Marxist, certainly claims to be a humanist. Most of the others think primarily, if vaguely, in economic and political terms: they do not, that is, really accept my fundamental proposition, although this is perhaps only subliminal in the case of Mr. John Wain. Mr. John Osborne, the playwright, certainly thinks almost exclusively about people: but appears to believe that the way to deal with them, first and last, is to be angry with them. Mr. Colin Wilson (the “Outsider”), on the other hand, is an interesting case, because he describes himself as an anti-humanist, but says that he is now inclining toward existentialism. This will land him in trouble, at least with Sartre: for Sartre claims that existentialism is a form of humanism. By this he certainly means something which I also mean here, namely that existentialism is a humanism because it starts from the concrete actual human person in given conditions; and also because he tries to give his philosophy to the world (and is most successful when he does) in an imaginative form.

Then there are Christian humanists everywhere. Insofar as they base themselves on a theological account of human nature and on the belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs, they appear to be involved in a contradiction which bars the development of a genuine humanism. I want to interrupt myself here and say that the abstract account of human nature is what causes the bar: and that we find a similar bar in all the other professional or organized humanisms. European existentialism, even in Sartre’s formulation, which stresses the concrete rather than the abstract, is still too much entangled with Teutonic idealism and Teutonic language. An Anglo-Saxon existentialism might be a pleasing speculation. Democracy in America and England, insofar as it has any vestiges of philosophy, has not quite lost sight of its original assumption that individual people count first and last: while the other most influential world outlooks, Catholicism and Communism, have lost this sense, whatever their trumpetings to the contrary. They have lost it because they are entangled with the abstract extremes of idealism and materialism, both of which neglect or try to obliterate the fact that a human being is a psychosomatic unit who can be considered either in his mindlike or his matterlike characteristics, but not cut up between them.

Humanism in the form of a professional movement might be described as an Anglo-Saxon invention. In Britain—I understand that this applies also in America—those people who, under the labels of their various groups and organizations, lay claim to the name of humanist, do not date their legible family tree much further back than the middle of the 19th century—and, in a significant sense, many of them have stayed there. The humanist organizations in Britain—the Progressive League, the Ethical Union, the South Place Ethical Society, and the Rationalist Press Association—are inextricably involved with the history of events and ideas at that period. This does not mean that, in discussing them, we cannot and should not, for certain purposes, go further back. The important events, for these movements, were the trends of material emancipation (which cover labor and trade-union movements, with their workingmen’s clubs and workingmen’s educational institutes): and also religious and feminine emancipation. And these of course go back to the liberalizing, and in part disruptive, effects of the French Revolution. But for purposes of discussion we have to stop somewhere, and the middle of the 19th century, the time of the controversy around Darwin’s Origin of Species, is the most convenient date far the rationalistic fixation which still hampers organized humanism in Britain. The positive attempt to which so many of those who had parted with supernaturalism, including George Eliot, gave their energies, was to found a rational and humane ethic: put in general and psychological terms, to substitute, in all fields, reason for authority, but especially for supernatural authority.

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I think that too much of professional or organized humanism, at least in Britain, has stuck in this dated, specialized, and negative rationalism. It has stuck in fact precisely where the supernaturalist enemy has stuck, in an abstract definition of human nature. Two camps glare at each other from diametrically opposed emotional fixations: it is a battle of antiquated loyalties rather than an argument meant to lead to a conclusion. It is noteworthy that in the humanist organizations, the age level is rather high; this at least suggests that there is not enough appeal to the younger generation which has the business of living and working a philosophy.

These remarks apply specially to the British Ethical Union and to the South Place Ethical Society. The aim of this last organization is to study and disseminate “ethical principles . . . and to cultivate a rational religious sentiment.” It is also an Ethical Church, with Sunday morning meetings, the singing of a rationalist hymn (which substitutes some abstract or ennobling concept for the name of the Deity), and the equivalent of a sermon, generally an ethical, philosophical, or psychological statement. I feel that this Comtean idea of a Humanist Church has something to be said for it, if we think of the advantages of an orthodox Church in the organization of social welfare and contact, and also of mental therapy. These old-school rationalists might indeed do more about developing such communal possibilities in competition with the Churches. It seems likely that they are at least semi-aware, as individual rationalists, of the emotional pull of the religions, and deny it with rationalistic threatenings sometimes, like Saul of Tarsus, at great and increasing risk of yielding to it. I am not attempting to say that the issue of realism versus the irrational in the fields of philosophy and of practical life is still not a live one; on the contrary, it is the most important of all. I am only saying that the flaming rationalist sword may not be the most relevant or efficient way of keeping the theological serpents out.

The serpents indeed abound and are very snakelike. Thus the controversy over Mrs. Margaret Knight and the British Broadcasting Corporation, which came to a head a year or two ago, involved important issues of free speech and liberalism. Mrs. Knight, an educational psychologist, was given the chance, after great difficulties and hesitation on the part of the BBC, to deliver some scripts attacking the religious education of children as psychologically unsound. The BBC arranged for her to be answered by an orthodox Christian, as is its practice with anti-religious broadcasts (this is always a one-way traffic: humanists are not invited to answer back religious propagandists). But in spite of this, the British public—or that section of it which allows the gutter-press to defend and represent its views of Christian principle, the sanctity of the home and the purity of education—rose up and demanded her head. (A respectable number of the Bishops wanted her to have a hearing!) After the hubbub had died down, the BBC showed no inclination to repeat the experiment, in spite of persistent prodding from E. M. Forster (whom I myself regard as the best type of literary humanist): he felt that Mrs. Knight should be heard again and, meeting with no success, he finally instigated a public meeting attacking the BBC for its cagey and indeed negative attitude toward humanist discussion and propaganda, compared to the time and resources it gives to established Christianity and other sects which can be classified as orthodoxly religious. At this meeting, which was packed, and at which Forster, Reginald Sorenson, and myself spoke in support of Mrs. Knight, the whole policy of the BBC with regard to humanism, in contravention of the implied principles of the 1949 Beveridge Report (which certainly allow for anti-religious discussion) was laid bare, and a suitable resolution was sent forward, which may have laid the foundations for some fruitful discussions between the humanist organizations and the BBC.

What Mrs. Knight had actually said during the original controversy seemed to many agnostics harmless and even antiquated. What was striking in the episode was the violence of public reaction which, hotted up as it may have been by the press, was also genuine. It was ideological warfare. Recent newspaper surveys in Britain have shown that most people do not care much about Christianity as a possible way of life, and though I have not the statistical evidence, I believe it very likely that a large proportion of parents are not greatly troubled one way or the other even about giving their offspring the conventional or ritualistic conveniences of religious education. (One should not pay too much attention to the large numbers who are baptized or later get married in Church, for this is either superstition, like touching wood, or social insurance.) In short, people don’t mind what they do, or what you do. But they can often get very impassioned about what you say—as giving away your dangerous thoughts. Even the BBC—still operating from the professed aim of its founder, the then Sir John Reith, which was to convert Britain to Christianity—means abstract dogma, not way of life. So that the fight is about an abstract definition of human nature: and over this both super-naturalists and rationalists can become irrational.

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It is not, nevertheless, true to say that all those who regard themselves as practicing humanists are unaware of the real humanist issue—that we want to know about human beings, first of all ourselves, and how to deal with them. But even the more objective and inquiring humanists have to rely for their sociological material and evidence on experts and specialists, who often belong—and often, too, without realizing the fact—to very partial traditions. Irving Babbitt’s label of “false liberalism” might be used comprehensively for these traditions. Their common characteristic is that they all refer to an abstract definition of man which claims to be exhaustive while it is in fact partial. The definitions, political, economic, and theological, vary, but in this they are all alike—they claim to tell us that we really need to know about the actual people we are going to meet and live with: they are all (Marxism is a very clear case in point), by implication, “psychologies.” If we are going to think and talk about human beings, of course we need a working definition, but we need to keep in mind that it is only an abstraction, and no substitute for whatever we can work out in our personal experience.

Among the “false liberals” Babbitt included the “sentimental humanitarians” and Marxists: and there are others whom I believe he would later have included, the extreme or diehard linguistic philosophers, particularly the logical positivists. This might look too remote to be relevant. What in fact have the concepts and movements mentioned in this paragraph in common? And why is the last example of special importance to humanists? The doctrine of liberalism is “false” when it takes the form of unreal abstraction, when it confuses the definition with the fact or, preferably, with the experienced concrete reality; when it tries to persuade us that Man can be free: which is as much as to say that an idea can be free: or alternatively that freedom is a material thing. This must work out in practice as meaning that human organizations, large or small, considered as entities, can be totally free and independent: and from this arises the cult of nationhood, leading via the Corporate State to inevitable warfare. Freedom, like all the great creative notions, including peace and love, is not only indivisible, but personal: I can only make myself free when I free you in the process.

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Logical positivism and some other kinds of linguistic philosophy come under the same general heading of false abstraction, be cause right down to the most intimate structure of logic and language—which ought to be the instrument of apperception and communication—they confuse theory and practice instead of relating them. Thinking about thinking and talking is not the same, and should not try to be the same, as thinking and talking. But this is the substitute which the logical positivists in particular, by their exclusive definition of “meaning,” try to palm upon us. For they assume not only that the language of science is an exact language (which within particular fields it can be) but the model of language; and they therefore dismiss statements made in fields of experience where this type of exact language cannot apply as “meaningless.” The resulting dismissal of “metaphysics” in the old sense need not detain us here. It is correct as far as it goes. What these thinkers have helped to show is that metaphysics is and was a matter of abstract language—and that is a necessary realization. But what they also dismiss, either overtly or implicitly, as meaningful forms of communication—the assertions of art or ethics—are simply not in the same category as logical and linguistic formulations. They are formulations of the processes of actual living, and that is something which can only be done by living individualities. Babbitt, I believe, would have included this recent philosophical development under “false liberalism” because it aims at a false independence and detachment of language and thinking from their spontaneous origins and uses. Language is something “given” in the experience of the individual. It is there first, probably before thinking in any definable sense, certainly before the logicians.

What these philosophers tell us about the language of science, except over the comparatively limited range of the “exact” sciences (those sciences in fact, like physics and mathematics, whose communication of information is limited to measurement and calculable prediction), is based on their own confusion between theoretical and practical logic. The human and sociological sciences mainly employ practical or inferential logic, not theoretical or mathematical logic. These sciences are certainly what Eddington called hypothetico-observational: which means in practice that the scientific worker in these fields very often begins with some sort of intuition or hunch which he proceeds to justify or not on the basis of the observational material which is available to him. As Karl Popper says, genuine science does not primarily seek proof: it challenges refutation. The purpose of a scientist in any field is to discover and communicate a likely pattern of events, not to prove himself right: only logical and linguistic experts are worried about this. The physical scientist, as we all now know, aims at statistical not immutable universal laws. Some of the social sciences employ statistics: and this is interesting because it makes visible a principle of scientific investigation. In these sciences it is much easier to see that the statistics produce evidence and support—they test the theory—but that they do not supply the place of the original creative act of observation, the original hunch or intuition which is the scientist’s practiced vision of his material or “world.”

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Modern humanists like to call themselves “scientific.” This is sensible if it means that, both in personal relations and public activities, a humanist aims to find and to base his opinions on ascertainable facts: on knowledge, instead of upon hearsay tradition, superstition, old wives’ tales, fantasy, and convention. But it means that the humanist has to check his beliefs and practice in all fields, by what the scientists, the experts, have to tell him. It is therefore supremely important that those experts should not be working consciously or unconsciously, from an unsound or at least partially unreal philosophy. For the humanist this is particularly important in the case of the social scientists, who claim to be the experts of “human nature”: chiefly economists, political philosophers, and psychiatrists (anyway people dealing with psychotherapy). Their common characteristic is that they are concerned with human needs, either psychological or physiological. This puts them in a special and influential category: for they implicitly claim to be both theoretical and practical. “Need” here means something which has to be both diagnosed and met. Among these “scientists” of human need, the most influential in our time have been the Marxists and the Freudians. I use these terms as labels for the main psychological and material trends of the modern age, and I intend them to cover two general attitudes. Certainly according to Popper’s definition it is easy to see how they qualify as pseudo-sciences, concerned with “proof” rather than challenging refutation. Most people are by this time familiar, at least by hearsay, with the kind of riposte—to patient or bourgeois enemy—which is typical of Freudian and Marxist alike: “If you argue with me it is only an emotional defense against a truth which you won’t admit (and which is of course embodied in me).” There is no need to deny the genuine intellectual and critical contributions of both Marx and Freud. I single them out not only because I include them under “false liberalism,” but because I think they share a radical fallacy with the doctrines they claim to oppose, with metaphysical and theological thinking about “human nature.”

False liberalism is false “free-thinking.” The emancipation of reason which, for present convenience, we can date to the French Revolution, developed into the outlook I have referred to as old-school rationalism. The “freedom” in much of the thinking which helped to produce the revolution, and in a very great deal which followed, was often a “freedom” from the concrete and immediate, it was a kind of false detachment from living experience. Philosophers philosophized about “Man.” (They seem always to have found it difficult to think about actual human beings. Their reputation for absent-mindedness is not wholly mythical, and absent-mindedness may be based on a dislike of present company.) We were given political and economic Man—and now we have psychological Man. This does not matter so much if, as the late Count Korzybski (the founder of “general semantics”) would have said, you remain aware that you are abstracting when you use this expression. But in fact and practice, the concept Man will give you pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy and religion, and pseudo-art. The humane or social sciences are valuable to the humanist insofar as they genuinely help him to live, to understand himself and his environment. They can achieve this insofar as they are a genuine unity of theory and practice—a genuine interplay of observation and hypothesis—and are genuinely interacting with some art. For example, biology and chemistry can interact thus beneficially with medicine. But this depends on good doctors who are interested in healing their individual patients, not merely in putting them on a sort of assembly line to inject them with all the newest drugs.

The unity of theory and practice is a prime claim of both Freudian psychology and Marxism. On the part of the Marxists this is overt. But the claim of psychoanalysis to be a therapy is in principle the same, and perhaps more immediately revealing. Complete theoretical knowledge of the origins of a neurosis is identified with cure; it seems that this claim is not often substantiated. The aim of a sound psychotherapy should be the restoration and the realization of the feeling self. This does not seem to be achieved by orthodox psychoanalysis: the reason, I suggest, is that it teaches the patient to concentrate on Man, according to an arbitrary intellectual definition, rather than upon himself: to intellectualize his problems and project them upon humanity. So perhaps we can find a more general definition of pseudo-science which would include Popper’s as an example. To Popper Marxism and Freudianism are pseudo-sciences because they seek “proof” instead of challenging refutation. We can generalize this further by saying that the pseudo-scientist is always trying to save his definition in the face of experience. In fact he does not properly distinguish theoretical from practical or applied or natural logic: and in social studies, he confuses the necessarily partial definition of mankind with actual men in living concrete situations. This is what may mislead the humanist: who anyway, as a human being living in a world which underestimates feeling, common sense, intuition, or hunch, by comparison with conceptualization, fantasy, and projection, has his own everyday temptations to confuse ideas with realized experience.

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This is not by any means a plea for a “new mysticism,” although it includes the suggestion that old-school rationalism and superstition are complementary poles. From the standpoint of a genuine humanist, of a man inwardly free, unafraid in his universe, unafraid, that is, of the abstractions both of religion and science, both can be seen as obsessional fixations: the reluctance to part with a concept, the determination to materialize it. The definition of the “false liberal” Man was that he was born good, and corrupted by society. This is just the pole of the doctrine of Original Sin, which is the fundamental false abstraction of pseudo-religion. The humanist needs rather to accept that human beings are radically ambivalent, most probably because they are at one and the same time members of a species, and unique persons: because they have at one and the same time the need to be free and the need to be physically and emotionally secure. Maturation can be regarded as the lifelong effort to heal or harmonize this opposition. The humanist then needs to extract the common factors from science, religion, and philosophy. As I have suggested they all show that they are genuine (and not “pseudo”) when they can ally themselves to an art, when they can somewhere come down to the particular, the concrete, the practical, the living and immediate.

The genuine philosophical expression of humanism may be found more in literature than in scientific or academic philosophy. Somerset Maugham said in his autobiography, The Summing Up, that before beginning to write a new book, he always re-read Voltaire’s Candide. I can well understand why. This little book seems to me still to say more, and more profoundly, about “false liberalism” and also about genuine or positive humanism, than all the works of the Encyclopedists and all the political, philosophical, economic, and psychological treatises which have been produced since. Pangloss, it will be remembered, maintained his Leibnitzian optimism, that this is the best of all possible worlds, in the face of his own and Candide’s most atrocious misfortunes. What Voltaire’s satire implies is that a humanist art must still be tragic as well as comic: for the situation of any individual human being in his world is in fact tragic: whatever we can achieve as a species, we cannot honestly deny this fact of the feeling world. A man’s desires are inherently much greater than his capacities. Time and mortality ineluctably deny his will to imagine and to embody his imagination. Moreover he only lives and creates by error, and by successive approximations to his goals. Perfection (and hence final optimism) is a chimera. But this “radical imperfection” is tragedy, not sin.

When I look around contemporary Anglo-Saxondom for creative works which embody a humanist philosophy and counter the Augustinians—those writers such as Eliot, Greene, and Waugh who get so much of their intellectual structure and indeed their imaginative material from the dogma of Original Sin—I mildly despair, and begin to check over my generalizations. And then 1 realize that a good humanist novel or drama would inevitably be characterized by the fact that its intellectual structure could not be detached by some neat process of filleting. It would of necessity have to be the attempt to see the whole man, the unique concrete person: and its morality would be implicit—in the history of an individual’s maturation and integration. So that it would not be Utopian (except satirically: the Utopian use of futurism seems to be a sort of satiric necessity for purposes of generalization and detachment): and it would not take the form of “Socialist Realism”—which is in fact ideal and abstract. A writer who comes to my mind is the ate Joyce Cary. He called himself a liberal, not as far as I know, a humanist: and his political writing strikes me as fumbling. But in his ample series of great novels he reveals himself as exactly what I mean by a humanist. It is significant that in his most remarkable book, The Horse’s Mouth, his chief character is an old obsessed painter who is always quoting Blake, and who in his very single-mindedness and single vision, acts, by conventional standards, as a “sinner.” The obsession with art has a general, not merely a special significance for Cary. As a British critic, Walter Allen, has pointed out, all Joyce Cary’s characters are obsessed with the creative imagination. It is in this kind of work and in this conception that I believe the humanist must look for his philosophy. Here he will find, if anywhere, the new “myth” which is the living truth of science, philosophy, and religion.

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For good or ill, human communities are renewed and kept going by their myth-makers: by the creative thinking or “visions” of their artists, scientists, philosophers, religious and political thinkers. This is opposed to the Marxian view that influential ideas are the product of social conditions: chiefly in insisting on the role of the creative individual who, however dependent on tradition or environment, must still be distinguished from either. It is obvious that to become effective, myths need embodiment. To choose two extreme examples: both Jesus and Hitler appeared in a certain environment of ideas, traditions, and social conditions: but surely it is idle to deny that without the particular “incarnation,” the course of history would have been very different? It is more useful then to discuss whether myths can be good or bad, rather than whether they are true or false.

My dictionary says that “a myth is a fictitious narrative describing supernatural personages and embodying popular ideas on natural phenomena”: I mean something a good deal more and different from this: but it is the second half of the definition which is important. A myth is certainly a fiction, but in the sense that it is a creation, a making or bodying-forth. It is not lies or propaganda. Plato’s suggestion that poets are liars, hence reprobates, has not only sidetracked a great deal of subsequent criticism, but also, by its mistaken opposition of poetry and truth, misled us about the nature of truth as well as poetry. A myth-maker, for instance a poet or novelist, does not feel that he is lying or doing propaganda; he feels on the contrary that he is making the best shot he can at telling the truth as he sees it. His myth is an attempt to account for natural phenomena as they occur in his experience: human and material phenomena. While his myth holds water, it will last both for himself and other people. Scientists, insofar as they make a humanist contribution, can be looked on as myth-makers in this sense. A scientific innovator, as I have already indicated, is not a collection maniac. Many people, including some scientists who do not reflect on their own processes, think that scientists go fact-grubbing year in, year out, until the heap bursts into a theory, as a smoldering haystack bursts into flame. But in fact, scientists, on the basis of their general practiced interest in a given field of phenomena, are much more likely to get a hunch, to form a myth, which they then proceed to test by their own and other people’s observations in the same field.

The role and value in fact of the individual scientist who produces a new hypothesis in the field of phenomena in which he happens to be interested, is comparable to those of the other makers of myth whom I have mentioned. He is a creator painting a world picture (it may be a world restricted to a comparatively narrow class of phenomena). But because of conditions in some sciences we can be misled about this creative reaction between the scientist and his world: and we can be led into attaching the wrong kind of importance to the distinction between the “truth” and the “fiction” of a myth: among other things we may forget that the language of parable is more primitive and therefore probably still comes more naturally to human beings than any other: it is partly the exaggerated prestige of mere literacy which has taught us that all which is not prose is mysticism: that, and the “exact” language of some sciences.

I have referred at length to distinctions which may be made between science and “pseudo-science.” The conditions which may mislead the humanist arise in the physical and mathematical sciences. It happens that very public and easily communicable standards of observation and testing obtain in these sciences: experiments can be exactly repeated without much difficulty. Exact prediction can take place. This gives us, I think, not so much a wrong or a too high, but an irrelevant standard of “truth” when we are considering the other creative activities. Prediction means that we can know in advance about the future, what will happen in a certain field: we can standardize some of our experiences. In the case of the other creative activities, the kind of experience which puts our theories to the test will be more haphazard, it may show us where we were right or wrong, in a more casual or drifting way: we may never be able to do more than live by our hunches, from day to day and even from hand to mouth. When, in art, philosophy, or politics or religion, we theorize about life or human beings, it is not only unjustifiable, it is extremely dangerous, to try to copy the exact but limited predictive capacity of the physical and mathematical sciences. For one thing, historical events have shown us, or should by now have shown us, that even if a thinker is content to theorize, others may be tempted to make his prophecies come true: if the theories don’t happen to fit the facts, the facts may be manipulated to fit the theories. Philosophers of history often seem to find, or to be afflicted with, disciples who will regard them as prophets. Marx, for instance, meant to predict: but he was retrospectively made into a prophet: his followers, when they got the chance, tried to cut human beings to fit his theories.

Pseudo-sciences are not content with the interpretative role of science: they tend to turn into mock-engineering. They base themselves on the (not necessarily conscious) assumption that it is both desirable and possible to change “human nature” by direct methods. These pseudo-sciences are to me examples of “bad” myths, not because it is untrue that human nature can be changed rapidly and directly—human beings are in fact alarmingly malleable and flexible and can be pulled and pushed about to a quite remarkable degree. But the positive implications of the myth are false: it denies the individual and his creative role: and also—generally in the interest of some social conception or pattern—his need for the sane selfishness of personal equilibrium. The distinction between a good myth and a bad myth is, I believe, largely a matter of this creative role of the individual. The good myths are pictures of life and the world which come from the spontaneous, open-eyed, and disinterested reaction of an individual to his environment. That is why I prefer art to science as a basis for a humanistic outlook. I don’t mean that humanists must be always reading improving books or staring at pictures, and that thus the world will be instantly changed for the better. I do think, on the other hand, that a slant toward art and the “humanities” would be a good educational basis for potential humanists, and that this can help to leaven the lump. For art is about what it feels like to be a human being in certain conditions of apperception. But people have to be trained not only to feel, but to discriminate. From the humanist point of view there are “bad” artistic myths as well as good ones. The D. H. Lawrence myth of sex was, I believe, a bad one, because it was destructive of human personality, especially of female personality. Real people, women in particular, vanished from Lawrence’s later pages. Your bad myth-maker is in a way a liar, for the paradoxical reason that he is too interested in what he calls the “truth.” Lawrence, for instance, was not to be argued with, he claimed an absolute validity for his account of human nature and the world.

Good works of art are original sources: which means, among other things, that their derivatives and their critical commentators often wander a long way from them, like streams: and in every new generation, some people have to try and get back to them. In this they are comparable with the original intuitions and pronouncements of the great religious teachers. For critics and disciples of all sorts seem often to be rather like ants, industriously carrying off as big a bit as they can hold, and thus demolishing the corpus of wisdom, with no very clear idea what they are going to build with it. Works of art are also images to be contemplated, they encourage to concentration of feeling and help resistance to the enormous and often meaningless distraction of contemporary life.

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I have tried to suggest some things which may be necessary for a genuine humanist outlook. I should be dishonest if I did not add that as far as I can see the whole trend of the modern world is in the opposite direction. On the other hand, I am not proposing that, even if we could, we should reject what we have gained from the sciences in the realistic appraisal of ourselves and our circumstances, only that we should learn to discriminate among them. Perhaps my real question is, whom ought we to describe as a humanist? Certainly not one who indulges in any of the facile optimisms and consolations either of science, rationalism, or religious orthodoxy. Positively, I should say that a humanist is one who is at least partially aware that our nature is ambivalent and our condition paradoxical, and who goes instinctively to the arts, with their less clouded intuition of tragic conflict and comic irony, to show him how this is so: one too who is ready to learn from any honest vision, perhaps because, in human matters, all unclouded visions tend to something similar: and one too who because he is primarily concerned with what it feels like to be human, tries at least for the present to redress the busy anxiety of the West by being in preference contemplative rather than active.

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