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THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Books by Kathleen Nott

Novels

MILE END (Hogarth Press)

THE DRY DELUGE (Hogarth Press)

Poems

LANDSCAPES AND DEPARTURES (Poetry London)

Criticism

THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Translation

NORTH-WESTERLY GALE (Noroit > by Lucien Chauvet)

(Hutchinson)

THE
EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

by
KATHLEEN NOTT

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD
MELBOURNE :: LONDON :: TORONTO

FIRST F'UBLISIIEn IQ53
REPRINTED 1954

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

AT THE WINDMILL PRESS

KINGSWOOD, SURREY

To
ROBERT NEUMANN

CONTENTS

Chap. Page

i. The Landlady's Ornaments 1

ii. The Dogma in the Manger 31

in. Mr. Hulme's Sloppy Dregs 56

iv. Mr. Eliot's Liberal Worms 105

v. Mr. Willey's Lunar Spots 140

vi. Old Puritan Writ Large 159

vii. Poetry and Truth 194

vm. Poetry and Truth (cont): Romanticism and

Classicism 233

ix. Lord Peter Views the Soul 253

x. Augustinian Novelists 299

xi. The New Philistinism 312

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 325

INDEX 326

CHAPTER I

The Landlady's Ornaments

NOWADAYS we are very commonly told that the Age lacks
Faith. When this statement is made from pulpits, it means
that the churches lack congregations, and that too is what it
usually means when it is given as a conclusion to public opinion
surveys. On the other hand, we are also very commonly told that
Reason has failed. These statements might lead to the simple and
melancholy belief that, the majority of us at present has neither
reason nor faith, not even faith in reason. I think there is a
certain sense in which each statement can be taken, if not as true,
at least as a warrantable generalisation. But that sense would
depend on a careful definition of what the users mean by those
rather vague expressions Taith' and 'Reason'. If we adopt both
statements as true, it looks as if we shall have to account for the
present uncomfortable state of the world by the theory that what
used to be called our faculties are simply exhausted.

I do not wish to deny that the world is in a bad way. But I must
add that there is no bad time like the present. Any extension of
our knowledge, either of ourselves or of history, confirms this
opinion. I would even agree that more faith, in something or the
other, makes it easier for people to live their lives, at some level or
the other. But my interest, with which the whole of this book is con-
nected, is rather with the other statement that Reason has failed.

There are many different tones of voice in which this statement
can be made. During and before the last war, many speakers
made it in connection with the condition of Germany, in a tone of
alarm and regret. Those who spoke with any precision usually
meant that 'reasoning has failed', that people who were still able

1

2 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

to see a reasonable point of view, one based on real experience of
human needs and circumstances, were not strong enough to put
this point of view to Hitler and his colleagues.

But the statement, in one form of words or another, is now
being put forward by a different kind of proponent, who also
means something quite different by it, though he is not always
clear what he does mean; and he says it in quite a different tone of
voice. The commonest member of this class is a literary critic
who is attracted toward general ideas, although he is not always
skilled in dealing with them. Under the decent tone of mourning
with which he celebrates the obsequies of Reason, one can often
detect a faint note of satisfaction. This can only be explained by
supposing that he believes that, if Reason has indeed failed, we
have something better to put in its place. That is what the literary
critics or the writers about literature, with which this book is
largely concerned, do mean. They mean that something which
they call Reason has failed to provide us with an explanation or a
way of life, and that therefore something else called Faith can
come into its own.

Basil Willey* shows that many seventeenth-century anti-ration-
alists thought that to discard superstition, including the belief in
witches, might be the first step towards atheism. It was better to
believe anything than nothing. With the exception of C. S. Lewis,
whose interest in the Devil plumbs unusual depths, most of the
writers with whom I shall deal are not so conventionally anti-
rationalist as this. They merely claim to represent orthodox
Christian theology and a higher kind of reason.

Anyone who writes about literature ought to have cultivated
a sense of history, including the history of philosophy and its
terms. If he has done so, he will have involved himself in some
attempt at understanding how philosophy and the meaning of
the terms it uses have been affected by the development of the
sciences. The sciences show men at work employing, among other
mental capacities, their reasoning power. There is no sign that
Reason, in this sense, has so far failed mankind. One of my

* The Seventeenth Century Background.

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 3

motives in writing this book has been the realisation that the
thinkers whom I discuss do not find this fact, if indeed they grasp
it, as consolatory as they should.

Philosophers themselves have been considerably responsible,
by using the term in a variety of ways which are sometimes
inconsistent, for the confusion which is so common to the literary.
They have been fond of distinguishing what they call a priori
modes of thought, for instance the particular kinds of abstraction
which we employ in the mathematical sciences and in formal
logic, from our other powers of obtaining knowledge by inference.
What has impressed the philosophers about mathematical know-
ledge has been its certainty. They attributed this certainty to the
fact that the mathematician or logician extracted truth by
analysing the implications of the propositions or statements with
which he dealt. How far such propositions were applicable to
the reality of experience was not relevant.

Every philosopher building a system of the universe has had a
hankering for a like certainty. Philosophers infect the literary
and make them yearn too, if indeed the yearning is not what
makes every man a philosopher at heart. But our ability to reason
is based on inference, on our attachment to human experience,
and this can never give us more than a high approximation to
certainty. Our world is probability. This was grasped by
philosophers such as Hume and Kant; but even these two, to a
different degree, by their attitudes toward mathematical reasoning,
have misled those whose emotional hunger for certainty is so
great that they choose intellectual starvation if they cannot have
tlieir preferred diet. If by Reason we mean reasoning-power, our
capacity for inference and thus for increase of real knowledge, we
can say that Reason has not failed.

To many people, however, Reason stands only for our capacity
for forming abstractions and deductive systems without the
check or even the stimulus of experience. This is what passes
for thought at many very different levels of learning. One of the
main tasks of genuine thinking is to make sure that 'Reason* in
this sense, does fail.

4 THE EMPEROR S CLOTHES

An opinion which is at least implied by a great many of the
writers whom I shall discuss is that during the seventeenth
century, because of the scientific and philosophical developments
which took place, a valuable tradition was broken which should
have remained dominant. In so far as these writers refer solely to
the tradition of poetry, I agree that they have some justification
for this opinion. But I shall propose a quite different set of causes,
and I shall contradict the assumption, which lives like a gollywog
in most of their ink-wells, that it would be a good thing if we were
able to wish out of the way the dominant achievements of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The eighteenth century is often called The Age of Reason; and
what is commonly complained of nowadays in the nineteenth
century is less the aggressiveness and irrationality of its sexual and
industrial relations (which however the lapse of time has not
cured) than the rationalism of many of its leading writers and
thinkers.

When we use the words 'century' or 'age' we mean in practice
the intellectual attitude which was dominant and generally
accepted as normal by two or three generations of people. In a
certain sense we can describe the eighteenth century as the Age of
Reason and we can also say that the nineteenth century was
marked by an increase of rationalism. But it is as well to remember
that in those ages, as at all times, most people, including those
people who lived by employing one or more of their mental
capacities, were governed at the best by feeling, and at the worst
by prejudice, rather than by the results of the deliberate exercise of
their reasoning power. This meant, then as always, that fhe
majority of people were dominated by various abstractions. This
realisation may help us to examine our own dominant ab-
stractions and prevent us from absolutely preferring them.

Many of our contemporary writers and critics, especially those
whom I call neo-scholastic, dislike the rationalism, liberalism and
humanism which became dominant intellectual attitudes after the
seventeenth century. But what is important, now as then, about
these attitudes, is how far they can be described as true or false.

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS

If they were merely abstractions, deductive systems of thought
and were not continually controlled by an ever-developing humai
experience, they were so far false. In so far as they sprang fron
the same experimental method which gives us a correct histor>
psychology and anthropology, they were true. What the nee
scholastic critics of those abstractions fail to observe is that, ii
advocating a return to dogmatic theology, to ecclesiastica
'orthodoxy', they themselves show that they are governed by ,
much falser and more obstinate abstraction. For there is n
experimental check on theology.

Chief among those abstractions of previous history which ar
attacked by neo-scholastic literary critics today is the idea c
inevitable progress, which is always linked by them wit
rationalism. I suggest that the cause for the failure of this ides
for our inability to believe in it any longer, is the same that w
constantly discover in other generalisations and ideals whic
seem promising but which somehow fail to guide our lives tha
it is a false abstraction. In other words, this idea was based o
insufficient experience. That means that men were using thei
reasoning power, their capacity for inference, incorrectly or nc
enough. For reasoning or being rational is simply making logics
inferences, examining experience impartially and returning to th
check of experience. In so far as we use our reasoning powe
upon our experience we always make some progress in th
direction we are exploring. Progress for the whole human rac
would be, if not inevitable, at least highly probable, if a sufficien
majority of people were trained to use their reasoning power o
their general experience, as a scientist is trained to use his reason
ing power on his special experiences.

There were, no doubt, some excellent or exciting manifestation
of the human spirit in the seventeenth century and before, whic
were set aside by the preoccupations of the eighteenth and nine
teenth centuries. But, on the other hand, we can justly say tha
both these ages did much to establish a tradition which ha
become, and ought to have become, dominant in the seventeent
century, the tradition of experimentalism, of the correct use c

6 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

reasoning power. The fact that, in this tradition, some people
have now begun, however insufficiently, to reason about them-
selves, to apply scientific methods of inquiry to what, too often
with unwarrantable implications of absolutism, we call human
nature f is one of the main causes for the contemporary dislike of
scientific method among influential literary men, and for their
attempt to lump the scientific approach with all the other out-
worn and ultramontane abstractions.

The fact remains that, though there is no such thing as
'Inevitable Progress', by using our reasoning power upon our
experience we do progress, and only so. If you will not allow
that it is our human obligation to increase knowledge, and that
the use of reason in the sense which I have defined it is an
essential part of this work, you have no alternative save to build
your intellectual framework out of dogma, abstractions whose
analysis is forbidden. The writers whom I discuss and whom I
call neo-scholastic, because they are reverting, at various speeds
and from various directions, to a pre-scientific philosophy, try to
do just this. Chief among the dogmas which they try to import
into our intellectual outlook is the dogma of Original Sin, which
is certainly the psychological foundation of Christian orthodoxy.
This dogma implies, not that we do not or are unwilling to use our
reasoning powers upon our own natures, but that we are in-
capable of doing so. Most of the people I discuss live by or on the
use of imagination. That may make it excusable for them to
cherish a mystery. But they ought not to foster mystification.

On all counts, Mr. T. S. Eliot is probably the most significant
of the neo-scholastic writers in England today. This is partiy
because he is really distinguished as a poet and literary critic;
partly because his reputation as an orthodox Christian became
general only shortly after his reputation as a poet; partly because
he has thus had nearly twenty years to establish his views in works
which are always sure to be received with interest and respect; and
partly because the method he uses to establish them is insidious.

In 1934 T. S. Eliot published his After Strange Gods. Its sub-
title was 'A primer of orthodoxy'. This was not the first indication

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 7

which he had given, either in prose or verse, of his theological
views and intentions. There had been, for example, the collection
of essays at first called For Lancelot Andrewes, later revised and re-
issued as Essays Ancient and Modern; while in Ash Wednesday and
some of the Ariel poems his conversion had already reached
poetic expression. Nevertheless, I see After Strange Gods as a
landmark, in the particular and remarkable sense which is implied
in its sub-title.

The book consists of three lectures delivered to the University
of Virginia. It is about orthodoxy and heresy as qualities which
can be discovered and for which we ought to seek in contem-
porary literature. I do not think that Mr. Eliot fully succeeds
either in defining or isolating these qualities. What he has in
mind seems to be something closely in conformity with the
theology of the Catholic Church, although even this is not
categorically stated. But the kind of evaluation which he is
attempting in this book certainly calls for such an arbiter. We
have to conclude from this book that Mr. Eliot thinks that the
Church ought to be the arbiter, not only of human but of literary
values. In fact, he makes a curious distinction between literary
and theological evaluations of merit: but I hope to show that from
his own point of view this distinction is untenable. He made it
perhaps because an excellent literary taste, acquired from learning
to discriminate the best rather than the orthodox, was for the
moment stronger than theological discipline.

For Mr. Eliot himself the book would probably lose its point if
he were able to define its two main terms more precisely. Certainly
for those who cannot help believing that the prime qualities of
literature are something more interesting, important and indeed
universal than orthodoxy and heresy, the book would lose most of
its curious significance. For Mr. Eliot's quiet and really unargued
reinstatement of these and other dogmatic terms is in itself a
method. When first realised, its effect on a mind which cannot
regard the liberal and humanistic tradition of free inquiry as
dead is disquieting. Mr. Eliot reminds me of a dignified landlady
who without a word retrieves the tribal ornaments from the

8 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

cupboard where the guest has hidden them, and puts them back
on the mantelpiece. The 'orthodox' or neo-scholastic literary
movement of our time has had champions far more explicit,
aggressive or naive. Among writers who are mainly or solely
creative, there are for instance Mauriac or Graham Greene, who
express their orthodox theology through the colour of their
imaginations. In explicit philosophy, between such extremes of
dignity as Maritain on the one side, and C. S. Lewis or Miss
Sayers on the other, we have T. E. Hulme, who was ready to
tackle most of the tougher issues and whose baseless assumptions
were few, if essential to his argument. But nothing has been more
valuable to the scholastic reaction than Mr. Eliot's decorous
though unlegitimised reoccupation of a territory which many of
us had thought already subject to reason. Perhaps he soothes
many whom he does not convince. People who care for literature
and particularly for poetry would always sooner be reminded of
the seventeenth-century pulpit in the golden age of tough-minded
bishops, than of the soap-box. Those who, like C. S. Lewis and
Miss Sayers, never shirk any theological issue, pay for their
earnestness and temerity with a certain vulgarity, like the
Salvation Army.

In any case, Mr. Eliot's approach is disturbing. He makes his
critics feel ungentlemanly, not only because he has thus reticently
identified his whole life with a point of view, but because no one
can seriously question his importance as a poet and critic. As far
as England in the twentieth century is concerned, it was his
sensibility which restored poetry to itself. His apparent 'modernity'
was not merely a reaction to Victorianism and Georgianism, to the
work of Tennyson in decay, to Swinburne obsessed with ver-
balism, or to Drinkwater and the Squirearchy. It was a successful
attempt to restore the true tradition of English poetry, the
direction which it had lost since the seventeenth century. In this
attempt to restore the English tradition, his instinct to use large
transfusions of the European and the strictly contemporary was
a sound and true one. Moreover his selection of the moment and
even, in a partial sense, of the cause of the deviation from the true

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 9

poetic apperception was also precise. In the seventeenth century,
there did develop a 'split in sensibility', a dissociation between
intellect and emotion which did not completely heal in poetry,
until our day. One can however agree in part with the diagnosis
and the treatment, while still questioning the pathology. The split
in sensibility is, either openly or by implication, the foundation
of much of Eliot's critical opinion. Implicitly his diagnosis has
been that poetry was dying because of liberal humanism. Liberal
humanism was based on free or scientific inquiry, which has shown
itself as continually in conflict with the philosophy of the Church.
The cure is 'orthodoxy'; submission to dogma, to authoritarian
belief. If thought and emotion are split, if scientific inquiry
conflicts with the world-view of the Church, then we must give up
science. Though Eliot never, as far as I know, makes a definite
pronouncement of this kind, it is implied in his use of the word
'orthodoxy'. In After Strange Gods we are told that there is an
orthodox Christian sensibility which authors ought to exemplify.
Mr. James Joyce did eminently exemplify this (the evidence is one
short story, 'The Dead'). Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, who
often describe wanton cruelty and insensibility, and moreover
express no moral disapproval of what they describe, did the
opposite. Mr. Eliot ignores the rather commonplace explanation
that both these authors may have felt it to be their first business to
put down what they saw. Nor does he pay any attention to the
fact that Lawrence's whole work was an express reaction against
what he regarded as romantic falsifications of emotion. I do not
think Lawrence was interested in cruelty as such. He was simply
trying, often mistakenly, to get down to the truth about human
sexual relationships. This of course left no room for any kind of
'orthodoxy' in his sensibility.

Mr. Eliot however thinks that such an orthodoxy of sensibility
is possible and desirable. If we fit After Strange Gods into the
implications of his work as a whole, we shall see that he follows
T. E. Hulme in regarding the tradition of science and of liberal
humanism as mainly responsible, not only for heresy or un-
orthodoxy of sensibility, but for the 'split' which took place in the

10 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

seventeenth century. But since his method is so rarely explicit, we
shall have to examine the whole body of his critical and social
writings. With many of his followers who have committed them-
selves more openly, if not more rashly, this will not be necessary.

I shall not only discuss the neo-scholastic movement in modern
English criticism, the contemporary attempt to find a continuity
with the world-view which existed before the Renaissance, when
the method of scientific inquiry became dominant. I shall also
attempt to provide some opinion on what the relations between
literary, particularly poetic, apperception and scientific inquiry,
that is, any free inquiry which aims at knowledge, ought reasonably
to be. The very assumption that such relations can and ought to
be found is an implicit claim that 'orthodoxy' is of its nature a
bar to creative and critical development. I am saying therefore,
among other things, that whatever went wrong with poetry after
the seventeenth century, it was not 'science'; not, that is, the kind
of inquiry which is free from regard for authoritarian beliefs.
That Mr. Eliot is so important as a creator and critic, and con-
tinues to be so; that orthodoxy has not sterilised his production or
his critical sensibility (although in my view it has weakened them),
is the reason why he receives a large share of attention in this
book. To most of the purely literary critics who have come after
him, the fact that 'orthodoxy' has seemed to work; that, in
competent hands, it has produced some interesting poetry and
literature, has been perhaps of excessive importance. Orthodoxy
or something like it has certainly provided a good many poets and
some novelists with something to write about, but this fact does
not justify us in making any assumptions about the value either" of
their work or of orthodoxy.

Writers who concern themselves with this problem of the split in
sensibility, of the seventeenth-century impingement of scientific
method and discovery upon the literary imagination, and who
think that our present troubles have arisen because men then
'chose' a humanistic instead of a theological world- view, are fond
of saying that 'Science' or 'Scientists' need only be accepted as
talking sense inside their own fields ; outside, their pronouncements

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 11

are no more valid than anyone else's (unless, oddly enough, their
religious and philosophical views happen to be 'orthodox', as they
sometimes are). Mr. Basil Willey is a good example of this. The
type of statement which he and his kind make is important for my
purpose because of the way in which it is generally worded. It is
not of course 'Science' which makes pronouncements: and the
expression 'Scientist' as it is invariably used in this conjunction is
in fact a similar piece of hypostasis. I mean that, when they refer
to 'Science' or 'Scientists', Mr. Willey and those who agree with
him create fictional entities to which they attribute objective
substance. But a scientist's pronouncements are valid when they
result from the application of scientific method. What this is can
be discussed later on. The point is that there are no 'fields' which
can be marked as out of bounds to scientific method, and this is
true even though the results of inquiry may be negative. Similarly
there is no abstract entity called Science, and no person who is
wholly described as The Scientist. To those who hold that The
Butcher is still The Butcher even when strolling out on early-
closing day in a bowler hat and striped trousers instead of a
striped apron, I should reply that when we are considering the
butcher's field and the validity of his theory and practice, we are
concerned with his actual selection, dissection, handling and
delivery of joints. To many people, including myself, his butchery
may be not only an influence upon his whole personality, but a
symptom of it; but that is beside the point. We are talking of the
application of a technique or a method and the validity of its
results. What was rediscovered in the seventeenth century was the
method by which we obtain and can hope to obtain knowledge.

To many of the writers I have quoted and intend to quote, for
instance Willey, and in particular T. E. Hulme, with his philosophy
of 'intuition' based on Bergson and opposing itself to the ab-
stractive intellect, my analogy of The Butcher would probably be
only too welcome. Hulme had a great part in the invention of the
literary man's bogey of The Scientist dissecting a dead universe
and delivering the ever more disjointed pieces. It is true that
anyone using the method of science, the method of obtaining

12 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

knowledge, has to spend part of his time generalising, forming
hypotheses, and that this is a kind of 'abstraction'. But that it
'kills' anything is a mere metaphor from anatomical and botanical
techniques. Whatever 'killed' poetry, or rather whatever weakened
and impoverished poetic imagination from the seventeenth
century onwards, it was not scientific method as such. Anyone
engaged in scientific inquiry has to spend a great deal of his time
in a learning passivity which differs from the poet's chiefly in its
objects, which are those of direct external perception rather than
those which have been selected by or subjected to internal
emotion. Science is essentially the method by which we obtain
knowledge. We therefore cannot say that there exist 'fields' in
which The Scientist has nothing to tell us. (A fortiori we cannot
say that we can obtain another kind of 'knowledge' in those fields,
by other methods.)

It is worth noting that contemporary scholastic and theological
thinkers are glad to invoke the authority of The Scientist who does
make statements outside the 'field' of his speciality, provided that
these confirm or can be interpreted as confirming the limitations
of the scientific method of obtaining knowledge. Welcome also as
equally authoritative are the interpretations, given by philosophers,
of recent scientific discoveries or principles which can also be
taken as meaning that our pursuit of knowledge is inherently
limited. I should be surprised and dismayed at this common
human wish for intellectual self-castration if I did not see that
there was always in these cases a further intention of substituting
a different kind of knowledge or 'truth', coupled with a sense of
relief that the way to do this had apparently been left open. One
must grasp that not to know something does not mean the same as
to know something quite different.

'Scientists' as respectable as Eddington are joyfully invoked as
theologians by the neo-scholastics. The word 'Scientists' is in
inverted commas here because Eddington and others who apply
scientific method and technique in a special field are in fact
invoked by the neo-scholastics simply for the authority of that
method and technique, not at all for its application: and also

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 13

because it has been found in practice that they leave it behind, like
everyone else, when they enter the field of theology and the super-
natural.

This metaphysical use of the words Science and Scientist is
typical of neo-scholasticism and is in fact made by all the writers
criticised in this book. The practical purpose is to enable them to
equate science with the quantitative sciences and thus to insinuate
an unnecessary limitation into our human capacity for knowledge.
Our inevitable errors and ignorance can then be attributed to the
inadequacy of the human mind and of human intellectual pro-
cedure, while a different, divine and presumably perfect kind of
knowledge can be posited on the other side of an impenetrable
curtain. It is necessary therefore to state here that, in the usage
of this book, and I believe in fact, a scientist is someone in the
process of applying the scientific method of inquiry in no matter
what field; while science is the accumulated and progressively
organised body of results from such applications. Like the butcher,
the scientist will take a day off, though less regularly, and stroll
out in flannels instead of a white coat. Both of them are liable to
become churchwardens. Both of them on their days off will be
willing to chat and even to argue on a great variety of subjects
which have nothing to do with the laboratory or the refrigerator.
For both of them there will be an inevitable danger in this. On
this day neither will be formed and circumscribed by the material
in which both normally work, and which by its very nature largely
accounts for the neatness and inevitability of their execution and
for the chief value and further productivity of their results that a
structure of nature is revealed and that a community continues to
be nourished on mental or physical meat. A butcher, though he
may go to Smithfield and there take a shrewd interest in the
operations of the wholesale market, let alone criticise the Govern-
ment for bulk-buying, may be excused for a certain passivity
toward the provenance of his material. Division of function is a
principle at least of second nature. Similarly the scientist does not
have to discuss ultimates in order to do some good precise work
with his given material. He will, for example, discuss whether it

14 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

exists or not, when he is being an amateur philosopher, on his day
off. As an amateur philosopher, however, he has one great
advantage over his fellow-churchwarden, the butcher, that his
expertise is of much wider application. It is capable of exhibiting
the structure of any material and predicting the future behaviour
of any similar agglomeration or organisation of that material.
The scientist, that is, can generally think correctly as a philosopher;
because the philosopher, when he is thinking correctly, is thinking
as a scientist, in relation to his particular material. The butcher
has perhaps one advantage over both of them, at least as far as his
working week is concerned; that when he has no carcase, he is not
tempted to display any chops.

Whatever the butcher may think or not think about his whole-
sale supplies, the scientist generally gets his working material
from unimpeachable sources: from predecessors in the special
field with a tradition which includes the view that they would not
be paid by monkeying about with the facts and records; from
instrument-makers with a tradition of accuracy which is priceless
to themselves; and also from direct observation individually and
in a team whose work is mutually corrective.

Unless a scientist is thus working in a given material, that is,
with phenomena which force themselves on him as existing quite
apart from his own personal and mental activity, and which he
tries to account for by a recording and comparative technique, his
views are no more interesting and conclusive than those of the
butcher who is chatting of something other than chops; although
they may be expressed with more literary grace.

It will be said that the material of theology, questions of the
human being's feeling of guilt and responsibility, his sense of
something outside himself at once supporting and punitive and
therefore his capacity for love and dependence, his hopes and fears
about death, are precisely something that does exist and force
itself upon the attention of all of us, including scientists. In my
sense of the word, none of these is a 'given* material. They are
certainly just as much a material for scientific inquiry as anything
else in the world ; but, as one of its first tasks, such an inquiry has to

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 15

try and isolate what is pure and spontaneous in such feelings, from
what is the result of particular education and communal habit; to
try and get down in fact to the 'given' material. In this field
scientists are welcomed by the neo-scholastics only as theologians,
not as scientists. Conversely, theological dogma is implicitly a
refusal to admit that scientific inquiry can have any authoritative
pronouncements to make about human responses.

It is significant that the scientists who have been promoted
from churchwardens to deacons are usually physicists or
astronomers, workers whose interests are most remote from the
professional study of psychology, other people's and probably also
their own. But we must remember that they are being invoked on
their day off. Eddington, who is frequently thus invoked by
literary men, and who answers, I must repeat, not as a scientist but
as a theologian, so that his views carry no special scientific
weight, has also been responsible for an excellent definition of
scientific method. "Physical knowledge," he says, "is hypothetico-
observational," and adds: "This means knowledge of the results
of a hypothetical observation, not hypothetical interpretation of
the result of an actual observation." This means that
generalisation and experiment cannot be separated. The
generalisation is already implied to some extent in the experiment
which the scientific observer makes. But it is also the experiment,
the operations which the scientist performs, which state the actual
meaning of the generalisation. Neo-scholastic thinking, on the
contrary, is always an attempt to force generalisation and ex-
periment apart. It is common practice for all neo-scholastics and
for* those who dislike and fear science to try to identify scientific
method with measuring techniques which are supposed to
produce exact results; the implication is that where the material
does not allow for exact calculations arising from the use of
instruments, there can be no science.

Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, said that scientific method
implied great boldness in the framing of hypotheses coupled with
great patience in collecting facts. This agrees with Eddington's
view but says nothing about calculating instruments. I mention

16 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

this here because I want to make it clear at an early stage that
what happened in the seventeenth century was the establishment
of the recognition of the way in which we actually obtain know-
ledge, if at all. Men did not begin far from it by becoming
materialists, or denying God; even less, as Mr. Willey suggests, did
they suffer a mysterious change in their taste for 'explanations'.
Simply it became visible beyond reasonable dispute, over a
number of fields, that if we wish to know, observation is an
essential part of expressing our ideas in meaningful form. This
does not mean that we must have no general views in mind while
we observe. Quite the contrary. But our ideas, our general views,
are ideas of what we are looking for.

This hypothetico-observational principle, however, is a general
one. It is an attitude of mind, or has to become one. In so far as
it did become so, it probably made the biggest intellectual con-
tribution to the liberal humanism which developed in Europe after
the seventeenth century. The obsequies of this liberal humanism
are now constantly I hope prematurely being celebrated by
our neo-scholastics. Mr. Eliot and others condemn liberalism
by which they mean just this attitude to experience. It is a general
principle, as I have said. One wonders therefore what neo-
scholastics who use trains, steamships, aeroplanes, and are
motored from stations and airports to give their international
lectures, would put in its place. I do not say that these mechanical
objects embody moral worth, only that they are inevitable long-
term products of the hypothetico-observational approach. Many
of our neo-scholastics, I am sure, are logical enough to be Lud-
dites. They would give up their air passages if they could only Imve
the medieval scholastic system undamaged by Galileo. But that is
the least they must learn to ask. If men learn to think consistently
in the direction that leads to aeroplanes, they will also think in the
direction away from authoritarianism and therefore theology.
Moreover, they will learn to think in a direction which leads to
classifying all phenomena as objects of study, therefore we can
say, as examples, toward psychology and anthropology and away
from Sin and the Church. Those who blame 'Science' and

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 17

'Scientists' for our misfortunes would speak more accurately if
they blamed scientists for not thinking consistently, for not
applying their method to all the phenomena they meet, for having
too many days off. If scientific workers were in fact 'consistent,
they would realise and also demonstrate that their method is a
unifying principle. It is useless to say for instance that you
cannot 'measure' the mind. You can observe it. Mechanical
materialism and mechanical idealism no more and no less than
modern scholasticism are all, as philosophies, forms of hypostasis,
of attributing existence to the unknowable. They are therefore
essentially attempts to deny this principle of the unity of know-
ledge which we should have learned and accepted in the seven-
teenth century.

One of the main theses of this book is that the growing body of
knowledge is thus unified; that we know, if at all, in one way, not
two. Another main theme is a question which I shall make some
attempt to answer: If we assume that there is this unity, a growing
unity of a growing body of knowledge, what relations ought to
exist between it and the human mind in its imaginative and
creative functions? I find it impossible to believe that no such
relations need exist, that ascertainable truth is of no importance to
an imaginative or indeed a critical writer. On the other hand 1 see
that an important and vocal section of our literary life both in
England and Europe does, implicitly at least, assume that there are
two ways of attaining to truth, the one scientific and presumably
inductive this is lightly treated as a rule and the other
theological. To this section any admission of limitation in the
applicability of scientific method, any suggestion that there are
fields in which our hypothetico-observational principle cannot
achieve any results, is a kind of victory. They are often misled by
philosophers; and often also scientists themselves do not bother
to make themselves plain enough. The propaganda- value and the
comfort provided by these 'victories', these triumphs of a certain
kind of 'invincible ignorance', are so great however that perhaps
no explanation can ever be plain enough. The so-called Indeter-
minacy Principle is a case in point (the Principle of Uncertainty

18 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

associated with Heisenberg). This has been and still is con-
tinually referred to as something which undermines causality,
and so leaves the door open for Free Will and the Spiritual.
Bertrand Russell however has stated quite clearly what the
Principle is really about and what conclusions we are or are not
justified in drawing from it.* In The Scientific Outlook he writes:

"The Principle of Indeterminacy states that it is impossible to
determine with precision both the position and the momentum of
a particle; there will be a margin of error in each, and the product
of the two errors is constant. That is to say, the more accurately
we determine the one, the less accurately we shall be determining
the other ... the Principle of Indeterminacy has to do with
measurement not with causation. . . . [The Indeterminacy] is a
physical fact causally connected with the fact that the measuring
is a physical process which has a physical effect upon what is
measured. There is nothing whatever in the Principle of In-
determinacy to show that any physical event is uncaused."

This should be plain enough. That it is not is shown among a
host of examples by a reputable literary critic, Mr. Walter Allen
commenting on a reputable scientist's opinions (Dr. J. Bronowski :
The Common Sense of Science).

"Indeed, so far from the universe and nature being governed
by immutable laws, it now appears that what lies at the heart of
the universe and nature is uncertainty. The future of the
electron cannot be predicted with complete certainty because we
can never be completely certain of its present. Heisenberg's
principle of uncertainty refers to very small particles and events,
but, as Dr. Bronowski comments :

" These small events are not by any means unimportant. They
are just the sorts of events which go on in the nerves and the brain
and in the giant molecules which determine the qualities we
inherit.' (By the time we have inherited them they are not un-
certain.)

*And see p. 270.

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 19

"This revolution Dr. Bronowski summarises:

" '(The notion of uncertainty) replaces the concept of the
inevitable effect by that of the probable trend ... the un-
certainty is the world. The future does not already exist; it can
only be predicted. . . . History is neither determined nor
random. At any moment it moves forward into an area whose
general shape is known, but whose boundaries are uncertain in a
calculable way. . . . The will on the one hand and the com-
pulsion on the other exist and play within these boundaries.' "

From all this Mr. Allen proceeds to draw the conclusion:

"If statistical probabilities have taken the place of immutable
laws and if it is the essence of statistical probabilities that they
can tell us how often, in a given series, the coin will fall heads and
how often tails, but can never tell us the sequence in which they
will fall heads or tails, then once again the onus for the future is
thrown upon individual choice and action." (He finds a reflection
of this in literary existentialism.)

I should say, on the other hand, that there was nothing in the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and indeed nothing in Dr.
Bronowski's remarks to justify any statements at all about the
freedom of the will (individual choice and action). The Un-
certainty Principle, as Russell says, tells us about physical
measurements, not about hypostatical entities such as Will and
Freedom. As Dr. Bronowski says "History is neither deter-
mined nor random. At any moment it moves forward into an
area whose general shape is known, but whose boundaries are
uncertain in a calculable way." (Not in an incalculable one.)

It is true that we have now to accept a philosophy based on
statistical probabilities rather than detailed and strict deter-
mination. But I think that Mr. Allen's misunderstanding arises
from an old confusion between determinism and predictability
which was one of the errors of nineteenth-century billiard-ball
mechanism. This confused view is the one which can be stated as:

20 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

if we knew all causes we should know all events. This view, if it is
to have verifiable meaning, posits an All-Knower, a concept
which is itself unverifiable in experience. The confusion is one
which, says Russell, speaking of Bergson, "vitiates ... a great
deal of the thought of most modern philosophers I mean the
confusion between an act of knowing and that which is known."

Bronowski, it seems to me, has the distinction clear, for he says:
'The future does not already exist; it can only be predicted." Mr.
Allen ought to note that he says "It can be predicted."

What Dr. Bronowski's book is about is the improvement of the
understanding of the sciences by poets and artists. As Mr. Allen
goes on to comment:

"What one dreams of, of course, is that poets and men of
letters should be as much at home in the ideas that have made
their world as Dante and Chaucer were in theirs and Dryden in
his. Perhaps it is no longer possible. But if that is so, science, to
go back to Wordsworth, will never put on form of flesh and
blood and take its place as a dear and genuine inmate of the
household of man. In which case, we may expect the 'loss of
nerve' that according to Dr. Bronowski has befallen us as a result
of the shattering of the unity of knowledge to be progressive."

These comments seem to me instructive and just. In particular
it seems to me that poets ought to grasp not only what ideas have
made their world but that these ideas have really done so ; and that
first of all they ought to grasp what it is that constitutes the unity
of knowledge. If they do not grasp that this unity in fact consists
in the method by which we obtain knowledge and that this
method is the essential characteristic of science, it is certain, so it
seems to me, that the assumption that knowledge is not essentially
unified will take over and dominate them, as it is already be-
ginning to do. This means further that the only intellectual
system which they can adopt will be one based on authority, not
on inquiry. We all of course believe much on mere 'authority'
and, to live, we are obliged to do so. The important thing is that

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 21

nothing should prevent us, poets or citizens, from using our
minds if we have the will and ability to use them.

This is not abstract 'Liberalism' (with which Mr. Eliot says our
society is 'worm-eaten') ; it is the principle of biological survival.
That free inquiry often produces fear and repugnance, as well as
enlightenment and liberation, is not an argument against it,
although it is true that these emotions always have that apparent
force in the minds of those who prefer some other system, and
account for much of the reaction against 'liberalism'. Intel-
lectually, as I have already tried to show, nothing has changed
in a way which justifies the reaction, between the seventeenth
century and our day. This means that, in spite of the ill-founded
philosophical contributions of some scientists, there really has
been no new development in science and critical philosophy
which justifies a departure, in any branch of thought, from what
Eddington himself called the hypothetico-observational method
of obtaining knowledge. What our age may have to content itself
with learning is that we know not so much and may not soon
know very much more, even of what it seems biologically
imperative for us to know. On the other hand, to depart from the
method which leads us to knowledge will not make us any less
ignorant.

What Eddington called the hypothetico-observational method
has throughout history been the method, and the only method by
which men have arrived at what real knowledge they have. This
means that in so far as the method has been applied, there has
been a certain progress. A 'belief in progress' became dogmatic
(an$ was thus of course mistaken), during the nineteenth century,
as a result of the very successful application of the method in
physical and mechanical fields. Historically, the contemporary
development of a counter-philosophy, based on scholasticism and
theology, can best be understood as a reaction against this 'belief
in progress'.

Certainly, the neo-scholastics can point to insecurity, war,
destruction and a refusal to go to church, wherever they look; but
to blame these on to science, on to the desire, the possibility and

22 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

the method to know more, seems to be a clear case of post hoc,
propter hoc. The disparagement of scientific method, and the
refusal to admit that its applicability is potentially unlimited,
express themselves among those who are not yet wholly con-
vinced by dogma in general statements of the type "Our moral
progress has not kept pace with our material progress"; and
among those who have become converted, in statements about
Original Sin. The belief in Original Sin, the belief that human
beings are born essentially 'bad' and cannot become 'good',
except through supernatural assistance, generally implies in
practice that we cannot become better by knowing more about
ourselves and about the nature which we share with others.

The belief in progress did in fact, as I have said, become
dogmatic in the nineteenth century, therefore uncritical; and, in
so far as uncritical, false. But it is useless and senseless to base
dislike of scientific method upon the beliefs and conduct of
people who merely saw its achievements in the limited physical
field but who made no attempt to apply it in their own private
lives, nor in their public activities and relationships, and who
indeed did not begin to understand that it was possible to make
such an application. By the beginning of the twentieth century
the collection of the data of observation of human mental life
and human social relations had hardly begun, and we are only
now in the stage of framing some of the most important
hypotheses.

However anti-Pelagian* your view of 'progress', it is in fact
fairly useless to deny that 'knowledge' does, within the limitations
of its own method, 'progress'. That a large number of oon-
temporary critics and polemicists who refer to the idea of
progress do not accept this meaningful limitation of the word
partly accounts very largely so, in my opinion for their
contempt of mankind, and enables them to enjoy, as cheerfully
and unctuously as they do, the race's bad health. There are a
great many reasons, no doubt some of them connected with
emotional, intellectual or social vested interests, all of them of

*See p. 70.

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 23

profound psychological importance why so many people do not
wish to believe that any of us can learn to behave better, without
supernatural aid. It is a sad fact that the anti-Pelagians, or the
Augustinians, as Mr. Walter Allen calls them especially those
whose belief in Original Sin is dogmatic do not always behave
better, but often worse. This may suggest that morality in
behaviour is after all intimately connected with one's intellectual
outlook, and may actually depend on whether that outlook is true
or false. There are many examples of this connection and I shall
refer to others in the course of this book; but as an illustration I
summarise an article in The Times Literary Supplement of June
8th, 1951.

This was a review of a book by John Nef, called War and Human
Progress. With some justification, it seems, in the substance of the
book he is reviewing, the reviewer tries to place the responsibility
for total war on contemporary scientists and on "the corrosion of
faith and the corruption of moral standards by modern philo-
sophy". . . . "The roots of war lie in those qualities of human
nature which earlier ages described as sinfulness. But the inter-
pretation of life which accepts the fact of sin also acknowledges
the saving mercy of grace the possibility, that is, that the spirit
of man can discern the good and that the human will can strive to
attain it. Fulfilment of this possibility requires supernatural
help . . ."

"Nothing," the reviewer says elsewhere, "is in deeper contrast
with the attitude of many contemporary scientists than the sense
of social responsibility and religious awe which restrained
Napier . . . and Newton from recording clearly, even in secret
notes, ideas which they knew could be turned to purposes of
mass-destruction. "

The facts behind this illustration are, on the contrary, that
Napier described his 'engines of mass-destruction' as clearly,
probably, as he thought them out they were mostly pale shadows
of Leonardo's speculations. However, Urquhart says that he built

24 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

and tried one of them with complete success. Napier thought of
them, not with shame, but as "proffitabill and necessary for ...
withstanding of strangers, enemies of Gods truth and religion"*

The last quotation suggests that if Napier were or were likely to
be restrained by anything, it would not be by religious awe.
Examination and comparison of contemporary religious and
scientific character seem to confirm this. Scientists are, as the
worst you can in general say about them, anxious and half-
hearted in their agreement about the necessity of mass-destruction,
engined or otherwise. It was against the expressed prayer of the
only scientists who knew what the results would be, that President
Truman and Mr. Churchill persisted in their determination to
drop the first atomic bomb. The real flame-throwers and fire-
eaters are in the religious camp. Einstein in his moral views on
war compares favourably with many Church leaders. A Com-
mission appointed by the Federal Council of the Churches of
Christ in America said:

"If, as we have felt bound to acknowledge, certain key
industrial targets are inescapably involved in modern war, we
find no moral distinction between destroying them by tons of
TNT or by fire, as compared with an atomic bomb, save as
greater precision is possible in one as compared with others. . . .
We believe that American military strength, which must include
atomic weapons, as long as any other nation may possess them,
is an essential factor in the possibility of preventing both world
war and tyranny."

I do not say that the practical view of this Church Commission,
its evaluation of the moral distinction between various engines of
mass-destruction, is necessarily incorrect. But one does not have
to be a pacifist to think it both remarkable and significant that
none of the Established Churches has ever declared uncom-
promisingly that mass-destruction is morally wrong. Surely a

*As for Newton's military work, it was confined to some studies in
ballistics, which he published immediately.

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 25

case could be made out for this view which would not be in-
consistent with the teachings of Christ? Many scientists, on the
other hand, have found themselves able to do so. Further it may
be held that this American Church Commission (among other
religious bodies) has given its blessing to 'totality' in a way which,
for internal philosophical reasons, comes more easily to the
religious than to the scientific mind. It is reasonable, I think, to
conclude that, historically, war has been nearer to 'total', the
more it has been religious and the less it has been scientific. The
science of war itself, as treated from Clausewitz onwards, has
directed itself toward destroying the enemy's military power and
the springs of it. A strong religious motivation, as we can see
from the Crusades against the Albigenses, is more likely to
encourage the belief in the moral Tightness of sacking, pillaging
and total slaughter. We must firmly believe in the absolute
wrongness of our adversaries, their 'sinfulness' as The Times
Literary Supplement reviewer called it, before we can know that
we are right in destroying them utterly. It is true that a totalitarian
political system can also give something like this moral security to
its devotees, but from history it seems obvious that they learnt this
attitude more from the teachings of the Church, for so many
centuries the guardian and teacher of all moral philosophy, than
from the scientists, whose philosophy has not yet had time, either
for good or bad, to be anything like so clearly formulated. It
is only when we can equate our opponents' ideas and beliefs
with sin that we can destroy them in peace of conscience. Belief
in an absolute or original Sin is not compatible with the
working habits of most scientists. But behind the doctrine of
Original Sin, behind also therefore the new militant theology
and scholasticism, is the implication that scientific investigation,
if and when it is carried over into the field of human mental
life and human social behaviour, is not only fruitless, but
wrong. This is the only logical conclusion of an authoritarianism
which tries to claim finality for its view of human conduct and
psychology.
I shall have a good deal more to say on the subject of Original

26 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Sin. The example quoted here from a leading literary review is,
however, a good and significant example of the kind of attack
which is being made on the idea of the possibility of human moral
progress. Moreover the attack in general on the concept of
'progress' illustrates clearly the neo-scholastic way of thinking.
We can call it the compulsion of hypostasis. Not only do these
writers have to keep their own concepts at a high level of ab-
straction, but they prefer to tilt at the windmills of their adversaries,
those generalisations often made by the ignorant; and always
divorced from the field-work, the testing in experience, of any
kind of scientific method: a method which is of course also applied
in psychology and anthropology and on which any fruitfulness in
their results must depend.

I think that it is reasonable to hold that every increase of
knowledge is valuable, in however small a degree, and that in so
far as the sum of knowledge in the world can be said to have
increased, then the world can be said to have progressed. But
any moral implication in the word progress must be carefully
examined. The new anti-Pelagians, having an absolute standard
of morality, do not regard morality as in any important sense
dependent on knowledge. It is easy therefore for them to dis-
tinguish a duality in human history, to admit the advance of
physical knowledge, while discerning stasis or decline in morality,
which for them should arise from faith. Hence it is easy too, for
them to condemn, for misinterpretation and false optimism, those
Victorians who based a belief in total progress on the doctrine of
evolution, and on material and scientific successes.

The Victorians, however not least those who had the most
earnest moral hope about culture, enlightenment and unending
advance upon this planet were personally often far from optimis-
tic. Yet an eschatological gloom did not prevent the best of them,
for example Matthew Arnold, from examining the clearly visible
cultural, intellectual and social changes around them in the spirit
of liberal and humanistic inquiry, rather than of Church ortho-
doxy ; although Arnold may be said to have been the inheritor of
both traditions. The humanistic, heretical or inquiring spirit, the

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 27

essentially scientific, was still the stronger. No one can say that
Arnold's judgment of the contemporary state of culture was
flattering, or anything but critical. His views on keeping the study
of science in its educational place, as compared with the classics,
were not perhaps very different from Mr. Eliot's own. Mr. Eliot
writes much of tradition, especially of tradition as the basis of
orthodoxy, and by tradition he means our dual European in-
heritance, from the Greek and Latin classics on the one hand, and
from Christianity on the other. Where Arnold differed and where
he was, I think, representative of the best of his time, was in the
fact that tradition, primarily if in the main unconsciously, meant
for him the tradition of liberal humanism, just that spirit of
unimpeded inquiry which begets both intellectual (and hence
material) progress and a humanitarian morality.

Arnold and his sad, serious and honest like were the heirs of a
tradition, the tradition of free inquiry, which in spite of all
contrary appearances, is our oldest; and which had maintained its
dominance in Europe, with whatever difficulties, since the
struggles of the seventeenth century. (Can we not even say that
the tradition, in the manifestation of a Protestant conscience, has
had the larger share in conditioning and capacitating Mr. Eliot
the Pilgrim Fathers have done more for him than the Church
Fathers?) One of the main intellectual fruits of the tradition for
Arnold and his like was that knowledge was still indivisible. For
them it was perfectly possible to conceive of moral progress for
mankind as a whole, just because knowledge was really conceived
of as the essential instrument of any progress. In so far as the
Victorians meant this, and this is what those who cared about
culture, tradition, the mind and its freedom did mean, I do not see
that the idea is ridiculous nor that it has been shown to be wrong
or even extremely improbable.

If, for the sake of theoretical clarification, we can separate the
intellectual interest of human beings from their more self-
interested passions, particularly fear and greed, we can see that,
left to itself, the development of knowledge would be a natural
process. Knowledge naturally and inevitably increases among

28 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

men unless men themselves do something to stop it, either by
removing the tools of knowledge or by denaturing its receptacle.
If the growth of knowledge is not actively impeded, by amputation
or perversion, its mere quantitative and departmental increase
will gradually bring about a qualitative change in the whole body
of knowledge, will beget a world-view which will always be
approximating to the truth. That this gradual change and
approximation to a true world-view cannot be said ever to have
been observed on a large scale in human history is only a reflection
of the violence with which usurping world- views have maintained
themselves. They are usurpers, because they are not, as they
should be, abstracts of growing knowledge, but the symptoms of
the self-interested passions, in particular of fear and greed. The
anti-Pelagians, the believers in Original or absolute Sin, certainly
recognise that evil has its roots in these passions, but ignore or
deny the fact that the first manifestation of their evil is in the
tainting of our intellects, the distortion of our capacity for
receiving truth. That Catholic orthodoxy locates sin in the mind,
not primarily in conduct, does not imply a recognition of the way
in which these passions in fact operate. On the contrary it implies
a refusal to recognise that these passions can be understood and
criticised intellectually, even by those who suffer from them, and
that thus, and thus only, their effects on conduct can be con-
trolled. I do not deny that this requires a different social climate
and that we must then become acclimatised to it. But the first
step is that human beings should not be discouraged in dis-
covering that such self-understanding is possible and desirable.
One of the chief ends of Catholic orthodoxy, however, in its me'htal
location of sin, is to make a prime sin out of heresy, which in
order to pursue inquiry in peace and freedom has to shut the door
on authority.

Because these self-interested passions are omnipresent, it
remains purely hypothetical to talk of an unimpeded advance, or
preferably, process, of knowledge. Such a process however was
what was implied by those Victorians who, in the second half of
the nineteenth century, reached some insight into the material and

THE LANDLADY'S ORNAMENTS 29

philosophical changes around them, but by continuing in the
tradition of liberal inquiry were able to see a future as well as a
past for moral and cultural life. Matthew Arnold in particular saw
the functions of the literary man and the poet alike as critical.
Sweetness and light never meant a 'belief in enlightenment'.
They were, on the contrary, only potential products of continuing
a method which so far had brought us all our valuable results in
any field.

For two centuries there had been an intellectual preparation for a
new cosmology, which did not become conscious and formulated,
in the literary mind at least, until about half-way through the
nineteenth century. Apart from the fact that at this time there
were revolutionary contributions to the science of man as well as
to the science of nature, there were a number of other practical
reasons why the 'split in sensibility', which we date to the seven-
teenth century, was less clearly manifest and effectual before about
Arnold's day. For one, poets are good at finding for themselves
naturalistic substitutes for mysticism, as we see from the different
cases of Wordsworth and Shelley. For another, the literary mind
continued to be able to find an intellectual sustenance in the
classics, though, naturally and rightly, of a concrete and imagin-
ative kind. The possession of literary sensibility does not always
imply much power of abstract thought or even much interest in
philosophy. One of the contributory causes of the novel's rise to
dominance may indeed have been the necessary limitation of its
imaginative field to the concrete and the naturalistic. For many
reasons, it has been possible and comparatively easy for novelists
to pay no precise philosophical attention to theology. But by
about the middle of the century, those whose temperament and
training obliged them to pay this attention for example, George
Eliot also found themselves obliged to choose between the
intellectual claims of theology and the method and outlook which
had produced the undeniable achievements of science, while
making them what they were themselves and endowing them
with their standard of truth.

It is easy to put a wrong satirical emphasis on Miss Macaulay's

30 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

story* of the Victorian clergyman who lost his faith as regularly
as his collar-stud. The charge of an arbitrary and even a fashion-
able reaction is easy to make, and is also often convenient to our
contemporary neo-scholastics. But there was nothing arbitrary
about Arnold's Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible.
They were the result of continuing logic and impartiality. What
has .happened between our day and the late middle of the
nineteenth century, when a literary man and critic, conservative,
religious, without specialised scientific training, and perhaps
indeed with some anti-scientific bias, with strong interest in the
humanities and more importantly with a respect and understand-
ing of our main intellectual tradition in Europe, could accept
the ordinary realistic scientific world-picture and celebrate the
obsequies of dogma? Certainly not a different and improved
logic nor contradictory factual observations. But these would be
needed to deflect the process of knowledge in the direction of the
new theological outlook. Anything else, as I have said, can only
be an amputation or perversion of knowledge. Many of our poets
and critics, the very people who would still perhaps agree with
Arnold that their proper business is to distribute the "best that
has been known and thought in the world", are today most deeply
engaged, sometimes unconsciously, but often consciously, in this
amputation and perversion.

1 Told by an Idiot.

CHAPTER II

The Dogma in the Manger

WHEN I said that many of our poets and critics who have
attached themselves more or less firmly to the cause of
dogmatic theology were engaged in the amputation and per-
version of knowledge, I did not mean to imply of all or even of
most of them that this was a direct or a willing aim. Their aim is
in most cases, I should say, emotional, not intellectual. Because
their attitude embodies a natural emotional outlook, of fear in the
face of inevitable nescience, one can feel a natural sympathy with
it, without taking the further step of attaching oneself to an
intellectual system which attempts to counter and thus console it
with false positive claims. Though the cosmology which present
knowledge allows us to hold is not a comfortable one for suffering
human beings, the neo-scholastics, by drawing unwarrantable
moral conclusions from the decline of dogmatic religion, make
our mortal state more miserable than it need be. Among them it
is more common than not to stress the moral rather than the
cosmological and eschatological grounds for a revival of dogmatic
Christianity, to fix their attention on the state of this world, rather
than on their hopes for a next and better one.

"The Christian thinker," says Mr. Eliot . . . "proceeds by
rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so;
he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory;
among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to
account most satisfactorily for the world, and especially for the

31 B*

32 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

moral world within; and thus, by what Newman calls 'powerful
and concurrent' reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed
to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever, this method
seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule,
not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so
greatly distressed by its disorder: nor is he generally concerned
(in modern terms) to 'preserve values'." (From The Pensees of
Pascal.)

We may set against this another quotation, this time from The
Idea of a Christian Society.

"To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of
morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality
from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion: and
we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian
states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always
found in democracies, to providing their national lives with a
foundation of morality the wrong kind perhaps, but a good
deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differen-
tiates a Christian from a pagan society/'

We need not for the moment consider the ambiguities of Mr.
Eliot's use of the words 'disorder', 'values' and 'morality', nor the
substitution of the word 'enthusiasm' for some such expression as
'moral earnestness', 'conscience' or 'Christian morality', which
would be more natural and less tendencious here. What is
significant and typical in these paragraphs, in my opinion, is the
kind of distinction which is drawn between the believer and the
unbeliever, in their relation to morality. The most interesting
thing about it is that it is a distinction with very little difference.

One of the commonplaces of observation is that what we may
call dogmatic, or even systematic, unbelievers are much more
concerned about social or objective morality, the state of the
world, than the general Laodicean (we can allow this to be
partially covered by Mr. Eliot's remarks about the totalitarian

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 33

states) ; and that they are often deeply troubled about the morality
of private relations.

Unbelievers, when they are dogmatic, share an important fault
with the dogmatic believer, as defined, at least in implication, by
Mr. Eliot. They have missed the point of the genuinely Christian
contribution to moral experience and growth. They too begin
with the state of the world instead of the state of their own hearts.
They are Marthas, troubled about many things. They have not
understood Blake's account of moral process "No man ever did
good except in minute particulars."

Dogma, on the other hand, never made any of us Maries. I
know only one place, at least in his expositive writings, where Mr.
Eliot shows even faintly that he has grasped the observational fact
that morality, however it is learnt, operates only through feeling.
This is in After Strange Gods where he discusses Christian
sensibility in relation to various authors, and I have already
referred to it. There he is far from clear and we must not forget
that because he is discussing heresy and dogma, his main concern,
even in this book, is with conformative conduct rather than with
the morality of feeling. We may already have some idea what Mr.
Eliot means when he writes of 'disorder' and 'values'. We can
say at least that 'order' has more connection with the imposed
system of an authoritarian Church, and 'value' more to do with
privilege, than either has with the original Christian conception
of charity.

To try, as the neo-scholastics do, to make morality depend on
the metaphysical dogma and the authority of the Church means
the tieath of morality. Matthew Arnold's account of religion in
God and the Bible and Literature and Dogma deserves renewed
interest because he saw that this would be so, and was concerned
to amputate dogma and metaphysics from the main body of
moral feeling while there was time to save its life. In opposition
to the neo-scholastics, his conception of the Christian faith is
specially important and interesting because he claims to do exactly
what the neo-scholastics say cannot be done, as they are most
concerned of all to show. Mr. Eliot and those who share his

34 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

opinions do not want people to be moral except as the Church
prescribes. Mr. Eliot sometimes refers adversely to 'private
morality' for example, as of George Eliot. This is only a way of
stigmatising all ethical standpoints which are not strictly that of
the Church; although, apart from having been individually tested,
they may represent a human and traditional co-operative effort
which lies anywhere between Protestantism and free thought. I do
not believe that even Mr. Eliot could say that Matthew Arnold's
morality was 'private'. It was based on the perennial Protestant
return to the Bible, a procedure always disliked by the meta-
physical and dogmatic Church. Arnold saw that the metaphysics
and dogma of the Church have really nothing to add to the
traditional religion which we have received from the Old and New
Testaments and which he considers as a developing and com-
plementary body of moral experience. Israel, as he says, was not a
metaphysical philosopher, and a right knowledge of the God-
head was never prescribed for salvation, until after the lifetime of
Christ. With a negative view of metaphysics, Arnold perhaps
allows himself to be too cheerfully, even if indefinitely, positive in
his working references to the ultimate objects of religion "the
Something not ourselves, the Eternal that makes for righteous-
ness".

This philosophic heedlessness has been seized upon by F. H.
Bradley, whom Mr. Eliot quotes with approval (see this chapter
p. 41). Perhaps Arnold could not at that time have thought
differently. In any case, the "Eternal Something, not ourselves"
is not a Something which we can know 'in itself or indeed know
at all. For Arnold to have said less was impossible. To have Said
more would have been to enter into a counter-metaphysics, as
usual of the unknowable. What both books are about is what we
can know, the developing body of moral experience. But there is
no need to gloss over the fact that, in taking this historical and
empirical viewpoint, Arnold overtly precluded the whole of
metaphysics and dogma as well as the supernatural, including all
the miracles, from verifiable meaning. And more: "The Church
is necessary, the clergy are necessary," said Arnold, but this seems

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 35

to be a kind of axiom, or a demarcation of critical theory, rather
as the concept of the Eternal making for righteousness is. If the
intellectual honesty of Arnold's general position has moved us to
any kind of sympathy, we may accept both the Eternal and the
Church as working propositions because the absolute content has
been pumped out of both of them. I do not wish to deny that for
the orthodox this removes also their significance.

To Arnold, religion was 'morality touched with emotion'.
Attachment to the traditional Church was one of the emotions
which touched Arnold's moral experience into religion.

Within the limits of these two attachments, to the Bible and the
Church, which provided him with that minimum of belief which
would distinguish his religion from ethics, Arnold made a plain
statement of the rational and critical view. It seems to me to be
for its time, the year 1876, both honest and correct. But if I single
out Arnold's date, with the comment that it is remarkable that
what was plain enough to one of the best and most thoughtful
critics of his day has in three-quarters of a century become
obscure, forgotten or unacceptable to many of his successors,
although there has been nothing in between to justify a reaction, I
do so in the awareness that Arnold's was not the only repre-
sentative 'Victorian view'. His work was a landmark as a plain
statement of empirical morality, which was not opposed to the
development of knowledge as a whole. But dogma has had its
own continuity, and it looks as if Newman has been more in-
fluential than Arnold. Arnold of course was hampered by the
need to refer to a framework of logic, science and history, while
Nejvman could speak straight to the heart and imagination.
Indeed we can say that Newman clarified the rational situation
by effectually removing belief from the sphere of argument. Since
his day, the most persuasive religious propaganda has based itself
on the admission that:

"faith was indeed incapable of rational 'proof, but that on that
very account it was unassailable by the 'mere' reason; a faith
which rested on demonstration would be either compulsory and

36 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

mechanical, or would be exposed to disproof by other de-
monstrations." (From Basil Willey: The Seventeenth Century
Background. Nineteenth Century Studies.)

No one can say, however, that this admission leads to intel-
lectual satisfaction, nor can it indeed be the official standpoint of
Catholicism, which seems rather to 'solve' the difficulty by imply-
ing that knowledge is hierarchical, a matter of intellectual 'class'.

I choose Arnold because he puts the theoretical position
sufficiently plainly to provide a background for literary men;
because his literary rank and insight still demand the highest
respect, and because he has received adverse attention from our
leading neo-scholastic, Mr. Eliot.

This adverse critical attention is interesting further for the
typical obliqueness of its method. Eliot attacks Arnold either by
applauding Bradley: "Those who have read through (Bradley's)
Ethical Studies will be ready with the remark that it was Bradley
in this book and in the year 1876 who knocked the bottom out of
Literature and Dogma" or by pretending that as a serious,
intelligible and well-considered contribution to the theological
controversy, Literature and Dogma is no longer of importance or
even of interest:

"Literature and Dogma 9 God and the Bible, and Last Essays on
Church and Religion have served their turn and can hardly be read
through. In these books he attempts something which must be
austerely impersonal: in them reasoning power matters, and it
fails him."

This is simply untrue.

There were a great many other writers in the nineteenth century
and onwards, many of them of distinction, who 'lost their faith',
whose conclusions, that is, about dogmatic theology were
adverse. Mr. Eliot's basis for choosing those he will study, which
is necessarily here my own, is again interesting. It is brought out
clearly in his remarks on humanism (The Humanism of Irving
Babbitt and Second Thoughts on Humanism), and the quotations
which follow contain or imply all that is important, for present

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 37

purposes, for us to know of Mr. Eliot's conception of religion, and
of his reasons for choosing certain subjects to attack rather than
others.

"Mr. Babbitt makes it very clear . . . that he is unable to take
the religious view that is to say that he cannot accept any
dogma or revelation: and that humanism is the alternative to
religion. And this brings up the question: is this alternative more
than a substitute. . . ? Is it, in the end, a view of life which will
work by itself, or is it a derivative of religion which will work only
for a short time in history, and only for a few highly cultivated
persons like Mr. Babbitt whose ancestral traditions furthermore
are Christian and who is, like many, at the distance of a generation
or so from definite Christian belief? Is it in other words durable
beyond one or two generations?"

"The religious habits of the race are still very strong, in all
places, and at all times, and for all people. There is no humanistic
habit: humanism is, I think, merely the state of mind of a few
persons in a few places at a few times."

"The humanistic point of view is auxiliary to and dependent
upon the religious point of view. For us, religion is Christianity
and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of the Church.

"Mr. (Norman) Foerster finds that 'the essential reality of
experience is ethical'. For the person with a definite religious faith,
such a statement has one meaning: for the positivistic humanist,
who repudiates religion, it must have another. And that meaning
seems to rest upon obscurities and confusions. I can understand,
though I do not approve, the naturalistic systems of morals
founded upon biological and analytical psychology (what is
valid in these consists largely of things that were always known)*,
but I cannot understand a system of morals which seems to be
founded on nothing but itself which exists, I suspect, only by
illicit relations with either psychology or religion or both, accord-
ing to the bias of mind of the individual humanist."

*I find it impossible to understand, and therefore to approve, this
parenthesis.

38 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Finally:

"Professor Babbitt knows too much ... too many religions
and philosophies, has assimilated their spirit too thoroughly . . .
to be able to give himself to any. The result is humanism."

These quotations remind us forcibly that for Mr. Eliot it is not
ethical meaning, but dogma, by which he means authoritarian
statements by the Church about belief, which is the essential part
of religion. Further, if there is any consistency at all among these
quotations, we must suppose that he wishes to separate dogma as
finally as possible from any rational system of ethics. How
otherwise is it possible for him to reach the conclusion, which for
many people in his situation would be despairing, that Professor
Babbitt 'knows too much'? Too much, one must suppose, to
assent to any dogma, not too much to extract the common
ethical basis from his exhaustive religious study? But Mr. Eliot
has stated his election of dogma, sometimes guardedly and
elliptically but, here and there, even in so many unamplified
words. What one ought not to miss is the fact that, to be logical,
Mr. Eliot would not be thankful to anyone who could show that
the Christian ethic was self-evident. This was indeed the dominant
and pious intention of many of the Victorians who either 'lost
their faith' or who arrived at conclusions resembling humanism,
whether they had been more influenced by German higher criticism
or by Comtean positivism. George Eliot's serious and well-
trained intellect found it necessary to sacrifice dogma and the
supernatural, but to her, as to Mr. Norman Foerster, 'the
essential reality of experience (remained) ethical'. And the
meaningful content of Arnold's 'Eternal that makes for righteous-
ness' is hardly different from this. But Mr. Eliot will have
nothing to do with the empirical except to stand it firmly on its
head. We see now on what grounds he chooses his opponents.
The extremist in religion is perhaps like the extremist in politics
his worst foe is what we may call a Third Force. If a principle is
chosen pragmatically, there is an obvious danger that it will really

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 39

work. Mr. Eliot is trying to put the Church, from the moral point
of view, in the position of the Dog in the Manger saying in effect
that men shall not be moral except after the Church's dogmatic
formula. I should be quoting him unfairly out of his context if I
did not add that Mr. Eliot in these essays (written round about
1928) sees a philosophical and practical value in humanism, but as
culture, not as ethics. His main anxieties on its behalf are those
already quoted: that it is a state of mind of a few persons in a few
places at a few times, and that, as a derivative of Christianity and
of definite Christian belief, it cannot be expected to be durable for
more than one or two generations.

One may ask whether Mr. Eliot is not putting the cart before
the horse. One does not need to have Professor Babbitt's know-
ledge of the world's religions and philosophies, to know that, in
attributing the moral understanding of Arnold and George Eliot,
and subsequent 'humanists' up to Babbitt, to the cause that they
were living on Christian capital, and to claim that any ethic which
is still valid for us today has no important source but Christianity,
is not only to beg the question, but to distort history.

I suppose this is where Mr. Eliot's distinction between the
cultural and the ethical comes in. But I should say on the contrary
that Matthew Arnold, to give only one example, was powerfully
and directly affected by the ethical meanings of both the Old
Testament and of classical teaching, not merely as both were
subsumed and developed in the Christian tradition.

But neither Mr. Eliot, nor any of the writers in any of the
quarterlies and weeklies and even dailies, where I have so often
seeai it referred to, really justify this idea about living on Christian
capital, nor the accompanying fear that that moral capital may be
exhausted, as Mr. Eliot, for one, suggests, 'in one or two
generations'.

This strikes me as implicitly an example of the gross materialism
which always sooner or later infects philosophies in proportion as
they aim at substantialising the spiritual: morality, like oil or gold,
is a quantitative resource and may be exhausted. One sees the
same quantitative anxiety in Mr. Eliot's other fear about the 'too

40 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

few humanists in too few places at too few times'. What he
means, I suppose, is something not unlike the Comtean view that,
to be effectual, humanists also need the binding traditions and
observances of a Church. And yet dogmatic Christianity has had
the services of a Church since its early days, and still the truly
religious within the Church those who attempt to love their
neighbours as themselves are, like the humanists, too few, too
scattered, too intermittent.

Moreover, Mr. Eliot is surely too convinced an anti-Pelagian to
wish or to expect anyone to say that religion, even orthodox
Christianity, has made the actual world very much better than it
otherwise would have been. The reason for the moral in-
effectuality of both humanism and religion is the same that we
are not so very easily convinced of the truth of the basic moral
observations, especially in our young and formative years, and
that even when we are, they are very difficult to apply. But
humanism encourages us to look for the empirical and rational
steps towards moral conduct, as dogmatic religion does not and
cannot.

The point about the religious humanists, of whom Matthew
Arnold is an example, is that they have a strong yearning for the
empirical. The main intellectual drive of such typical Protestants
is to show that the ethics of Christianity are verifiable, demon-
strably true, and that its moral essence consists just in this, the
freedom of intellectual assent. This search for verifiability
followed a typical course in Arnold, it led to the 'documents',
that is, to the Bible. The nearer to the Bible, the further away
from the Church. The historical Protestant path, which is still
continually followed by individual moralists, must lead to
absolute freedom for all inquiry, and so to the separation of
morals from any dogma, including that of the Church. This is
why Eliot is more hostile to Arnold for his empirical morality
than if he had had none at all.

The attack on the moral views of the humanists is expressed, as
one might expect, as an attack on their Pelagianism. I quote this
as it is interesting for later chapters of this book:

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 41

"For it is not enough to chastise the romantic visions of
perfectibility the modern humanistic view implies that man
is either perfectible or capable of indefinite improvement because
from that point of view the only difference is a difference of
degree. ... It is to the immense credit of Hulme that he
found out for himself that there is an Absolute to which Man can
never attain."

This then is the hypostatical shape of the mind which attacks
Arnold, particularly through Bradley, whose mental framework is
similar. The real enemy is Arnold's view that we cannot find in
experience, and also do not require, any such Absolute: God is
known only as moral experience, and since this is discovered, not
revealed, moral progress is possible, the transition from the
morality of the Old Testament to that of the New being one such
advance in the race's moral apperception.

The paragraph which Eliot quotes from Bradley's Ethical
Studies is cleverly chosen:

" 'Is there a God?' asks the reader. 'Oh yes,' replies Mr.
Arnold, 'and I can verify him in experience.' 'And what is he
then?' cries the reader. 'Be virtuous, and as a rule you will be
happy,' is the answer. 'Well, and God?' 'That is God,' says
Arnold, 'there is no deception, and what more do you want?' I
suppose we do want a good deal more. Most of us, certainly the
public which Mr. Arnold addresses, want something they can
worship; and they will not find that in an hypostasized copybook
heading, which is not much more adorable than 'Honesty is the
best policy', 'Handsome is that handsome does', or various
other edifying maxims which have not yet come to an apotheosis."

"Such criticism," comments Eliot, "is final. It is patently a great
triumph of wit and a great delight to watch when a man's
methods, almost his tricks of speech, are thus turned against
himself. But if we look more closely into these words and into
the whole chapter from which they are taken, we find Bradley
to have been not only triumphant in polemic but right in reason."

42 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

It is interesting but perhaps here not strictly relevant, to ask
whether one can really be 'triumphant in polemic' unless one is
'right in reason'. But it must be admitted that Bradley has
picked on the most serious inconsistency of Arnold's position :
God is a metaphysical concept and, since Arnold will have nothing
to do with metaphysics, the name is used by him in fact only as an
emotional invocation and, thus retained without any content, is a
weakness not strength in his argument. But Arnold was not and
probably could not be prepared for complete agnosticism.
Religion for him was morality tinged with emotion and if 'The
Eternal', whether making for righteousness or not, is a concept
difficult to verify in experience, Arnold meant a feeling, not an
intellectual experience, the experience of a tradition whose main
significance was that it was continuous and did not either begin or
end with ourselves.

It is perfectly true, as Bradley says, that people want something
more: they want assurances about the supernatural, especially
about the economics of the supernatural, the system of payments
and penalties which might be conjectured to counterbalance the
moral experiences of earthly life. This no kind of intellectual
analysis, whether it calls itself philosophical or theological, can
give them. That is the point of Arnold's work, to remind us that
we know nothing of the supernatural and that the validity of
moral experience remains, as it always was, unaffected by the
existence or non-existence of the supernatural. Literature and
Dogma and God and the Bible are the literary man's handbooks of
negative theology. I do not see how Mr. Eliot can so easily
dismiss Arnold as 'weak in philosophy' or 'reasoning powgr'.
His philosophical arguments are not original, nor intended to be,
and that is their strength. They are essentially Kant's critical
arguments, which have never been given a satisfactory meta-
physical answer, and they simply remind us of what we ought not
to forget. Mr. Eliot and his kind sometimes seem to imply that a
philosophical argument dies if it is not repeated every few years,
like a kind of claim. This may be true and I think it is so of merely
metaphysical or dogmatic philosophical structures which live

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 43

only in words. But a sound philosophical argument is an analysis
of some sort of experience, it is not merely a legal claim upon our
understanding which has to be made annually in order to preserve
its validity.

Some such assumption is behind Mr. Eliot's references to the
'unreadability' of these books of Arnold. They are only unread-
able to eyes and minds already firmly closed. But to anyone,
however familiar with the philosophical arguments, who wishes to
see how the controversial climate has changed between Arnold's
day and ours, they make extremely interesting reading. For in the
pages of the neo-scholastics, whether they are suave like Mr.
Eliot's or something between apocalyptic and tub-thumping like
Mr. Lewis's or Miss Sayers's, free controversy, so much alive among
the Victorians, has been stifled. In one way or another, they all
behave as if their chief adversary, the continuity of historical and
scientific experience and discussion, just were not there.

The last paragraph may make it appear as if my selection of
writers to lump together as neo-scholastic, is indiscriminate or
even careless in its literary evaluation. This is not so. I am well
aware that the perceptions of Mr. Lewis and Miss Sayers, either of
life or literature, are immeasurably coarser than Mr. Eliot's, who
is in any case probably the most distinguished critical and creative
mind to be discussed in this book. But Mr. Eliot, having a precise
and profound sense of language, has only himself to blame, if he is
mentioned in such a breath. He shares the vices for which I call
them all 'neo-scholastic'. He also uses many words as if they were
things, and with them gives a Name a Bad Dog, for example
'Liberalism', and 'Science' which he in general employs with a
pejorative flavour. Mr. Eliot has said, a statement of profound
importance for us in this book, that we must learn to scrutinise
our reading of literature by precise Christian and theological
standards, but perhaps first we should all scrutinise our reading of
theology, especially of literary theology, by precise literary and
semantic standards.

Arnold is interesting, especially for his time, because he had
grasped the importance of the semantic principle that words are

44 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

not things, and the philosophical arguments he selected should be
taken as leading up to a special implication of this principle for
literature and religion. It is remarkable that a man so ex-
ceptionally and significantly sensitive to the emotive power of the
language of great literary and religious writing, to the seemingly
independent existence which all good poetry attains, should have
been so clear about the distinction between that and the kind of
'existence' which can be discussed with philosophical meaning.

Basically, as I have said, Arnold's arguments are those of post-
Kantian critical philosophy. It seems doubtful that the purely
critical side of Kant's philosophy has ever since been set aside by
any more positive view. These arguments are set out by Arnold
in God and the Bible, a sequel to Literature and Dogma, particularly
in the chapter called The God of Metaphysics'. There he begins
with a criticism of Descartes :

"Everyone knows," says Arnold, "that Descartes, looking
about him ... for a firm ground whereon he might take his
stand and begin to operate, for one single thing which was clearly
certain and indubitable, found it in the famous "Cogito, ergo sum, I
think therefore I am'. Thinker after thinker has paid his tribute of
admiration to the axiom; it is called the foundation of modern
philosophy. Now we shall confess with shame . . . that from
this fundamental axiom of Descartes we were never able to derive
that light and satisfaction which others have derived from it.
And for the following reason. The philosopher omits to tell
us what he exactly means by to be, to exist. . . . Perhaps he really
does mean something more by the words, something that we fail
to grasp. We say so, because we find him, like philosophers in
general, often speaking of essence, existence and substance, and in
speaking of them he lays down as certain and evident many
propositions which we cannot follow. For instance, he says : We
have the idea of an infinite substance, eternal, all-knowing, all-
powerful, the creator of all things, and with every possible per-
fection. . . .' All this, I say, our guide finds certain and not
admitting of the least doubt. It is part of the things which we

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 45

conceive with clearness and distinctness and, of which, therefore,
we can be persuaded thoroughly. Man is a finite substance, that is,
he has but a limited degree of being, or perfection. God is an
infinite substance, that is, he has an unlimited degree of being, or
perfection. Existence is a perfection, therefore God exists;
thinking and loving are perfections and therefore God thinks and
loves. . . . Not Descartes only, but every philosopher who
attempts a metaphysical demonstration of God, will be found to
proceed in this fashion, and to appeal at last to our conception of
being, existing."

Arnold deals with these concepts of being or existing, seman-
tically, in a way which anticipates certain twentieth-century
attitudes and shows that it is not unreasonable to place him in the
succession which leads to Ogden and Richards. Being and
Existing, when they mean anything at all, must be conceived in a
way which derives from their original etymology, roots which
mean 'breathing' and 'growing', but the certainty in the Cartesian
metaphysician's mind is about something which thinks and loves
without breathing and growing.

"Let us take the grand argument from design," says Arnold.
"Design, people say, implies a designer. The ambiguity lies in the
little termination, er, by which we mean a being who designed.
We talk of a being, an etre, and we imagine that the word gives us
conscious intelligence, thinking and loving, without bodily
organisation. . . . Design implies a designer? Human design
doe; it implies the presence of a being who breathes and
thinks . . ."

What Arnold calls the 'grand argument from design', Kant
calls the 'physico-theological proof. This is one of three to which
he reduced all the purely metaphysical proofs of the existence of
God, claiming to have demolished them all. The ontological
proof, originated by Anselm, is the one, to which Arnold refers in
his discussion of Descartes, with its conclusion that God must

46 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

exist, since existence is a perfection which God could not con-
ceivably lack. Kant pointed out that existence is not a predicate, it
is not an implication or quality of any subject, or on the other
hand something that must be affirmed or denied about any
given subject:

"A hundred thalers that I merely imagine may have all the same
predicates as a hundred real thalers," he says.

By Aquinas, whose philosophy is now regarded as the in-
tellectual groundwork of Catholic orthodoxy, the ontological
proof was set aside in favour of the cosmological proof, which
states that if anything exists (as for instance I know myself to
exist), then an absolutely necessary Being exists, and this must be
the Ens Realissimum, that being which has the greatest possible
reality. Kant said that this was only the ontological argument
over again, since the Ens Realissimum is claimed as the subject of
all possible predicates which belong to being absolutely. If
Aquinas's favourite proof can thus be reduced to one on which
orthodoxy does not pretend to build, it looks as if the intellectual
foundation which he provides to neo-scholasticism might be
shaky.

Of the physico-theological argument, or argument from design,
which maintains that the universe exhibits an order which is
evidence of purpose, Kant says that at best this proves only an
architect, not a creator, and therefore cannot give an adequate
conception of God. By this he seems to mean the same as Arnold,
that the order of the universe, if it is indeed visible, still implies
nothing whatsoever about the being who thinks and loves.

His practical conclusion is again like Arnold's that the only
theology of reason which is possible is that which is based upon
moral laws or seeks guidance from them. Like Arnold, he is not
out to deny the existence of God, merely to purify conception
from conclusions which are without intellectual warrant.

These references are not intended to be more than a reminder
that there is a historical philosophical sequence, at least from Kant,

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 47

in which Arnold may be found. There has been a negative
progress of knowledge. We know that we cannot know the
existence of God. If people are to believe in the existence of God
they must do so on other than intellectual grounds. The logical
analysts in our own day have found additional negative arguments,
summed up by Russell as his 'theory of descriptions', which
claims that existence can only rightly be asserted of 'descriptions'
or qualifications, and not of names, of the connotative and not the
denotative; but that need not detain us. It is important to notice
that scepticism, even if it appeals to logic and the demonstrable, is
still a tradition that is, it has a consolidated existence which goes
far beyond our or any contemporary needs, wishes or ideas.
Mr. Eliot, I know, 'will not argue' (After Strange Gods) with
those who are in radical intellectual opposition, but they are, after
all, in this opposing tradition, a consolidated existence beyond
immediate logomachies, which it is a tall order to ignore. But if
you will not argue, what else can you do with it?

And if God's existence presents us with such grave philosophical
difficulties, what are we to say of such dependent categories as the
incarnate divine and the miraculous, which, as they are claimed
to manifest themselves, do fall within the region of critical and
historical experience? For those, who 'will not argue' about God's
existence require that in the name of 'orthodoxy' we should assent
to such dogmas as the Fall, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and,
even more important and perhaps even more remarkably,
Original Sin, which do fall within the empirical purview and the
field of ordinary probability. One should keep it continually
before one's eyes that when the neo-scholastics talk about these
dogmas they are not speaking symbolically. In general, they mean
exactly what they say in so far as they know what they mean.
Mr. Eliot's foundation is and claims to be dogmatic (Original Sin,
the theological dogma, must be admitted as a 'very real and
terrible thing') and it may be said that the foundation of dogma, in
turn, is faith and ecclesiastical authority. But if there were nothing
but dogma and authority there would be no theology. I do not
believe for one moment that Mr. Eliot would allow that the

48 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Church's dogma is inconvertible. Somewhere in the vaults of
history she keeps the intellectual gold to honour her dogmatic
paper.

But not all the neo-scholastics are intellectually so reticent,
nor perhaps so wise, as Mr. Eliot. They 'will argue'. I suspect that
it is really because he knows a great deal more about theology and
philosophy than, for instance, Mr. Lewis or Miss Sayers, that Mr.
Eliot will not. They, however, are willing if not able to divide the
philosophy and the psychology of the divine between them. Miss
Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, tells us exactly how God feels,
and in particular how he would feel if he had written a detective
story. (One of hers : he could have done no less.) Mr. Lewis, in
Miracles, shows himself sufficiently impressed with Miss Sayers's
understanding of creative and critical ability, her own and that of
others, to use the gist of this analogy.

Both these writers could be described, not too metaphorically, as
fundamentalists. They claim that all the answers which the
human mind requires, to form an adequate picture of the universe
it inhabits, are to be found in the Christian revelation, as inter-
preted by the Church; and this includes answers to those astio-
logical and eschatological questions which according to the
empiricist are meaningless. One may perhaps admire the con-
sistency of their determination more than that of their logic, but
one should never forget that to be willing to answer all the
ultimate questions does not imply that you are willing or able to
answer all the intermediate ones. A psychological or anthropo-
logical study at any level, provided it is honest and objective, will
provoke the observer to reflections which cannot be set aside* by
the doctrine of Original Sin, and this even if he comes to agree
with Freud that human beings are radically aggressive. An
answer may be framed much more to shut up an opponent than to
satisfy him. Adults, when they have got themselves into the
position of claiming omniscience, even a vicarious one, as the neo-
scholastic apologists have done, are bound to try and treat their
adversaries, or even their questioners, as children.

On these ultimates Miss Sayers and Mr. Lewis 'will argue',

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 49

whereas Mr. Eliot 'will not'. As a result his work reads far less
condescendingly and more tentatively. The tone becomes
different, as soon as he will argue, or at least quote argument, as in
the paper on Bradley and Arnold, or indeed in the one on Babbitt.
Here he himself shows signs of withdrawing behind the magisterial
manner (with that worst of the master's mannerisms, playful sar-
casm). Mr. Eliot's work is mostly staid, objective and critical,
at least when its objects are literary. An emotional mannerism
suggests that he is producing a case, rather than a study, and that
he is not sure of it. And, indeed, it would surely have been better,
from his own point of view as well as ours, if he had treated
Arnold's religion of morality with more respect.

We may agree with Bradley that Arnold's 'Eternal making for
righteousness' is not verifiable in the sense in which a scientist
would be satisfied to use the word, and it seems obvious now that
in basing his beliefs on the inductive and experimental Arnold
dismissed theology and metaphysics quite as radically as, let us
say, A. J. Ayer in our day. But the morality of experience, which
he isolated as the essential of religion, seems to me to have at least
the level of objectivity which we find in many of the social
sciences, and certainly to record for us much more realistically
and exactly than the neo-scholastics do, the nature of Christianity.
Bradley makes too much of an implied utilitarianism in criticising
Arnold, and this is also one of the stock ways in which the anti-
Pelagian classicists of our day try to make their opponents look
ridiculous. The implication was that Arnold claimed that the
Eternal, making for righteousness, also at least in the long run
made for happiness and that this is not so very different from
talking about the greatest good of the greatest number (and that
this of course is damnable). Here I should like to draw attention
to a common controversial habit (alluded to elsewhere as 'Giving
a Name a Bad Dog') which comes into prominence whenever
there has been a marked change in the philosophical climate, and
which always affects worst those who have an emotional objection
to an empirical attitude. There has been such a climatic change
between the time of the Utilitarians and ourselves and now it

50 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

seems very difficult to examine the value of their proposition
objectively. The anti-Pelagians in particular are much inclined to
believe that a change in the fashion of philosophy, which can
certainly be induced, and can possibly be brought about by this
system of pejorative reference, can, if it favours their beliefs, be
rated as a kind of criticism. The basic utilitarian propositions are
descriptive of human behaviour, and being descriptive, tied to the
individual observation, are necessarily partial and open to con-
tradiction. But it is not intrinsically absurd to seek happiness,
one's own or that of other people, or that of as many people as
possible, and we can hardly say that, even as a political philosophy,
utilitarianism has failed, because it quite certainly has never and
nowhere been thoroughly tried. What Arnold did say was that:

"To feel that one is fulfilling in any way the law of one's being,
that one is succeeding and hitting the mark, brings us we know,
happiness. . . . We have already had Quintilian's witness how
right conduct gives joy. Who could value knowledge more than
Goethe? but he marks it as being without question a lesser source
of joy than conduct"

This certainly looks like utilitarianism to say that men will
not, and to imply that they ought not to, be expected to behave
well without the promise of some reward, and that the reward is
happiness and that happiness is worthy to be sought. But I am not
so sure that this is unverifiable by ordinary common-sense
observation, which we constantly use and must use, to continue
living. I believe that the original object of the teaching of Christ
was to show men how to be happy; that this is the meaning of the
Christian concept of love or charity, and has always been, however
dimly and imperfectly, the aim of any philosophy which has
concerned itself with the laws of human life and behaviour on this
planet; and that this concept, which we particularly associate with
Christ, is what Arnold had in mind and what the neo-scholastics
today have largely forgotten. Arnold's 'Eternal' and 'Righteous-
ness' could no doubt do with more definition; they seem to be

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 51

concepts poetically 'thrown out', as he would say, at an object only
dimly perceived. But if his statements about the relation of
happiness and morality are in a different class, as regards
verifiability, from scientific statements, they are also in a different
class from the statements of mystics. They are based on general
and traditional human experience and the causal connections
which it has noted, and there is a considerable question whether
the experiences claimed by the mystic are of any meaning or value
even to himself unless they are an extrapolation from these more
common and naturalistic connections. We plain mortals can
generally see well enough the causal connection between conduct
and the happiness it brings, while we cannot see the causal
connection between the inward experience of the mystic and the
happiness that is supposed to bring, unless the mystic is also
concerned with conduct: unless, in other words, he provides us
with a human hypothesis as well as a mystical one, for the
equilibrium and sense of significance, the fulfilment and peace
which he in general claims to achieve. However true it may be
that if you seek happiness you will not find it (surely because this
is too abstract to be an occupation), if you despise it, either for
yourself or how much more easily this comes for other people,
if you try, that is, to cut yourself away from the texture of ordinary
actual living, you will not find anything at all.

I intend no more than to suggest that Arnold's 'Eternal making
for righteousness', if interpreted as what he would have called a
symbol 'thrown out', is, whatever Bradley may say to the con-
trary, not without meaning. What seems to me altogether
acceptable in Arnold, and what he largely if not entirely meant, is
that morality is organically human, it is within the human race and
develops with it. That it is not a dogma up in the sky must be
plain to many of us beside the Existentialists, as it was already
plain to Arnold. But since that fact is far from plain to our neo-
scholastics, it has to be repeated here.

The subject-matter of religion, says Arnold, is conduct, and
conduct, at a low estimate, is three-fourths of human life
"every impulse relating to temper, every impulse relating to

52 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

sensuality and we all know how much that is." And if morality
is thus human, and indeed, we can say, what makes society
organic, then it must develop or die. We have admitted that
Arnold never makes clear, and perhaps did not know, what he
means by the Eternal, but at least we can say that conduct, the
moral law of human existence which is internal to society, is
always concerned with what does not begin and end with our
individual experience. Change, as in other evolutionary depart-
ments, may appear retrogressive, and even often is so. But the
moral law is internal, not superimposed, it is like other natural
laws, a generalisation which acts at the same time as a method of
making discoveries moral discoveries. This is the only way in
which it can remain 'moral'. Christianity, then, as expounded by
Christ, may be looked upon as a set of moral discoveries resulting
from the application of the developing moral law as expounded by
Israel.

We can comprehend, if not justify, the dogmatic claims of the
neo-scholastics when we grasp that morality cannot be both
relative and absolute. If it is based on the experiences of man, it
not only does not require but cannot admit the sanctions of
theology. The old distinction between natural and revealed
religion was in this sense a valid one. Hence we can see light upon
the depreciation and actual dislike of humanism which is felt and
expressed by Mr. Eliot and others. We must believe, if we do,
'because it is impossible'. There is no other ground. Possibility
means that which lies within experience. But Arnold was right
that the Christianity of Christ, developing out of and criticising
and interpreting the religion of Israel, did refer to experience, in
particular to the basic experience of the need of charity.

It is interesting therefore to see where the practical moral
preoccupations of the neo-scholastic literary philosophers lie,
what aspects of human conduct and its implied scale of values
they think worth notice or consideration, since their idea of
morality, which is based on the theological doctrines of the Fall
and of Original Sin, is fixed and extra-human. I shall make
frequent references to other writers, but it is in Mr. Eliot's work

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 53

that we find the clearest and most detailed picture, the nearest
thing to a system, and also the most interesting omissions. Both
in his prose and his poetry there are many references to Time,
particularly to the Past; but in the poetry in general, references to
the concept of love, Christian or secular, are rare, and in the later
poetry any awareness of the immediate neighbour, in the Christian
sense of that term, is lacking. There is a recognition of and a
distaste for copulation. From the earlier poems we can remember
Sweeney Agonistes and also the typist in The Waste Land. By the
time we reach the Four Quartets the mainspring of human life has
become a habit of peasants, remotely imagined. Spring is

The time of the coupling of men and woman
And that of beasts.'

We cannot blame Mr. Eliot for not being a poet of love, but we
cannot call him a Divine Poet in the suffering, concrete way of
Dante or Donne. As he says to his soul,

'Wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing.'

In one of the late scenes of The Cocktail Party he seems to
allow Edward and Lavinia the faint warmth of a dismal com-
panionship in inadequacy. There is more in human love than this
and most dramatic poets, Christian or not, have been aware of it.
Even if the ecstasies sometimes prove to be illusions, it is the
natural task of the dramatic poet to make us feel the force and
indeed the creative stimulus of the illusion upon its victims. Mr.
Eliot's main interests now lie with a theory about human emotion
and behaviour, rather than with the emotion and the behaviour
themselves. But the dogma of Original Sin and of the Fall cannot
serve him or anyone else dramatically or poetically. It cannot
bridge the discrepancy between the abstract idea of Good and
suffering humanity in need of charity. His characters are all in
that state of passive suffering which Arnold, dramatically, saw
and condemned in his own Empedocles. Beneath the large fiat
tombstone of unalterable, because abstract, guilt and sin which he

54 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

has laid upon them, they squirm but they cannot act. And in his
polemic and philosophical writing he has become obsessed with
the bones of society, because the flesh has failed him. This is the
necessary and evil result of hypostatical thinking.

In these prose works also, where he makes an attempt to sketch
an ideal or improved order of living, his prime concern is never
with the individual heart and its needs and capacities, nor indeed
in any real sense at all with that 'freedom of personality' which
Christian thinkers in general claim to hold sacred*, but with the
order and structure of society.

But Mr. Eliot tries to base his Christian society upon an
abstraction, the doctrine of the absolute and inherent imperfection
of men and women, without reference to their real relationships
or the world of real activity into which they are born, without
reference, that is, either to experience or tradition. Christ never
made this mistake. Can anything be more central to his teaching
than the concept of charity, which refers to the individuals of
flesh and blood with whom one is actually in touch? Whatever
he has to say and it is relatively little about the possible order
of society, springs only from this. And whatever we can apply of
his teaching springs only from this. And from our failure to
grasp this point springs also the badness of our present society
and of all other societies. There never has been a Christian
society, but to dwell continually and only on our incapacities, and
to claim, as the dogmatists do, that because they are real, they are
absolute, certainly means that we always shall miss the point, and
that there never will be a society in which charity is more im-
portant than power. A good society must be a living organism, it
must have vitality and growth, and this means that individuals
must be so born and educated that they can perennially recognise
something spontaneous and new as well as something ancient and
common in the other individuals they meet. This is the meaning of
love or charity. This kind of sharply individualised awareness is

*I am not under any liberal illusions about individualism ; I refer strictly
to personality, the entity with which these writers claim the state etc. ought
not to interfere.

THE DOGMA IN THE MANGER 55

moreover an essential characteristic of the good artist and poet, to
whom, therefore, dogmatic abstractions of any kind are special
poison.

The goodness or badness of society does not consist in con-
formity or non-conformity with any imposed intellectual structure.
To try and impose any intellectual dogma whatsoever on the
growth of society, which is the growth of individuals, comes
always in the end to an attempt to abstract and perpetuate what is
old and bad in that society. Dramatically it means robotry or
death in character and personality. Mr. Eliot is no better and no
worse than Shaw in this respect.

Dogmatic theology, because it denies the goodness or badness
taught to us by experience, is driven to make common front with
the worst causes, which can still be recognised as such by any
mere reader of the gospel. Mr. Eliot and his followers or sup-
porters are at heart concerned not with charity but with power.
Our deplorable society therefore should not hope or expect to get
from them the succour that it needs. For all our genuine cultural
impulses of whatever kind, even the lowest including the range
of examples given by Mr. Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition
of Culture, seem to spring from our need of charity rather than
of power. At least we can say that culture originates in the
urge to live together rather than in the urge to die together, for
whatever cause. The Church, if it were to regain its ancient
authority, would do so more than ever by imposition, and by
alliance with corrupt and power-seeking forces, as we can observe
wherever it has had the opportunity to advance of late years. The
Chu/ch has never remembered for long how to rule men by their
affections, and now, for obvious reasons, it can only intervene
restrictively in their intellectual interests or in any but their
simplest pastimes.

All dogma, in fact, including, and especially, the dogma of
Original Sin, divorces us from real and natural morality, which can
only be taught us by personal and individual love, generally
experienced early and unconsciously. If we cannot learn out
morality from that reality, we shall learn it from another : hate.

CHAPTER UI

Mr. Hulme's Sloppy Dregs

IN his introduction to his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
Mr. Eliot says that "to rescue this word (Culture) is the extreme
of my ambition." The semantic aim is stressed throughout the
book and this, in a dogmatist, must draw our attention and
perhaps arouse our suspicion. Can it be that Mr. Eliot detects a
semantic abuse only on the part of those, the secularists, whom he
must regard as the enemy? There are many hints throughout the
book that the issue of the dependency of culture upon religion,
or vice versa, was after all prejudged in Mr. Eliot's mind:

"The facile assumption of a relationship between culture and
religion is perhaps the most fundamental weakness of Arnold's
Culture and Anarchy. Arnold gives the impression that Culture
(as he uses the term) is something more comprehensive than
religion; that the latter is no more than a necessary element,
supplying ethical formation and some emotional colour, to
Culture which is the ultimate value."

It looks as if in rescuing the word Mr. Eliot has reserved it in his
mind already for a higher fate than mere liberty.

One may limit one's aim to a semantic criticism, but I do not
think it makes sense to limit one's semantic criticism. Apart from
this one work Mr. Eliot is not more remarkable than anyone else
for his interest in semantics, while the philosophy on which he
now bases his life and work abounds in terms which have to be

56

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 57

believed before they can be understood: for so I interpret Mr.
Eliot's studied refusal to analyse these basic concepts of his faith
which he says are of the greatest importance for the rest of us.

But for those of us for whom belief is still not a mere surrender
of intelligence, but something connected with at least the possi-
bility of discussion; who cannot, with Tertullian or Sir Thomas
Browne, believe the more, and even the more virtuously, 'because
it is impossible'; nor even, with the Queen in Alice in Wonderland,
perform our spiritual exercises before breakfast, by believing six
impossible things, there is only one way in which we can give
scholasticism, old or new, any meaning, and that is by trying to
investigate its terms.

Most of these words and conceptions have already been
mentioned Original Sin, the Fall, the Incarnation. Moreover it
has already been said that these ideas immediately involve us
with other conceptions which are necessary to give them some
appearance of objective validity: the dual conception, for instance,
of the words 'truth' and 'knowledge', the implication that these
have, each of them, two distinct and opposed applications, one in
the field of science and one in the field of religion.

These words and conceptions may be said to provide the new
scholasticism with its basic stock-in-trade, but it will be necessary
to investigate other terms which are common in wider fields,
particularly in literature and criticism. The changes in the use of
the words Romanticism and Classicism, for instance, will illustrate
what happens when notions of heresy or orthodoxy get loose in
literary criticism or in the philosophy of art.

These words, which throughout their history have always been
remarkable for semantic abuse, are important as they are used by
the neo-scholastic literary school, because they stand in a special
relation to the Pelagian heresy, which is a denial of the strict
dogma of Original Sin. The Romantic, according to the neo-
scholastics, is someone who bases all his thinking and writing on
the assumption that man is only corrupted by society, that he is
born 'good' and, perhaps more importantly, is perfectible by his
own efforts. It is important to notice that the possibility that

58 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

natural 'goodness' or natural 'badness' do not have any very
precise meaning is never taken into account.

All these words and conceptions are manifestations of a single
attempt to reassert a world- view, that of theological scholasticism,
which is in absolute contradiction to the philosophy, the im-
plications and the practice which derive inevitably from the
scientific approach to the world. I have adopted Eddington's
term hypothetico-observational to define this. Whether or not
your emotional or impulsive reaction to the idea of science is
favourable, it is advisable, especially if you are a person dealing
with words, to make yourself aware that this absolute opposition
between science and scholasticism is a fact. There are many
people who are trying or will try to muddle you. Not all of them,
as we have already seen, are clerical or literary. Some of these
amateur theologians are men of science, for instance, Eddington
himself. Outside their own specialities, men of science do not
seem to treat words or conceptions more critically than anyone
else. Unless creative and critical writers themselves begin to find
out exactly what they are talking about, we may find ourselves
back in the Dark Ages sooner than even those who hanker for
them, as the source of all light, may like.

The commonest way of disguising this total opposition between
religious dogmatism and science would certainly often dismay the
more imaginative writers, if it were clearly grasped. In the face or
scientific argument, not all of them have the stamina of D. H.
Lawrence ('I don't feel it here,' i.e., in the solar plexus). The
disguise is the Two Truths theory, which I have already mentioned.
This is used by clerical and professional theologians, and we must
expect them to use it. Their position is by definition hypostatical,
and this is the only way they can keep it up.

But it is also used freely by literary men and critics who should,
one feels, have vested their interests in purifying the language of
the tribe, not in leaving it worse confounded. Underneath, the
Two Truths theory is merely another form of hypostasis, an
unwarrantable attribution of substance to a mere concept. It
states that science, whose method has admittedly produced

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 59

verifiable results in its special fields, must stick to those fields.
Religion on the other hand has its own special field of Truth'.
This theory, in one form or another, has been prominent since the
seventeenth century, when the results of the scientific, the
hypothetico-observational, method became striking. In the
seventeenth century, it received the support even of inductive or
materialistic thinkers, such as Bacon, who were impatiently
enthusiastic about the results of scientific method and did not
want, for various reasons, to be bothered by the orthodox
authorities. In our day, those thinkers who fear that materialism
is necessarily hostile to poetry as well as to religion and who
equate 'Science' with 'Materialism', and 'Materialism' with a
universe of billard-ball atoms and no morals, use this theory as
their chief intellectual basis. As usual we must except Mr. Eliot,
who never argues but states. But the theory is present or implied
not only in the professionally theological works, including those
of Maritain, Demant and others, but in the theological applica-
tions to literature which Basil Willey has taken from T. E.
Hulme, apart from the Hallelujah Chorus of C. S. Lewis and Miss
Dorothy Sayers. Cleanth Brooks, a distinguished and penetrating
literary critic, employs the theory in a secular form, but he has also
marked hostility to science and does not grasp what science is. In
passing, I must also give special mention to Mr. Norman Nichol-
son (Man and Literature), since his revelation of what he means by
science puts this characteristic incomprehension in a handy and
referable form:

")uring the last few centuries there has developed a tendency
to think that truth is only to be known in the sphere of science,
and by science is meant the art of recording and measuring natural
phenomena. Thus that a halfpenny is an inch across is 'true';
that the 'Mona Lisa' is beautiful is a 'matter of opinion'. The
effect on the arts of this unconscious belief is clear; the concerns of
poetry, religion and so on are not true. . . . The imaginative life
of poetry became at best only a fairy tale to be indulged in for its
own sake. Clearly such a mental atmosphere was not likely to be

60 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

productive of great poetry, and there are no great poets among
the realists. . . . The revolt against the confinement of thought
within the limits of dry materialism was headed naturally enough
by the poet and the metaphysician. But later on they were joined by
the scientists too (my italics), for the development of psycho-
analysis and anthropology shows that scientists were beginning to
realise that there were more things in the universe than could be
put in a test-tube or measured by calipers. The cult of the irrational
took many forms, some of which seem scarcely to deserve to be
called irrational (Note: Then why call them so?) There was
surrealism and its allied -isms: dadaism, symbolism etc. There was
psycho-analysis and the study of the unconscious mind and its
symbols. (Note: How can such a study be irrational?) There was
the revived interest in myth and folk-lore."

Unfortunately there is much that needs to be said further on the
subject of the scientists who 'joined' and why they did so. But
first I must point out the confusion which Mr. Nicholson makes
between the knower and the thing known, typical, as I shall often
show, of his fellow-thinkers; here between the scientist and his
object of study, between the irrational phenomena and their
rational and co-ordinated examination. Then there is the quaint
implication that the scientists moved rather later than the average
human being into the Horatian position about the contents of
heaven and earth, and apologetically produced several new kinds
of subject-matter which they could not put into their test-tubes or
measure with their calipers. I suppose Mr. Nicholson may think
that by the expression "the art of recording . . . natural
phenomena", he protects himself from the accusation that he is
living in a Dureresque dream of retorts and crucibles (and perhaps
also in a fantasy of Black Magic and Auto-da-fe). But I think it is
clear enough, from the context, that he is talking in terms of
outworn materialism, which necessarily involves him in outworn
idealism. It must constantly be repeated that these attitudes
are counterparts. One deals in lumps of matter and the other
deals in lumps of mind. 'Psycho-analysis' and 'anthropology',

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 61

as he conceives them, are Mr. Nicholson's 'lumps of mind'.

For the scientist, phenomena must have a 'given' quality, even
if he inseparably and concurrently sets about evolving a working
theory to discover the next stage of the 'given'. This primarily has
nothing to do with any substantial universe behind the given
phenomena, any Reality behind Appearance. The characteristics
essentially discovered in the universe by the scientific approach
are three. First, givenness: this word is preferable to objectivity
as it does not immediately involve us with epistemological
philosophy, either idealism or materialism. The second charac-
teristic is unity. Phenomena, that is, do not arbitrarily resist his
patterns of investigation, there is continuity between those
elements in a situation or event which are recognisable and those
which are new and as yet not altogether connected ; in other words,
scientific investigation does not have to reckon on meeting with
the supernatural. The third characteristic is regularity or law,
which is continuous with the conception of unity the given will
continue to be given.

It will be seen that all these are qualities of the scientist's
experience, not of any 'substance' behind phenomena. But when
any of our experiences are really experience, when they have been
examined and related and have produced some understood
alteration in our information or emotions or both, they are
potentially scientific. When there are any phenomena at all, there
is the possibility of scientific inquiry, with or without test-tubes
and calipers. Indeed, because unity of investigation, the practice
of asking questions in such a way that the possibility of an answer
is ynplicit, is an essential of science, all phenomena whatsoever
must at least theoretically demand scientific inquiry. This is
implicit in the concept Phenomena. No supporter of the Two
Truths theory, I am sure, would claim that religion has no
phenomena. To all of us the universe asks for a meaning.

The assumption that nothing is scientific which is not quanti-
tative and 'materialistic', in the narrowest and most rigidly
mechanical sense, is not an accident, nor wholly due to ignorance
of what scientists are really up to with their laboratories and

62 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

notebooks. It is an integral part of the Two Truths theory, which
depends, as Bertrand Russell says :

"on the time-honoured principle that anything which cannot
be proved untrue may be assumed to be true, a principle whose
falsehood is proved by the fortunes of bookmakers."

This theory provides all our neo-scholastics with their necessary
field of nescience, over which they may assume the truth of their
preferences. To limit science to what science can gropingly
measure is automatically to exclude the social and non-quanti-
tative sciences from scientific status, and this, as the typical
quotation given above from Norman Nicholson will illustrate, is
exactly what theological apologists wish to do. For psychology
and anthropology claim to tell us something about the nature of
'Man', and it is only by an act of enclosure around this concept,
which keeps it in the field of nescience, by definition not open to
scientific survey, that many other basic concepts of theological and
scholastic thinking such as 'Freedom' in 'Freedom of the Will'
can be preserved. When science is merely measurement, ignorance
can be not only bliss, but knowledge. But of course to say that
test-tubes and calipers not only never did, but never can, tell us
anything direct about the Nature of Man (if we can for purposes
of discussion accept that abstraction) is, even if true, not the same
as saying that observation and the hypotheses based upon
observation cannot tell us anything about the subject.

Comparatively lately, the neo-scholastics have received a bonus
from certain scientists, including Eddington, Sir James Jeans, #nd
others who should know better, in the form of support for some of
the more fundamental theological doctrines, including that of
Free Will. The support has sometimes been based on an inter-
pretation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (often mis-
leadingly and tendenciously known as Heisenberg's Principle of
Indeterminacy). Over the implications of this principle Eddington
exhibited a curious conflict of mind. Within the framework of
Newton's mechanics, which treated momentum and position as

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 63

independent entities, it has proved impossible to pin down with
infinite accuracy the behaviour of the minutest particles of matter.
Such a discovery is a typical signal to scientists that the frame-
work is due for revision; and in good part it has been revised.
But in the interim, while the older mechanics strongly governed
the mental habits of professional scientists, the discrepancy
presented itself as a breach in causality, through which something
like the personal caprice of an electron could insert itself.
Eddington, whose scientific thinking was always liable to dis-
turbance by his religious convictions, was fascinated by this
paradox of misstatement. Whenever he faced the blunt question
whether such play in the gears of the machine was quantitatively
large enough to cover the 'choices' and 'actions' of a living being,
he admitted it was not so. In fact he categorically stated that
nothing he had said in his theoretical work could be justly so
interpreted.

He believed in Free Will, as he made clear more than once in
his scientific as well as his mystical writings, but claimed that he
did so on grounds of intuition, not at all because of the 'indeter-
minacy' of ultimate particles of matter.

"If we could attribute," he writes in New Pathways in Science,
"the large-scale movements of our bodies to the 'trigger action' of
the unpredetermined behaviour of a few key atoms in our brain
cells the problem would be simple; for individual atoms have
wide indeterminacy of behaviour . . . (but) ... I should
conjecture that the smallest unit of structure in which the physical
effects of volition have their origins contains many billions of
atoms. If such a unit behaved like an inorganic system of similar
mass the indeterminacy would be insufficient to allow appreciable
freedom."

However, having snatched 'freedom' from the electron, he at
once proceeds to bestow it upon another conception, the unitary
consciousness, whose reality is not necessarily greater nor
whose existence more assured than those of the electron, merely
because people have been talking about it longer.

64 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

"My own tentative view," he continues, "is that this 'conscious
unit' does in fact differ from an inorganic system in having a much
higher indeterminacy of behaviour, simply because of the unitary
nature of that which it represents namely the Ego."

As far as I can see, what this all amounts to is the following:

"There is nothing whatsoever in the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle which has any bearing on the problem of Free Will.
Pursuing scientific standards of truth, I have nothing to add to the
negative contribution of my scientific predecessors to theological
beliefs. However, I believe not only in Free Will, but in an
absolute, detached and unified consciousness, which is the same as
'mind' or 'soul', as those terms are used by theologians. I think
there is another order of truth other than the scientific, that is
because, as Mr. Willey would say, I do, or I wish to do so, not for
any scientific reason."

Eddington was in other words a stout supporter of the Two
Truths theory, but the general reader must understand that this
was, as usual, as a layman, not as a scientist. Eddington wrote
about his religious opinions, and about many of his philosophical
ones, on his 'day off'.

Eddington's case illustrates a condition which is common to
many scientists, and has recently been discussed in an interesting
article in the Journal of the Philosophy of Science by Professor
Herbert Dingle. Dingle points out that twentieth-century
scientists in general have not grasped the philosophical rim-
plications of the technique of observation and experiment which
became the groundwork of scientific method in the seventeenth
century, and which they themselves continue to employ correctly
and fruitfully. Most of them are very imperfect philosophers.
Their philosophy in general is an unconscious hangover from that
old conception of substance, that there is, behind phenomena,
behind experience and experiment, a substantial Real Universe
whose nature they are endeavouring to determine. Dingle makes

MR. IHULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 65

a special onslaught on materialism. Applying his ideas to
Eddington and others, we can see that, whatever their views about
freedom and causality in connection with the atom and however
much continuing scientific investigation breaks the atom down
into electrons, protons, neutrons, positrons and so on, the
conception of these scientists does tend toward an ultimate
abstract atomicity whose nature it is to be inaccessible and ever
beyond experience.

What Dingle should have said is that, from this point of view,
Idealism or Materialism is merely a matter of verbal preference.
What is science is continuing and related experience. Atomicity is
a concept which either materialism or idealism might juggle with.
But I am afraid that Professor Dingle's selective criticism of
materialism is significant. He rightly states that science is about
experiences and their relations, and that the rigid concept of an
external world, to the total knowledge of which science was
continually approximating, limited the scientist's field of inquiry
and therefore of experience meaning by this that an ultimate
external world was in fact a concept making a specialised demand
on measurement. But he is yet able to say that it should now be
possible, although admittedly unlikely, for religion and science to
"advance in harmony and even with mutual assistance".

Professor Dingle's reason for supposing such a possibility is at
first sight one we can understand. It is that science has nothing to
say about the intrinsic value of any experience, only about the
relations between experiences, all of which are equally valid

scientific material, at least potentially.

*

"Macbeth's dilemma about the reality of his dagger, which he
could see but could not feel, was no dilemma to the nineteenth-
century playgoer. If the dagger had been real he would have felt
it: he didn't feel it, so it was not real, and could therefore be
ignored. It didn't occur to the scientist of that time that, 'real' or
not, Macbeth certainly had the experience of seeing it, and that
experience called for scientific study just as much as one accom-
panied by the corresponding experience of touch."

66 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

But since Professor Dingle confesses that he is not 'optimistic'
about the prospects of this harmony, we must conclude that he
regards the harmony as desirable, and his reasons for this are less
acceptable. There will, he thinks, be further conflicts between
religion and science; the present philosophical honeymoon or
should one say courtship is unstable because:

"Men with little scientific curiosity, to whom their religion is the
most precious thing in life," will not view "without protest what
they cannot but regard as a degradation of the highest they know"
when "the scientific psychologist, inevitably seeking to correlate
religious experience with other phenomena," brings it "into
relation with psychological states, some of which are regarded as
abnormal or even pathological."

When religion thus returns the ring, the situation, according to
Dingle, will rest on a misunderstanding. This seems to me a most
extraordinary statement. It is perfectly true that a scientist is not
concerned with the intrinsic values of the experience which he
may correlate, perfectly true also that the word 'pathological'
has not for him the chief significance that it has for those with a
preconception of what is to be regarded as a healthy state. But I
do not see how Dingle can miss that the religious protest which he
foresees is intrinsic to the religious view. Scientific curiosity
must intrinsically seek to correlate all phenomena, and religious
preconception must intrinsically seek to bar this all-reaching aim,
to put forth a departmental resistance which, if allowed, frustrates
correlation, and therefore precludes 'harmony'. *

If 'delusions' such as Macbeth's dagger or the pink rats of an
alcoholic are as worthy of scientific study as any other genuine
experience, which no one wishes to deny, this is not because the
examining scientist believes that there are no such things as
delusions. By relating the pink rats or the dagger to other
communicable, agreed, and probable experiences, the scientist
comes to give meaning to the concept 'delusion'. I also say
nothing either absolute or comparative about the intrinsic value

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 67

of the experiences, Macbeth's, the alcoholic's or the com-
municant's. I only say they have a meaning and are part of
knowledge only in so far as they are agreed, communicable and
related to other experiences, which in fact determine their prob-
ability, their givenness.

Many concepts which theologians regard as the most essential
part of religion are not experiences at all in the sense in which
both Professor Dingle and I are here using the word, a sense in
which we both admit a 'delusion' as an experience. Dogma for
instance is not anybody's experience in this sense. I think that
Professor Dingle has unconsciously misinterpreted his own
statement about the scientist's indifference to the value of ex-
perience, to mean that all experiences whatsoever have in fact the
same value. This is to ignore the binding and imposed quality of
the relatedness of experiences, which gives us science and all its
positive achievements. Describing, as an illustration of the
progressive metaphysical emancipation of science, the way, for
instance, that mass, 'the fundamental property of matter', has been
removed from substantiality by the theory of relativity, he says
that it is now entirely a matter of "your or my caprice which of
two bodies contains the more of the eternal, independent, sub-
stantial reality of the universe." Of course, it is not a matter of my
caprice, but of my relations to other events, which may be
measuring instruments or positions in space or time, but which,
in any case, are given experiences, experiences imposed on my
passivity. The word caprice in fact introduces the idea of sub-
stantive mentality, and proves that Professor Dingle has jumped
our of the frying-pan of materialism into the fire of idealism.

When we are able to observe facts and to form hypotheses
which we can use to predict further relevant facts, we are behaving
scientifically, whatever the subject-matter of our observations may
be. It will certainly be pointed out by those who prefer that
psychology and anthropology should never be sciences, for
instance, by those who still claim that theology is a science, as well
as by many less prejudiced critics, that the real difficulty in the case
of these social studies is to decide what is a fact and what is not.

68 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

All sciences need this particular skill, but there is no reason to
deny that the observation of the facts of human behaviour,
whether they are those of activity and organisation or are
introspective, needs exceptional skill and training in detachment.
But it must be said that if we encourage the development of this
skill in suitable people, we may come to know about ourselves and
about the laws which govern our human behaviour on this planet,
whereas if we continue to ratiocinate in the fixed hypostatical
concepts which we have inherited from scholastic thinking, as in
one form or another, and consciously or unconsciously, most of
us still do, human nature, as it is vaguely called, will abide a
mystery, and we shall never be less foolish than we are now. We
know in one way or not at all.

Therefore it is interesting and important to examine those
theological concepts to which our literary neo-scholastics give
most attention, and which they are most anxious to revive. It will
be said that these concepts are the central dogmas of the Christian
faith, the sine qua non of orthodoxy. That is so. But if we com-
pare the practice of Mr. Eliot, who is a first-rate literary mind and
therefore not likely to be a fool in other fields, with, let us say,
C. S. Lewis or Dorothy Sayers, we see that these two are game, as
Mr. Eliot is not, to go out on all the street corners and among the
booths and side-shows, and there if necessary strip to the waist
and challenge all comers. Orthodox theology, for them, has an
answer to everything, and they are ready to give it with all the
aplomb of Datas. I know that they are braver and stupider than
many of their orthodox literary fellows, but it is interesting to
consider why an orthodoxy which is not only less muscular but
less pinheaded than theirs should be relatively cautious in its
minimal claims.

Mr. Eliot, we find, commits himself to the dogma of the
Incarnation and also to that of Original Sin, commits himself, that
is, in so far as he may be said to give a philosophical assent
rather more discreetly than valorously.

The Incarnation is a special case. It is so central to Christian
belief that, without it, there is really nothing which can be

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 69

intelligibly described as Christian orthodoxy. We may set it aside
for the present, because it is a doctrine which the orthodox
cannot be expected to surrender or, apparently, to discuss. Mr.
Eliot does not discuss it, whatever the warrior caste of literary lay
theologians feels called upon to do. It is a doctrine which affects
epistemology, and though I do not find it possible or necessary to
ignore epistemological matters, the prime concern of this book is
not with metaphysics, but with that area of discussion where neo-
scholastic claims conflict with observable experience, the
subject-matter of science. We might hold that the doctrine of the
Fall of Man, as an unverifiable hypothesis about history, is in
itself outside this area. But it is interdependent with the doctrine
of Original Sin. This is the basis of theological psychology and,
since psychology is a scientific subject whose material consists
of observable experience, it should be possible to reach a
rational understanding of what the neo-scholastics mean by this
concept.

Possible, but by no means easy. It is more commonly referred
to than explained. And if we take the reference back as far as we
are able, we are not much better off, since it is difficult to be
certain exactly what is orthodox and what is not. The two most
important branches of the Christian organisation, the Roman and
Protestant Churches, are not in complete agreement. Indeed,
when Mr. Eliot refers to the Church, it would often be helpful to
know which one he means, for the dogma of Original Sin not only
refers, through its connections with the Fall, to a palaeology
without field-work, but has had in comparatively recent historical
times a schismatic development which is still unresolved. We
know from Mr. Eliot that Original Sin is a very real and terrible
thing, but he does not even tell us in what its terror, certainly not
in what its reality, consists, and no other literary neo-scholastic
seems to be able to tell us more, except that we must believe it.

There is the doctrine as stated by Augustine that all men have
inherited from Adam the inability to abstain from sin which
Adam showed when he ate the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil. Of themselves, men have for ever lost the power

70 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

to be virtuous and they can attain this only by the grace of God:
but agreement as to whether this first sin on the part of the Father
of Mankind has its nature of sin from the fact of disobedience to
God's command, or from the curiosity which led Adam to seek
independent knowledge, or from the concupiscence which the
eating awakened in him, seems never to have been final 1 y reached
among those who claim, however, to be orthodox.

In Paradise Lost which because of its literary merit ought to
speak to the literary orthodox with peculiar authorit. on all
matters relating to the Fall and to Original Sin Milton supports
what we may call the Test' theory. This is that Adam was put to
the test by God's command, and failed through his disobedience,
the eating of the apple having no inherent significance. Un-
fortunately, as far as I know, Milton has never been taken as
settling the question. The Churches themselves seem never to
have made a precise and agreed decision among the three possible
interpretations which I have mentioned above, as a brief re-
ference to the history of the controversy will show. Pelagius, a
British monk who, when he was in Palestine at the beginning of
the fifth century A.D., was affected, it is believed, by a certain
slackness in the monasteries, developed a theory of self-help, that
men were not born inherently sinful, but in a neutral moral
condition, and that grace, conceived as divine intervention to save
each individual soul, was not necessary but was granted in the
general form of freedom of the will so that men had the capacity
to become free of sin by their own efforts. After Augustine, whose
views, one must believe, were conditioned by his own psy-
chological experiences, these propositions were condemned, and
the conception that men were essentially helpless toward their own
nature, particularly toward their own concupiscence, while only
the individual intervention of divine grace could help them to
conquer this sinful tendency which they had inherited from
Adam, for a time prevailed. This was followed by what is known
as the semi-Pelagian theory, which lays stress on the imperfection
of human nature and the essentiality of divine help or grace, but
otherwise softens or ignores the Augustinian implications of the

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 71

immediate and apparent damnableness of the new-born, with their
cradle concupiscence, and of the utter damnation of the un-
baptised. Nevertheless, even within the Catholic Church, the more
austere view was revived with bitter partisanship by the seven-
teenth-century Jansenists, while Protestantism, at the Reforma-
tion, took an Augustinian slant culminating in the Calvinist
predestination, a ferociously repressive doctrine to which we
can point whenever it is stated that the 'Protestant spirit' is
inevitably allied with a belief in 'Progress'.

So far we can accept that Mr. Eliot, as a Catholic or Anglo-
Catholic, is probably a semi-Pelagian, and even perhaps that in
refraining from stating what Original Sin exactly is he has
followed the highest orthodox example. Human beings arc
radically imperfect, and are so from birth, and need the actual
intervention of the divine if they are to heal their imperfections.
But if the imperfection is radical and inherited it must bear some
resemblance at least of type to the First Sin, and one would like to
know in what the sinfulness of this consisted. If, as it appears,
neither the Test' theory nor the concupiscence theory is inherent
in this imprecise term when it is used by literary theologians,
nothing else remains but to suppose that Adam's sin, which we
share and from which we also suffer, was curiosity, the mere wish
to find out. If this is so, and it strikes me as analytically logical,
this not only accounts for the contemporary literary antagonism
to 'Science', but it also leads us back to the Two Truths theory.
If wanting to find out for ourselves, either as individuals or as
members of a secular organisation, is at least potentially sinful, in
thesense that it can be so defined by an ex cathedra pronounce-
ment, we cannot do anything else, if we wish to avoid sin, than
believe what we are told by religious authority that is, we must
attribute a special and 'higher' order of truth to a certain body of
deductive and hypostatical pronouncements.

This, in fact, is what we are asked to accept if any intellectual
content whatsoever is to be granted to current revived theological
orthodoxy among the literary; if that is not to be regarded solely
as an attempt to rationalise the sense of guilt and inadequacy

72 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

which is partly natural, and partly fostered in all of us, from our
earliest moments.

During this century we have been asked to accept it, sometimes
with diffidence and an apparent wish to 'reconcile' the 'truths' of
science and of religion, but sometimes also with dogmatic and
specious aplomb amounting to insolence. The diffident approach
often gets support from the tender-minded, and also from the
genuinely tender-hearted, therefore it is likely to commend itself to
those whose interests are specialised in a literary or artistic
direction. The bolder dogmatic approach is more characteristic of
those whose interest, or custom, is, whether openly or not,
polemic and aggressive, although it may partially disguise itself
as a concern with literature or art. A certain kind of split character
which couples dogmatic insolence, to the point of violence, with
genuine critical or aesthetic ability is also possible, and appeared
with T. E. Hulme.

Hulme's Speculations, edited from notes and scattered material
by Herbert Read, appeared posthumously not long after the end
of the First World War, in which Hulme had been killed at the
age of thirty-four. This book is a manifesto against all the
humanist philosophies since the Renaissance.* Hulme, making
the humanist test the disbelief, implicit or expressed, in the dogma
of Original Sin, classifies them all as essentially one philosophy.
He is not more precise than any of the writers who have succeeded
him about what he really means by Original Sin, nor, I should
say, theologically more accurate. In general, he couples the rather
wide interpretation that man is radically imperfect, and needs God
to achieve any ethical standard whatsoever, with a rather more
definite dogmatism about the nature of the divine, its complete
separation from the sphere of ordinary knowledge by a real and,
as it were, chasmic discontinuity. This might not call for any very
active criticism, other than the observation that it is a rather flatly
dogmatic example of the Two Truths theory, if Hulme had drawn
the logical conclusion from this concept of absolute discontinuity

*It was the duty of every honest man to cleanse the world from these
'sloppy dregs* of the Renaissance, according to Hulme.

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 73

between the sphere of ethical and religious values, and that of
scientific investigation that there was no more therefore to be
said, or known, about it. However, the bulk of Hulme's writings
then follows, part of it aesthetic but most of it epistemological,
which shows that Hulme himself did not allow the discontinuity,
which he had posited, to trouble him and that the 'Keep Out'
notice which this concept implied was meant only for humanistic,
not for theological, reasoning. Hulme's aesthetic theory, parti-
cularly when it is about the nature of poetry, is acute though
limited. It was part, I should say, of a then general valid reaction
in the writing of poetry, and was therefore partly drawn from
awareness of actual valuable practice among his contemporaries;
while it gave them an active encouragement to continue in the
same direction. This applies particularly to the Imagist poets
with their insistence on concreteness and accuracy of description
of the objects with which poetry deals, whether these objects
are mental or physical. This, with its counterpart in Hulme,
who narrows the aesthetic impulse to an urge for precision which
can be said to have achieved its aim when we feel that the
artist was actually and vividly in the presence of the object he
describes, is true enough so far as it goes ; and particularly in the
case of poetry, which deals in words, it is a natural and healthy
reaction when poets themselves have become infected by the
historical tendency of language to become cloudy, hypostatised
and meaningless to detach itself, in short, from constant re-
ference to experience. This means that in so far as Hulme and, for
example, the Imagists were saying and doing anything valuable,
they were simply reasserting the general nature of poetry, which of
course has constantly to be reasserted, not only by movements or
by critics, but by every poet, in so far as he is a poet, in his in-
dividual practice from day to day. It does not mean that the
tissue of critical generalisation with which Hulme connected his
aesthetic observations to his underlying philosophical concept was
justified any more than that the concept itself was verifiable. It
was perfectly true that just before Hulme there was a confusion
between poetry and mere emotion perhaps partly due to 'War-

74 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

poetry', which needed cleaning up, and that what passed as poetry
was often vague, diffuse and sloppy, in short that verse-writers
were dealing in poetically and semantically diseased language;
but there is nothing in this to excuse a lot of critical language
about Classicism and Romanticism which is also made semantic-
ally sloppy by these hypostatised concepts. For Hulme simply
identifies Romanticism with the man-centred humanism which he
hates and whose universal rejection he prophesies, and Classicism
with the God-centred view of orthodox Christianity. This leads
him to some odd sorting of poets and to some perhaps anxious
subdivision of his own classes. Shakespeare, he says, for instance,
is classical, but with a dynamic classicism ; he is a classic of motion.
Horace is still classical. This makes one wonder if there was also a
special Harrowing of Hell for otherwise deserving literary men
who were either pre-Christian or not clearly orthodox.

However, this view of the classical is the point of juncture
between his aesthetics and his main philosophy. Good poets have
throughout history practised in a way which agrees with Hulme's
limited aesthetic, whether he would have called them classical or
romantic. I have dealt with this at length in Chapter VIII. What I
wish to discuss here is Hulme's anti-humanistic contribution to
neo-scholastism.

T. E. Hulme's work stands on a dogmatic basis, as I have
indicated the statement that man is a fallen and radically
imperfect creature. This he calls the doctrine of Original Sin and
characterises it as the central conception distinguishing the
medieval Christian attitude to life from the humanist attitude
which, so he says, has been dominant, to the point of completely
unconscious acceptance, ever since the Renaissance. His work is
also with some striking variations which do not affect the under-
lying philosophical structure based on the Two Truths theory.
His method is to divide knowledge into three spheres, claiming an
absolute discontinuity among them. The two extreme spheres are
those of religion and inorganic science, while the middle one
covers everything which we describe as biology or the social
sciences. He gives the extreme spheres a kind of polar absolute-

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 75

less. The idea of discontinuity here is simply another way of
stating that we have two ways of knowing, each absolutely and
squally valid in its own sphere. But the idea of the third or
intermediate sphere, and particularly of its separation from the
sphere of normal science, is of special interest because it is an
expression of Hulme's wish to keep biology and the study of
social phenomena 'pure' from scientific method, to preserve, in
"act, the whole content of 'Human Nature' for the field of
nescience. This wish is at least implicit in all scholastic and neo-
jcholastic thinking, and seems to be also the only ground on
>vhich that philosophy can re-erect itself.

But this idea of the third sphere concerned with the vital or
>vhat Hulme calls the 'loose' sciences (it is a 'muddy mixed zone'
3etween two absolutes : this seems an example of what Richards
:alls emotive language) has another and more particular use in
[iulme. For though, as I have said, the fundamental concepts of
;his manifesto against humanism are stated as flat dogma, Hulme
ntended to be the philosopher of the reaction which he helped to
naugurate to erect an intellectual system designed to be tight
igainst the encroachments which, for example, physical and
istronomical science had been making for quite a long time. To
io this he was prepared to make at least some show of meeting
critical philosophy on its own empirical ground. He thought he
lad discovered the technique and the empirical basis in the
Dhilosophy of Bergson. His reasons for isolating "the muddy
nixed zone of the loose sciences" which are concerned with life
he refers to them also as 'vital' to distinguish them from physical
:>r mechanical) become clear. Certain basic concepts of scholastic
,heology have to be saved at all costs. For example, the concept of
i fixed 'Human Nature' and at the same time the contradictory
concept of an absolute Free Will. For the dogma of Original Sin
s not only inextricably involved with these two, but, in particular,
without Free Will in the absolute, it becomes a doctrine of
lespair from which it is very difficult to keep out some kind of
ieterminism. It is interesting that Hulme with his sharp separation
3f the spheres of knowledge should have felt so much eagerness

76 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

to put up a rational dialectic in this 'vital' sphere. He was
relatively young, as well as ardent and militaristic, and this may
have brought out a special moral and intellectual pride. Certainly
his zeal seems to have been in the first place philosophical rather
than Salvationist and, unlike for instance Mr. Lewis and Miss
Sayers, to be more expressive of the study, or at least of the
drawing-room, than of the soap-box. In any case, Bergson
provided him with an imposing terminology for this effort, which
was not less hypostatical in the original than in Hulme's inter-
pretation.

Bergson, as we know, was centrally concerned to distinguish the
'vital' from the mechanistic. I shall discuss Bergson's theories only
in relation to Hulme's use of them, because it is only in this
connection that they bear on the current situation in poetry and
art. Apart from that their place seems to be in the history of
philosophy.

I have referred to the fact that literary men who are Churchmen,
and anti-humanist in the sense that Hulme defines it, in general
take their thought back as far as the basic theological dogmas and
attempt very little intellectual justification of their position.
Their major premiss is Church Authority. This does not mean,
however, that they admit, either to their readers or to themselves,
that their beliefs are absolutely impossible to verify. In particular,
T. S. Eliot, both in his poetry and in his prose, alludes to a whole
corpus of ecclesiastical learning which, as I have said elsewhere, is
a kind of bank where the intellectual gold is kept to honour all
fiduciary issues, when the demand is made. On the other hand, it
is not uncommon for literary theologians to suggest, as a kind of
tu quoque, that as far as popular understanding and practical
application are concerned, the average member of a democratic
society is in the same intellectual position as the ordinary lay
faithful the 'metaphysic' of science, for him, is also based on
Authority, and he has to accept conclusions based on a reasoning
which he cannot possibly follow. "... A word half-understood,
torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of
psychology," says Mr. Eliot in the essay on Lancelot Andrewes,

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 11

"conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of
a statement ... all dogma is in doubt except the dogma of
sciences of which we have read in the newspapers . . ."*

This looks plausible enough; and no one deplores the in-
accuracy and the wishful thinking of popular scientific journalism
and of journalistic accounts of science, nor the hypostatisation
which these share with scholastic thought, more than the re-
spectable, hardworking scientific specialist. Of course the word
'dogma' is employed by Mr. Eliot in this one sentence, in two
totally different senses, only the second, one can see, being loose,
popular and pejorative. What is completely withheld from the
average reader in this emotive aside is that the statements of
scientists (it is only newspaper behaviour which turns them into
'dogma') have either a short-term or a long-term route towards
verification: short-term towards their fellow-scientists who can
understand the same technical language, and long-term towards
their ordinary fellow-beings who can eventually see and judge of
the predicted results. Theological dogma is never thus travel-
stained, it remains always in the empyrean and never comes down
to earth to be sullied by common use and proof.

Yet theological authority never ceases to imply that the
arguments and proofs are available, although to find them we
must leap over the history of the last three centuries which has
really been the history of the miserable passion for induction, for
the forming of hypotheses on the basis of observation and go
back to the time when thought, as Mr. Eliot says, was "orderly,
strong and beautiful"; was, in fact, a system of ideas about the
unknowable which did very little to account for the known, and
was largely based on unanalysed assumptions.

But it is true that not all writers who feel the need of a creed of a
Weltanschauung, can be quite satisfied with the feel of the
intellectual paper-money, even when they pass it. As writers,
especially as good writers, they are perhaps more likely to be first
impressed, especially in the psychological field with which they
are so closely concerned, with a kind of faithfulness to law in the

*What does 'alien' mean in this context?

78 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

world around them, in particular to tragic law, than with its
mystery as demanding an aetiological explanation. I do not think
that Mr. Norman Nicholson (Man and Literature) is correct at
least I do not think that his statement means either very much or
means what he says when he says that few great poets are or
have been materialists. Few great poets apart from Lucretius may
have been materialists in the strict metaphysical sense. But few
great poets have written about metaphysics in any form. It has
been relatively common for them, as it were, to 'go to church on
Sundays' as in a way even Shakespeare did. But in fact they
have mostly not wished to be bothered by any public or con-
ventional creed at all, since all creeds become stereotyped and
tend to stop them using their eyes, ears and other senses with
fresh immediacy. It is quite likely that the present revival of
scholasticism may help to produce good poetry in those poets
whose gift lies in their sensuous immediacy or innocence and
who are thereby saved from anxious or unskilled thought.
However, we ought not in general to be in this state of primal
intellectual innocency and, if we must think, it is better that we
should think about something rather than nothing.

A shrewd sense of politics or perhaps of ecclesiastical policy is
probably necessary to deflect a lively intellect, which often
means an aggressive and argumentative intellect, from the
discussion of metaphysical fundamentals. Hulme shows a mind
of this quality even when discussing literature and art, but
having chosen to be a philosopher he could, unlike Mr. Eliot,
hardly do without a dialectic, although we can observe his natural
preference for the aphoristic and the intuitive, the kind of philo-
sophy which is really personal; not striving toward objectivity or
even systematisation; more, let us say, of the type of Nietzsche,
than of Aristotle or Kant.

Bergson was a godsend to him, for Bergson's philosophy
appeared to give to intuition the kind of empirical status which
every Englishman even an Englishman of twentieth-century
buccaneering type as Hulme was, intellectually requires in order
to philosophise comfortably. I am not myself taking here an

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 79

aesthetic view of philosophies; I think that the English empirical
tradition from David Hume onwards has given us our best
approximation to 'general truth'. I only say that it is difficult for
an Englishman wholly to ignore this tradition, whereas it is quite
possible, for example, for a Frenchman to do so. I think that the
famous French 'clarity' and 'logic' really amount to a certain
linguistic structure, a prose shapeliness constructed out of words
and concepts which are still implicitly 'classical' in the sense of
Latinised, are scholastic and deductive and quite without density,
floating detached both from emotion and experience. This
linguistic structure gives the possibility of at least three attitudes
toward empiricism, in France. It can be ignored as, let us say,
Jacques Maritain largely ignores it. It can be discovered with
rather nai've surprise and then clumsily translated into something
very like scholastic terminology this seems to be what the
Existentialists are doing. Or it can be completely misappropriated
in its psychological aspect and development, and used to give an
appearance of verifiability to concepts which are really theological.
This was what Bergson was doing. He was trying to save Free
Will in the theological sense, by using an argument, an hypothesis,
which referred to an apparent observation about the nature of
human mental process, a piece of psychological empiricism. This
was what Hulme seized on, because, whatever he might say about
dogma, and about the separate spheres of 'knowledge', something
in him could not be rationally satisfied with the idea of two
equally valid (but often opposed) ways of knowing. He wanted
one way of knowing, but he wanted that way and this is a con-
tradiction to be a demonstration of the empirical truth of the
dogmas which he had stated as unshakeable and indeed un-
approachable postulates.

What Hulme set himself to attack was the world- view which he
refers to a$ Huxley's Nightmare "the certainty that nothing can
exist outside the gigantic mechanism of causes and effects ; necessity
moves the stars in the sky, and necessity moves the emotions in
my mind." As stated, this view certainly has a little too much of
that self-complacency at his own cosmic heroism which was

80 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

typical of the Great Victorian and which demanded an emotional
counter-reaction. Probably it was quoted by Hulme partly
because it is such a clear example of that picture-thinking of
which, as we shall see, he accused intellectual, non-intuitional
thinkers, because he himself was unable to conceive of any other
way of thinking. This world-picture of Dame Necessity shoving
us all, atoms and humans alike, ahead of her, till we all fall into the
bottomless pit certainly calls for a natural rebellion, and that is
what it gets from thinkers like Hulme and all those who feel,
consciously or unconsciously, that 'the intellect' and therefore
the method of science is some kind of wicked and wilful im-
position upon the universe and not merely, when it is used
correctly, the way in which we receive and classify our given
experience. What was impossible for Hulme was to detect and
demonstrate the real defect of such thinking that it was only a
form of hypostasis, just as characteristic of materialistic philo-
sophers as of idealistic. Necessity is thought of, although un-
consciously, as a real entity distinct from the ordered events in
which it reveals itself, and which are our experience.

According to Hulme, Bergson does deal successfully with
Huxley's Nightmare. Bergson showed, he says, that the
mechanistic theory of the universe is only a necessity of the
intellect, not of the whole of nature. What the intellect requires,
what satisfies it as an explanation of the universe, is 'explication'
'the unfolding of a tangled mass into an extensive manifold.' We
must note here that Hulme had already staked a very subjec-
tivist proviso about all philosophical explanations whatsoever
except, as far as I can see, those of theological philosophyrthat
they were all, at bottom, expressions of what the philosopher
individually found satisfying. Any intellectual explanation of the
universe and this covers in fact all philosophies which are not
opposed to scienceseeks, he says, satisfaction through spatial
unfolding. "It is not satisfied until it can see every part it wants
to form a picture."

Hulme continues "It is possible that there may be a method
of knowledge^which refrains from forming pictures . . . other

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 81

methods . . . besides that of analysis. I may have a perfect
knowledge of a friend's face . . . without being able to analyse it
into parts."

Intellectual explanation, according to this, means visualisation
or unfolding in space. Analysis means analysis into spatial parts.
It is not only possible, one must reply, it is certain, that there are
other methods of obtaining knowledge which are non-visual and
therefore non-spatial, while still being analytic and repre-
sentational. This geometric view of all logical thinking was
possible to Hulme, and also to Bergson, because both men were
acute visualisers. Visualisation is often a valuable habit, especially
to poets; but in an attempt to obtain the clear and independent
truth about the world of experience it is more of a nuisance, since
it leads to argument by analogy, and to that particular erection of
our own mental habits into laws and systems which I constantly
refer to as hypostatisation.

Not only a great deal of mathematical thinking, but a great deal
of common thinking on ordinary practical subjects, is non-visual
and therefore non-spatial. Since Galton's Inquiry into Human
Faculty it has been clear that there are a great many different
types, between the almost hallucinative visualiser and the person
who does not visualise at all. It might seem that Bergson and
Hulme cannot be talking about anything so obvious as this, that
they cannot really mean that intellectual analysis proceeds only by
forming pictures. But Hulme, as far as his dialectic philosophy is
concerned, is only an interpreter of Bergson, and Bergson's anti-
intellectualist philosophy does seem to be built upon this simple
misconception. He seems in fact to have no conception of the
nature of abstract thinking, and therefore no belief in its existence.
Russell makes this clear in his criticism of Bergson's account of
number. Number, says Bergson, is "a collection of units", which
we picture by having "recourse to an extended image in space".
But actually by visualisation we cannot obtain a picture either of
number in general or of any particular number. We may picture,
say, a six at dice, but this is not the number six, and certainly it is
not a picture of 'number'.

82 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

The intellect, then, in behaving abstractly, does not behave
typically or efficiently as Hulme, after Bergson, claimed. We may
agree that there are other methods of obtaining knowledge than
the visual, or than spatial explication. But we mean something
different from either Bergson or Hulme.

According to them, the intellect interprets, and distorts, reality
as an 'extensive manifold', by unfolding it into parts and laying
them out in space. If however there is, on the other hand, some-
thing which we can describe as an 'intensive manifold', something
which cannot be analysed into parts but only seized as a whole, if
there are cases of real interpenetration in the world, then, says
Hulme, Bergson will have proved his point there is another kind
of knowledge than that which we obtain through the intellect.

Bergson considered that he had found this 'intensive manifold'
in mental life itself. To account for the fact that our mental life,
in so far as we are aware of it, certainly seems to consist of
successive states and must therefore be said to be known by the
intellect with its 'spatial' or explicatory analysis, Bergson formed
the conception of two Selves, a more superficial self whose
successive states can be thus intellectually analysed, and a more
fundamental self whose states are totally interpenetrative, and can
only be seized in flux by another mental faculty, a quite different
way of knowing, which he called Intuition.

As Hulme says, "It is inconvenient that it is so difficult to
convey what (Bergson) means by this fundamental self, because it
is on the experiencing of this state that depends also what he
means by an intuition. I said earlier that an intuition was the
process of mind by which one obtained knowledge of an intensive
manifold."

In short, intuition is what reveals the intensive manifold and the
intensive manifold is what produces intuition. This argument
certainly suggests a fundamental descent into the very narrowest
circle of the mental underworld. Nothing could be further from
an intellectual unfolding in space or daylight.

It is not necessary here to go into the question of how far
Bergson was influenced by, or in practical agreement with, the

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 83

conception of an unconscious Self which arose in the contem-
porary psychology of Freud and Janet and to which he refers in
Matter and Memory, or how far this conception can be used to
give meaning to his Fundamental Self. It is only Hulme's inter-
pretation and its purposes which matter here. Hulme's purpose is
to combat mechanistic determinism and to save the doctrine of
Free Will and the conception of unpredictability in the universe.
Therefore if we could suppose, perhaps charitably, that, in giving
some sort of account of Intuition and of the Fundamental Self,
Hulme was only referring to the way in which unconscious
processes become ponscious and not only creative and mathe-
matical thinkers but most people of ordinary education are now
familiar with this we should still not have got very far with
understanding Hulme's philosophical intentions. He says himself
that there is nothing mysterious, ineffable or infinite about either
Intuition or the Fundamental Self. Intuition is a "perfectly normal
and frequent phenomenon ... in all probability any literary
man or artist would understand would grasp much more easily
what Bergson means by an intuition . , . nearly all of them
constantly exercise the faculty." It is curious that Hulme did not
observe that not only literary men and artists, but also intellectual
and scientific thinkers, constantly exercise this faculty. In fact, the
circulation between conscious and unconscious processes is
characteristic of thinking of all kinds. We are all of us capable of a
rapid, sometimes almost instantaneous, survey and summary of
our mental events, in a direction in which we are practised, and
have all of us experienced this. We can call this Intuition for
conversational purposes, if we like, as long as we remember that it
is indeed not a 'mysterious' or even a distinct 'faculty', nor one
which peculiarly works on a material distinguishing itself from the
rest of the circulation of mental life what the Bergsonian
Fundamental Self would have to be. It would perhaps be salutary
to recall the expression 'A woman's intuition'. Surely this, if not
totally 'mysterious' let alone generally incompetent clearly
illustrates what I say: it is a quickening and sharpening of
perceptiveness in a practised and interested direction.

84 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

I should say that, whether deliberately or not, Hulme leaves out
the obvious fact that mental processes which he would describe as
'intellectual' for example, analytical and scientific ones work
in the way I have discussed, exactly like creative or artistic ones,
because he has to save Intuition and its counterpart, the Funda-
mental Self, so as to prevent the whole of Bergson's philosophy,
and therefore the whole of the intellectual defence of dogmatism
which he is trying to construct, from falling to pieces.

So this fundamental self has to exist and moreover it has to be
free. To understand what Hulme means by freedom in the
individual or unpredictability in the universe, we must go a little
into the use he makes of Bergson's theory of time and change.
The deterministic account of change, by which he means the
mechanistic theory of the universe, that an infinite intelligence
which knew all causes would be able to predict all effects, is only
true, he says, if we admit that everything can really be analysed
into separate elements so that change is only alteration in the
position of particles. This applies if the knowing intellect is, as
Hulme defines it, a faculty which operates only by 'spatial' un-
folding. As already stated, this is a poor account of intellect and
its operations.

"We have just seen," says Hulme, "that mental life at the level
of the fundamental self cannot" be thus spatially analysed. We
have just seen, on the contrary, I hope, that this Bergsonian
concept has no apparent meaning, since the relationship of the
Fundamental Self with the faculty of Intuition is the only evidence
which Hulme has so far given for the existence of either. If
Bergson was vaguely referring to what Freud and others have
called the Unconscious, then it must be said that we only know
about this at the level of the conscious (or Superficial) Self.

Nevertheless Hulme supposes that this Fundamental Self shows
its freedom by changing in a way which will not fit in with the
kind of conception the intellect forms of change. And "if we
suppose," he says, "that free acts are possible, we are landed: it
follows that real novelty is possible: that things can happen which
could not have been foreseen even by an infinite intelligence." It

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 85

may seem to be splitting hairs to say that the mere form of the last
sentence is full of implication which is probably merely careless.
But nothing whatsoever to do with real novelty, or things happen-
ing, can be said to follow from anything which 'we suppose' either
about free acts on the part of the Fundamental Self, or indeed
about infinite intelligence. But I believe that this construction,
merely careless though it may be, is a minor illustration of the
underlying confusion, which Hulme made equally with Bergson,
between the totality of cause and effect, and an infinite in-
telligence which might be conceived to know that totality in an
absolute sense.

The construction covers as usual a determination to attack the
scientific method of understanding the universe. But the attack is
not even well conceived. We have seen that the 'explicative' is not
the sole or even the main way of knowing in the scientific sense.
But it seems to be inexorably implied in both Hulme and Bergson
that we are only free if we do not 'know' in this or indeed in any
comprehensible sense. A free act is defined in effect as a non-
intellectual and indeed unconscious act. The result is that
Hulme' s account of a determined universe lays altogether too
much stress on the notion of an absolute predictability.

In scientific thinking this idea has much less practical bearing
than Hulme understood. Philosophically it is a reaction to a
doctrine of Free Will which is itself mechanistic, the notion of a
separate faculty which consists of a capacity to shove without
being shoved. Scientific thinking is concerned primarily with
understanding necessary relations, not with producing effects.
Simikrly what we really mean by our will is a form of conscious
understanding. The internal sensation of volition results from the
adjustment of our emotions to our understood conditions. The
sensation of frustration results from the failure of our fantasies of
power, from the maladjustment to our conditions which is caused
by imperfect understanding of them. The notion of an absolute
predictability is a mechanistic one which troubles idealists much
more than empiricists. It is interesting that this notion, whether it
is employed by those who call themselves determinists or by

86 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

idealists, is really inseparable from the notion of an infinite
intelligence. To a scientific, or even to an ordinary human,
intelligence actively engaged in seeking knowledge, it is not of
much use.

Before the principle of Indeterminacy (better, Uncertainty) was
propounded, a doctrine of science was that if all basic natural
laws were correctly enunciated (basic laws being distinguished
from others which could be derived from them by the exercise of
reasoning), and if the state of the universe could be completely
determined over a short interval of time, then the state of the
universe could be determined at any other time, past or present.

It was also believed by scientists that there were no barriers to
progress in the enunciation of natural laws; that increasing
accuracy of apparatus and increasing accumulation of study
would enable unlimited progress to be made in this direction.

No particular attention was paid to the possibility or otherwise
of determining the state of a larger and larger volume of the
universe; thus this doctrine resembled the statement of Archi-
medes that, given a sufficient lever and fulcrum, he could move the
earth. This was a useful statement about levers; none but the
shallowest mind looked forward to the day when the earth would
thus be moved. The doctrine of determinism is a statement about
the universe, that it is indefinitely amenable to prediction; nobody
bothered himself about whether its entire state would in fact be
predicted some day by scientists.

After the enunciation of the Uncertainty principle, it was agreed
that on the ultra-microscopic scale the quantities of position and
velocity could not be determined with unlimited accuracy a< the
same time. Other more complicated measurements, which could
be determined with complete accuracy, took their place. Thus the
expectation of being able to determine the state, not of a larger and
larger, but of any smaller and smaller volume, of the universe, in
the old terms, was disappointed. This is as if Archimedes had
been forced to add: given any lever and fulcrum, he could not
move a meson (which would still be a useful statement about the
nature of levers).

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 87

I have indicated before, and shall say again, because in view of
current literary, journalistic and theological misunderstandings it
can hardly be over-emphasised, that the uncertainty is on an
ultra-microscopic scale and shades into virtual determinacy at the
level of practical life. The movement of a man's finger could not,
under this principle, be indeterminate to the breadth of a hair, if it
were watched for a lifetime.

In partial compensation for this loss of ground, the principle of
relativity implies that it is now unnecessary to know the state
of the whole universe in order to predict the behaviour of a part of
it, over a certain range of time.

This doctrine of science, then, leaves no room for 'novelty' in
the sense of being able to move a finger and thereby disturb the
predictability of the surrounding universe. The novelty it admits
is of a quite different kind : the statement of new and more nearly
universally valid laws, and the registering of a somewhat larger
store of facts about the state of the universe at given times.

Underneath the Hulme-Bergson ideas about predictability and
novelty are all the usual misconceptions about the nature of
knowledge that it is not knowledge unless it is absolute, and that
it is not scientific if it is not quantitative and dependent on
measuring apparatus. He ignores the facts that science is a
method of inquiry and that it refers to experience. There is an
enormous range of scientific inquiry which produces an enormous
body of verifiable information which is not affected, let alone
invalidated, by the notion of universal predictability. The
generalisations which result from scientific investigation into
human life and behaviour on this planet, for instance in biology,
medicine and psychology, are quite obviously verifiable or not. I
mean that in these cases, as a mere minimum, it should be obvious
to laymen, including Hulme, that the generalisations are verifiable
or not, and claim to be knowledge only in so far as they are
verifiable. If they are not verifiable, they can be, and are, con-
tinually set aside for others which are so.

The fundamental misconception is about the nature of in-
tellectual process. According to Hulme, we cannot be said to

88 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

'know' anything in an intellectual sense, unless we know every-
thing. We see now why the idea of infinite intelligence is really
inseparable from that of an absolute predictability.

Hulme had put himself on an old and awkward spot. For in
order to save the idea of 'novelty', of freedom in the universe,
even an infinite intelligence would be liable to be^suddenly caught
out by arbitrary limitations. Anatole France (lie des Penguins)
put it in the mouth of the Lord, and in a nutshell:

"In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of
what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced,
and in my blind clearsightedness I will let myself be surprised by
what I have foreseen."

Hulme and Bergson have done nothing more than uncover,
without solving, the old dilemma of God's omniscience versus our
freedom. From Hulme as a convinced theist entering the arena of
empirical discussion we might justly have expected more. But
from his account we can only conclude that freedom in the
universe is a form of ignorance, and that the reality or objectivity
of the universe essentially depends on being unknowable by the
ordinary human method.

Whatever his empirical claims, the Two Truths theory the
assumption that because we do not know something, and indeed
cannot know it by our normal means of obtaining knowledge, we
are therefore in a position to know something else by some other
means lurks at the back of all Hulme's work. What he means by
'real' or 'reality' is simply that which we do not 'know'.

The account of the difference between 'real' time (the
Bergsonian duree reelle) and mathematical time is again cast in
the superficially empirical form which was Hulme's chief debt to
Bergson and most valuable instrument in trying to erect an anti-
humanist and neo-scholastic philosophy. The illustrations all
turn out however to be inapplicable, in general merely analogous,
and in fact meaningless.

The distinction between the two times, says Hulme, is this;

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 89

"In the mechanical world . . . time might flow with an
infinite rapidity, and the entire past, present and future be spread
out all at once. But inside us, it is very different. In us time is
undeniable fact. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water I have
to wait willy-nilly until the sugar melts. This is real time: it
coincides with my impatience, that is with a certain portion of my
duration which I cannot contract as I like."

This is an example of the curious spatial imagery which con-
firms that Hulme's view of the intellect was due to his inability to
think outside his own visual habits. The distinction between
mathematical and real time results from a confusion, not a
clarification. The inhabitants of the 'mathematical world', as
Hulme calls it who include not only astronomers and the
authors of Bradshaw, but all those less specialised citizens who
keep a clock on the mantelpiece and regulate their engagements
by it would, according to Hulme's distinction between time
calculated and time merely 'experienced', have a lesser reality in
their experience than those who only vaguely look before and
after: a tramp, let us say, who has never succeeded in stealing a
watch, but knows he 'has been here before'. Yet, on the contrary,
what is affirmed by the theory of relativity is that all measurers of
time can be, and on occasion need to be, aware of abstracting
from experience; but this again affirms the 'reality' of the ex-
perience.

That some of our experiences can be referred to conceptually,
or in terms of measurement, is a necessity of communication. On
the other hand, correct abstraction, or the forming of concepts,
depends on awareness of concrete experience and reference to it.
Failure to grasp this procedure and relationship causes the kind
of confusion which results, in Hulme and others, in such false
distinctions as his 'mathematical' and 'real* time. Incidentally this
total incomprehension of the nature of normal abstraction results
in a Platonic dualism, although again we must say it has been
stood on its head: the concepts, the abstractions, the mathe-
matical world are created by Hulme as bogus real entities, of a

90 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

sort, inferior in his Tlatonism', to the entities of intuition and
sensuous, but not over-conscious, experience. This does suggest,
although one need not labour the point, an attribution to the
normal intellectual processes of hostility or corruption; of actual
ill-will or even Original Sin !

The quotation is important as an illustration of Hulme's
confusion of subjective, or introspective, and objective experience,
as well as of his dislike of an objectivity whose essential com-
municability takes the form of measurement.

How any temporal process taking place in a glass of sugar and
water can be said to coincide with the emotional experience which
I describe as impatience, or how that impatience can be identified
with a portion of my duration, especially if I have not tried, by
egg-boiler or stop-watch, to find out how long I felt impatient, is
very difficult to understand. Hulme seems to have forgotten, too,
that he can boil the water. The results of that, the speeding up of
the 'real time' which he must also conceive as being present in the
glass, will not be less apart from me or my time. The time taken
will be the sugar's plus the water's plus the heat's time, not
specially mine.

Hulme continues that "One could express the same idea in a
different way which brings out better the causes of it and the more
important consequences of it." Incidentally, the example brings
out better Hulme's inverted Platonism which I have referred to
above, as well as some of the consequences of that unconscious
dualism.

"If a child has to fit together a jig-saw puzzle, it can learn -to do
it quicker and quicker. Theoretically ... it requires no time to do
it, because the result is already given. . . . The picture is already
created and the work of recomposing it can be supposed going
faster and faster up to the point of being instantaneous.

"But to the artist, time is no longer an interval that can be
lengthened or shortened. To contract it would be to modify the
invention itself. It is the actual living progress of the thought, a
kind of vital process like ripening"

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 91

The word 'theoretically' covers an implied conception that
mechanical or, let us say, inorganic reproduction, as opposed to
living or artistic creation, is somehow 'unreal'. Hulme goes on:

"In the world of mechanism . . . there is no real creation of
new things, there is merely a rearrangement of fixed elements in
various positions. They can't be said to exist in time, because
nothing new happens. . . . At a certain depth of mental life you
experience real time because there is a real change. ... In real
time you get real creation and so real freedom . . ."

And further:

"Now here you get the essence of the thing. Real duration, real
time is an absolute thing which cannot be contracted or hastened
because in it real work is being done, really new things are
appearing."

All this, reduced to its logical elements, reads as follows:

"Time is that which is produced by real change, and real change
is produced by real work, and real work is that which embodies
real time. So Time is produced by Time."

In fact, if we refer to the example of the jig-saw picture, there is
no time distinction between the artist and the child, and it is
striking that Hulme should leave out of account the movements
of the child's hand and body, which, in however small a degree,
must cause some chemical combustion and should therefore use
'real time' exactly as the glass of water and sugar does. Moreover,
it is not possible that the operation should take no time at all. The
finished picture which for the sake of discussion we may suppose
to be in the child's imagination, or even another finished picture
which he may have in front of him to copy, is a different or an ideal
picture which must not be identified with the one on which his
process of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise, is at work.
Hulme merely has an unconscious preference for an ideal or

92 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

mental process, and an unconscious wish to attribute a greater
and substantive 'reality' to it than he is willing to attribute to one
of which at least a partial mechanical materiality is obvious.

He might have confined himself to processes of living matter
such as growth and gestation, and claimed that, because in general
we cannot hasten these processes, they may be said to take place in
'real' rather than in 'mathematical' or mechanical time. Many of
these processes can now be affected chemically, for instance the
growth of plants and the rate of egg-production, which can be
accelerated by heat and light, but on the Bergsonian definition it is
difficult to say whether such over-time is real or mathematical.
One cannot be sure from Hulme's account of Bergson's con-
ception of the two times whether they are supposed or not to differ
entirely in kind, yet it is difficult to give them any meaning at all, as
distinct concepts, unless they are. The only distinction which
Hulme illustrates concretely is the possibility of multiplication :

"In the case where you have a number of elements merely
changing in position, time is not really involved at all, for time
makes no difference to them. They never alter; they never grow
old ... If you doubled the speed at which the change of
position took place it would make no difference at all to the
system. Take any example of such a system, say the astronomical
one. The planets following certain fixed laws follow certain fixed
courses. It would make absolutely no difference to these courses
if you supposed the speed doubled."

An impartial observer might be inclined to say that we know
rather less about the practical possibilities of speeding up the
cosmic processes than the vital ones and that, if anything, it is in
the latter, as I have indicated above, that we can observe the
effects of multiplication. We may therefore think that their time
is no more and no less real than that of any other process in the
universe.

It is Hulme's hope that we can "find the key to reality . . .
in terms of mental life" because, he claims after Bergson, it is in

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 93

mental life that we have an intuition of, we directly know, real
time, real change, therefore real freedom and the possibility of
new creation, as opposed to the 'fixed future' of a universe
mechanically conceived. The main distinction between the mental
life of which we have an intuition and the mechanical world which
we know by the intellect, and can also foreknow to a greater or
lesser extent, is that the first is vital. There are two further
important distinctions between a vital process and a mechanical
one. The first is that the vital cannot be "dissected and spread out,
without losing its vitality at least in that form". The second is that
we don't quite hiow what goes on in a vital process ; while, as far as
the mechanical view is concerned ''whether the complexity of life
comes as the result of the working out of certain mechanical laws,
or whether it is following a plan laid down for it, in both cases the
future is fixed and could be known to an infinite intelligence.
That is 'they don't exist in real time at all.' " (Does this refer to the
concepts of law formed by mechanists and finalists or to life as
dissected by them?)

It is clear that the first of Hulme's distinctions here rests
entirely on a confusion caused by his own purely metaphoric
account of intellect. If he were being merely anatomical we might
agree, although without much enlightenment, that the vital
cannot be "dissected and spread out without losing its vitality".
But in Hulme's context the reference is to the behaviour of the
intellect it is the intellect's act of knowing which dissects and
spreads out the vital.

It is therefore not at all remarkable that we 'cannot quite know
what goes on in a vital process'. Let us, however, notice that this
very ignorance is equated by Hulme with our possibility of free-
dom. In other words the fact that we do not know something is
taken to prove that we know something else. This, as I have
remarked above, is the typical philosophical procedure of
theological and scholastic apologists. Finally the same concept
that ignorance is freedom is implied again in the last quotation,
where the possibility of absolute foreknowledge is equated with
complete determinism.

94 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

If there were an 'infinite intelligence' with 'absolute fore-
knowledge' who had 'laid down a plan' for the universe to follow,
I do not see how his plan could help taking real time. Surely
Hulme's theology must have included the belief in some infinite
intelligence of this sort? How is that to be saved from the fate of
existing only in mechanical or mathematical time?

What Hulme has arrived at is that we know objective reality
only through intuitive and unconscious processes (which I suppose
would include some artistic ones). Intellectual, critical, scientific
and conscious processes are subjective. By the time we can
analyse our knowledge it has ceased to be knowledge. Knowledge
would therefore, one supposes, be incommunicable and the
intuitions of mystics are in the most favoured position. How
much this resembles the anti-intellectualism of the Nazis and the
'knowing-together' of D. H. Lawrence, how redolent it is of
blood and soil! How far from remarkable it is that Hulme was a
professed militarist and that, for all his preferences for vital
process he helped to inaugurate a cult for the non- vital in art!
How unreason, in all its manifestations, yearns for death!

However, Hulme was not content to leave the world of apper-
ception in the maya-like state to which he had reduced it. He was
aware of his philosophical responsibilities and his duty to protect
his intuitive pronouncements from too glaring a critical light, and
so the verifying process of the intellect, its most important
function, which had been thrown out like a bad angel, had to be
summoned back to sign its own death warrant.

Hulme felt that, as far as the individual mind was concerned,
he had 'refuted mechanism'. But on the other hand there might
still be some people who would prefer to attribute subjectivity to
our intuitive (or vital) processes, rather than to our intellectual
awareness and analysis of the external world; who would still
believe that that world could be most meaningfully and pro-
ductively considered by intellectual methods, including the
methods of calculation, as well as observation and generalisation;
and who would claim that the 'feeling of free activity which you
feel in a certain state of tension' tells us nothing positive or certain

MR HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 95

about the universe as a whole, nor indeed about anything external
to the feeling, nor anything profoundly illuminating about the
feeling itself.

"You now get the second passage to reality," says Hulme. "You
have . . . still to prove that this state of flux . . . this feeling of
a free activity ... is not merely a subjective state of mind, but
does give you real information about a reality which exists outside
you": information, we must note, of a superior reality, whatever
this may mean, to any which you obtain by observation, analysis
or generalisation. I believe that, in his heart of hearts, what Hulme
meant was that 'information' obtained in this way made you feel
superior, although there was nothing at all implied about its
actual value. I fear that all those who believe in a second (and
superior) order of truth are imbued with this assurance, which is
emotional, but not intellectual, and is based on a stock confusion
of subjective with objective experience.

This question of 'intuitive' information about reality to which
Bergson devoted his second book, Matter and Memory, "involves
the relation of the mind to the body". It is interesting that Hulme
himself thought that the novelty of Bergson's treatment of this
question lay in the fact that he dealt with it "not as a mere matter
of speculation but on the basis provided by an examination of a
body of empirical observations". This sounds like a remarkable
concession to the scientific attitude; but whether it is so or not
becomes more doubtful when we examine the data which Hulme
quotes from Bergson.

The 'body of facts' on which Bergson operates to support his
theory of the relation of soul and body, and of the vitalistic
current which carries a free and unpredictable creation through
the material universe, "are those connected with aphasia, i.e., the
various ways in which we lose our memory for words." It is not
necessary to go into the modern psychological theories which
among others attempt to account for this phenomenon, because
Hulme ignores them; and though Bergson alludes to them,
assuming their support, his proof is a metaphysical or philo-
sophical one, and can be dealt with wholly within that category.

96 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

In Hulme's interpretation, at least, I myself cannot see what
distinction he employs between aphasia and ordinary forgetful-
ness. He goes straight to the Bergsonian account of memory in
which the account of non-remembering or forgetting is implicit. It
is immensely difficult to escape from what I have elsewhere called
the Topographical Illusion',* the tendency to think of the mind as
if it were spatial, with floors and compartments. Much of the
philosophical thought of Freud and Jung is vitiated by this habit.
Therefore it is not surprising that Bergson and Hulme, those
inveterate analogisers and visualisers, should fall straight into it.

"Just as many things exist in the next room," says Hulme, "of
whose existence I am not conscious at this minute, so there exist
trailed behind in me, as it were, a whole host of memories of my
past of which I am at the present moment quite unconscious. It is
then as if all our memories existed quietly in a kind of next room
where one was not conscious of their existence ; but that now and
then one emerged and became actual by playing on the keyboard
of that special part of the brain with which it was concerned."

What this means, I suppose, is that the memories (which are, of
course, a knowledge of external reality), have somehow got 'into'
the unconscious mind, but how we do not know, since they only
appear one by one to play the brain's piano, and the brain is
nothing but a selector. This means, in the Hulme terminology,
that the brain separates them out of the intuitive unconscious
mass and of course they must lose 'vitality' and 'reality' in the
process. One must conclude that as an instrument of apper-
ception the brain is always by-passed, except for its purely
intellectual or analytic function. And one must ask where
exactly Hulme himself did his thinking when, at least in intention,
it was not as here, 'empirical', but 'intuitive' D. H. Lawrence's
solar plexus or the apperceptive heart or liver of a pre-cerebral
and pre-cortical physiology would seem to be demanded. Hulme's
account of the relation between the mental and the cerebral does in

* Horizon. Vol. 113.

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 97

fact beg the question of that relation between the inner or mental
life and external reality, which was intended to provide his whole
anti-intellectualist philosophy with an empirical status and begs
it quite as crudely as I have suggested. For what, says Hulme,
"should we see if we were able to look into the brain and to see all
the atoms in motion?" This is a miniature form of the question
about the 'infinite intelligence' and its total prediction of the
universe. It cannot be answered in a way which gives us any
empirical information, because it is not possible to look into the
living brain and 'see the thoughts'. I doubt whether any 'parallelist'
or mechanical materialist has ever claimed or imagined that
he could do so. But Bergson apparently thought he could
do so, at least theoretically; and that when he actually looked
he would see only those parts of a man's thinking which were
concerned with preparations for action or were a distinct visual
image. If we could thus look and if this is what we saw, I should
still say that compared to Bergson and Hulme, many mechanical
materialists would be in an advantageous position as far as
collecting possible information about psychological reality was
concerned. Many of them, that is, are able to accept the prob-
ability of unconscious mental processes because they have not
deprived themselves of the possibility of judging these by effects
and behaviour (ideas and actions).

But by his own apparently unconscious 'spatialisation' both of
the 'inner' and the cerebral life, that is exactly what Hulme himself
has done. "You may," he says, "persist in asking the question:
Where are these past memories storedT And naturally, since we
have strayed into his spatial account of mental life, we do have to
ask him for this extension of topography. His answer is that they
are 'in' the inner of second self, which, as one remembers, is the
vessel of duration or real time.

"The whole of your past life is in the present. This inner stream
which composes your inner self bears in it not the whole of your
past in the form of completed pictures, but bears it in the form of
potentiality. In this stream the elements are, as we said, inter-

98 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

penetrated. All that happens in an act of recognition is that the
interpenetrated parts get separated out."

Now it is here of no particular importance whether we regard
the brain as matter or intellect, since both of these and Bergson
hardly seems to distinguish them are thus chiefly characterised
by their function of analysing out the impulses and events
which otherwise remain wholly interpenetrated in the inner
or mental, or, on the other hand, in the 'vital' life. (To get the
full extension of meaning implied in 'vitality' we have to turn
to the evolutionary doctrine which comes shortly.) But if this
is the function of the brain and supposing, as Hulme suggests,
that we could look into it and read its thoughts or images, I do
not see what relation, if any, we should find between them and
the stored and potential hosts of memories, nor between them
and the past, which, according to Bergson and Hulme, ought
to be continually implied in their present activity. On the
Bergsonian definition, the brain's thoughts and images must
exist only at the level of the superficial self, and must as it were
be sloughed from the vital passage of the inner or fundamental
self, through 'real time'. More strictly, it seems to me, the
brain, like any other 'piece of matter', must produce only a
negative of mental process, a jelly-mould without content,
and it would appear impossible to have any objective know-
ledge at all. On the other hand, I do not see how an 'intuition'
gets into the brain without instantly dropping dead. If the
argument has now been reduced to a mere comparison of
metaphors, that is no doubt due to the philosophy of Bergson
himself, who recreated the entire universe after his own images,
the metaphors in terms of which he thought he discerned his
own mental life. In fact his philosophy is simply the old idealism
writ large and somewhat blurred. On his view it is not possible
to believe that there is any connection at all between cerebral
and mental life. He has merely uncovered the old Cartesian
problem How do the mind and the body influence one another
at all, if they are totally distinct substances? but his solution

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 99

is no more valid than the theory of animal spirits or of the Two
Clocks.*

If the brain, as the first piece of matter on which the free un-
predictable inner life has to operate, cannot, by definition, tell us
anything about that Bergsonian intuition, how also can it tell us
about a Bergsonian, or free, unpredictably evolving universe?
Even Bergson's philosophy is difficult to account for at all without
assuming the validity of some intellectual process, and in fact
Hulme's main reason for quoting Bergson's evolutionary theory
is that he thinks he can use it to provide the whole of the philo-
sophy of intuition with an empirical basis as well as to show
that external reality is not mechanical. The empirical nature of an
empirical test does not depend only or mainly on isolated notes of
experience, like stuffing a duck with snow, but on the observation
that the tissues of all ducks, in these repeated circumstances,
are preserved. This is the experience which results from the
experiment and it calls in the mind's powers of analysis
and generalisation, in short what we often briefly call the
intellect.

The evolutionary theory of Bergson is briefly that the universe
behaves 'as if a current of vital impulse were passing through it,
'inserting' ever and ever more freedom and consciousness into
matter. Bergson takes as his empirical 'proof the development in
totally different species, for example the vertebrates and the
molluscs, of a similar organ, the eye. On either the mechanistic or
the finalistic view of evolution, says Hulme, this similar develop-
ment is very difficult to understand. If we are mechanists, he
says, we believe that the eye was 'constructed' and if we are
finalists that it was all part of a plan. One may ask, of course, in
connection with both these concepts, who or what constructed or
planned, and one also notices in passing that the Bergsonian
creative evolution is not easy to distinguish from pantheism in

The theory of the Two Clocks was invented by disciples of Descartes
to resolve the difficulty in which his theory has left the interaction of mind
and matter. Mind and body, according to this theory, are separately wound
up by God so as to synchronise perfectly. This makes it look as if it were
my will which moves my body.

100 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

some form, and certainly seems to leave an individual Creator out
of account, and that this should have presented difficulties to the
orthodox Hulme.

Accepted scientific theory of evolution does not base itself on
mechanism or finalism, as defined by Hulme, but on selection and
adaptation. The eye's seeing is conceived as having differentiated
itself out from a general sensitivity to light which characterises the
lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, and from phototropism,
the tendency to turn toward the light, which characterises plants.
This causes chemical change in the organism. There are, as Ida
Mann says (The Science of Seeing), "degrees of seeing" based on
the particular adaptation of the organism and its light-sensitive
cells to light.

This adaptation is quite left out of account if we conceive the
eye as the end-product of a wishful process. However, this
wishful eye, produced because the organism wants to have vision,
is Bergson's answer, as quoted by Hulme, to the mechanistic and
finalistic accounts of evolution. Both mechanism and finalism, as
Hulme defines them, with their 'construction' and planning, are, I
suggested, forms of the usual intellectual Aunt Sally. The intellect
can only analyse, therefore it can only conceive of an organism, in
this case, the eye, as an individual construct, or as part of a plan,
of a wider construct. On the contrary, the Bergsonian view shows
us the eye as the result of a simple unanalysable desire for vision,
its degree of complexity being the result of the organisation which
matter has received from that development and direction of
consciousness. As this desire or impulse is simple and un-
analysable, the investigations of the intellect, and therefore the
observations of science, are automatically ruled out and there-
fore, one would say, the empirical basis for the Bergsonian view
of evolution. In fact, there is no empirical basis for Bergson's
Creative Evolution. It is simply an analogy with what he imagines
he discerns of free choice and consciousness, in introspection of
his own mental life or fundamental self, or intensive manifold.
An analogy in any case cannot be held to be evidence and, as we
have seen in Hulme's account, there seems to be no kind of

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 101

evidence that the fundamental self, if it exists, is free and un-
predictable and no explanation of how it can be conscious.

All this however is the whole philosophical backing which
Hulme provides for the essential concepts of scholastic orthodoxy
in particular for Free Will and the existence and freedom of
God, implying the possibility of miraculous intervention to
which he hoped that the Bergsonian 'empirical' revelation of two
kinds of knowledge would clear the way.

The chief dogmas of Catholic theology those I have mentioned
above and also, for instance, the doctrine of the Incarnation
cannot be proved empirically. Hulme, although he makes flat
dogmatic statements about some of them, as we see in the first
part of Read's edition of Speculations, particularly about Original
Sin and the existence of God, is not so clear as, let us say, Mr.
Eliot, on this inability, I have discussed him and his use of
Bergson, for one important reason, because he illustrates a special
confusion which has been and still is valuable to scholasticism.
This confusion is between the fields of epistemology and of
psychology. The confusion is implied already, I think, in the
concepts, which theology puts all on the same dogmatic basis.
For instance, Free Will, if it means human free will, is a psy-
chological concept, whereas the existence of God is an epistetno-
logical one. The discussion about what I can know by logical
implication, if anything, can never be quite on the same footing as
that about what I can know, if anything, by introspection.

In the section on 'Humanism', Hulme has some interesting
remarks about what he calls The Critique of Satisfactions'. He
says, with much justification, that actual philosophy is not a pure
but a mixed subject. Mixed up with the 'purely scientific and
impersonal' method is something which aims to show what,
according to the philosopher's conception, the world should be in
reality:

". . . We should expect to find that consciously or un-
consciously, the final picture (the philosopher) presents will to
some degree or other satisfy him. It is these final pictures that

102

THE EMPEROR S CLOTHES

m 2*ce it true to say that there is a family resemblance between all
philosophers since the Renaissance ... the final pictures they
present of man's relation to the world all conform to the same
probably unconscious standards or canons of what is satisfying.
. . . The philosophers share a view of what would be a satisfying
destiny for man which they take over from the Renaissance. They
are all satisfied with certain conceptions of the relations of man to
the world. These conclusions are never questioned in this respect.
Their truth may be questioned, but never their satis/actor iness.
This ought to be questioned. This is what I mean by a Critique of
Satisfaction"

We have sufficiently considered the epistemological, or what
Hulme would himself have called the 'scientific' part of his own
philosophy and we can now reasonably apply the Critique of
Satisfaction to it. There are 'conclusions' at the end of Speculations
but I think that we need not confine ourselves to these. As
opposed to the post- Renaissance humanist philosophers whom he
rounds up for punishment, Hulme was a quite overt apologist. He
set out, not to analyse and reveal by implication, but to prove
something. His 'conclusions' and therefore we must suppose his
satisfactions are manifest from the first page. It may be true that,
in so far as they do not maintain themselves as purely critical or
analytical and semantic this is certainly not Hulme's meaning,
however all philosophies are at least in part disguised psycho-
logies.

We should ask ourselves whether or not Hulme did in fact
mean all philosophies, including theological philosophy, or
scholasticism. When we remember his division of knowledge
which gives religion an absolute sphere of its own, and inorganic
science another, we shall find ourselves justified in concluding
that Hulme was ready to make an exception in favour of scholastic
philosophy, and that his main object in trying to reduce all other
philosophies to the same subjective level of psychological pre-
ference was that he wished to restore theology to its old position
as 'Queen of the Sciences'. This is the Two Truths theory

MR. HULME'S SLOPPY DREGS 103

carried to its most extreme form. And in uncovering this wish, we
also apply Hulme's Critique of Satisfaction to his own philo-
sophy. It is not only subjectively a disguised indication of his
own psychological processes the will to power, the over-
estimation of order, the preference for the hierarchical. But it is
primarily a claim to be an objective and final psychology, to
tell us the real and absolute nature of Man, and so to nullify the
painstaking, tentative and scientific effort of human generations
to tell us something humbler and more reliable about human
motives and behaviour. In short, his whole work is aimed at
annexing the terrain of the 'muddy mixed sciences' to the
'absolute' zone of religion.

When we are making our choice nowadays between the
scholastic and the scientific descriptions of the universe, which
both include an account of human behaviour and its meaning,
we must make ourselves clear how far the concepts of Sin,
Original and otherwise, and of Free Will, which are the foundations
as well as the conclusions and satisfactions of Hulme's philosophy,
and of that of all the scholastics, imply a complete opposition
both to common sense and observation. As conceived by them
all, Sin is an absolute state and Free Will an absolute faculty.
Neither is contingent upon anything at all, except divine grace,
and sin has no apparent relation with my capacity to do right
or wrong. The fact that I can, though improbably perhaps,
and certainly laboriously, alter my character to some extent,
with sufficient understanding, that is with sufficient examination
of my inveterate habits, is disregarded, and therefore the ways
in which I do, or may occasionally, show limited choice are
also disregarded. Yet this limited choice, this occasional capacity
to see what I must do in a total given situation, is a meaning
one can give to 'Free Will'. However, this possible examination
of my habits and subsequent modification of my character by
a more conscious 'choice' among limiting alternatives is not
distinct in kind from learning to correct my mistakes in any
other field, including the most practical. I learn, and I also
unlearn, by changes which take place in my nervous and cortical

104 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

system. To say that I am in absolute (Original) Sin or that
I have the faculty of absolute Free Will is to rule out all the
habits which have formed me in my existing personality, and
therefore not only my capacity for education, but everyone
else's. If we are absolutely sinners with absolute Free Will,
then it is impossible for us to learn to drive cars or to play the
piano.

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Eliot's Liberal Worms

A LTHOUGH it has been repeatedly necessary to attack the
J^Vintellectual foundations of theology, it has not been my
prime object to do so, but rather to make some conjecture of the
kind of mental climate in which writers would have to live and
write if the orthodox, by moral, social or legal pressure, could
impose their orthodoxy upon our ways of thinking.

Hulme was, as I have said, an overt apologist for the theological
attitude, and his expressed aim was to provide it with an objective
intellectual basis. I spent so much time in examining his in-
tellectual arguments, which are seldom more than superficially
convincing and are often surprisingly naive, largely because of this
expressed aim, which is of a kind to leave a substantial residue of
hope in the minds of those who want the consolations of a satis-
factory intellectual conviction without undertaking the labours of
establishing it.

This applies to a great number of artists, critics and writers.
For them Hulme' s Speculations may well have had the force of a
manifesto. But it is interesting to ask oneself whether those of
Hulme's younger contemporaries who actually read and con-
sidered his arguments, as I am sure Mr. Eliot and Mr. Herbert
Read did, need have taken the trouble. For on matters of
emotional importance, as we all know, people are hardly ever
converted by intellectual argument. The gallant, even swash-
buckling, undertakings of Hulme and the more suburban sallies of

105

106 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Lewis and Sayers have had their effect on the neo-scholastic
movement only in so far as nobody has seriously read them.
Authority has to speak in closed books; and the authorities are
quoted, not for knowing, but for appearing to know. Mr. Eliot
has always had the wisdom to rest his authority on this law.
Hulme is even one of the closed books to which he can refer his
own more authoritarian pronouncements.

One cannot be sure whether Hulme, if he had lived longer,
would have told less or more. In practice he did not get so very
far with his intellectual exposition. When we look for the in-
tellectual backing to orthodoxy in the connected part of his
philosophy, we find, as I have indicated, that nothing much more
than the doctrine of Free Will is covered; I suppose because it is
the fundamental link between epistemology and psychology,
between the description of the universe and the description of
man. I myself question whether he would have gone much
further in intellectual or theological disquisition; whether he
would have been able to tell us, what Mr. Eliot refuses, any good
reasons for believing in Original Sin or for hating Humanism.
It seems to me probable that his philosophy would soon have
revealed itself as just as much a negation, just as much a reaction,
as any of the later forms of neo-scholasticism. By the word
Reaction I mean that kind of tidal wave which mounts from the
accumulation of individual frustrations and dislikes. Reactions
are progressively self-suggestive and impress us with their in-
evitability because we are all secretly aware that emotion rather
than intelligence controls us. Hulme 'foresaw' a return to
religious orthodoxy and to 'classicism' because he hated humanism,
not because he had analysed humanism and found it wanting.
Humanism masquerades unquestionably in many opprobrious
shapes and it is true that not all professed humanists like their
fellow human beings very much better than the religiously
orthodox do. But the test of the genuineness of humanism is the
experimental attitude towards all human problems. This is what
Hulme really hated, as his following neo-scholastics also do;
but he grasped more clearly than some of them have since

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 107

done that humanism was thus an intellectual method and he
tried not ungallantly to counter it with another.

Mr. Eliot also knows that anti-humanism requires a method,
but he has probably learnt something from Hulme's failure and
knows too that direct disputation has no future.

By 1934, he had arrived in his critical work at the statement:

"Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a
definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age
there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters,
so far can literary criticism be substantive. In an age like our own,
in which there is no common agreement, it is the more necessary
for Christian readers to scrutinise their reading, especially of
works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological
standards. The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined
solely by literary standards ..."

To know by what steps Mr. Eliot arrived at this position
would be at least as illuminating to his literary admirers, among
whom I count myself, at least as important a piece of documen-
tation for our day, as St. Augustine's Confessions were for his.
But Mr. Eliot is not going to write his Confessions. He does not
instruct or inculcate, he only manifests himself with baffling
discontinuity. The view just referred to, of theological scrutiny,
together with the definition of orthodoxy and heresy on which he
is going henceforth to take his stand, were shown in practical
application in After Strange Gods. It is only from the time of these
pronouncements onwards that his claims have been at all
reasoned; and, even so, his arguments seldom refer to the meta-
physics of orthodoxy, but to its practical or ethical side. In
After Strange Gods he expressly states:

"I am not arguing or reasoning or engaging in controversy with
those whose views are radically opposed to such as mine. In our
time, controversy seems to me, on really fundamental matters, to

108 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

be futile. It can only be usefully practised where there is common
understanding. It requires common assumptions, and perhaps the
assumptions that are felt are more important than those that can
be formulated. We experience such profound differences with
some of our contemporaries that the nearest parallel is the
difference between the mentality of one epoch and another. In a
society like ours, wormeaten with Liberalism, the only thing
possible for a person with strong convictions, is to state a point of
view and leave it at that."

I do not think that that is 'the only thing possible'. I think
that a person with strong convictions might still examine the
foundations of his convictions, even at the cost of being eaten
by the worms of Liberalism. But the important thing for Mr.
Eliot is common assumption, common understanding, that is,
agreement is more important to him than the reasons, if any,
through which that agreement is arrived at. One cannot altogether
resist the suspicion that the literary Sons of the Church are some-
times almost snobbishly embarrassed by their parent, whose hold
on authority is not diminished by the fact that her practical
standard of morals, intelligence, sensibility and imagination is
necessarily much lower than theirs. Sometimes one would dare
to guess that, by the occasional tribute of a kind of petty fine
upon their greater mental endowment, they purchase the privilege
of its unrestricted employment during their purely professional
application. Even Mr. Graham Greene, whose views must often
be much more his own than they are the Pope's, has been
known to bestow faint praise on a not particularly distinguished
novelist, merely because she was dealing with a Catholic
problem.* Mr. Eliot's very refusal to discuss with his and the
Church's opponents suggests, at least to me, a similar act of
devotion and intellectual sacrifice.

Yet one cannot admit that the steps by which he has arrived at
his dogmatic orthodoxy are unimportant and uninteresting,

* Evening Standard, July 13, 1945

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 109

especially in view of the profoundly important social conclusions
in which he is overtly involved by them. Nor can there be any real
doubt that there was a continuous and ordered procedure, though
so much of it has been subterranean. The evidence of conversion
to orthodoxy which Mr. Eliot gave was indirect. Most of the
people who talked and wrote about The Waste Land when it first
came out said nothing about Eliot the Christian, because pre-
sumably they knew nothing. Even retrospectively there seems not
much more reason for concluding from this poem alone that Mr.
Eliot was a Christian than for concluding from Macaulay's Lays
that he was an Ancient Roman. In his poetry, as far as the outside
public could see, the conversion was a discontinuous mani-
festation. It happened some time between 1923 and 1930. It was
a complete metamorphosis and Mr. Eliot's poetry has now no
other theme than religion. In his prose the stages have been more
apparent. For Lancelot Andrewes was the manifesto essay,
published in 1926. The surface interest of this paper is secular, it
is largely concerned with Andrewes' literary significance, but it is
already written from the assumption of certain theological
absolutes, including the continuity and importance of the English
Catholic Church, and the weight and authority of her doctrines,
as if no one had ever seriously called these in question. What we
might call the toposcopy of this particular essay later becomes
interesting. In the shuffling of subsequent collections one watches
for it like the joker in a pack of cards. In Selected Essays (1932)
it has got well away behind the Elizabethans and even Dante
many of these were of much later publication. It heads a small
run of Church preoccupations, followed by a series of literary
essays with theological and sociological implications (including
Baudelaire, Arnold and Pater, F. H. Bradley, and The Humanism
of Irving Babbitt, all of which have been or will be alluded to in
this book).

In the later and most recent collection, Essays Ancient and
Modern, published in 1936, the Andrewes paper has moved to the
top. Is it fanciful to suggest that Mr. Eliot, refusing the direct
or confessional, has another method of his own the strategic?

110 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

He seems to have moved his units into position under cover of a
philosophical black-out, and we awake to find ourselves occupied.
The collection builds up to the last paper but one (Modern
Education and the Classics), the last paragraph of which may be
taken as a retrospective text for the whole work:

"If Christianity is not to survive, I shall not mind if the texts of
the Latin and Greek languages become more obscure and for-
gotten than those of the language of the Etruscans. And the only
hope that I can see for the study of Latin and Greek, in their
proper place and for the right reasons, lies in the revival and
expansion of the monastic teaching orders . . ."

Even the contrast between the first and last papers, between the
one on Lancelot Andrewes and the one on Tennyson, is not
insignificant. The paper on 'In Memoriam' is, it seems, nostalgic,
and for an age in which Mr. Eliot might even have been more at
home; since in the Victorian intellectual battle to be either on the
side of the Angels or of the Titans was not disreputable, and a
writer who lays so much stress on the intellectual basis of ortho-
doxy, while he never unveils it, would not have needed perhaps to
be so reticent. However, by this method which, negative though
it is, gives a kind of unity to Essays Ancient and Modern, Mr. Eliot
has outflanked the agnostic hosts of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and brought dogmatic theology triumphantly home, so
that the contemporary literary tribes take comfort without really
knowing why. They are like the Ashantis with their Golden Stool.
Mr. Eliot's orthodoxy is for them, if not for him, a closed symbol
of power. Is it not remarkable that this considerable amateur
of the Church Fathers has nothing to say about theology,
except allusively in his verse, until he blossoms into full
orthodoxy?* From that position, he proceeds at once to the
practical application in its extreme form for society rather
than for literature.

*In The Idea of a Christian Society and in Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture. Nothing could be more merely allusive than After Strange Gods,
which purports to be a study of the relations of literature and theology.

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 111

The theoretical link has disappeared in the lacuna. Can we not
justly call this skirting of all philosophical discussion a method
and a much more prudent one than some of his more eristic and
naive contemporaries have chosen to follow?

We saw that as far back as 1931 (essay on 'the Pensees of
Pascal') Mr. Eliot took over Newman's 'powerful and concurrent
reasons' for finding himself "inexorably committed to the dogma
of the Incarnation". But he has not adduced any others for, apart
from this and the statement about the very real and terrible
nature of Original Sin, we know nothing positive about Mr.
Eliot's theology. Apart from the allusions in the later poems to
the relations of time and eternity, we know little about his
metaphysics. When we would penetrate further, we are always
side-tracked to the Church visible if not precisely located. It may
be a good thing for his poetry that Mr. Eliot himself still remains
so visibly in this world. Whatever he says about time and eternity,
a significant part of the Four Quartets is still about the world of
visual and auditory objects, even if the objects have grown less
interesting, more general, less acutely observed. Yet there have
been great religious poets who made a world, which seemed to
them beyond time, imaginatively real to all of us. If God has been
an experience for Mr. Eliot in the same sense as for Dante, Donne,
Herbert and Vaughan, he does not communicate that experience.
The thought and observation behind the Four Quartets is not
mystical at all, it is in the main about human life and its in-
adequacy and sin. Compared with the human life of the earlier
poems, this one is over-generalised, but still we can say that
where any of the Quartets is moving or exciting as poetry Mr.
Eliot is living in the world of sensuous experience. I refer as
particular examples to the opening paragraph of Section I and the
second part of Section II ('In the uncertain hour before the morn-
ing') in 'Little Gidding'. Apart from these and a few more para-
graphs the language is abstract. Where it refers to felt emotion,
the emotion is negative or one of general distaste, not realised in
particularities.

112 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

"Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate . . ."

"The whole world is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere."

There is no reason at all why Mr. Eliot, either as a poet or a
man, should like his fellow-beings, but writers who have hated
them as a real experience have often been able to communicate
that experience so that we did not lose the sense that it was indeed
human beings who were being shown us, even fellow-humans.
Compare Shakespeare's Roman mobs, for instance, with any of
Eliot's abstract throngs on the suburban hills or in the Under-
ground. If we look at the framework of the poems attentively we
can see the cause. The religious experience itself is not intuitional,
it is 'intellectual', or perhaps I should say 'literary'. Whatever
Mr. Eliot's personal experience has been, his poetry refers only to
similar or secondhand experiences, as they have been recorded in
theological works or by mystics. This contradicts nothing that
Mr. Eliot has said himself religion, we remember, ought to be a

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 113

matter of intellectual conviction nowadays, not of 'enthusiasm'
(by which I suppose he sometimes means feeling). This is all very
well, but the great believing poets were able to convey their
religion to all of us as poetry. Moreover intellectual conviction
ought somewhere at least to be conveyed in intellectual terms.
Looking in the poems vainly for 'enthusiasm' how much more
vainly we look for argument. By the time Mr. Eliot allows himself
to become explicit in prose, we find that he has gone into politics.
In The Idea of a Christian Society and in Notes Towards the De-
finition of Culture the whole question of attempting to convert has
been successfully bypassed and Mr. Eliot is beginning to plan.
In After Strange Gods he was really doing the same thing already,
but at least there was that portentous statement about scrutinising
our reading by precise ethical and theological standards. On
scrutinising this statement in its context, with the feeling that here
Mr. Eliot, however much we dislike his conclusions, is at least
within his professional province and here at least we may be
given some insight into the practical impingement of the chief
dogmas upon literary experience, we are left still baffled and
disappointed.

In After Strange Gods, which is about orthodoxy and heresy
and about the meaning of these terms and the attitudes they cover
in relation to literary criticism, but which is all the same a very
short book, Mr, Eliot comes rather slowly to his only piece of
practical criticism, although that is what those of us who are not
orthodox, and perhaps some of those who are, are most in need of
if we are to give the terms any precise evaluation. Having come
thus gradually to the pronouncement that there is such a thing as
'orthodox sensibility', Mr. Eliot gives us, perhaps a little re-
luctantly, three contemporary illustrations three short stories,
one by Katherine Mansfield, one by D. H. Lawrence and one by
James Joyce. All three turn on the theme of disillusionment and
are about the relation of a husband and wife.

The first two, according to Mr. Eliot, are heretical and the
third orthodox in sensibility. Admittedly when you are talking
about sensibility your descriptive method may reasonably be

114 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

ostensive, but somehow we do not seem to come to any very clear
perception of the underlying principle which these stories either
affirm or deny. Miss Mansfield's story, we are told, has, because of
its slightness, practically no moral significance. Lawrence's, on the
other hand, reveals "an alarming strain of cruelty and a baffling
want of any moral awareness" in the characters. Joyce is the
"most eminently orthodox" of modern writers. His story (The
Dead') is certainly about kindness, about a humble sense of
generosity felt by a husband toward his wife's girlhood lover, now
dead. But one wishes that Mr. Eliot, even in this short book,
could have directed his critical apparatus instead on the vast main
body of Joyce's work. Surely an orthodoxy so eminent must have
revealed itself at least in a number of illuminating flashes any one
of which could have been more usefully isolated for the brief
quotation which Mr. Eliot's space seems to allow him. To others
Joyce's 'orthodoxy' is not eminent, not even obvious, even to
others whose whole literary philosophy is centred in a demand for
the return to Christian cultural tradition. For example Mr.
D. S. Savage in The Withered Branch. I quote this not because I
am in general agreement with this work but because it puts this
particular point bluntly:

"The most imperceptive comment ever made on Joyce was
perpetrated by T. S. Eliot, when in his book on literary heresy he
wrote that of the eminent writers of his time Joyce was the most
orthodox. Joyce's orthodoxy was limited to the Catholic in-
doctrination which he suffered in his youth, and from which all
his subsequent life was an effort to free himself."

I think that the reality to which Mr. Eliot is referring, whether
he means to or not, is just this struggle, never successful, which
Joyce continually made to get away from the effects of early
Catholic indoctrination. But those in whom Catholic teaching
is vestigial and unaccepted cannot by any manhandling of
language be described as 'eminently orthodox'. And what is

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 115

the good of all our scrutiny of our reading by Christian theological
and ethical standards if at the end we not only cannot be sure
what is orthodox and what heretical, but confound or invert
them?

In so far as Mr. Eliot means that cruelty is immoral, and
generosity and pity are moral, I am happy to sympathise with him,
but even if this is all or even the main part of what he means by
'orthodoxy and heresy of sensibility' we may still deplore the
terminology and its assumptions. There is indeed a preoccupation
with cruelty and a revolt against tenderness to be discerned in the
work of Lawrence and other contemporary writers. But does Mr.
Eliot mean that authors should not describe cruelty if they observe
it in the world and in human character? Or that books which
describe cruelty should not be read? Or that, if read, they should
be condemned as bad books? Or that authors should not appear
in any way to identify themselves with the cruelty which they
describe?

The first three interpretations must be excluded because a great
deal of literature, including the Bible, Homer and the Greek
tragedies, Shakespeare, Miss Austen, The Waste Land, Mr. James
Joyce and Mr. Graham Greene, is partially concerned with the
description of cruelty whose quality is plain, whatever its degree.
If Mr. Eliot means the fourth possibility, that an author should
not at all identify himself with cruel characters, I am afraid we
must again dismiss almost the whole of literature, unless we are
going to accept a definition of cruelty which is limited to the one
type which Mr. Eliot gives, a definition too narrow for Mr. Eliot
to make it clearly or even to give it much meaning.

I suggest that Mr. Eliot comes so slowly and obscurely to his
main point because he is hard put to it to define, not only a
sensibility which while admirable is uniquely Christian, but also a
sense for cruelty which shall adequately cover all the wide
varieties of this most recognisable vice. The mutual attitude of
husbands and wives, offering a wide choice of cruelties, has been
much studied by authors; it is therefore important, but not
uniquely so. Most authors, professing Christians or not, through-

116 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

out literary history, have offered us, as a consequence of their
social, religious or historicaj status, a wider choice of varieties
than this and often in unrelated fields. Their sensibility is at best
partial and thus only partially 'moral' or 'charitable'. And I am
not by any means referring only to their unconscious cruelty, the
insensibility which may be mainly or wholly historical and for
which we must not blame them. There have been authors who were
at least professing Christians whose attitude, often overt, both to
women and the poor, to love or money, is aggressive or un-
charitable, is in fact neither Christian nor humane. It is quite
difficult to think of an author, male or female, in English literature
from Elizabethan times onwards who is quite free from these two
vices of snobbery and uncharitableness. The poets have on the
whole been freer, though sentimentality and lies about sex come
under the heading of unconscious cruelty. Most of the theologic-
ally orthodox novelists from Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth and
Miss Austen onwards have in these two respects been serious
offenders. Miss Austen in particular often seems hard put to it to
tell the difference between love and money. My point is that their
orthodoxy did not help them to refrain from describing human
behaviour as they saw it, and in their own circumstances, partially
identified with it. So why should it help us in assessing them?
The freethinker George Eliot was freer than most from these
cruelties. In our day the orthodox Mr. Eliot is not free from
them. His female characters are mostly neurotic, ugly or savage
(it often depends whether they are rich, poor or middle-class)
unless they are heavenly or mythical, or he can enchant them into
statues, as with La Figlia che piange. His poor have 'unwhole-
some lungs' and their souls are 'unhealthy' or sprout despondently
at area gates.

Mr. Eliot refers specifically to the scrutiny of literature, other-
wise I should suggest that what he really proposes to us, so that
our criticism of contemporary cruelty should be practical and thus
manifest a moral attitude, is that we all ought to do all in our
power to spread the sense of charity in life and affairs, whether
we call this Christian, orthodox or merely humane. This way

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 117

authors, reflecting human nature, will also at last benefit. But I do
not think that this is Mr. Eliot's proposal. The lack of social and
moral awareness in contemporary authors and their characters is
so alien to Mr. Eliot's own nature that he is "completely baffled by
it", so he tells us.

But Mr. Eliot, in such eminently orthodox company as the
Dean of St. Paul's, has at least as completely baffled many of us
who are not orthodox, by newspaper appeals for the preparation
of atomic weapons against Russia.* This demand, it should be
noted, depended, not on the belief that Russia was preparing a
direct attack on the democratic West, but only on the supposition
that she would continue her indirect methods of infiltration. The
view which Mr. Eliot supported here was in strong contrast with
his lukewarm attitude to German Totalitarianism, as expressed
in The Idea of a Christian Society. If this striking opposition
between action and thought, between the demand for charity
and the desire for order, is really allowed for in orthodoxy,
Mr. Eliot has brought us no nearer to understanding Christian
sensibility.

After Strange Gods is a book where Eliot the literary critic and
Eliot the social and religious thinker meet first and perhaps last.
It looks as if this experiment with the application of precise
theological and ethical standards, if indeed they are precise, has
dulled rather than sharpened his literary criticism, certainly if we
are to judge by his selection. At the time when he was as far as
we could see, preoccupied with literature (The Sacred Wood) his
wide learning and his historical sense made it possible to choose the
right problem before anyone else was keenly aware of it. This
problem, of the dissociation of poetic sensibility, which he dates
to the seventeenth century, he had isolated and was discussing as
far back as 1921. Until the seventeenth century, thought' as
he put it, 'could be felt', there was no necessary distinction
between intellect and emotion, a great advantage to poets. "In the
seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which
we have never recovered." On the question of poetic sensibility

* Observer, December 1947.

118 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

there is probably no one living who has more that he ought to say,
and more that is worth listening to. But by the time that Mr. Eliot
feels ready to give us the answer to this question what happened
to poetic sensibility in the seventeenth century and what has
continued to affect it ever since? he has become in the main a
thinker on social matters with a theological bias, and the answer
seems to be wrong. He begins by talking about Christian sensi-
bility and, as we have seen, he is not very clear as to what that is.
This question of poetic sensibility and its dissociation during the
seventeenth century is so important and has become the central
point of so much literary discussion that I shall leave it for later
and fuller consideration. I shall say here only that I believe Mr.
Eliot and most of those who have precipitated themselves after
him into the discussion to be typically and significantly wrong in
attributing the dissociation to the development of the scientific
spirit in the seventeenth century.

Since the publication of After Strange Gods Mr. Eliot, in his
prose works, has told us relatively little about sensibility, either
Christian or poetic, but a great deal about how we ought to
behave. This is understandable, since thought and feeling are now
narrowly circumscribed for him by dogmatic standards. The
dislike of the scientific, that is the critical and observational, or
humanistic, spirit could be discerned in his work, even while it
remained ostensibly literary, as in Essays Ancient and Modern,
and has already been referred to (page 77).

Dislike does not improve his understanding of what scientists
are doing. As we saw, sciences do not depend ultimately on any
sort of dogma, however much the man in the street, or Mr. Eliot
himself, may garble their pronouncements. Their criterion is an
ultimate verifiability and their capacity to repeat their results on
qualified demand. In passing, let me quote, as an illustration of
what verifiability does not mean, the following from Mr. Eliot's
essay 'The Pensees of Pascal', on the subject of mystical experience:

"Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at
will, science cannot claim to have explained them."

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 119

Similarly, of course, we might say that until science can re-
produce eclipses at will, science cannot claim to have explained
these also.

In the paper on John Bramhall, we may quote:

"Thomas Hobbes was one of those extraordinary little upstarts
whom the chaotic motion of the Renaissance tossed into an
eminence which they hardly deserved and have never lost. When
I say the Renaissance I mean for this purpose, the period between
the decay of scholastic philosophy and the rise of modern science.
. . . The thirteenth century had the gift of philosophy or reason;
the later seventeenth century had the gift of mathematics or
science, but the period between had ceased to be rational without
having learned to be scientific."

Here the use of the word 'rational' is scholastic, not contem-
porary; and behind the opposition between the words 'rational'
and 'scientific' is the assumption that a deductive system of
thought could increase knowledge, and that the method we choose
to increase knowledge is thus a matter of arbitrary choice.
Behind that, of course, is the implication that philosophies, and
science itself, are all entirely relative to given periods, while
theology alone is objective.

The dislike of science is carried into the field of psychology.
This is worth considering here, for reasons which I have already
given, in particular for the reason that the belief in Original Sin
must imply the rejection of the idea of a scientific psychology, a
psychology, that is, which generalises, on the basis of observation,
about human mentality and behaviour. I must interpolate here
that it does not much matter at present, whether we have a
'scientific psychology' or not. What is important is that we
should have a psychology which is trying to become scientific, to
marshal its observations in the only way which has led us to
ascertainable truth in other fields. Mr. Eliot's views and the
citations which I shall give are important because they do indeed
clarify the fundamental opposition between the religious and the

120 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

scientific ways of looking at human problems. This opposition
is being more and more sharply realised, especially in certain
literary periodicals, where it is now commonly implied that if
religion and psychology are not at one in their general account of
human nature, then psychology will have to go.* Organised
religion depends on the concept of sin, and psychological theory
cannot be expected to stop short of analysis of this concept, with
at least the result, we must say, of very radical changes in its
meaning.
Still in the essay on John Bramhall, Mr. Eliot says:

"There is a modern theory, closely akin to that of Hobbes
which would make value reside entirely in the degree of organis-
ation of natural impulses ... the difficulty with such theories is
that they merely remove the inherently valuable a further degree."

They do not. Mr. Eliot begs the question. The quotations he
gives are based on the view that the inherently valuable is some-
thing which cannot be meaningfully discussed. They are on the
other hand an attempt to redefine 'value' as anything valued
what is in practice desired or valued. The concept of degree arises
only within the practical organisation of these valued things or
ends, f

This implicit question-begging is present again in the statement
about Bramhall and his method of attacking Hobbes.

"He touches the point of practical importance . . . when he
says simply that Hobbes makes praise and blame meaningless
'If a man be born blind or with one eye, we do not blame him for
it; but if a man have lost his sight by his intemperance, we blame
him justly'."

"This objection," says Eliot, "is finally unanswerable." But it
is not. Hobbes's theory of morals is deterministic. We may

*Cf . also the Pope's pronouncement to neurologists and medical psycholo-
gists: reported Times, Sept. 17, 1952.
t Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 346-7

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 121

attempt to oppose or correct his theory on philosophical grounds.
But whether that theory is correct or not, a mere practical
consequence of it, in this case that praise or blame becomes
meaningless, cannot be used as part of the argument. This
meaninglessness of praise or blame is recognised far more sharply
by Bramhall and Eliot than by Hobbes, whose character however
was such that he would hardly have deprived himself of an
aggressive satisfaction, the right to blame, without good philo-
sophical cause.

Neo-scholasticism however, which is essentially an objection to
contemporary philosophical and scientific theories, especially
when they touch 'human nature', bases itself largely on the belief
that the practical consequences of a philosophical theory, as they
appear in the established social and moral field, can be adduced
as so many good reasons for not holding it and for rejecting its
truth.

The implication that even science and all philosophies (apart
from the Philosophia Perennis) have a predominant element of
time and taste in them, reflects Mr. Eliot's own emotional pre-
ferences and an attitude which we have already seen in Hulme.
Again and again we find allusive and summary generalisations
which illustrate this bias and which remind us that the trick of
hypostasis, of referring to a subjective abstraction as though it
were a substantive existence, is its inevitable but misleading mode
of expression. In the same essay we have "In a period of debility
like our own . . ." And again "Bramhall affirmed the divine right
of kings: Hobbes rejected this noble faith." It may be objected
that Mr. Eliot is perfectly entitled to be traditional, conservative, a
laudator temporis acti, even 'reactionary'. He is not bound to feel
at home in our contemporary world. Moreover Charles the
Martyr still has his devotees and Mr. Eliot may have his whimsies,
or even, for all I know, his fun. But whether as a writer and a
critic he is entitled to animate his conceptions and to marshal
them as sheep and goats in separate pens, I gravely doubt. A
candid examination will show that 'debility' and 'our age* are
goats, while 'divine right of kings' and 'noble faith' are sheep.

122 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

These terms are all used truthfully when they are used with
reference to a concept of history, implicit or explicit. When
referring to time, Mr. Eliot always hankers for timelessness.
'Our age' means the age in which we ourselves, including Mr.
Eliot, live, what makes us ourselves and makes Mr. Eliot himself,
all of us with our emotions, our crotchets and our degrees of
capacity for examining them; and also with our traditions, for in
the twentieth century we receive the seventeenth filtered through
the eighteenth and nineteenth. To say or to imply that this is a
pity or a bad thing, is to deny both our traditions and ourselves,
and to surrender the valid use of criticism. 'The divine right of
kings' was an historical and political phenomenon. It was no
more inherently noble than 'our age' is inherently 'debilitated'.

I have already referred to the paper on Bradley in relation to
Arnold. In the present context it is again remarkable, because it
reveals the same connoisseur's attitude towards philosophies, the
philosophy-taster's, the deliberate innocence towards the fact that
philosophies are at least an attempt towards establishing a relation
to objective truth. It may be held that the assumptive and allusive
attitude, marked throughout this essay, towards philosophies
which Mr. Eliot dislikes is justified, because it is impossible to
launch a reasoned refutation of a philosophy every time one
mentions it. But one or two quotations will suggest that Mr.
Eliot's ground of enmity to any philosophy is always the same.
The criterion is always tradition, not descriptive truth. For
example:

"This is the social basis of Bradley's distinction, and the social
basis is even more his claim to our gratitude than the logical basis :
he replaced a philosophy which was crude and raw and provincial
by one which was, in comparison, catholic, civilised and universal.
True, he was influenced by Kant and Hegel and Lotze. But Kant
and Hegel and Lotze are not so despicable as some enthusiastic
medievalists would have us believe, and they are, in comparison
with the school of Bentham, catholic, civilised and universal. In
fighting the battles that he fought in the seventies and eighties,

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 123

Bradley was fighting for a European and ripened and wise
philosophy, against an insular and immature and cranky one."

Since Mr. Eliot never issued a precise intellectual manifesto, I
have been trying in this chapter to extract both the method and the
matter of his development into the full orthodoxy of a practical
and planning Churchman. This should at least have told us
something of his dislikes and of their rationale.

We know already that Mr. Eliot dislikes humanism. There are
one or two paragraphs in The Humanism of Irving Babbitt* also
in this same collection, which are worthy of comment. Eliot quotes
Babbitt as saying:

"In fact, in so far as I object to the moderns at all, it is because
they have not been sufficiently modern, or what amounts to the
same thing, have not been sufficiently experimented.'*

He comments :

"We may be allowed to inquire where all this modernity and
experimenting is going to lead. Is everybody to spend his time
experimenting? And on what and to what end? And if the ex-
perimenting merely leads to the conclusion that self-control is
good, that seems a very frosty termination. . . . What is the
higher will to will if there is nothing either 'anterior, exterior or
superior' to the individual? If this will is to have anything on
which to operate, it must be in relation to external objects and to
objective values."

But if the higher will is a religious will, what is that to will?
The Will of God? But how are we to know the will of God except
in relation to external objects and to objective values? And who is
to decide what values, if any, are objective? Mr. Eliot would say
the Church, and that is of course to beg the whole question of
humanism versus religion. All values are agreed conclusions
relating to experience. They are arrived at by individuals or
bodies existing in space and time. Those of us who cannot help

124 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

seeing that all Churches are temporary and relative will prefer to
be guided, where we need guidance, as we all do, by individuals
and bodies whose experience is widest, most impartial and most
experimental, in short most nearly humane. I think when we
consider Mr. Babbitt's use of the word 'experimental' we may pay
him the respect and do him the justice of supposing that he is
referring to the scientific rather than to the merely Bohemian
temper. The Eliot who noticed and disliked the mere revolt and
moral destructiveness, which was mixed up, in the twenties, with
some genuine experimentation in new ways of living has, not for
the first time, palmed another meaning of a word upon a context.
This time the word is 'experimental' and the context is Mr.
Babbitt's.
I must refer once more to that arch-curiosity among statements :

"Professor Babbitt knows too much ... too many religions
and philosophies, has assimilated their spirit too thoroughly . . .
to be able to give himself to any. The result is humanism."

Mr. Eliot has surely made here the strangest confession of faith
through ignorance. One wonders exactly how odious is com-
parison, how many religions one may safely know about, to be
certain of remaining orthodox, or whether perhaps we may
suspect that the logical end of orthodoxy is to know nothing but
itself? The point here is that Mr. Eliot does not want religions to
be scientifically studied. This gives us the clue to the meaning of
his remarks on humanism and the experimental. It gives us also
the essential explanation of all his other dislikes, including
liberalism, psycho-analysis,* sexual relations apart from the
narrow prescription of the Church, freedom of intellectual
inquiry, and 'progress'. All these things when they are valuable,
that is, here, when they lead to increase of happiness or content-
ment, do so in so far as they are the result of an observational,
experimental, a scientific attitude.

*Cf. reference to Dante's childhood experience in the Vita Nuova: E.
paper on Dante [Selected Essay*, 1932].

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 125

Mr. Eliot and the rest of us have the choice, not least in any-
thing which concerns the mind and heart, of being scientific or
idolatrous. Moreover I believe that this is nothing new. It applies
as it has always applied in religion, philosophy, art, science,
politics, ethics, psychology and all our practical and spiritual
activities. To take the one example of religion, there has been a
continual forward movement, from Judaism to Christianity and
through the different Christian reforms, away from graven images.
Graven images include blood-sacrifices, dead dogma and all the
stones of false abstractions offered us for the bread of meaning.
Christ said with exceptional precision what he meant instead of
meaning what we say. But we have continually to re-translate
what he said according to our need and circumstances. The
language of the contemporary experimental psychologist, for all
its blemishes, is a closer translation than the dogma of the
Church. It has often a noncomformist uncouthness and bareness,
alternating with a kind of Lutheran garishness, but the dogmas
are false abstractions, and so dead idols.

So far we have failed to discover in Mr. Eliot's prose works any
theoretical illumination about the nature of orthodox thought or
feeling. That such an illumination would not be unreasonably
demanded from a literary man of Mr. Eliot's eminence is illus-
trated by the example of Arnold, already given, who was ready
to write about everything that he understood of Christianity, both
as emotion and as metaphysics. With Mr. Eliot, we go back as far
as dogma, conventional and authoritarian pronouncements on
Christian conduct and belief, and we can go no further. We have
to try and find out from the implications of two works which are
later than anything I have so far mentioned, and which give Mr.
Eliot's constructive view of a Christian society, of orthodoxy in
practice, what are his real beliefs about orthodox thought and
feeling. These two books are The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).

These two books may well be taken as giving us some idea of the
kind of world in which Mr. Eliot thinks he would like to live; but,
in a strange way, a picture of the contemporary world which Mr.

126 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Eliot dislikes emerges much more clearly. I do not say that Mr.
Eliot, or anyone, ought to like the contemporary world, but
perhaps it ought to be disliked with a different sort of criticism.
And what he chooses to dislike most is remarkable. For instance,
I believe that it is fair to say, and I shall shortly illustrate this by
quotation, that he really dislikes some of the things we have
mentioned, such as liberalism and population control, rather
more than totalitarianism, rather more than war and much more
than 'the corporative state' which, as he reminds us, was hon-
ourably mentioned by the Pope in the Encyclical Quadragesima
Anno.

His dislike of revivalism (Moral Rearmament) which is strong,
might be accounted for by his election of dogma rather than
'enthusiasm', as characteristically Christian. However, we may
legitimately remind ourselves that the previous great wave of
emotional religion, the Evangelical Movement, was among other
things a precursor of nineteenth-century liberalism. Psychologists
observe that the repression of emotion helps to inhibit general
intelligence. Moreover it does not follow that emotions released
by religious enthusiasm will remain permanently attached to
religious conceptions. In the case of side-tracked or inhibited
intelligence, the release of any emotion may mean the release of all
and even the overthrow of values which have become stereotyped.
This may be a contributory reason for Mr. Eliot's dislike of
'enthusiasm' that it is associated with the attitude which can be
roughly generalised as Romanticism, and hence with the arch-
enemy, liberalism.

I share Mr. Eliot's dislike of Moral Rearmament, but for the
very different reason that I think it plays dangerously with the
technique of psychological catharsis. But whatever one thinks of
this or any particular example of religious emotion, there is very
strong ground for saying that original Christianity was primarily
concerned with the emotions and with their re-education, and with
their positive realisation in personal relations. Matthew Arnold
was in the right of it when he said that, at least during the life-
time of Christ, a 'right knowledge of the Godhead' was never

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 127

prescribed. Christ was interested in feasts, presumably because
they stimulate charity, but otherwise paid a somewhat unwilling
attention to social and ritual observances. I do not see how a
society which was remotely Christian could grow, unless some
general attempt were made to release and re-educate our warped
emotions. We are not likely to prefer to love, unless it is made
worth our while in the unconscious stages of education. However
unlikely it seems at present that any state and I am afraid that it
is only the state which could allow time and money enough will
let itself be persuaded by its psychological experts to undertake
this vital experiment, it is still more unlikely that the hierarchical
and stratified society which Mr. Eliot sketches would do anything
to educate any of us into feelings and relationships which were
remotely Christian. In The Idea of a Christian Society Mr. Eliot
does, unusually, refer to charity, but with very little emphasis and
only in the context of a reference to humility, and the general
picture which emerges is lacking in this and in the other Christian
virtues of faith and hope. That is, he does not believe that his idea
will be realised and he certainly gives no indication that anybody
would be happier if it were. Yet I cannot accept that happiness was
a notion which was alien to Christ, for the reason that it is im-
possible to love without happiness. There are allusions to nature,
especially to its abuse, in Mr. Eliot's book, but none to natural
enjoyment. I do not think it is insignificant that the style of
presentation is itself negative, always eliminative, almost a
Negative Way. This we might expect from Mr. Eliot's special
theological and mystical preoccupations, but it impresses itself
on me at least as a technique of avoidance and its total effect is
tiresome, as if one were watching someone with an obsession to
avoid all the cracks in the pavement. For example:

"In using the term 'Idea' of a Christian Society I do not mean
primarily a concept derived from the study of any societies which
we may choose to call Christian; I mean something that can only
be found in an understanding of the end to which a Christian
Society, to deserve the rume, must be directed. I do not limit the

128 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

application of the term to a perfected Christian Society on earth;
and I do not comprehend in it societies merely because some
profession of Christian faith, or some vestige of Christian practice,
is retained . . ."

Or again:

"I am not at this moment concerned with the means for bringing
a Christian Society into existence; I am not even primarily
concerned with making it appear desirable; but I am very much
concerned with making clear its difference from the kind of
society in which we are now living."

It is true that the elimination in these negative notions is
apparently directed towards clarifying a positive aim ; and in fact,
although Mr. Eliot specifically avoids any practical discussion of
the relations of Church and State and excludes consideration of
the form of political organisation suitable to a Christian State, he
does work through to a sketch of the basic structural elements in a
Christian Society. This is however left deliberately vague. The
vagueness, considering the scope of the book, is no doubt
legitimate. The basic elements, as 'working distinctions', are then
the Christian State; the Christian Community; and the Com-
munity of Christians. The Christian State is "the Christian Society
under the aspect of legislation, public administration, legal
tradition and form". The Christian Community seems to mean
those over whom the Christian statesmen rule, considered as
a whole. The Community of Christians means those from
whom "one would expect a conscious Christian life at its highest
level".

From the point of view of the Idea of this Christian Society, the
relations among these sections are supremely important. But
though these relations, says Mr. Eliot, may be looked at in
connection with the problem of belief, the most important thing
that the rulers and the ruled have in common is that what is
expected from them is conformity of behaviour. The ruled or the

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 129

Community of Christians may realise their Christianity almost
wholly in behaviour ("'customary and periodic religious
observances and in a traditional code of behaviour towards
their neighbours") because their capacity for thinking about the
objects of faith is small. As for the 'Statesmen', whose capacity
for thinking about anything may be presumed greater, it is not
primarily their Christianity which matters:

"but their being confined, by the temper and traditions of the
people which they rule, to a Christian framework within which to
realise their ambitions and advance the prosperity and prestige of
their country. They may frequently perform un-Christian acts;
they must never attempt to defend their actions on un-Christian
principles."

We need not at present consider the Community of Christians,
the believers who have presumably both the capacity and the time
to think about the objects of faith, and whose Christianity is
active, whether or not their lives are completely dedicated to
realising the Idea of a Christian Society. This Idea would not
only be acceptable to them, but the rest of us can see why. But
Mr. Eliot has given us these two other classes to consider, each of
which alone must be far larger than that of the consciously devout
and orthodox. There must therefore be some inducement or
persuasion felt by these classes to stay in and maintain a society
which they at least know to be 'Christian', some power which will
operate the machine for which Mr. Eliot has given us a blue-
print. It is difficult at first to see what this can be. I do not think
that Mr. Eliot is totally Utopian, for a Utopia is abstract, it is
really about ideas which are intended to give us a plan for a
desirable juture. But Mr. Eliot is not only pessimistic about the
future, he is also rather more concrete than the Utopian and he is
clearly referring to a state of society which he thinks has existed,
and worked, in the past. The problem, both for Mr. Eliot and for
his Christian Society, then, can be stated in another way as
How to attain the Past.

130 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Personally I believe our present society to be developing on
lines many of which are profoundly mistaken. I find an un-
balanced industrialism and the wastage of human lives and
natural resources as well as the immense amount of individual
frustration and dissatisfaction especially its perversion from
understanding, through unconsciousness as deeply deplorable as
he does. I do not think that we ought to give either 'Science' or
'Industrialism' its head without a primary concern for human
benefit. I agree that there is much to be said for some form of
regionalism which Mr. Eliot advocates in the later book, Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture and, what would follow from
this, that we ought to maintain a certain piety towards our old
traditions, those that are positively beneficial such as Wensley-
dale Cheese, and those that are harmless, like Bishop's gaiters. I
mean by this that we should continue to live and enjoy what is
living and enjoyable, not that we should necessarily insist on
Morris-dancing round the village green if there is a more lively
local custom arising, which brings us into more stimulating contact
with all our neighbours.

But there are two practical allusions they are hardly more
made by Mr. Eliot which seem to me to reveal a condition which
would be necessary if Mr. Eliot's Christian society were ever to be
brought into being, and which perhaps he ought to state more
clearly. While stating that the 'parish is certainly in decay', he
gives the parish as an example of community unit, 'the traditional
unit of the Christian Community in England'.

"The unitary community should be (as the parish is) religious-
social, and it must be one in which all classes, if you have classes,
have their centre of interest."

The other important allusion is to the education of the rulers
(the Christian statesmen) :

"I should not expect the rulers of a Christian State to be
philosophers, or to be able to keep before their minds at every
moment of decision the maxim that the life of virtue is the purpose
of human society . . . but they would neither be self-educated

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 131

nor have been submitted in their youth merely to that system
of miscellaneous or specialised instruction which passes for
education : they would have received a Christian education. . . .
A Christian education would primarily train people to think in
Christian categories, though it could not compel belief and would
not impose the necessity for insincere profession of belief. What
the rulers believed, would be less important than the beliefs to
which they were obliged to conform. And a skeptical or in-
different statesman, working within a Christian frame, might be
more effective than a devout Christian statesman obliged to
conform to a secular frame."

Now what exactly can it be that obliges a statesman who, in
spite of a Christian education, is sceptical or indifferent to Christian
belief, to work within a Christian frame or "to design his policy for
the government of a Christian society?" And what would oblige a
Community which was unable to think about the objects of belief,
to accept his government, unless it conferred obvious and im-
mediate material benefits which the Community would have to
be advanced enough, in an intellectual sense, to realise or 'think
about'?

What also would persuade them to revert to the life of the
parish when they are so forcibly drawn to industrial centres? for
Mr. Eliot knows that they will also not be able to think consciously
about the advantages of that life, some of which are indubitable.
I am afraid that Mr. Eliot knows that nothing can so persuade
them but some form of force which would cover the destruction of
our present material development, and also of the ideas which
made that possible, for good as well as ill the ideas of liberalism,
humanism and science. And who would be the instrument of this
force? The most likely answer is the Christian statesmen who
would have been 'taught to think in Christian categories'. What
exactly these categories would be Mr. Eliot does not tell us, but on
his own showing they need not be connected with charity nor with
the sense of individual and personal value, but only with the
statesmen's sense of their own power and of the prosperity and

132 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

prestige of the national unit which they were ruling. I do not
know what Mr. Eliot's views on Machiavelli may be, but the
quotations already given illustrate his profound contempt and
dislike for Hobbes. Yet his own political views, if they could be
put into practice, would surely reveal themselves as not less
cynical than those of Machiavelli or even Hobbes. Since a
'Christian education', as Mr. Eliot conceives it, would be an
education which left them free to think and act primarily in terms
of their own and of national power, I do not think it would save
his 'Christian statesmen' from acting as any minority class, in any
community, which had been given, either by education or by the
economic condition of that community, the right and the means to
power, would do, in the face of a threat to that power's con-
tinuation. How much more totalitarian evidence do we want
under our own eyes? However much or little education Hitler and
Mussolini had in Christian categories (which their sense of power
enabled them to divorce very easily from Christian feeling), it
seems certain that Franco has had a great deal. As far as I
remember, Stalin was brought up in a seminary and designed for
the priesthood.

The Idea of a Christian Society was published in 1939, after the
outbreak of the war with Hitler's Germany. Mr. Eliot no doubt
did well to suggest that we ourselves might not be free from all the
defects of totalitarianism. But his views on what these defects
really are, and also on what they were felt to be by the majority of
people who detested them, are not easy to discern and, where
discerned, are difficult to accept.

"The fundamental objection to fascist doctrine, the one which
we conceal from ourselves because it might condemn ourselves as
well, is that it is pagan. There are other objections too, in the
political and economic sphere, but they are not objections that
we can make with dignity until we set our own affairs in order.
There are still other objections, to oppression and violence and
cruelty, but however strongly we feel, these are objections to
means and not to ends."

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 133

Further, in an astonishing note:

"(By fascist doctrine) I mean only such doctrine as asserts the
absolute authority of the state, or the infallibility of a ruler. The
corporative state', recommended by Quadragesima Anno is not
in question. The economic organisation of totalitarian states is
not in question. The ordinary person does not object to fascism
because it is pagan, but because he is fearful of authority, even
when it is pagan."

The order in which Mr. Eliot tabulates what he conceives to be
the main objections to fascist doctrine is logical for one who holds
that dogma is prior to morality. But it is significant that though
he is correct in judging that the 'ordinary person's' order of
objections is different from his own, he still gets that order wrong.
What the 'ordinary person' primarily objects to in fascism is that
it is violent and cruel. I would go further and say that where the
ordinary person is 'fearful of authority' it is because authority
sooner or later tends to be arbitrary and may therefore be violent
and cruel. For his dogmatic purposes, Mr. Eliot has to dis-
tinguish over-sharply between ends and means. A striking fact
about cruelty this was clearly visible in the worst aspects of the
Nazi regime is that it is a means which is not sharply dis-
tinguishable from an end. To the natural morality of normal men
and women it is as near to being absolutely hateful as anything
can be. Moreover the objections which can be made to fascism in
the political and economic sphere may still be made by the
ordinary person even though he may not be interested in politics
or versed in economics, and made 'with dignity' precisely because
these objections too are based on his fundamental objection, his
hatred of cruelty and violence. These objections in the same order
apply also to the Corporative State, whether it is recommended by
the Pope or not, and whether Mussolini had been taught to think
in Christian categories or not. Mr. Eliot refers more than once to
the efficiency of the totalitarian machine, for example: "I suspect
that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal

134 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

of admiration for its efficiency." Efficiency for what? Not surely
for the preservation of a balanced economy, for I do not believe
that Mr. Eliot would so describe the short-term policy of Guns
before Butter, nor even for the prosecution and winning of a world
war, to which such efficiency as the Nazis had was mainly directed.
There are plenty of accounts from informed sources of their
wastage, circumlocution and plain stupidity in prosecuting their
evil aims. Certainly they were not efficient in regard to the other
political and economic aims which Mr. Eliot, often in common
with the ordinary person, picks out as basic for any society which
is to endure at a tolerable level of humanity, whether Christian or
not. I mean that their 'efficiency' was not good enough to enable
them to preserve natural resources, to give their population 'a
proper and particular' cuisine (NDC p. 27) or, most remarkably,
considering their efforts to that end, to get that population to
increase. I cannot believe that Mr. Eliot is only referring to
'getting the trains to run to time' when he writes of efficiency.*
Yet another quotation makes one ponder: "The fact that money
is always forthcoming for the purpose of making more money,
whilst it is so difficult to obtain for purposes of exchange, and for
the needs of the most needy, is disturbing to those who are not
economists." I believe that the ordinary person, who is also not an
economist but does not have to think about getting to the Riviera

*A note made by Mr. Eliot on pacifism is relevant. It is because he has a
moral hatred of violence and cruelty that the ordinary person hates war
even if he also hates it because it is inconvenient and terrifying. Mr. Eliot
says: "I cannot but believe that the man who maintains that war is in all
circumstances wrong, is in some way repudiating an obligation towards
society; and in so far as the society is a Christian society, the obligation is
so much the more serious. Even if each particular war proves in turn to
have been unjustified, yet the idea of a Christian society seems incompatible
with the idea of absolute pacifism; for pacifism can only continue to flourish
so long as the majority of persons forming a society are not pacifists; just
as sectarianism can only flourish against the background of orthodoxy."
This is an interesting example of the falsity which may be introduced by
analogous thinking. It is fair to say that pacifists may depend for their
continuance on non-pacifists. But does Mr. Eliot really mean that sec-
tarians are more viable in such countries as Spain, which provide the most
orthodox of backgrounds? Sectarians, as pacifists, flourish most where the
ordinary person retains notions of liberty and is not penalised for his
unorthodoxy.

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 135

this side of eternity, is also disturbed by the difficulties about
money which Mr. Eliot mentions, but that once again he puts
them in a different order of importance, based, once again, on a
different and perhaps more natural morality. There is some
evidence, as we have seen in quotations already given from his
poems, that Mr. Eliot has a lack of understanding of and sym-
pathy with ordinary persons, that he looks upon them as generally
unhealthy and unhappy, whether at the dog races, the flicks, or in
bed, and, as it were, worked by the roundabout of mechanised
pleasure like automata. I do not think that this picture is
absolutely representative. If it were so, the solution would be
perhaps not to take their toys away from the people but to give
them more opportunities to share our more refined enjoyments.
If that were accepted by Mr. Eliot he would have to recast some
of his ideas on 'education'. The dogmatic view of human nature
as I have repeatedly pointed out, does not allow for the education
of the emotions, the most fundamental education, because it does
not permit us to discover what the emotions really are.

One may conclude that Mr. Eliot's Christian Society would not
be really designed to satisfy in just proportion the needs of the
ordinary person, of whom he has a poor and, I think, biassed
opinion, even if conceived as part of a Christian Community.
Those who would benefit most would be the class which he has
described elsewhere (in NDC) as the filite.

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is a book which sticks
closely to the intention indicated in its title and for that reason it is
less relevant than most of Mr. Eliot's books to my main theme.
One may agree that the word 'Culture', like so many other words,
is abused, very often by cultivated persons, and one may also
agree with many of Mr. Eliot's indications of what it ought to
mean and what it may not mean: for example, on the one hand,
that it is not synonymous with education, still less with 'in-
struction', and, on the other, that one cannot really understand it
except as applied to the total way of living in which a community
has grown. There are however the usual fraught statements in this
book, referring to the whole background of Mr. Eliot's thought,

136 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

which one woulcd like to see amplified, and often clarified. And,
as usual, particularly in the case of The Idea of a Christian Society
we find, if /we piece these and other more positive statements
together,, that we have quite a distinct picture of what Mr. Eliot
dislikes* in our present society, a much more baffling indication of
what/he feels he would prefer or of what he even feels may at some
time have existed, but very little idea of what his answer would be
to the question : 'How do you think this preferable society could
be brought into being?' Without doubt, Mr. Eliot, pursuing the
negative or eliminative way to which I have referred, would say
that this question is 'outside the scope' of 'the present' (or any
other) essay.

But if we take some of the statements, especially those to which
I have referred as fraught and unamplified, we see that their
scope, in necessary implication, is very large. The implication is
that the ideals and the ideology which underlie our present
Western society, whoever holds them or whether anyone holds
them in consciousness or not, are false; and that the political,
economic and educational structure which has arisen upon them
is therefore wrong and unnatural. The sign which he gives is the
statement that culturally our own period is one of decline. This is
contrasted with a picture of the positive conditions which seem to
have been necessary to maintain a flourishing culture.

The most important of these conditions are two: attachment
to a religion, and a stratified society. It must be carefully noted
that Mr. Eliot does not claim that the fulfilment of these two
conditions will bring about a renewal of culture, only that a highly
developed culture is improbable without them, and that our
existing culture is certainly doomed unless the community re-
attaches itself to the Christian faith. The apparent modesty of
this claim may mislead some readers, especially as there is also an
indication of flexibility in Mr. Eliot's view of the political and
social structure which would be appropriate to his Christian and
cultural community. The filite, for instance, on whom so much
depends, should continually be replenished from other classes as
well as that of the rulers. There is a place for opposition as a

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 137

therapeutic friction, for sects, and even for liberalism, as a
necessary negative influence. That for Mr. Eliot is very liberal
indeed. Nevertheless we ought not to let ourselves be deceived
about the main implications of this book, which are the same as
those of The Idea of a Christian Society. Liberalism and human-
ism are still the main enemies. For the ideas of liberalism and
humanism (liberalism is among other things a humanistic inter-
pretation of Christian philosophy) have, whether we like it or not,
laid the foundations of our existing Western society, whether we
like that or not. And the stratification of society, and the social
status of the Church as well as of sects and oppositions, can only
be modified by a widespread modification of the status of these
ideas in men's minds. This modification can only be brought
about in one of two ways, either by persuasive demonstration that
they are false that would imply, of course, as a first step making
them a great deal more conscious than they are in the majority of
minds or by their repression. I do not think that the first is really
possible, because the ideas have had and still have their chief
value in so far as they spring from the scientific attitude. They are
valuable because when they mean anything at all they are true,
and because their implications are being constantly tested by the
only tests we know. The second course, repression, is only
possible by force or subversion. We know from experience that
this is so, the repression is inevitable; it is either acute, as with
fascism, or chronic as with the Roman Catholic Church.

Because we already have this experience, I doubt that Mr.
Eliot, however much he may prefer an eliminative or negative
way of expression, is normally entitled to maintain so academic a
spirit towards the issue of power. In fact his equanimity is reserved
entirely for the fate of liberal ideas. The fate of ecclesiastical
Christianity, as we can see not only from the letter already referred
to (see p. 117), but from the sum of implications of his social
writings, does not leave him cold. And yet it has obviously been
liberalism which assisted Christianity to survive, rather than the
other way round. Mr. Eliot's preference as far as the organisation
of society is concerned is not academic. That he ought to answer

138 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

this question How is this preferable organisation to be brought
about? is implied in his anti-liberalism and his views on the
stratification of society because these opinions, in peace-time,
imply a reversal of that trend in Western society which is normal
and most conscious. We hear too much nowadays about the
Church as the sole preserver of values, culture, knowledge and
civilisation, especially throughout the Dark Ages. In fact, values
cannot be preserved, only used. The foundations of what is good
in our present culture were laid by the Greeks, the Romans, the
Christians; and also by the Mohammedans, who made a practice
of preserving the civilisation and learning of the countries they
conquered and were Western Europe's first point of contact with
the Greek masters, particularly with Aristotle. Because of this and
also because of the attention they paid to mathematics, we might
regard the Mohammedans as largely responsible for the two
opposing developments of Western culture, into scholasticism on
the one hand and science on the other! But perhaps their main
contribution was after all something not unlike the most civilised
spirit we have, that of liberalism. For they seem to have been on
the whole much more tolerant of, and even interested in, alien ideas
than either the Christians or the Jews, who suffered their conquest,
have been when in power.

What is and was good in our society, stemming from all these
sources, is and was something that expressed itself in practice as
a liberal, humane sense of reality. This is how we have received
the genuine meaning of Christianity, much more than through the
Church in its more rigid organisations. A man at any time in the
last two millennia became a Christian in practice by becoming more
nearly liberal and humane. And in the latter part of those two
millennia liberal humanism tended away from the rigid stratification
of society. I repeat that to check or reverse this trend still needs
force, as in fact we have seen recently and expensively. Liberal
humanism is not merely negative, as one would gather from Mr.
Eliot's allusions, not merely the destroyer of traditions, that with
which society is worm-eaten, when it is most significant; nor, on the
other hand, a mere party-colour or a lackadaisical habit, as Mr.

MR. ELIOT'S LIBERAL WORMS 139

Eliot would have us believe, when he refers in intolerant tones to
tolerance, that most difficult and civilised of virtues. Part of the
difficulty of tolerance lies in defining its own limits, because the
true as well as the lackadaisical liberal feels uneasy when he stops
short of tolerating intolerance, including that of the Church, and it
is indeed essential to liberalism to tolerate some degree of in-
tolerance. 'I detest your views' yes, I do indeed detest them. But
liberalism really consists of a right and a duty the right to think
correctly, that is, in relation to reality; the duty to combat false
ideas, but with truer ideas, ideas, that is, which are closer to
experience.

It might be argued that the issue of force is implied here but also
without being answered. Liberal humanism is primarily an
attitude towards discoverable truth, but certainly today we seem
called upon to defend the stocks and the channels of that truth
against encroachments from all directions. Liberal humanists
however do seem to have been ready to die for their belief and
attitude in considerable numbers; whether soon enough or finally
enough it is not my business to discuss, since neither Mr. Eliot
nor myself have made any claims about the success of our beliefs.
But the general ideal which was discoverable in the last war was
that of liberal humanism rather than of orthodox Christianity,
and an answer has thus been made on the issue of force. There-
fore it seems to me that the onus of discussion is now with the anti-
liberal side to which Mr. Eliot belongs. For the truly liberal
attitude towards Mr. Eliot's beliefs implies as usual that one
attributes to him both rights and duties. He has the right to
ventilate his opinions. But he has also the duty of carrying them
to their logical conclusions. That the cost of implementing them
would be great and ugly is one of these conclusions.

CHAPTER V

Mr. Willey's Lunar Spots

ONE of the most pregnant contributions which Mr. Eliot has
made to criticism is his observation on the dissociation of
sensibility, the split between thought and emotion, which took
place in the seventeenth century (Essay on 'The Metaphysical
Poets,' 1921):

"It is something which had happened to the mind of England
between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the
time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the
intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning
are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as
immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an
experience; it modified his sensibility. . . . The poets of the
seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the
sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could
devour any kind of experience. ... In the seventeenth century a
dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never
recovered, and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by
the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century,
Milton and Dry den."

While this conception, which is also related to his views on the
relation of philosophy to poetry, is, I believe, central to Mr.
Eliot's own thought and feeling in and about poetry, he has not
been at pains to develop it. But it has been developed by other
writers. It has also been contradicted by some, for example Dr.

140

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 141

Tillyard in his interesting and lively book on Milton. In my view,
both those who agree and those who disagree with Mr. Eliot on
the degree of responsibility for the 'dissociation in sensibility',
have in general missed the point. Mr. Eliot it is true used the
word 'aggravated', not 'caused', and it seems probable that he
himself has not worked out the full implications of his statement.
When we talk of dissociation of sensibility, purely poetic influence
can hardly be exaggerated, but when they talk of influences, most
of the writers who have discussed the idea have separated
Milton's thought from his poetry. As I believe that these writers
have from either side misconceived Mr. Eliot's opinion and mis-
laid its true and valuable implication, which is highly relevant to
this book's main theme, I shall discuss the subject here.

Mr. Basil Willey's The Seventeenth Century Background is
particularly interesting not only because it attempts to give an
historical picture of the 'dissociation in sensibility' and because it
at least gives the problem of the relation of poetry to truth a
merited attention; but also because its theory derives from Hulme
as well as from Eliot, and we may therefore look upon it as a
flood-mark of the penetration of anti-humanism into literary
criticism. As early as his second page, Mr. Willey makes use of
Hulme's idea of the critique of satisfactions and of the subjective
nature of philosophical goals, which I have already discussed.

"First it may be well to inquire," says Mr. Willey, "not with
Pilate 'What is Truth?' but what was jfe/f to be 'truth' and 'ex-
planation' under seventeenth century conditions. As T. E. Hulme
and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to
become critically conscious of one's own habitual assumptions;
'doctrines felt as facts' can only be seen to be doctrines, and not
facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually with the aid of a
first-rate metaphysician."

And further:

"The clarity of an explanation seems to depend upon the degree
of satisfaction that it affords. An explanation 'explains' best when

142 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

it meets some need of our nature, some deep-seated demand for
assurance. 'Explanation' may perhaps be roughly defined as a
restatement of something event, theory, doctrine, etc. in terms
of the current interests and assumptions."

These early quotations seem to me to contain in germ the
fundamental errors around which Mr. Willey has constructed his
book. In itself the statement that it is a metaphysician, first-rate
or not, whom we need to put us right and make us critically
conscious of our concealed assumptions, begs the question. Mr.
Willey's book is mainly about the impact of scientific discovery on
seventeenth-century thought and poetic sensibility. The con-
clusions about the nature of the universe and of the mind which
were found to be disturbing were largely those of the physicist
and the astronomer, working or trying to work inductively ; that is,
by observation and experiment. The method and its apparent
threat of unlimited applicability was what caused the disturbance;
though, in general, inductive thinkers, or those who were fascinated
by the method's possibilities (e.g. Bacon and Browne), refrained
from applying it in the field of religion. A metaphysician, who in
general feels no obligation to use this method, is hardly likely to
be the one to assist us in dealing with any concealed assumptions
which may lead us either to accept or deny it. The causes for our
want of critical consciousness are either logical or psychological
we fail either because we do not think in applicable form or
because the pressure of emotion makes our thinking subjective
and to eradicate these causes we need a logician or a psychologist.

,Mr. Willey's 'metaphysician' is thus a first and early hint of
his own most significant underlying assumptions that all ex-
planations are alike* explanation' ; that they all alike relate only to
subjective satisfaction; that the fact that some of them are checked
and controlled by experiment or return to experience makes no
important distinction among them; that there are, in short, two
'truths', one of theology and one of science, and that each has a
special sphere in which its judgments alone are valid. This
reminds one of Hulme's sharply demarcated sphereswith the

MR. WILLEY S LUNAR SPOTS 143

'muddy mixed zone' between. In Mr. Willey's case it looks as if
this underlying assumption of the duality of 'truth' also covers a
bias in favour of theological 'truth', because it is supposed to
appeal to our 'deeper' interest an idea which itself covers a great
many assumptions of value.

A quotation from Mr. Willey's next page illustrates this under-
lying assumption and bias particularly well, and also the
typical semantic shift with which it insinuates itself:

"Such a demand (i.e. for restatement or explanation) . . . does
not necessarily imply the 'falsehood' of the older statement; it may
merely mean that men now wish to live and to act according to a
different formula. This is especially evident in our period when-
ever a 'scientific' explanation replaces a theological one. For
example, the spots on the moon's surface might be due, theologic-
ally, to the fact that it was God's will that they should be there;
scientifically they might be 'explained' as the craters of extinct
volcanoes. The newer explanation may be said, not so much to
contain 'more' truth than the older, as to supply the kind of truth
which was now demanded."

I know that he might consent to expand the expression 'due
theologically' into 'might be explained from a theological stand-
point', but we ought not to miss the implication of value and
relative degree of reality, in the positive 'due' as opposed to the
word 'explained', made hypothetical by inverted commas.

The rest of the paragraph develops this imputation of sub-
jectivity to scientific method an imputation, we might almost
say, of whim, certainly of a kind of fortuitousness, which ignores
the binding and interlocking quality of historical human experi-
ence. This makes one wonder whether Mr, Willey unconsciously
conceives his seventeenth century as existing in a 'metaphysical'
isolation without relation to other centuries which had gone and
were to follow.

No one can deny or should wish to deny that there are at all
times psychological needs and drives determining the direction of

144 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

our interests, either as individuals or as members of a com-
munity, determining therefore the kind of questions we are likely
to ask and the kind of answers we are likely to get. But the
questions, if they mean anything, will come out of a body of
experience which connects us to the whole history of mankind
upon the planet, while the answers, if they make sense, will appear
within an existing body of knowledge, although they may extend
and indeed make profound structural alterations within it. This
continuity of investigation and discovery is the very foundation of
knowledge and it only became possible when the experimental
attitude was achieved. To ignore this historical interlocking of
everything we can be said to know, to ignore the tradition of
science whose establishment was the great achievement of Mr.
Willey's Century, is simply to insinuate one of the old bad
hypostatical heritages of scholasticism in a disguised form. If we
were totally ignorant of the history of scientific development,
within and outside the seventeenth century, Mr. Willey's 'ex-
planation' of explanation would never give us any idea that
something more than a fortuitous emotional need of a very vague
entity, the human heart, had been required to set it in motion :

"A comet, for example, or an eclipse, was explained when
instead of being a disastrous omen ... it could be shown to be
the 'necessary' result of a demonstrable chain of causes. No one, it
need hardly be said, wishes to deny that this explanation had and
still has a more 'satisfying' quality than the one it superseded. But
why was it more satisfying? It was more satisfying . . . because now,
instead of the kind of 'truth' which is consistent with authoritative
teaching, men began to desire the kind which would enable them
to measure, to weigh and to control the things around them. . . .
For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to
convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the
condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no
other. . . . Speaking generally, it may be said that the demand
for explanation is due to the desire to be rid of mystery. Such a
demand will be most insistent when the current mysteries have

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 145

become unusually irksome, as seems to have been the case in the
time of Epicurus, and again at the Renaissance. At these turning-
points men wanted 'scientific' explanations because they no longer
wished to feel as they had been taught to feel about the nature of
things. To be rid of fear fear of the unknown, fear of the stars or
of the devil to be released from the necessity of reverencing what
was not to be understood, these were among the most urgent
demands of the modern as of the ancient world; and it was
because it satisfied these demands that scientific explanation was
received as the revelation of truth."

If Mr. Willey means what he says by most of these remarks,
it is still difficult to know what he means! Are we supposed to
believe that the superstitions, fears and longings of unknown men
and women, who themselves knew nothing of these individual
scientists and their work, constituted any actual demand which
could possibly influence the experiments, discoveries and cal-
culations of Copernicus, Galileo or Newton? If we suppose that
these scientists themselves felt fear or any other emotional attitude
towards the phenomena which they investigated, and most prob-
ably they did, can Mr. Willey say how this affected or was at all
connected with the actual observations and measurements which
they made? Galileo, as we all know, became conscious, after the
scientific event, of reactions of fear and aggression from one
organised body of unscientific human beings to that event itself,
but all that made him do was to tell a simple lie which did not
affect the validity of his discovery one way or the other. All that
'men's fear' here did was to cause them to repudiate science. In
general one can say that the fear of science has been as strong or
stronger than the fear of the gods or of natural events. Mr.
Willey's evidence seems to be limited to the rather personal
attitude of Lucretius. Who indeed are 'men'? these 'men' who
'felt', 'feared' and 'demanded'? To use 'men' instead of 'Man',
which must very nearly have come to Mr. Willey's pen, is a way of
conferring a specious air of inductiveness. It would be amusing,
if one had time, to follow out all the implied hypostases in the

146 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

statements I have quoted these are only examples. Elsewhere
Mr. Willey says :

"All explanations of the scholastic type seemed to the new
(experimental) school to be merely statements of ignorance
masquerading in philosophic dress, equivalent, in fact, to assert-
ing that things are such-and-such because they are."

I think it will be seen that Mr. Willey's 'explanations' of
explanation are themselves of this type.

. . . "What, since the Renaissance, has been called 'science' . . .
has achieved what it has achieved precisely by abstracting from
the whole of 'reality' those aspects which are amenable to its
methods. There is no point in denying that only thus can
'scientific' discovery be made. What we need to remember,
however, is that we have to do here with a transference of interests
rather than with the mere 'exantlation' of new truth or the mere
rejection of error. All we can say is that at the Renaissance men
began to wish for a new life-orientation, and that this involved a
hitherto unthought-of degree of control over 'things'. Accordingly,
the sort of knowledge which dealt with the motions of bodies
came to seem the most real, the most genuine knowledge, and
scientific 'truth' the only genuine 'truth'."

Now this is not 'all we can say' although it is perfectly true that
it is 'all' that the neo-scholastics can say. It is all that Mr. Willey's
contemporary authorities, including Hulme, Maritain and
Christopher Dawson, to mention only a few, have succeeded in
saying. These are among the 'voices' which, says Mr. Willey,
have been raised in protest against the uncritical acceptance of the
'scientific' assumptions. These are the thinkers who have made it
possible for Mr. Willey and ourselves, if we will, "to consider the
two world-views with no antecedent prejudice in favour of the
modern". We should pause and consider first the semantic load
which Mr. Willey's quotation marks, as well as, for example, the

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 147

word 'modern', when he employs it, have to bear. For they both
subtly beg the question: the quotation marks by implying that the
comparative reality we ought to attribute to the scientific or
the scholastic generalisation is a matter of unhistorical choice;
the word 'modern' by suggesting that the change in the general
outlook since the Renaissance is a matter of time only and its
inevitable fashions. Whether consciously or not, Mr. Willey in
fact considers the two world- views with an antecedent prejudice in
favour of the ancient. Whether he means to or not, he has opted
for the scholastics. It is not that science abstracts from 'reality'
those aspects which are amenable to its methods. Science is a
method which is imposed on us by reality or the nature of 'things'
or experience, if we want to know anything about them at all. It is
not true to say that any transference of interests was necessary to
make men wish to have control over 'things', although it may be
true that more men become aware of a wish for such power if it
becomes more possible to attain it. Men have always needed and
wished to have this control, from the times when they first hunted
or tilled, as a condition of remaining on this planet. They con-
solidated their hold on their terrestrial circumstances, precisely in
so far as any of their shrewder observers noted any natural
recurrence, from the Nile floods to the monsoon rains, precisely
in so far as their magic or religion became a form of science. We
must always oppose this historical tradition of scientific
observation to the mystical fortuitousness which the neo-
scholastic inevitably discovers in the changed Renaissance
outlook. The implication, if not the statement, that at the
Renaissance men changed their ideas about the world and the
nature of truth simply because they did inheres in all neo-
scholastic thinking. This is 'all they can say', since, if we do not
admit the hypothetico-observational method of science as the only
human test of truth, we have no alternative but to adhere to the
dogmatic pronouncements of the most influential authority we
can find.*

The choice between warring authorities is only a secondary difficulty,
for our choices are made easily and unconsciously by our purely emotional
personality, once we have cut out the difficulties of conscious cerebration.

148 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

But apart from that, if we insist that all such changes in the
general outlook are thus subjective and arbitrary, it becomes much
easier to claim the equal validity of our own prejudices. I quote
Mr. Willey quoting his 'protesting voices'. First, from Maritain:

"In the sixteenth century, and more particularly in the age of
Descartes, the interior hierarchies of the virtue of reason were
shattered. Philosophy abandoned theology to assert its own
.claim to be considered the supreme science and, the mathematical
science of the sensible world and its phenomena taking precedence
at the same time over metaphysics, the human mind began to
profess independence of God and Being. Independence of God :
that is to say of the supreme Object of all Intelligence. ... In-
dependence of being: that is to say, of the connatural object of the
mind as such, against which it ceased to measure itself humbly,
until it finally undertook to deduce it entirely from the seeds of
geometrical clarity which it conceived to be innate in itself."

This, says Mr. Willey, is M. Maritain's version of 'what really
took place at the Renaissance'. As I have just said, it is the stock
scholastic version and means that men ceased to think purely
deductively because they did, that is, that the revolution was
purely subjective. I do not know how the last sentence of the
quotation helps Mr. Willey, mainly because I am never at all
certain what the scholastics mean by Being, except that it has
nothing to do with the way anything may be said to exist. But as
Mr. Willey has been talking about 'scientific' assumptions and
their uncritical acceptance, I suppose that he uses the quotation,
as a whole, as meaning that the new contribution of 'Science' was
the kind of deductive 'certainty' that geometry was accorded by
Descartes and Hobbes, philosophers with no interest in the
experimental method, except a somewhat hostile one. This belief
about 'Science', with its implication that 'Science' is essentially a
false and impious claim to mathematical certitude about every-
thing in the universe, is, as we have seen, both untrue and irrele-
vant. But it is an essential part of neo-scholastic philosophy.

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 149

After this Mr. Willey quotes Christopher Dawson:

"The Western mind has turned away from the contemplation
of the absolute and eternal to the knowledge of the particular and
contingent. It has made man the measure of all things and has
sought to emancipate human life from its dependence on the
supernatural. Instead of the whole intellectual and social order
being subordinated to spiritual principles . . ."

And then there is T. E. Hulme, who, says Mr. Willey, "just
before the war proclaimed, in language of remarkable trenchancy,
the death of the humanist and scientific traditions springing from
the Renaissance, and demanded what was in effect a return to the
ideology of scholasticism. 'As if,' he wrote in 1913, 'it were not
the business of every honest man at the present moment to clean
the world of these sloppy dregs of the Renaissance'."* Mr.
Willey is not the first, and will not be the last writer to confuse
such stirring sentiments as these with meaningful and critical
observations. Hulme and the others are simply saying that they
do not like the fundamental and inevitable development which
took an irrevocable step forward about the time of the
Renaissance, and would like to check and reverse it. Hulme, I
think, realised the suggestive power of prophecy, and believed,
not altogether mistakenly, that to proclaim that an anti-humanistic
revival was gathering was the best way of inducing one.
Scholasticism does still, as Bacon said of it :

"Out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit
spin out unto us laborious webs of learning. . . . For the wit and
mind of man, if it work upon matter . . . worketh according to
the stuff and is limited thereby ; but if it work upon itself . . . then
it is endless and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admir-
able for the fineness of the thread and work, but of no substance or
profit."

Thus it is typical of modern scholasticism that, not being
limited, as science is, by the necessity of a return to the verifiable.
* Already referred to on p. 72.

150 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

it should organise the fears, the ignorance, the abstractions, the
wishes and emotions of human beings, into a 'reality' which
presumes to compete with the given and related world gradually
revealed to us by scientific method. Scholasticism has seized on
and misinterpreted the fact that the majority of workers in the
field of physical science at present agree that there are some in-
herent limitations in their method of observation and inquiry, but
still does not pay enough attention to the other fact that this
method, depending on an ultimate return to the verifiable, is the
only one that scientists recognise. When we come up against a
wall, there is no excuse for saying that it is a door. If we persist in
seeing doors where none exist, there is no knowing what we may
see through them. Whatever it may be, its validity will be purely
arbitrary.

There are two maxims which we ought continually to bear in
mind that the fact that our knowledge in any field has come to
an end does not mean that we can go on to a different kind of
'knowledge' in that direction; and that authority, however deeply
and widely founded upon the wishes and votes of men, is no
substitute for experiment and demonstration.

This book is not Utopian. It is not offering a substitute
'religion' of Science, nor any 'belief in Progress, itself a hypo-
statical notion. It tries to combat certain recent misconceptions
and misstatements about the only method by which we do get
public and communicable results (often negative), whose truth
can be accepted by all honest people of open mind and sufficient
instruction. It does not claim that all the results of such scientific
inquiry in all fields are humanly encouraging or sociably desirable,
and for the present leaves aside the question of what moral
responsibility should be taken by governments and individual
scientists for controlling these practical results.

It does, however, claim that to stifle or in any way to limit
scientific inquiry as such and this must be the practical aim of
the consistent scholastic must lead to the death of any hope of
finally humanising this planet. In its special bearing it claims that
poetry and literature, the arts which reveal in verbal meanings the

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 151

most intimate and at the same time the commonest experiences
of the most sensitive individuals, must, if they are not to wither,
establish some positive relations with science, whose method
alone reveals to us the structure of the known and knowable.
This is particularly so because 'Man', whether we like it or not, is
no longer mainly a noumenal mystery, he is a phenomenon in
which the area of the arbitrary is being reduced by the same
method of observation and comparison, he is becoming an object
of study about which he himself is beginning to be able to
generalise; and poetry and literature is mainly concerned with the
nature of 'Man'.

I must stress as strongly as possible that I am not trying to make
any pronouncements about what the abstract relations of 'Poetry'
and 'Science' ought to be. No statements of this sort can be made.
Poets should and generally do absorb what knowledge they need.
But poets themselves often feel that they should have a definite
relation to knowledge, and this implies that they have at least
some assumption of what knowledge is. For example, one could
develop an instructive comparison between Mr. Eliot, on the one
hand, no doubt justifiably complaining of the want of learning of
many young contemporaries when: "they (the older poets) are
that which we know;" and on the other, Mr. Robert Graves, who
believes that poets have a kind of proleptic instinct, they know by
special gift where to find out what they need to know; and Theo-
dore de Banville, who said that poets should include technical
and engineering handbooks among their essential reading. The
instructional point is the difference between the two underlying
assumptions. For Mr. Eliot 'knowledge' is knowledge about
literature (and of course theology). For Graves and Banville,
knowledge for the poet is what enables him to talk about con-
temporary living in a way which does not conflict with the daily
sense of reality; or about former living in such a way that it still
continues to live in a way which we can feel sensibly. Banville and
Graves are not necessarily better poets for this, they merely have a
better poetic theory, which pays more attention to the fact that
poets have by nature, and implication, lively minds and therefore

152 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

generally are, and probably ought to be, intellectually curious.
As I have said before, it is not an abstraction called Science
which is being discussed, except by scholastics, but a method of
obtaining knowledge of the world we live in. For the poet this
method, even in its departmental applications, may work by
altering the whole structure of his experience. It is the nature of a
poet to be specially sensitive ioform, or pattern Goethe was the
supreme example of this and I think this is what Mr. Graves's
'prolepsis' really means. A poet has an instinct for a living
hypothesis, on a small scale or a large one, and in this he is not
opposed to, he is parallel to, a scientist. I have said that know-
ledge is a method; but, more importantly here, knowledge is a
process, essentially interlocked with living experience and practice,
and somewhere along the line of this process the poet must live.
Knowledge, of its nature, cannot be made static, and even Mr.
Eliot, who hates progress, endangers his poetry, I believe, when
he turns his back on process. My belief that to do this is the death
of words is dealt with at length in the section 'Poetry and Truth',
and there too I have given reasons why I think that the poet who
wants an intellectual understanding of something credible about
human behaviour should attend to the consortium of psychologists,
which exists, though at a minimum, rather than the pronounce-
ments of the Pope or of the whole College of Cardinals. One can
say here that psychological science, for all its jargon and limita-
tions, and in spite of its partial subjection, in common with other
forms of cerebration, to some forms of philosophical nonsense, has
given us new knowledge about ourselves, in the sense in which I
am using the word knowledge throughout this book; and that this
knowledge has had more direct bearing upon the poet's (and
novelist's) world than most kinds. For poets are always feeling
their way towards the awareness and the expression of dramatic
relations, on the stage or in their own hearts. Denial of obser-
vational truth here is something to which not only they but their
audiences are most quickly sensitive. The Church's view of sin
and responsibility certainly did and does produce vivid Moralities.
So of course did the Spanish conception of Honour, another

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 153

powerful abstraction. But poetic drama, in its great ages, has
mostly been about crime, which is a matter of social definition.
The study of psychology has made the general sensibility towards
these themes inevitably humanistic in important aspects. Poets
and their audiences now live in a world where they know, however
unwillingly and uneasily, that tolerance and humanity are part of
the structure of virtue, because they know that criminals are also
victims. Sympathy, or rather empathy, with the 'criminal' is what
produces the poetical element in drama and in the novel. To try
to assert theological paramountcy in the issues of human
necessities and shortcomings is to remain among abstractions,
an uncomfortable situation for a poet, where he may find himself
stranded among verbal aridities. This appears to me to be the
case with The Cocktail Party.

Mr. Graham Greene, who appears to work so vividly and
realistically within an intellectual Catholic structure, is on the
contrary successful, I believe, in so far as he remains a human
realist. To be suffering and hunted, to be obstinately courageous
and obstinately aware of cowardice, is a human and, historically
speaking, not uncommon situation. To be mentally tortured
about what seems a human necessity for deception is another such
situation we can all sympathise with imaginatively. But for this
we do not have to believe in the intellectual paramountcy of the
ideas for which the priest in The Power and the Glory, or the
policeman in The Heart of the Matter -, suffer; we only have to
believe that they do, and cannot help suffering. I should say that
in so far as we do share Mr. Greene's intellectual convictions we
miss the poetry and drama, and I have an idea that that is what he
himself feels, at least to some extent. There always have to be one
or more characters for instance Father Rank in The Heart of
the Matter who have the function of pointing out that even the
Church's dogma cannot cover all that ought to be known and said
on the subject of the sense of salvation or of damnation. To my
mind, many of Greene's characters, when they come to give any
definition of what they mean by sin or virtue, seem alarmingly
out of touch with the experiences which actually do cause human

154 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

beings either the suffering of guilt or the satisfaction of genuine
achievement.

Something similar may be said about Mr. Eliot, who seems now
to be so Augustinian that he is positively Calvinistic. Only a firm
belief in predestination, surely, could account for the extraordinary
equation of values in The Cocktail Party, where Peter is as morally
bound to make a Hollywood film about the decay of the British
aristocracy as Lavinia is to stay at home and have a party, or as
Celia is to go to Kinkanja and suffer a martyr's death by the
startling and not insignificant means of crucifixion.

Calvinism or not, certainly no one connected with the play can
be said to be particularly justified by works not even Mr. Eliot,
who has assumed too much behind the scenes and made too big a
claim on at least the poetic faith of the audience.

Many poets, from Shakespeare to, let us say, Lorca, whatever
lip-service they may or may not have paid to theological religion,
have lived, as far as their poetic senses were concerned, naturally,
in a naturalistic world, and these remarks are therefore mainly
applicable when an intellectual solution of human problems
seems to be demanded. But in the contemporary world, in-
tellectual solutions are demanded commonly enough. The
relation of poetry, I repeat, to intellectual truth is and ought to be
an indirect one, since poetry is the product of a whole experiencing
mind. Poetically a too direct relation to any theories which are
not yet knowledge, which have not yet altered the structure of
experience, is as bad as or worse than none at all* This applies
to scientific as well as dogmatic theories of human nature.

One of the proofs that we are building a genuinely scientific
theory of human nature may turn out to be just the capacity of the
theory to be absorbed and lived by the most imaginative or poetic
minds. The idea of an 'absolute Science' of human nature or
anything else, is meanwhile a literary abstraction and as
employed by our idealists, dualists and scholastics a highly
mechanistic one. They confuse scientific method, not only with

*D. S. Savage (The Withered Branch} has pointed this out in connection
with Auden.

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 155

philosophical generalisations about it, but with technology.
Living among and often enjoying machines, they now more than
half believe that the purpose of 'Science' is solely to produce
machines and eventually robots, and forget that its most im-
portant purpose is, as always, to ask and answer questions about
our life on this planet.

If 'Science' is an abstraction, so, as I said earlier, is 'The
Scientist'. That is the main reason, no doubt, why we find him
among Mr. Willey's 'voices of protest' against mechanistic and
deterministic assumptions, although the voices which Mr. Willey
actually quotes are those of two philosophers, Professors Burtt
and Whitehead anyway, of two experts in other fields than those
of physical science speaking as philosophers.

To give Mr. Willey every chance we can quote him some
professional scientists. Sir Arthur Eddington, like Sir James
Jeans, made very distinguished contributions to physical and
astronomical science. But, as we have seen earlier, he also com-
mitted himself to more abstract opinions which are not essentially
different from Jeans's figments, God the Mathematician, the Great
Architect and so on. Though Eddington actually disclaimed the
possibility of scientific support or proof for religious doctrine, he
finished up, as we saw, in idealism and a mystical substantialisation
of Mind which is not much less Berkeleian than Jeans's view.

Since these are hypostatical conceptions, relating to the tribal
and uncritical Sir Arthur rather than to the objective and
scientific Eddington, they have had more effect in confirming the
popular mind in its working myths than his scientific conclusions
have had in developing and changing its understanding of the
universe. The quotation, however, which I have given before, is
from Eddington in his professional capacity:

"Physical knowledge is based on observational procedure
more accurately, physical knowledge is hypothetico-observational.
. . . This means knowledge of the result of a hypothetical
observation, not hypothetical interpretation of the result of an
actual observation,"

156 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

A hypothesis is in fact an imaginative act. Moreover, there is
nothing random about experiment. I suspect that when the
average scholastic mind thinks the words 'performing an ex-
periment' it forms an image of something like conjuring or even
Black Magic. At the back is the feeling, which may even be
attributed to the performer, that only God knows what the answer
will be, what will pop out of the hat or out of the bowels of the
earth. And indeed at the 'Stinks' age when most of the literary
scholastics left off their experimental education, God alone did
know what the answer would be. If we were then so helplessly
driven to blow ourselves up, that may have led to our fascinated
and horrified expectation that the 'Scientist' can in the end do just
that and nothing else!

One of the most important characteristics of science is its
continuity. A scientific worker does not 'perform an experiment',
form an abstract generalisation about it and then tell the world
that that is what the world is unchangeably like, but this seems
to be the way the scientific Aunt Sallies of Mr. Willey and many
philosophers are expected to behave. It is much more the case that
the scientific worker has an idea what he is looking for, which
arises more or less vaguely from the existing body of knowledge in
his field, and which is confirmed or not by experimental work. It
is a question of clarifying, of giving more and more meaning to
experience, so that he and other men may live more and more
consciously in the world given to their senses. The world was
given and the world will continue to be given. Experiences
become more and more related. It is philosophers divorced from
the experimental attitude who are responsible for cutting short
and killing this extension of consciousness which is the individual
scientist's unexpressed aim.

The relation of the two complementary scientific activities
has been put clearly by Bertrand Russell:

"The men who founded modern science had two merits which
are not necessarily found together: immense patience in obser-
vation and great boldness in framing hypotheses. . . . Copernicus,

MR. WILLEY'S LUNAR SPOTS 157

like his great successors, possessed both . . . the test of scientific
truth is patient observation of facts combined with bold guessing
as to laws binding the facts together."

Furthermore, Russell, at the end of Human Knowledge says that
adherence to the strict doctrine of empiricism is precisely what has
revealed to us the inadequacy of all knowledge. But this gives us
no ground whatsoever for claiming that any non-empirical theory
based on what we don't know and can't know, would be more
adequate.

It seems to me that Mr. Willey has the popular or even news-
paper view of scientists, and does not really understand what the
scientific activity is. The retorts and crucibles with which Faust
ran through the whole of 'Philosophy', although he certainly did
not thereby succeed in moving out of the alchemical age, still
wreathe their diabolical fumes around too many contemporary
minds, at least back-stage. Just about the time that Mr. Willey was
probably beginning his adult reflection on the contemporary and
modern, Spengler elevated 'Faust' (the Faustian) to the rank of a
temporal category. Especially for the readers of Humane Letters,
who are unconsciously assured of the brutality and even wicked-
ness of scientists, it has always been confusing that science should
be known in the senior university as Natural Philosophy.
Whether any of this strictly applies to Mr. Willey's background or
not, it is certain that he confuses the special observations of
scientists with the hypotheses and generalisations of philosophers
and 'thinkers' which may appear or may claim to be based on
these observations.

Mr. Willey attributes the Renaissance change of outlook to a
mere change in demand men began to wish for a scientific
'explanation' and no other. This idea is also implicit, as we saw, in
Hulme.

To my mind, it is an exaggerated estimate of the power of
human wishing to believe that it could be decisive in bringing
the scientific outlook to dominance. Nowadays when people
talk, as Mr. Willey does, about 'wishes', it is natural to suspect

158 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

that Freud's unfortunate expression 'wish-fulfilment' is at the
tip of their tongue, for use against the opposition party. Hack-
neyed by everyone and understood by practically no one among
the newspaper public, it has by now hardly any use save as
a weapon convenient to both idealists and materialists. Freud
himself clearly recognised that a wish-fulfilment was essentially
an ineffectual wish, a substitute for reality, which consoled for a
failure to alter the observable in a desired direction.

That was a classification intended as a basis for the further study
of wishes, so that some estimate of their possibility of real fulfil-
ment and of their general relation to observable reality could be
made. Freud's own philosophical edifices are not always soundly
erected, however good his observations were. There is, in fact, an
enormous psychological subject-matter by now, to which philo-
sophers might well begin to turn their training; beginning with
what nature has supplied, their own minds. Yet at present hardly
anyone, even as part of a philosophical education, certainly not as
part of a general education, receives any training in understanding
that wishes are a proper and indeed necessary subject for observa-
tion in themselves and that, though they are in a different category
of experience from that which understands and observes, they
are not in a different category from the rest of what is observable
and observed in the world. Mr. Willey attributes seventeenth-
century science to a change in general wishing. But of course the
only wish which ever issues in science is the wish to find out. Mr.
Willey's study has taken a wrong turning. It would have been
useful indeed if he had examined the characteristic 'wishes' of the
seventeenth century and had shown how these issued, not in
'Science', but in substitute philosophies which had no relation to
the experimental method, and were unconsciously based on fear
and hatred of the wish to find out.

CHAPTER VI

Old Puritan Writ Large

IT is unlikely that Mr. Eliot's reference to the 'dissociation of
sensibility', the split between emotion and intellect which
characterised poetry between the seventeenth and twentieth
century, was, in his own mind, intended to develop into a direct
attack on the method and outlook of science, whose advancement
has been parallel. In general, Mr. Eliot's direct references to science
are slighting but slight. The allusion to the influence of Milton
and Dryden which ends the quotation I gave at the beginning of
the last chapter suggests that he might have carried on, if at all,
with a more literary emphasis. This might have been fruitful.
Mr. Willey and others, assuming that the dissociation was genu-
inely schizophrenic, that is, that it was necessarily pathological,
have not been content merely to describe the change in relation
which took place among poetry, science and religion in the
seventeenth century but have looked round for a toxic agent.
This they have found in 'Science'. This in any case assumed, I
think, that poetry is primarily, and was primitively, a religious
activity. Certainly it was early associated with religion. But
primitive religious activity covered a great many functions and
forms of apperception which time has separated more or less
completely. The imaginative organisation of sensibility was one
of them, the kind of inquiry and practice which later developed
into science was another. Poets, at all times living primarily in
the world of immediate sense, have an underlying interest in both
these functions. What discourages them from this sensuous

159 F*

160 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

immediacy, this preference for seeing the general only through the
concrete and particular, may disqualify them as much for scientific
as for poetic perception. It may not be irrelevant or insignificant
that Mr. Willey can be found saying:

"What the cold philosophy did destroy was the union of head
and heart, the synthesis of thought and feeling, out of which
major poetry seems to be born."

The point is that Mr. Willey's cold philosophers, though for
him they are destructive of poetry because they base themselves on
'Science', harmed poetry in so far as they, just like any other sort of
ideological middlemen, traded in generalisations and abstractions.
It is just as harmful for poets to read about 'Science' without due
awareness of the kind of abstraction inherent in such literature as
to have a staple diet of theology. Both are potted, or lack verbal
roughage. Certainly a poet who swallowed Descartes or Hobbes
whole and uncritically would do himself no good. But I doubt if
anyone ever did. I shall suggest that the issue is one of verbal
influences, and that this has been misunderstood by Mr. Willey
and others whose interests, whether consciously or not, are vested
in the traditional, the theological or the scholastic.

It is particularly to the mechanistic views of Descartes and
Hobbes that Mr. Willey attributes the change in the status and
value of poetry which took place in the seventeenth century.
Though both these philosophers pay lip-service to Christianity, we
can agree with Mr. Willey that the absolute dualism of Descartes,
the really unbridgeable gap between mind and matter, or thought
and 'extension', did probably reinforce

"the growing disposition to accept the scientific world-picture as
the only true one"; while "the criterion of truth which it set up,
according to which the only real properties of objects were the
mathematical properties, implied a depreciation of all kinds of
knowing other than that of the 'philosopher'."

The aesthetic psychology of Hobbes may also be described as
poetically discouraging. His distinction between Fancy, which

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 161

finds 'unexpected similitude' in 'things otherwise much unlike', and
Judgment, which 'discerns dissimilitude in things that otherwise
appear the same', is not only too limited to illuminate us strongly
on the whole poetic activity, it is also typical of the one-sided
intellectual who feels that he ought to include art in a coherent
philosophical system, while he still feels ham-handed in its
presence; typical, too, of all those who, whatever their aesthetic
sensibility, still have an intellectual axe to grind. Mr. Eliot, for
instance, advocating the closed theological system, tells us that
poetry is only a 'superior amusement', a view which would not be
alien to the eighteenth century, with its generalised, abstract and
mechanical conception of poetic language. It may well be that the
Hobbesian attitude that "Fancy without help of judgment is not
commended as a virtue" whereas judgment was commended for its
own sake, has, as Willey says, encouraged the degeneration of
poetry.

We may agree anyway that a degeneration followed, while still
being unable to go the whole way with another critic, Mr. Cleanth
Brooks, who says that it lasted essentially unchecked until the
twentieth century, when what he calls the Third Poetic Revolution
took place. Throughout the whole of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, he says, no successful attempt had been made to
heal the split in sensibility. Poets had either accepted an inferior
status in relation to truth or science which had forced them to
limit their apperception of real objects and accept a specialised
range of 'poetic' subjects, those that were suitable for 'fanciful' or
generalised treatment, or they had indeed revolted and had
attempted to free the imagination from the limiting categories of
Fancy and Judgment or generalised 'good sense', but had done so
by opposing only another range of subjects, vaguely indicated as
'poetical'. This is how Mr. Brooks sees the Romantics; the
Platonic categories of apperception which poets such as Keats
and Shelley, and Wordsworth, when he is being professionally
high-minded, seem to impose on themselves give him some
support. These poets failed, he thinks, in so far as they accepted a
specialised status and did not boldly claim the whole of reality for

162 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

poetic apperception. In effect, he thinks, they were still suffering
from Hobbes and his kind, whose influence on poetry Brooks
finds as sinister as Mr. Willey does.

"We have abundant evidence of the esteem in which such poets
as Cowley, Davenant and Dryden held . . . Hobbes, and as Ransom
... put it, 'what Bacon with his disparagement of poetry had
begun in the cause of science and protestantism, Hobbes com-
pleted'. . . . The name (of Hobbes) stood for common sense and
naturalism and the monopoly of the scientific spirit over the
mind. . . . The weakening of metaphor, the development of a
specifically 'poetic' subject matter and diction, the emphasis on
simplicity and clarity, the simplification of the poet's attitude, the
segregation of the witty and the ironical from the serious ... all
these items testify to the monopoly of the scientific spirit."

We ought to note the expression 'the scientific spirit', which is
itself, as we might expect in this connection, a type of hypostasis.
Actually it implies that science is identical with its analytical and
classificatory aspects. If this were all that could be said about
scientific method there might at least appear to be more sense in
equating the abstractions and generalisations of a philosopher
with science. It would also be possible to agree that such a verbal
dilution might well wash the very stuff of poetry, that special
concrete grit, out of circulation. But this is not exactly what
happens. Not all, nor even perhaps most, poets read about science;
while, on the other hand, poetic apperception, the apprehension of
the universal in the concrete, is something very like the basic
scientific intuition.

Mr. Brooks thinks that the Romantics failed to accomplish the
needed poetic revolution because they were not witty, they did not
succeed in fusing the discrepancies and oppositions of experience,
as the Metaphysical poets had done; and that this again was due to
the fact that they accepted the separation of truth and poetry, of
prose and fancy. I should say, on the contrary, that they
succeeded, as they often did when they simply went back to what
had always been the poetic muttons, when, for a beginning, they

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 163

went back to living in their senses and put down what, as poets,
they actually saw, heard and smelt; and, not less importantly,
when they allowed themselves to become aware of the operations
of their own internal world, each poet's mind, with its hinterland
of archaic and universal symbolism. This seems to me the
specific excellence of the 'Romantics', their inexhaustible con-
tribution to poetic reality. For though with Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley and Blake this quality appears in a re-
volutionary form, so that the Passions need not any longer be
confused with the Vapours, but could be written with a small p,
described and delivered it appears as a basic quality in many later
and modern poets. Verhaeren is a good example. Much critical
attention has been given to Mr. Eliot's dictum that "Poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but the escape from emotion". (In the
context, Mr. Eliot makes it clear that he finds it necessarily
unpleasant to have emotions.) Now this opposition does not
circumscribe the poetic situation. But if we take it in con-
junction with Mr. Eliot's other much-quoted generalisation that
the task of the poet is to find the 'objective correlative', in words,
of his emotion, we can see what it ought to mean: that the words
of a poem contain the particular, concrete and individual shape
in which alone we are to experience the poet's 'universal', the
imaginative hypothesis which he has formed relating to some
aspect of the world. But if he is to recognise this universal and to
deliver it in particular shape, it is his business not to escape from
his emotions, but to be aware of them with peculiar exactness and
intensity. To know what one's emotions are, one must make an
act of detachment from them, but detachment is by no means the
same as escape. To escape, or rather to try to escape, from one's
emotions implies that one ceases in the end to know what they
mean oneself, they become irrecoverably private. To detach
oneself from them, on the other hand, is a first step towards
discovering what in them is representatively human. The end of
such detachment is to bring a relatively formless intuition on to
the plane of the observable. The poet's detachment results in
bringing his emotion on to the level of sensuous apperception,

164 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

making it move among rhythms and images where other people
can see what he is expressing. This effort of conjunction of an
inner with an outer world is the greater category and subsumes
Mr. Brooks's lesser one, of metaphysical-type wit. The conception
does of course imply what he claims that there are no specifically
poetic subjects but for a quite different reason, that there is no
opposition between truth, either of feeling or of sense, and poetry.
The idea that there is such an opposition would probably never
have been suggested except by philosophers of various schools
who always live ex officio one storey above the apperceptive and
intuitional level of both science and poetry.

There are, it seems, other factors which we must observe if we
wish to account fully for the decline in poetic language during the
eighteenth century, and these have been consistently under-
estimated by Willey and Brooks, and all those who are suspicious
of the increase of knowledge.

During the seventeenth century the poet was certainly told,
both sharply and frequently, that truth was what was wanted, and
that he was a producer of fictions. This was not new, however.
The view dates from Plato, and it had provided a flourishing
controversy in the previous century. It would be interesting to
speculate how far this attitude towards poetry goes with a
particular kind of mind, the authoritarian and institutional.
Certainly we can say that the authoritarian and institutional kind
of mind inclines to think of Truth in the abstract, as hypo-
statical and deductive. It is likely, that is, to split our way of
knowing sharply into generalisation on the one hand, and
observation on the other, and to confer too high a status of reality
on generalisation, the 'Universal'. It will be unwilling to return
constantly to experience. Hobbes, in fact, who had a poor
opinion of the 'Gentlemen of Gresham College' with their
'mean, common' (and probably smelly) experiments, is the type
of such a mind. To either the imaginative or the inquiring
intellect the word experience means something living and new,
one's own experience first of all. To the authoritarian it means
essentially someone else's experience, something which has already

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 165

been accumulated, is traditional, formalised and dead. This kind
of mind is the enemy of both poetry and science.

That is certainly true of Hobbes, who comes in for most of the
blame for poetry's down-grading during the seventeenth century;
and although we find it natural to ascribe 'enmity' to the passion-
ate Hobbes rather than to the mild-mannered Locke, it is in fact
true of Locke also. Neither Hobbes nor Locke apparently under-
stood what men of science were up to. Nor did they understand
that the concept of knowledge had radically changed. So if we
blame them for not liking poetry, let us not blame them under the
title of 'scientists'. They were probably still determined, as are
many contemporary philosophers, let alone theologians, that
philosophy, in virtue of its very abstraction, must maintain the
status of a superior kind of knowledge.

Locke is described as empirical, but he had as little real interest
in genuine experimental method as Hobbes himself, whose
philosophy is the final expression of a fear-driven and violently
selective dream of 'geometric' certitude. Locke's psychology,
no doubt, could not be empirical in the sense we accept today,
when we no longer have to rely on individual introspection or the
limited objectivity which literature or conversational discussion
can give us. We have better techniques of introspection and
unlimited comparative data, and we know enough to be able to
say that Locke's tabula rasa is wrong as a description of human
mind, whether we get all our 'ideas' from externality or not.
There is no point of experience at which we can say that a mind is
blank. This is a mechanistic conception. Locke's psychological
animal was just as much an abstraction as Hobbes's 'political
animal' and the selection involved was not less personal because it
was less passionate.

Both men were enemies of science as well as poetry because
they misunderstood or denied the mind's imaginative synthetic
activity, which may reveal itself either in poetry or science.

I am convinced that both Mr. Willey and Mr. Brooks are sub-
consciously aware that what is bad for poetry is the confusion of
abstract and deductive systematisation with reality. Surely

166 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

nothing can be much more abstract and deductive than theology?
It is interesting to note that the two deductive systems which are
strong enough today to have a bad effect on poetry, those of
Catholic theology and Soviet Marxism, also have a bad effect on
experimental science.

We can agree with Mr. Brooks when he says that we have had
the Third Poetic Revolution, whose:

"importance . . . lies in the fact that it attempts a complete
liberation of the imagination. The successful use of prosaic or
unpleasant materials and the union of the intellectual with the
emotional are symptoms of imaginative power not, as F. L.
Lucas would interpret them, symptoms of the death of poetry."

The poets of the twentieth century, in short, were able
spontaneously to heal the 'split in sensibility'. According to Mr.
Brooks, this showed that they had ceased to be cowed by the
scientific conception of truth which had dominated the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which, he suggests, had
been merely by-passed by the Romanticism generally identified
with poetry throughout the nineteenth century.

Now how are we to suppose that the poets achieved this victory,
this reassertion of poetic values against scientific, if that indeed is
what they were doing? Certain of them, for instance Tate and
Ransom, whom Mr. Brooks quotes, had beliefs and attitudes
about the nature of science and its impact on imaginative life, and
Tate wrote poems about not being scientific in a way which
reminds one of Wordsworth writing poems about writing poetry.

But the best of the new poetry, including Mr. Eliot's, did not
come out of this attitude to science or out of any systematised
attitude to truth or the nature of reality. It is obvious that
systematised attitudes one way or the other do not produce poetry,
they can at most produce attitudes towards poetry, and restrictive
attitudes at that. An anti-scientific attitude produces beliefs about
poetry, among other phenomena, which are not only restrictive,
but restrictive in just the same way as a philosophy based on

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 167

misguided and uncomprehending pro-scientific enthusiasm is said
to have been by Mr. Willey. So to the anti-humanist Hulme the
important element in poetry is Fancy, a dry quality opposed to the
more emotional imagination, while to the far from pro-scientific
Mr. Eliot poetry is a 'superior amusement'. The word 'superior'
even has an Augustan ring.

Thus I do not deny that a restrictive philosophical practice,
from whichever wing it comes, is harmful to poets and poetry in
so far as it really affects them. The reason is the same in either
case. Abstractions are harmful when they get loose among a
poet's words. But it is generalisations about scientific activity
which are abstract, not scientific investigation and work, in so far
as they are allowed to act on and change reality. What happens to
language is the point where anything happens at all. In trying
to assess any poetic revolution or reaction one ought never to
underestimate purely poetic influences, as they are likely to be the
most important of all, at least the sine qua non. It is therefore
strange that Mr. Willey, who gives considerable space to Milton,
should treat him as an effect rather than a cause. He studies the
Milton who has been affected by 'experimentalism' (to Mr.
Willey for this purpose the essence of Milton's Protestantism is
'experimentalism') rather than the Milton who did extraordinary
and powerful things to the English language and so acted directly
on the cortex and nervous system of other poets. Poets in fact are
governed primarily by their senses and by what other poets are or
have been doing the second is more often of prior importance.
Shelley said that "Most wretched men Are cradled into poesy by
wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song." It was
typical of Shelley's own sidetracking by philosophical abstraction
(of whatever sort) that he should make this false generalisation.
Far more often, quite buoyant men are cradled into poetry by a
fascination felt at what has been done with language in poetry, and
by a desire to do as well or better. Hypostatising the common
unpleasant experiences of growth into general concepts of 'Wrong'
on the one hand or 'Sin' on the other will only delay the process of
artistic maturation or of converting these realised experiences into

168 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

poetic meaning where it is all in the words. This primacy of
language is the main reason, one certainly not ignored by himself,
why the fortunate and, one may believe, lasting influence on
English poetry has been that of Eliot the poet rather than of Eliot
the scholastic theologian. For what inaugurated the Third Poetic
Revolution, to adopt Mr. Brooks's classification, were facts such as
Eliot's vivid concrete and accurate poetic apperception as well as
such a markedly technical movement as Imagism.

The poets returned to business. I do not say that they had been
unaffected by misconceptions of science. The first business of a
poet is rhythmical, auditory and visual receptiveness. He ought
not to allow any purveyors of abstract generalisations to harm that
receptivity by predigesting his material for him. In the days of
Dante the theology of the Church provided a highly visual and,
one may say, rhythmical material, created a universe of high
imaginative order in a space not previously occupied by the
probabilities of physics and astronomy. The material could be
realised with sensuous immediacy; it was not predigested.
Nowadays theology cannot provide this imaginative material; like
other abstractions it has a devitalising effect on poetic language,
as it has done with Mr. Eliot's, and takes the grit out of it.

On the other hand, doctrinaire and systematising mechanists,
such as Hobbes, while they are just as bad for poets, are often a
godsend to the scholastic-minded, since by abstracting |from the
working generalisations of scientists, they appear to be more
'scientific' than other hypostatisers. 'Matter' in such usage is just
as much a hypostasis as 'Spirit'. We have already seen that
Hobbes was not a scientist nor particularly interested in scientific
method, and though he may for instance have been interested in
Galileo's work, there is no sign that he grasped its real im-
portance as an illustration of a new way of looking at things. We
know from Aubrey that Hobbes was a favourite companion <5f
the peripatetic Bacon and took down the Master's thoughts.
But it is quite clear that the great inductive method made no
impression on Hobbes at all. Hobbes may have suffered from
Renaissance pride, but he took in little Renaissance science. The

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 169

'great patience' in gathering facts which Russell coupled with
'great boldness in framing hypotheses' as characterising scientists
was surely lacking. Particularly in the fields of political science
and of psychology, one may regard Hobbes's collection of facts as
unusually and significantly partial. In the first field, the selective
agent was dissatisfaction with his own social and material
position, and in the second, satisfaction with his own impulses.
He wished for a policy which would make Hobbes secure and for a
psychology which established his own aggressive nature as
humanly representative.

We must return to our position that poets not only ought to be,
but are, influenced more by poets than by any other users of
language. What went wrong in the seventeenth century is for the
purposes of this discussion a matter of language. It is therefore
reasonable, if we want to find a major factor to account for the
prolonged dullness, artificiality and poeticism which blighted
much of eighteenth-century poetry, to look for some historical
accident of language itself. I do not agree with Mr. Willey that
the phenomenal Milton is to be understood either as an effect of
'experimentalism' or as a successful evader of a harmful dis-
sociation between 'truth' and feeling, which had already taken
place. I think on the contrary that Milton the poet was the
portentous and comet-like cause which accounted for much of the
devastation in poetic language. One can and does admire his
music, rhythmical genius, sense of form, intellectual ease and
power, and even his 'gigantic loftiness', while still believing that it
would have been better if no one had tried to imitate him or even
perhaps to learn from him in the sense that most great poets can
be learned from; and that his influence alone was enough to inflict
a hampering sense of inferiority on a whole poetic generation
even if there had been no false aesthetic from philosophers to
spread the damage.

This is not to disparage Milton, merely to say that he was not
the sort of poet who starts a successful school. It may be that we
can say this of any artist whose individual achievement was both
highly specialised and near perfection in its specialisation. There

170 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

is nothing more to be done in that particular direction. In diction
there are thus two orders of poet. The other order, the one to
which Milton did not belong, is of those whose use of language
starts a new mode of apperception of the ordinary living universe,
and includes some major poets for instance Dante and many
minors. We can only quote Shakespeare and Milton. But we can
inherit the language of Dante and also of poets who, compared to
him, were minors, even though its radio-activity diminishes from
generation to generation. Blake and Tennyson were among such
minors who alter both poetic and common experience more than
the rarer monumental and finished masters. From their originality
or uniqueness, from their own special qualities both of vision and
diction, not in any case readily separable, much could be learned.
More indeed could always be learned and bequeathed by contem-
poraries, and would be perhaps, if they thought less about grading
so-and-so as a major or a minor, and more about illustrating the
fact that the poet was valuable. A minor poet may dwell more
fully in the universe of general experience than a major poet with a
more comprehensive vision, even if the frame through which he
looks at the world is esoteric or unusually personal or abstract.
From a major such as Dante on the other hand there may be so
much left over that other poets who do not share his vision, can
still learn to see a different view with the same eyes. Of Milton
one can almost say that the substance of his great poem exhausted
the language available for it.

Mr. Willey is more interested in the fact that Milton achieved a
great poem which was recognisably religious, at a time when the
critical spirit was unfavourable to religion, than in the poetic
means by which the poet projected his vision. So we do not hear
very much from him about what poets thought of the poet Milton
just as we do not hear what scientists thought about poetry, or
science. We hear in general only what philosophers thought about
the imagination. He quotes at length the unduly complacent
remarks of Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), in his History of the Royal
Society ; on the advancement of modern learning, which among
other triumphs has 'removed the rubbish of ages' and 'freed our

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 171

understandings from the charms of vain apparitions'. Disliking
fairies, animism and primitive beliefs in general, Sprat also dis-
approved of the figures and tropes to which these had given
substance. These he regarded as the chief characteristic of poetry.
He recommends to his readers a clear and workmanlike prose as
the highest means of modern communication. But, says Mr.
Willey:

"He would have been staggered to know that one hundred and
fifty years after him, men not out of their senses (though poets)
would be lamenting that glory and loveliness had passed away;
that later on, the recovery of every fragment of information about
primitive beliefs would be the life's work of a distinguished
succession of scientists; and that an outstanding mind of the third
century after his would be passionately striving to bring back the
pre-scientific consciousness, and reanimate the world which
science had 'killed'."

In another context these words would mean that, ignoring the
rationalisations of philosophers, scientific method in our century
advanced normally into the psychological and anthropological
fields which previously could not be investigated, but I do not
think that that is what Mr. Willey intended by them. I am not sure
whether the allusion is to Frazer or Jung. If to Jung, it probably
occurred to Mr. Willey because Jung's implied attacks on causality
have made him hopeful of finding support for the Two Truths
theory, rather than because he has been willing to estimate Jung's
contribution on the archaic contents of dreams in its context with
the rest of experimental investigation in this particular branch of
psychology.

If the allusion is to Frazer, the same essential estimate applies.
Both were "striving to bring back" material for study which had
been lost or disregarded, or to reveal new material. At least that is
the actual value of their contributions. They had no reason to
suggest, and Frazer certainly did not suggest, that contemporary
human beings ought to return to a pre-scientific mode of

172 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

consciousness. To study the thought-processes of savages it often
helps us if we think ourselves imaginatively into their skins, and
neither scientists nor poets should rob themselves of this enriching
empathy. But we should not put on their skins. Such extreme
identification is indeed characteristic of the totemic stage in
human development and we might come too late to find that
meanwhile the clothing of our right minds had been stolen. At
best we should be beachcombers and at worst rabbits.

Willey has confused the subjective with the objective, one of the
commonest of current philosophical mistakes. He has confused a
belief or an attitude or a mode of consciousness with the study of
that belief or attitude or mode of consciousness. What is implied
is that he cannot grasp that psychology or anthropology are
'scientific', and indeed in his use of the word they are not. For
behind his assumptions, exactly as in the case of Mr. Norman
Nicholson, quoted on page 59, lies the old test-tube-and-caliper
myth. This has no more bearing on the method by which we live
truly in a given world than Sprat's panegyric had.

Thus for the study of poetry and indeed of the 'dissociation in
poetic sensibility', Mr. Willey's remarks on Sprat and his like,
which precede a consideration of Paradise Lost, do not tell us
anything very illuminating. "This great religious poem" appeared
in the middle of the seventeenth century when "all these forces
scientific and philosophic, working together for Truth' " were
"tending more and more to show up the traditional imagery of
poetry and religion as obsolete, phantasmal or fictitious", and Mr.
Willey feels that he has to account for what must have been either
an astonishing integration or an equally astonishing disregard for
the need of integration of poetry and 'truth'.

"It is true," says Mr. Willey, "that Milton's outlook seems
never to have been influenced by the post-Restoration and Royal
Society atmosphere; he had nothing about him of the 'experimental
philosopher* ... but Milton was 'protestant' to the core, and this
meant that in the moral sphere he was an 'experimenter,' and had
the same disdain for all that was not 'truth' as the natural

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 173

philosopher had in his. . . . Intolerance of all except what
seemed to him most real was, then, a characteristic of Milton which
linked him with his age and vitally affected his choice of poetic
subject. . . . There still remained one source and one only from
which the seventeenth-century protestant poet could draw images
and fables which were not only 'poetic* but also 'true': the
Bible."

We may agree with Mr. Willey that Milton, as far as his poetical
work was concerned, did not pay much attention to scientific
discovery, or rather for this is what Mr. Willey is talking about
in practice, as we have seen to the philosophical and speculative
conclusions which had been rightly or wrongly drawn from it,
although from his prose writings we can find that he was aware of
what was going on in the sciences and interested in it. We may
fiurther accept that to draw his fable from the Bible gave him a
sense of unchallengeable veracity, because so far no serious
challenge in this field had been issued by scientific investigation.

Concern for truth and even more importantly for every human
being's right to know available truth, and even to discover it for
himself according to his abilities, was in the air and had been for a
very long time. We will, if so inclined, regard the Reformation as
the injected poison of the Renaissance, if not exactly part of its
'sloppy dregs'. However inherited, or acquired, concern for truth
and for liberty of thought and expression were in Milton's blood
and bone and the speculative results in Paradise Lost are no doubt
individualistic and unorthodox even from the Protestant angle.
We must note however that Raphael answers Adam's inquiry
about the relative merits of the systems of Ptolemy and Galileo
only doubtfully, concluding with an exhortation to intellectual
humility which should satisfy the most authoritarian. But it is,
I suppose, this idea of Protestant individualistic inquiry which
regarded itself as limited only by the authority of the Bible, to
which Mr. Willey is referring when he calls Milton an 'experi-
mentalist', while describing his great religious poem as an 'isolated
volcano' or a lucky accident of time, which no one could have

174 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

expected in the seventeenth century, when intellect and emotion,
truth and imagination, were at the point of dissociation. Milton,
as it were, only just got it in, before the vandals of reason and
empiricism fell on the cosmogony and history of the Bible and
reduced them to literalities, subject to the need of verification.

I think that Milton was in the line of 'experimentalism' and it
must be clear that I also think that it was natural, inevitable and
right that he should be so. Once he had appeared, all those
striking characteristics which made Milton might have been seen
as historically conditioned and therefore inevitable. This does not
mean that they all sprang from a single root or that they were all
directly connected with each other. Something, we agree,
debilitated poetry. I think that a vital part of that something was
Milton's successful exploitation of language, not the 'experi-
mental' in Milton's thought and view of life.

It is common, especially with anti-humanists, to lump experi-
mentalism, individualism, rationalism, liberalism, protestantism
and even capitalism together in this fashion. But an individual
may be connoted by any of these attitudes and activities
without necessarily sharing in all or any of the others. If
Milton, as poet, felt comfortable in relation to the 'truth' (as Mr.
Willey prints it) of his subject-matter, we cannot take that as
meaning that those who employ scientific method in any field,
including that of biblical criticism, ought to drop it in case they
make poets feel uncomfortable, or even that the use of any scientific
method whatsoever is wicked. Accepting that Milton was both a
poet and, in morals and psychology, something of an 'experi-
mentalist', we might take that, instead, as evidence that great poets
are great poets, for one important reason, because they charac-
teristically try to integrate their poetry with truth; that is, they
try first to integrate themselves with their experience, emotional
and intellectual. If they fail, they may conceivably also feel that
their poetry has failed, not that they have been misinformed about
the nature of existence.

We cannot know that Milton, if he had lived in one of the
difficult centuries which have followed the seventeenth, would not

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 175

have been able to find the imaginative equivalent for the contem-
porary conditions of life, would not have been able to make a new
and different effort of integration. It seems to me highly likely
that he would have been able to make this effort successfully.

He was in one important respect at least more typical of his
immediate age, less of an 'isolated volcano', than Mr. Willey
indicates. What Milton thought about 'Science' might or might
not have been similar to, or influenced by, what Hobbes and other
philosophers thought about the subject. What Milton did have in
common with them was something which I refer to for con-
venience as Puritanism, although I mean by the term something at
once more special in origin and more general in psychological
application than is usually meant. Critics of all kinds who have
observed the severe and 'lofty' quality of Milton's powerful
uniqueness, have used his 'Puritanism', in the more common-
place sense of the word, as an explanation, and have either ignored
or been made merely uneasy by reminders of his Renaissance
sensuality. I think that the Puritanism is, indeed, for this dis-
cussion, the important quality, but that the essential in Puritanism
can be described as a preference for the Old Testament over the
New.

The dominant view of Paradise Lost, especially among those
critics who have no great interest in grinding a theological axe, is
that the Christianity expressed in it is far from strict orthodoxy.
This is true, not only of Blake and others who have commented on
Milton's at least covert weakness for Satan, but of Saurat and
Tillyard, who have compared the theological implication of
Milton's poem with his professed theological beliefs and also with
the theology generally accepted as orthodox. Mr. C. S. Lewis,
who has a theological axe to grind, tells us that Paradise Lost is an
overwhelmingly Christian poem and largely dismisses the im-
putation of unorthodoxy.

I think that, when we consider the poem and what has got into
it, what Milton thought or anywhere stated that he thought is
secondary. The feeling of the poem is not essentially Christian, if
by Christian we mean related to what Christ is reported as saying

176 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

in the New Testament, and we must not let Mr. Lewis and his like
obscure the issue with a false emphasis on intellectual orthodoxy.
Milton like other Puritans took his stand on the Bible, which
means on the Bible as a whole Mr. Willey will perhaps grant that
a belief in the 'veracity' of the Bible implies also a belief in the
Bible's unity. It is observable that in the psychological attitude
which this generates, the Old Testament becomes dominant as an
emotional factor. We observe this clearly when Puritanical
reformers thump the Bible and do not merely take their stand
upon it.

It is not only orthodox Christians or Biblical scholars who can
observe that the Bible is in fact not a unity; that there is a radical
change in psychological and social meaning between the Old
Testament and the New while, more importantly, as a child can
often see, they are in their most fundamental conclusions even
contradictory. The Christianity of Christ was a totally new
pronouncement about punishment and sacrifice.

Whether Milton was a Satanist, "of the Devil's Party without
knowing", whether he was theologically an Arian, believing that
the Son was inferior to the Father, and other similar questions are
interesting according to one's speciality. But unless we see them
in relation to a more fundamental attitude in Milton we shall miss
both the literary and the psychological significance of the poem.
We shall also miss the significance of some contemporary re-
actions to it, Mr. Lewis's for example, with everything that those
imply about the nature of 'orthodoxy'.

What the poem is about is punishment. That is also in fact what
the contemporary 'orthodox' and neo-scholastics, with their
emphasis on the Fall and on Original Sin, are talking about. The
awareness of 'Sin', or of Original Sin or personal Sin, is the
expectation of punishment, a main preoccupation of Hebrew
theology; and the attempt to justify the ways of God to men
always means the punishing ways of God to Man, because it is not
necessary to 'justify' the love of God. This justification is also a
Hebraic compulsion.

It may not appear very striking to say that Paradise Lost is

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 177

about punishment. But it is a striking fact, and it is worth our
while to remember that punishment, in the old tributary and
retributive sense, is not only not an integral part of Christianity as
stated by Christ, but that his main purpose was to supersede it.
Two thousand years of 'Christian' history have consisted largely
of intellectual and practical manifestations that human beings in
general cannot without great difficulty understand this simple
and profound revolution. The many gentle and mystical inter-
pretations of the ideas of sacrifice and atonement must not mislead
us. When we start to formulate our ideas about human nature
and about man's place in the universe, we are predominantly
liable to talk in fact about our own most primitive fears and
passions, the shadows of which we dimly perceive and try to
objectify. As a result, our theology, by whatever name we call it,
reveals itself as still tied to the God of Wrath; patriarchal,
aggressive, tense, aware of danger within and without, particularly
aware of the danger of love, and deeply preoccupied with payment
of a more or less material kind, which ranges from out-and-out
simony to merely telling one's beads, or to the various neurotic
compulsions.

Preoccupation with sin, one's own or other people's, also has
the mechanical quality which subsumes it under payment in kind.
For the belief in Original Sin is psychologically a tribute, a
mechanical confession that we are incurable, and that therefore
we must pay endlessly in order to be allowed to live.

One may readily understand how St. Paul and the early
theologians of the Church became dominated by the death of
Christ and saw it out of due proportion to his life; but one should
not fail to note how this negative interpretation, with its emphasis
on Sin, hatred of sexual life (which means in practice Hate) and
punishment, has foisted itself on the whole of explicit theology
since. When we build intellectual structures, we all drive more and
more towards the crudely mechanical and away from the life of
imagination and experience. The scientist, the poet and the
ordinary person who is making any conscious effort to find out
about human life by living it are all concerned in checking this

178 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

drive. For many purposes of communication we have to abstract
from experience and imagination, but we must always be aware
that we are doing so, and we should try not to kill our symbols.
When we try to turn them into Absolutes, we do kill them, for an
Absolute is just that which is never experienced either in our
imagination, our inward awareness of emotional existence, or in
our observation of the world around us; and the average human
mind can do nothing with it except substitute some crudity of
sense-perception whose grossness is in proportion to the degree of
abstraction.

The symbol of Christ's redeeming Blood illustrates both this
general human attitude towards all symbolism and the unconscious
retrogression of theological orthodoxy, since Christ, to a psy-
chology more compatible with the Old Testament than with the
New. Because that is what we can see, we think much more
readily of blood as something which is shed than as the circulating
medium of life. It has been comparatively easy for the orthodox
to associate it for us with violence and death. We may say that it
is thicker than water, but when we use it of kinship it is one of our
worn and automatic words. We have to imagine it flowing in
battle or in crime, if we are going to make a song about it or even
to reach the creative level of the detective story. The redemption
by blood too easily becomes a very mechanical and economic
notion, not morally superior to the cruder Old Testament beliefs
about sacrifice and atonement, which were essentially payment.
Those who infect Christian feeling and psychological truth with
the notion of an absolute Original Sin, whatever they may tell us
about Matter and Spirit, are trying to import a Thing into the
Mind. Such a very material stain needs a material agent to
cleanse it.

Christ's reference to his own blood occurred at the supper
which celebrated the Passover, normally a feast of thanksgiving
for deliverance. For two centuries after his death, the Eucharist
was celebrated as an Agape, or Love-Feast. However much
Christ's view of the Last Supper was dominated by his pre-
monition of his own death, we may reasonably conclude that the

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 179

more positive and living symbolism of the Bread and Wine, the
idea of sharing one's substance with the brothers and the beloved,
was not obliterated from his mind any more than from those of
his disciples. Such a poetic awareness of life continuing and
circulating is more in consonance with the gospel of love than
later interpretations have been, however orthodox.

The efforts of Reformers in religion have usually been directed
towards recovering the truth of Christianity, the actual meaning
of Christ's words behind the current theological misinterpretations.
But they have repeatedly failed and have stopped short at some
new justification of the hatred of opponents, in their more abstract
theory, and some rationalisation of their own guilt, as far as their
practical precepts are concerned.

The most unarguable meaning that Christ's words have is the
biological observation that 'We must love one another or die',
but this is seldom marked in any new outbreak of orthodoxy. As I
continue to point out, our most recent orthodox are far more
concerned with establishing codes of behaviour and belief than
with helping any of us to live in the actual world around us. It
may be that they know, as we all do, that to love one another at
present, as heretofore, appears impossible. But it may still be
necessary for survival that we should learn to do so and it serves
nothing to offer people instead mere talismans of salvation.

Puritanism got no nearer to the psychological truth of
Christianity than any other reforming movement, to the idea that
the fundamental sacrifice human beings must make, if they would
be rewarded by learning to love, is of their ^-hatred, their
compulsion to se/f-punishnient; but it may have stabilised the
human burden by giving a new range of objects on to which hatred
could be spread.

Milton's puritanism then cannot be understood in its perennial
significance for poetry and for human life, if it is treated as an
historical accident, merely as an effect of a contemporary outlook,
which has been accorded a capital P, although this is the way in
which it is generally treated by literary critics. Puritanical
austerity has many embodiments and it has often accompanied

180 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

periods of 'greatness' (of rising or successful aggressiveness) in a
nation's history. Towards Christianity, as towards everything else,
it is a Spartan attitude. It does not always, by any means, deny
itself splendour. But it does always tend to repudiate anything
which may be called 'effeminacy', and this too often has included
the more passive and sensuous kinds of awareness which are
necessary to poetry and art. Hence the occasional view that poetry
and music are mere accomplishments, the perquisites of the young
ladies in the drawing-room and directed towards their temporarily
relaxed admirers. This view when it arose did debar these arts,
because of the accompanying situation of young ladies, from
making any authoritative pronouncements about life as a whole.
That is an extreme situation, but whether the view expresses itself
in the form that poetry is a 'superior amusement' and whether it is
promulgated by Plato, by Mr. T. S. Eliot or by a Victorian
novelist, we can reasonably suspect that, in spite of the wide
differences of philosophical and aesthetic outlook, the old Spartan
and puritanical spirit is at work. Secretly this spirit is always over-
concerned with 'greatness', a concern which masks an excessive
self-assertion. This, if it becomes obsessive, is bad for poetry and
many other things. It makes one progressively blind to goo Iness,
which, as Aristotle remained aware, is always of its kind. One
cannot aim at sublimity without missing one's way or falling into
bathos. It is a by-product of looking where one is going in the
circumstances of a splendid imagination. Milton's 'gigantic
loftiness' was the effect of a powerful intellect and an exquisite
sensibility in a unique combination, and therefore, though it awed
his successors, it was the one quality they certainly could not
imitate.

This Spartan or puritanical attitude, with its accompanying
loftiness and contempt, is really what is dominant psychologically
in many of the writers and thinkers whom Mr. Willey blames for
being at least fellow-travellers with 'experimentalism', in Hobbes
particularly as well as Milton. It is in fact opposed to the ex-
perimental, which is a humbler and more passive attitude, and it
therefore works against both science and poetry. According to

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 181

Mr. Willey, Hobbes, for one, disliked the fictional in poetry
because he liked 'scientific truth'. It would be much more
accurate to say that Hobbes plainly disliked poetry (as so many
people do) and was interested in preventing it altogether. A
similar effect of Puritanism in Milton merely made his attitude to
the elements of poetry dangerously selective, at least by the time
he was ready to write Paradise Lost.

It is not at all surprising that something which also expresses
itself in a contemporary dislike of graven images and of stained-
glass windows should be paralleled in a poet's apperception by an
avoidance of the more spontaneous and idiosyncratic kinds of
imagery, since these often originate internally and unconsciously.
From present-day psychological investigation we learn that
repression works against the merely non-rational nearly as much
as against what appears to be obscene. It is obvious that
without the Reformation we should not have had Puritanism
in the formulation of a sect: and because Puritanism is also
an attempt to escape from dogmatism by exercising the right
of private judgment in relation to available sources, those with
a bias in favour of authority have found it easy to connect it
with the humanistic and experimental outlook. A logical result
of dogmatism, of Hulme's Two Truths system, or of any
attempt to oppose an Absolute to the scientific field of free
experimental inquiry, is that we are left with 'stills' of human
mental history, selected and static aspects. These leave out of
account the way that all manifestations of formal belief, including
Catholic Action and Communism alike, apart from the merely
reactive element inevitably present in everyone's formal beliefs,
are part of a shuttle movement. It is interesting to speculate how
far one can carry one's disapproval of history. Why stop at the
Renaissance? The doctrine of the Fall must contain the implicit
delusion that human history somehow, somewhere, ought to have
been different, and the feeling, probably unconscious, is discern-
ible, for example, in Mr. Eliot's Ideas and Notes about Christian
Society and culture.

But it does not much matter where we stay our regressive wishes

182 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

as far as human history is concerned. If we deplore a total way of
looking at the world which has grown up historically as a reaction
to that given and unavoidable world, there is only one meaning
which can be attached to this emotion that we wish we could
extirpate a section of human experience, or of reality. In our
public thought, as in our private emotions, this is a dangerous
delusion. The Two-Truths system has been taken over as a
description of reality by Mr. Willey and others, who ignore the
fact that it is a denial of past reality, since it implicitly denies the
way in which we have come to know anything about the past.
The failures and evils of history since the Renaissance are all
traced to the experimental spirit which, working in historians, has
given us the facts we distort, and an experimental spirit in any
subsequent manifestations is then used as an excuse for their
wholesale identification.

I said that the Puritan tends to repress his childish imagination
just because it is childish, if for no other reason, for childishness
may be felt to be disabling in a competitive world. We may
justifiably look on the present competitive world as evil but we
should recognise that its evil is the result of many strains, not all of
them in themselves evil, and many of them necessary. We should
try to save ourselves from identifying any one of them we happen
to dislike with all the evil which we discern. It is by now almost a
commonplace of writers on social history to identify Puritanism
with Protestantism, Protestantism with individualism, indivi-
dualism with the experimental spirit, and the whole lot with
aggressive competition in economic life. But this is to telescope
history and all the natural stages of inheritance. Mr. Willey has
achieved just this sort of identification of the experimental
spirit with all our present psychological evils.

The result is that he sees most of the poets of the seventeenth
century as sired by experimentalism out of inferiority, but Milton
as if, with the same sire, he had had a different dam, the absolute
truth of the Bible, that saved him from the verbal penury his
poetic half-brothers fell into.

My family tree reads rather differently. I find it more illuminat-

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 183

ing to see in Milton a fortuitous marriage between an ex-
perimental spirit which is natural to a poet, and the repressive
psychology of thePuritan (how his puritanism had lived through a
rich and strange past with classical learning, we can leave out of
the story). This marriage begot the uniqueness of Milton's
language, and the third generation was the repressed and distorted
eighteenth-century poets who could only compensate for their
feeling of inferiority by a pretended identification with their
dominating sire.

It would be a juster view than Mr. Willey's to say that the
practical results of science have restored to the modern poet much
of the material, if he cares to use it, which the Puritan in Milton,
and in others, rejected an extended, a magnified world of
fascinating objects either grim or beautiful. A poet ought not
perhaps to be primarily so 'gigantically lofty', so purely Attic.
Much of Milton's poetry springs from this aspect of Puritanism,
and his great technical achievements ought not to blind us to the
rejection involved. While we admire the resources and devices
with which poetic efficiency, making something positive out of
its very limitations, has achieved just this particular triumph of
negation, we ought to wish that these limitations should not be
compulsively adopted.

The mental archetype is still present with the neo-classicists,
however different the verbal results may appear. No one could
say that Mr. Eliot, for instance, has learnt obviously from the
Milton he used to deplore, but certainly he might have learnt
much about the poetry of austerity, of sensuous rejection, while
his underlying mental approach may not be so very dissimilar.

It is difficult to draw a comparison which is based on a common
negation, but a study of the imagery and dictions of Milton and
Mr. Eliot does suggest that the poetic apperception, in either case,
is related to a similar form of intellectual selectiveness; it derives,
as I say, with Milton, from his Puritanism, and with Mr. Eliot
from the sense of personal and also of Original Sin covering the
general human situation, which has received a structure from his
theology.

184 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

The qualities which result were always characteristic of Milton.
With Mr. Eliot they have become more marked as his scholastic
and theological persuasion has become dominant, overgrowing
the sharp and concrete apperceptions of his earlier poetry. They
are a preference for the abstract and general term, coupled with
an avoidance of the particular and concrete, a reluctance towards
fused metaphor, and another characteristic which, when it becomes
a disease, as it does, we can call audilism. This is referred to later.

Milton's language, as we all know, was heavily Latinised. This
was probably not due to the mere habit of classical scholarship.
It seems certain that he had the poet's sense of the history of
words and that when he used such expressions, as the 'palpable
obscure' or the 'vast abrupt' or the Horrid clime', his mind's eye
was well aware of thick darkness that might be felt and that
shielded all objects from sight, or of something steep and broken
away, or of parched sand. I do not say that Milton would have
written better or as good poetry if he had kept mainly to words of
Anglo-Saxon origin or even if he had not laboured rather to
exclude them. We cannot say that a thatch would look well on a
classical temple. Milton's Latinised usage was architectural and
the neatly jointed Latin constructions are as essential to his poetic
technique as the meanings and sounds of the words. But the
Anglo-Saxon words are the natural language of an immediate and
concrete apperception which lives willingly in the present of time
and the presence of fellow-humanity. There is no good poetic
reason why a poet should not prefer or think he would prefer the
past nor why he should like his fellow-beings there is every
reason, on the contrary, why his awareness of all aspects of the
present should be exceptionally critical. But it is poetically
dangerous if he does not like using his senses to obtain the most
precise awareness of what that present is. Milton's Latinism put a
verbal veil between himself and contemporary, that was, living,
reality. The result is literally monumental, static, relating more to
the acoustical medium of stone than to the word becoming flesh,
and to the past and dead rather than to the continuing present and
future.

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 185

The characteristics of diction and imagery which I have
mentioned spring directly from this attitude of abstraction and
sensuous withdrawal withdrawal, that is, from the concrete and
in particular from the sharply visualised :

"First in his east the glorious lamp was seen,
regent of day, and all the horizon round
invested with bright rays, jocund to run
his longitude through heaven's high road."

Or

"Meanwhile the tepid caves and fens and shores
their brood as numerous hatch from the egg, that soon,
bursting with kindly rupture, forth discloses
their callow young."

There are one or two quotations which are worth while giving
here, under the general heading of abstract language, from
Adam's instructional conversations with the Archangel Raphael,
because of the comparison they invite with Mr. Eliot and also
because of a possible contrast with Dante, whose philosophical or
theological passages seem similar, but serve, I believe, a quite
different intellectual structure and a form of apperception which
remains consistently poetic. For example:

"The swiftness of these Circles attribute
though numberless to His omnipotence
that to corporeal substances could add
speed almost spiritual."

Or

"He ceased. I lowly answered: To attain
the highth and depth of thy eternal ways
all human thoughts come short, Supreme of Things.
Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee
is no deficience found. Not so in Man,

186 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

but in degree the cause of his desire

by conversation with his like to help

or solace his defects. No need that thou

should'st propagate, already infinite,

and through all numbers absolute, though One' ;"

Such passages, which attempt, often with borrowed means, to
round a poetic vision intellectually, can fairly be paralleled with
Mr. Eliot's

"Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
all time is unredeemable".

Or

"In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession."

Or

"It seems as one becomes older
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a

mere sequence

Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning

the past."

Both these sets of quotations seem to me to be apart from the
author's purely poetic vision, although they may well be part of his

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 187

general philosophical or intellectual vision; hence their coldness
and prosaic quality. Mr. Eliot has given much consideration to
the problem of the philosophical poem and, according to the
Italian critic Luciano Anceschi, has shown signs himself of wishing
to write the poetic equivalent of the Summa of our time. Whether
any poet from Lucretius onwards has ever really solved the
problem of writing a whole philosophical poem, rather than one of
whose philosophy is the string on which the poetic beads are
strung, is doubtful. Dante seems to me to be the only poet who is
not much in doubt. Theodore de Banville, one of the extreme
advocates of the 'poetic moment', went so far as to say that the
chief way in which the poet shows his real poetic artistry is in his
production of the chevilles, his filling of the interstices between
these moments of 'pure' poetry. Milton, according to this test,
succeeds more obviously than Mr. Eliot. He has succeeded, as
usual, in making a self-pastiche of his own rhythmical and
verbal music. Mr. Eliot, on the other hand, may have got a
theological tune on the brain, but he hears it only himself. It is not
unusual for him thus to hear inwardly an incantatory music from
rather abstract words.

The importance and the similarity of the quoted paragraphs lie
not so much in their substance as in their kind. They both show
that any didactic or intellectual statement must at least be beyond
argument, it must not be in such a form as to tempt prompt
intellectual dissection, if it is to be poetically effective. Browning's
dialectic trick of providing his own questions and answers had
something to be said for it, but it can hardly be repeated, since it
provided him with the major individual quality of his style. As
Mr. Eliot himself has said, an intellectual structure must become a
vision to be valid as poetry it has to be seen, not reported. Poetry
is the felt truth of experience, where the reference can be im-
mediate, and very great poetry is the macrocosmic vision which
has also this immediate validity. For an intellectual poet this
means absolute conviction, which again implies an absolute
intellectual authority. Since history catches up on philosophies so
much more quickly than on poetry, this vast equilibrium is very

188 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

improbable. Nothing was much more unlikely than the in-
tellectual conjunction of Aquinas and Dante. But Dante's
intellectual vision was in fact a whole with his poetic, and his use
of language, in particular of imagery, is the sure indication of this.
(Shakespeare I believe had at least an equal wholeness though his
vision was humanistic and, as far as one can see, materialistic.)
Though there are long passages of didacticism in Dante, with
Beatrice as celestial school-marm, we are never far removed from
the concrete and vivid image which makes these poetically real and
which shows that for Dante the mythos was all part of a living
truth which to the poet was only an extension of the living world
around him.

Both Milton and Eliot are characterised by the absence or the
avoidance of the fused metaphor. The earlier Eliot of course did
occasionally use such metaphors often forcibly (cf. the yellow fog
in Trufrock'). Now he substitutes the particularities of prose ('Dry
Salvages') or the associative symbol. Descriptive particularity, I
know, has always been a characteristic of Mr. Eliot's style. It is
common also to good prose and, allied to dryness and wit, it is
natural and legitimate in a poet who is trying to show that poetry
needs a clean surface sometimes more than it needs 'depths' and
always more than it needs decoration. Precision is, after all, the
goal; and where the unlimited has become the meaningless, then
the localised and time-pointed actuality, which is the particularity
of prose rather than of poetry, may be the best kind of precision.
But not all depths and distances are false. It is unnatural that a
poet should never feel the need of that special kind of precision
which is the most central rendering of many dimensions of
apperception, that 'real presence' which is given by the fused
metaphor. That it is one of the most natural poetic activities is
shown by the fact that it is the chief poetic contribution to
ordinary speech.

The associative symbol which abounds in the later Eliot 'the
rose of memory', 'rose of forgetfulness', 'the bowl of rose-leaves',
'the blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour', has certainly nothing
to do with precision it is also not an attempt to make the experi-

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 189

ence of the world, or even of the community which is held together
by the particular language, present and real. And though, with Mr.
Eliot, it refers to a society in time, that does not necessarily make
it universal. It may well have no more than archaic force, and be
as specialised as the emblems of freemasonry.

The fused metaphor on the other hand always appeals to living
sense; and some dislike of living sense, with considerable im-
plications about a too partial view of the world's intellectual
structure, is what we may suspect when it is conspicuously absent,
as it is with Milton and with Eliot. In Milton the predominant
image is the classical simile, which selects, intellectually, a com-
mon quality out of a host of dissimilarities. This is at best a
purely denotative decoration, a kind of abstract illustration, with
the maximum suppression or avoidance of associative overtones.
We can say that it is centrifugal from precision, and just because of
this want of fusion of the many dimensions of qualities. Even if
the effect is pleasing generally only with a certain flat quaintness
the reader's mind shoots off at an unlimited tangent and has to
be brought back on a string to the main poetic intention. For
instance, Milton's well-known description of the Fiend's shield
and spear :

"The broad circumference
hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
at evening, from the top of Fiesole,
or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
rivers or mountains, in her spotty globe.
His spear to equal which the tallest pine
hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
of some great admiral, were but a wand "

which not only takes us on a tour of Italy and Norway but gives
us a rapid view of the recent Galilean advances in astronomy,
with a glance at the condition of the British Fleet, before coming
back, rather disconcertingly, to the main picture of the geology of

190 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Hell, which had quite ceased to affect our associations. Milton's
poem can support this immense diffusion; but the instinct of a poet
writing anything less spacious, is, I am sure, against the blind and
tentacular wavings of such similes. Matthew Arnold in his
shorter efforts does not do them well. The point, however, for us
is what they represent, how the underlying attitude to experience
affects the choice and type of imagery. Eliot, as I say, now avoids
imagery, and he does not of course substitute any such form of
mere decoration. But his earlier apparent similes are worth look-
ing at, as they serve to illustrate the change which has taken
place in his later work. I call them 'apparent' because the 'like' or
'as' is merely syntactical, they are actually metaphors fused
with the whole real and living scene which is present to the poet's
eye:

"Like a patient etherised upon a table."

"Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question."

"And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

In all of these the compared characteristic is provided directly
by the visual and temporal setting which has given the poet his
immediate inspiration. Or, to put it another way, the imagery is
revealed still in the matrix of experience, not detached from it.
Dante's images which use the syntactical simile form are also
often really fused metaphors. This is the more remarkable since,
as I have said, they often had to deliver a purely intellectual
content and might well have remained merely illustrative and
also, like Milton's, something of a poetic archaism. I have
indicated above why I think it was uniquely possible for Dante to
achieve this. Here I shall merely give examples of the way in
which I think it was achieved :

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 191

"quando incontrammo d'anime una schiera
che venian lungo 1'argine e ciascuna
ci riguardava come suol da sera
guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna;
e si ver noi aguzzavan le ciglia
come'l vecchio sartor fa nella cruna."

(When we encountered a troop of spirits, coming towards us along
the verge, and they all of them peered at us as if it were by the
faint light of a new moon; puckering their brows at us as an old
tailor does at the eye of his needle.)

At first sight, one might say that the old tailor squinting into his
needle's eye is as remote from the theme as the Tuscan artist from
the burning sands or marl of hell. But this is not really so. All
the emphasis remains on the act of peering, and this old pro-
fessional concentration is all within the total dramatisation of the
urgent need to 'make out'. It clinches and at the same time
universalises the actuality.

And then from Canto V, the famous double image of Paolo
and Francesca:

"E come li stornei ne portan Tali
nel freddo tempo a schiera larga e piena,
cosi quel fiato li spiriti mali . . .
E come i gru van cantando lor lai
faccendo in acre di se lunga riga,
cosi vidi venir, traendo guai,
ombre portate della detta briga "

(And as the starlings in the cold season are borne away by their
wings in a broad close flock, so these lost spirits were borne upon
the blast. . . . And as the cranes depart with their mournful
chant, making a long streak in the air, so I saw them come
wailing, the shades tossed on this turmoil.)

This is by no means a mere point-to-point comparison of kinds

192 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

of physical flight. It has many dimensions of similitude
helplessness, the pathos of being a creature, waning light, all used
to extract and concentrate the maximum emotional meaning from
the vision of this flight of dead lovers, and to evoke for us at once
its automatism and its naturalness.

Finally there is the particular and significant use which Dante
makes of his imagery, to make an immaterial conception part of a
vision which, though ecstatic, is still earthly :

"Cosi parlommi, e poi comincio 'Ave
Maria' cantando, e cantando vanio
come per acqua cupa cosa grave."

(Thus he spoke to me and then began to sing 'Ave Maria', and
still singing vanished like a weighty thing through deep water.)

Or

"La mia letizia mi tien celato
che mi raggia dintorno e mi nasconde
quasi animal di sua seta fasciato."

(My bliss holds me hidden in its radiation as a silkworm is
hidden in its silk.)

Of course, images of light and translucent media are dominant
in the Taradiso\ I doubt if this is purely emotional and associ-
ative. It was an attempt at exact description. Abstract vision in
poetry needs to be implemented by as much sensuous experience
as possible. But there are limits to the possibilities of finding
earthly 'objective correlatives' with which to fuse the ecstatic.
Dante does wonders within the limits of his cosmogonical
information. His sensibility was not dissociated even his
traditional and orthodox symbols and his mystical mathematics
were feelings to him. That does not mean that he can always
convey the feelings to other sensibilities which through lapse
of time have become alienated from what was knowledge to
him. But the starry dance of the twenty-four Fathers of the

OLD PURITAN WRIT LARGE 193

Church (in Taradiso' Canto XIII) at least reminds us of something
more wooing than the odour of sanctity, while Dante himself,
becoming roselike at one point:

"E io a lui 'L'affetto che dimostri
meco parlando, e la buona sembianza
ch'io veggio e noto in tutti li ardor vostri
cosi m'ha dilatata mia fidanza
come'l sol fa la rosa, quando aperta
tanto divien quant'ell' ha di possanzaV

(And I said to him "The affection you show me when you speak to
me and the warm intention which your glowing conveys to me
dilate me and encourage me as the sun does the rose when she
opens to her fullest extent.")

is moving because he does so in the natural atmosphere of
emanation and sunlight and response to warmth. Moreover the
symbol is defined anew by the sensuous materiality of the whole
poem, in which the vision is always that of a living eye. It is in no
sense archaic and shows no signs of wearing down to cliche as
even the classical and verbalist roses of the Pleiade did. Finally
there is the great vision of the vast white rose of the empyrean in
Cantos XXX and XXXII. At the point at which we feel the full
poetic force of the whole great Vision of Dante, we are all inside
this Celestial Rose and the bees are a simile for ourselves.

But still the similes are limited mostly roses and bees, and
light and water. Hell and Purgatory are more like home; and the
chief benefit of this familiarity for poetry is that it supplies the
imagination with inexhaustible and detailed sensuous nourish-
ment. In poetry, distance may lend a kind of disenchantment.

CHAPTER VII

Poetry and Truth

IN treating Donne and the Metaphysicals, Mr. Eliot picked the
right problem, but whether he has stated it accurately or not I
doubt. Mr. Eliot refers to the disintegrative effect of the new
learning upon Donne.

We can certainly recognise the effects of the collision in 'this
sensitive mind' between the old tradition and the new learning,
but may question whether or not 'disintegrating' is the right
adjective when we are referring to the poetry. We ought to
consider the earlier Donne apart from 'The Metaphysicals', none
of whom, to judge from their poetry the only valuable way to
judge them in this connection, passed through anything like his
curious rich vivid and analytic naturalism with its extraordinary
range and subtlety of experience. Then we shall realise that in this
earlier work, Donne did indeed represent a tradition which was
later broken and one which the twentieth century, in so far as it
has done anything good at all, has been trying to restore.

For these poems are in the true tradition because they are
'Renaissance'. What neo-scholastic critics dislike in the 'Renais-
sance' spirit, which gave us humanism and science, is precisely
that which gives us the most complete poetry. That is, fidelity
to experience, which makes either pure Ugliness or pure Beauty
irrelevant categories. The most important experience for a poet is
full experience of his own human nature. This does not mean that
the good poet is in the mothlike condition of the girl in the song
who went up to London 'just to see the bright lights gleaming,

194

POETRY AND TRUTH 195

'Eeding not temptation'. It is not important that experience should
be sought, only that it should not be denied. In between Donne
and our older contemporaries the split in sensibility has been real
enough. The older psychological tradition, based on orthodox
theology, with its abstract conception of sin and its over-emphasis
on suffering, frustration and emotional defeat, could not in fact
come to terms with the new learning. Since that was primarily a
method of inquiry, it had no inherent limitation and must
eventually be applied to 'human nature' itself.

The result was that the old tradition tried to defeat the new
learning, and largely succeeded. But poets, in so far as they are poets,
are always the last victims of this defeat, not the first. Anything
that we can subsequently recognise as a 'Renaissance', however
minor, of poetry, always turns out to be a resuscitation of the
'Renaissance spirit', of the wish to find out and learn, to receive
experience, and to enjoy the experiences one has received.
Fundamentally, the poetic impulse is an openness to perceptive
living in the human world, which is enjoyable to the poet because
it is willing. It is a law of human psychology that the full
realisation even of conflict or opposition in oneself, or in the
external world, brings a peculiar satisfaction, if what is realised is
some form of the truly inevitable, if it is a vision of law or pattern.
This must have been included under Aquinas's 'Quod visum
placet'', and Shelley, in the Defence of Poetry, implied the same
thing:

"For from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the con-
stitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently
connected with the pleasure of the superior portions of our being."

This potentiality of enjoyable realisation of their own duality, of
the opposition and alternatives which are inherent in their own
impulses, is the basis of men's capacity to adapt themselves to the
laws of the physical universe and of their own natures. This
capacity remains perhaps in most men only potential; it is readily
misinterpreted and perverted, and its development in any

196 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

considerably depends on the spread of genuine knowledge among
all. But a developing capacity for realisation of law and inevitable
pattern leaves less and less room for Sin. Again I am not talking
about Crime, which, I have already stated, is a matter of social
definition.

Sin is a subjective state, interpreted in some variety by those
who experience it. But in practice it is the sense that man is a
doom-laden freak on his own planet, who can never know what he
is or where he stands. Sin may be described theologically as the
condition of being cut off from God, but its realisation requires
belief in the Devil, in essential Evil, very much more. In essence,
the neo-scholastics, with their belief in Original Sin and their Aunt
Sally attacks on the possibility of moral progress, are trying to
deny that men have this inherent potentiality for adapting them-
selves to the laws of nature and the laws of the mind, that men can
by any means acquire the freedom to recognise their own neces-
sities. I am not a Christian Scientist; and I do not deny that, up
to date, pain, cruelty and ugliness are more typical of our human
planetary performance than are their contraries. But the cure lies,
not in the conviction of Sin, not in the war of body and spirit and
the crucifixion of the flesh, but in the enjoyable admission of our
own dialectic. The essential of a poet is that he should be someone
who in some degree does realise and enjoy this representatively
human dialectic. If that is not his essential nature there is no way
of accounting for our love of tragedy. If it is, one must ask what
on earth Mr. Eliot means by the 'escape from emotion', as a
definition of poetic activity.

We can say that poetry which we can reasonably recognise as
such is always an attempt, however limited, to prevent or to heal
the split in sensibility which our unwillingness to be conscious
forces upon us. The victory is generally only partial or occasional.
The bulk of the work of most poets is a record of failures, though
the failures of a poet are generally interesting and instructive
enough to other poets. Only the rarest poets have been able to
live continually in a positive relation to the available knowledge of
their time. In the battle to force words to express the experience

POETRY AND TRUTH 197

of natural law, a vision which is at once whole and concrete and
this is what every poem from the smallest lyric to a full-scale
drama is really trying to do abstraction wins again and again.
The mind of the poet, which should engage gear between the inner
and the outer rhythm, slips its clutch. Even the innovating poet
too often devises some mechanism of language, some technique of
welding rhythm and imagery with emotional certainty, only to
lose the hang of it, though someone else may make it serviceable
again. Words become ghosts, and poets parody their earlier full-
blooded selves when they cease to be able to look directly at their
emotional experience and this may happen at any time in a
process which is essentially dialectic. It did 'happen with the
elderly solemn Wordsworth, with the Coleridge, who let himself be
seduced by Germanic idealism, as well as with Swinburne whose
words, as Mr. Eliot has said, developed a 'life of their own' and
a strange ectoplasmic kind of life indeed. Yet this is not peculiarly
a disease of those poets who may be lumped together as Romantics.
The Romantics Shelley, the early Wordsworth, Beddoes, Blake,
Keats had in fact only this in common, that, far from soaring
into the empyrean and beating their poetic wings in a void, they
were all trying, unconsciously, to unify sensibility again, to see
with the true poetic vision, which is tragic, naturalistic and myth-
making. Whatever any of them may or may not have said or
thought on the subject of 'Science', each of them in his most
successful work was trying imaginatively to be faithful to his
experience and to work inductively. They did not fail more
frequently than other poets. When they did fail, they failed as
other poets have done the range of merit may run from Crashaw
to Mr. Alfred Noyes through confusing abstraction with
experiences.

What Mr. Eliot means by 'dissociation of sensibility' is further
illuminated by his references to philosophical poetry. There are
some in his essays on Dante, on Shakespeare and Seneca, and on
Blake. In all of these there is the implication, if not the statement,
that the poet need not, in fact had better not, do any thinking for
himself, as it is on the whole bad for his poetry. A philosophical

198 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

poetry is certainly permissible, we are to understand, but, as
Lucretius and Dante illustrate, the poet is safer, as poet, if he
borrows his philosophy. Now there is a curious but not un-
typical aestheticism in this view which results, I think, from Mr.
Eliot's fixated conception of the split in sensibility. He is deter-
mined to see it and to maintain it as a 'split' rather than to see it
and to accept it as a natural dialectic conflict in the development
of poetry and of human mind, the resolution of which might be
fruitful and renewing.

He says in the Shakespeare-Seneca essay: "You can hardly say
that Dante believed, or did not believe, the Thomist philosophy,"
a statement which does not tally with the quotation he himself has
given from Dante's Convivio (in the essay on Dante in The
Sacred Wood) "the principal design is to lead men to knowledge
and virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them."

Again, in one of those fraught references which one would like
to see analysed, Mr. Eliot says: "It happened that at Dante's
time, thought was orderly and strong and beautiful." There is
really nothing fortuitous about thought, whose 'strength' depends
on its truth, its tie with given reality, while its order and beauty
are qualities dependent upon this tie.

Referring to Blake, Mr. Eliot says his "occasional marriages of
poetry and philosophy are not so felicitous" as either his "naked
vision" or "naked observation". Mr. Eliot quotes : "He who would
do good must do it in Minute Particulars," etc., and goes on "One
feels that the form is not well chosen. The borrowed philosophy
of Dante and Lucretius is perhaps not so interesting but it injures
their form less."

This is highly arguable. The Blake quotation has at least an
excellent gnomic quality; it is one of those statements which are
always being proved valid in the course of individual experience,
and this gives it the same kind of poetic merit as we find in much of
'Proverbs' and 'Ecclesiastes' where ancient traditional wisdom
may for any one of us at any time be transmuted into the warmth
and felicity of personal rediscovery. Parts of Dante, on the other
hand, which paraphrase the borrowed philosophy extremely

POETRY AND TRUTH 199

concisely, and often with the greatest skill, are surely often very
crabbed as poetry. This is not to deny that the borrowing
philosophical Dante can be translucent and felicitous, or that the
private philosophical Blake can be boring, bewildering and
vaporous. But it may be that when either is good or bad, in the
sense of poetically acceptable or inacceptable, the underlying
cause is the same for both poets. Credibility may after all have
something to do with it.

What seems to follow from all Mr. Eliot's references to the
relation of thought and emotion, and of philosophy and poetry, is
the implication that when a 'split' or an opposition occurs, when,
for instance, an objective situation which demands critical
application of the intelligence, from those who can think without
undue inhibition, arises in history, as one did in the seventeenth
century, the poet's duty as poet is to retire from the battle upon
the charity of some system which will give him intellectual food
and shelter for the rest of his days. Only one system can really
afford this vast intellectual philanthropy, although within the
Soviet frontiers a rival philosophical system is claiming a similar
abstract inclusiveness with equally bad results for poetry and art.
Many poets do avail themselves of their institutional privileges in
their old age. However, it is then revealed that there is no pure
charity about it. The benefits of the system are really only for
those who have contributed most of their poetic working life.
They will not become believers in time to receive their orthodox
poetic dole, unless they have been preparing to believe for a life-
time. Belief, to produce poetry at any level, must be emotional
assent as well as intellectual assent. One way of unifying sensi-
bility, of 'healing' the split between thought and emotion, is to
give up thinking for oneself. But this necessarily impoverishes
sensibility. The tragedy about giving up curiosity and speculation
is that one will never know precisely what one has given up. For
the ability to think freely is a necessary condition of feeling freely
and fully also. This does not mean that what is popularly called
Tree Thought' is necessarily free. It may be a safeguard against
sensibility and tied to moralistic internal prohibitions. Thought

200 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

that appears to be liberal and in favour of 'Humanity' may well be
an attempt to impose a new abstract orthodoxy. For *negative
capability', as Keats called it, the capacity to be sensible of reality
freely, that is, passively, without trying to interfere with it, flickers
and often goes out, even with poets ; how much more so with the
majority of human beings for whom, by training and habit, mere
'activity', mental or physical, is felt to be much more valuable,
indeed more virtuous than thinking and feeling.

All this leads to the question whether or not any general
statements can be made about a characteristic relation of poets to
their subject-matter. There has always been a wide range of
opposing opinions as to what constitutes the basic material of
poetry, what poetry is *about', if it is about anything. Behind this
there is the further question: what is the relation of poetry,
through its subject-matter, to objective knowledge or truth?
These questions should be kept distinct, but it is clear that they are
closely related. When a critic has strong and positive beliefs about
objective knowledge, about the nature of reality or truth, he
usually has little doubt that poetry should be in a positive relation
to this universal frame, and he is inclined to estimate 'greatness'
or poetic merit always with this extra-poetical standard in mind.
Plato, for instance, thought that poets had inevitably a wrong
relation to their subject-matter; that they were liars, because they
treated the absolute and divine, too often, in terms of the temporal
and fleshly. This is an attitude which continually recurs, in what-
ever disguises. At the other extreme, I. A. Richards makes a sharp
opposition between the scientific and the emotive uses of language
which implies that whatever any poet is trying to tell us, it is not in
any meaningful sense true or false; its value to us is not the value
of a piece of information which might enable us to correct either
our actions or our direction. Then there are all the rather more
negative definitions: Sidney's, that poets are not liars because
they 'nothing affirm', or Coleridge's 'willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith', or
Richards 'pseudo-statements' which seem to lie somewhere in
between active deceit and suspension of disbelief. But on the

POETRY AND TRUTH 201

whole the consensus of critical opinion has been against the idea
of Art for Art's sake and in favour of the belief that some highly
important relation always exists between poetry and 'truth'
however difficult it may be to define.

With Mr. Eliot one can detect a curious divergence between
the critic of poetry and the critic of society. As the first he in-
clines towards Valery's extremely aesthetic view poems are, after
all, written with words. If this means that every successful poem
is a piece of verbal one-way traffic, that the words never get out
again quite the same, I suppose one can accept it, because that is
only an intensification of what is always happening to language.
But I think this view shares a defect with all those to which I have
referred above, except Plato's, which is in a quite different cate-
gory: that is, it does not take into account what the words do to
our emotions, in poems their most considerable function. By this
I mean that poetry is a language of extreme precision; and that
implies that it has a frame of reference and therefore a standard of
truth. But its frame of reference, as has often been observed, is
not the 'dry biscuits' or 'tulip-streaks' of particular facts, but
general or symbolic situations. They are not general or symbolic
because they are hypostatical, but because they are existent and
common. They exist, for a large part of all our lives and for all
or some of our lives, below the verbal level. Poetry brings them
into verbal life and does so more accurately than any other use of
words can do. Our test of poetic truth comes after the poetic
event. We cannot judge a poem a priori because we become
aware of the frame of reference, one of our own basic emotional
situations, only after reading the poem; but the frame of reference
is there.

The second Mr. Eliot, the critic of society, nowadays with
Plato applauding somewhat hollowly from Limbo, departs from
his aestheticism and looks at poetry and literature partly as a
social phenomenon, from the angle of what he himself believes to
be true. In a statement which I have already quoted, Mr. Eliot
tells us that literary criticism must now be completed from a
definite ethical and theological standpoint, and concludes that

202 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

"the 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by
literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is
literature or not can be determined only by literary standards."

To his own and to his readers' advantage, Mr. Eliot might
elucidate this last sentence, written with his common evasive
prudence which is so often nearly prudish. He should begin by
trying to define what he means by 'greatness'. As it stands, the
sentence seems to suggest the 'dissociation of sensibility'. At
what point does the literary evaluation merge into the theological?
Either 'greatness' is a point on a continuous scale of values and
we had better try to find some more central standard which is not
purely literary, or else literary evaluation and theological
evaluation should each stick to its own business.

My own view is that poetry cannot be evaluated from a purely
semantic angle, nor on the other hand from the angle of any
particular subject-matter, claiming objective 'truth', in its own
terms. But I claim that there is a relation, and an intimate one,
although indirect, between the objective and categorical use which
he makes of his ordinary and public understanding and the poetry
which a poet produces. The more generalising capacity he has
(the more he is an 'intellectual'), the more obvious this will be.
Poets are not and on the whole never have been nai'fs. Moreover
they always in some important sense belong to their age, even if
they claim to detest it. Hence it is probable that the analytical and
comparative faculties will be much more highly developed among
our contemporary poets than among their forebears of only a
hundred years ago. I do not mean that contemporary poets have
better brains or even more learning than earlier poets. It is
obvious too that Coleridge, for example, had powers of abstrac-
tion and critical comparison which were above the average of
any time. I only say that a higher capacity for abstraction and
critical comparison is now necessary for a useful and general
education. The 'meaning' and applicability of the abstractions of
scientists and mathematicians cannot now be left out of account
by the poet. I do not believe that he can retain the romantic
alternative of just disliking them. For outside his ken and control

POETRY AND TRUTH 203

they really decide, in a very important degree, what sort of person
he is. They decide among other things the fact and the length of
his life, and much of the quality and content of the emotion with
which he lives it.

Words are symbols, and therefore as a means of communicating
our experience they are inherently imperfect. They always exist
at some degree of abstraction. But since this is their natural
defect, the best effort of the poet and the scientist alike, as well as
of the ordinary man when he is trying to be exact, is directed
towards continual awareness of the fact that, as the late Alfred
Korzybski said : "Words are not things."

This is not so obvious nor so simple as it sounds. If we think of
the Nominalist-Realist controversy and of the problem of the
reality of universals, we see that a large, perhaps a major, part of
philosophical discussion has centred round the opposition of
words and sensuous experience. The controversy is by no means
ended. A scientific inquirer seeking exact communication tends
more and more to leave words behind and to take to mathematics.
This is true even in the social sciences. Unfortunately it means in
our day that he leaves more and more of the possible audience
behind. The result has been that, left to themselves, they generally
begin to gossip, anyway to talk about something else, unaware
and unwilling to become aware that they are doing so. More
unfortunately still, the ordinary man, especially when he has
become the advanced political animal, can live on an inflationary
circulation of mere language for too long, quite unaware that he
has been off gold for years.

If we believe that poetry has still some important human
function, that it cannot be described, with such lamentable want of
definition, as 'a superior amusement', we must also believe that a
poet cannot neglect 'meaning', the way in which words are tied to
experience. We must even believe that he has a more serious duty,
not a lesser one, in this direction, than the ordinary person,
comparable in its own way to that of the scientist. Loss of the
continual awareness that 'words are not things' may account for a
great many immoralities, from bad style (including the style of the

204 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

*split sensibility' from which, we all agree, we have suffered since
the seventeenth century) to false philosophies with their pernicious
effects on social life.

That the poet's relation to meaning is, of all, the most difficult
to determine, does not mean that it does not exist.

The contemporary philosophical interest in semantics has
developed side by side with and at about the same pace as the
movement to revive scholastic thinking. They may be called the
poles of contemporary awareness of our intellectual predicament.
Both have a long historical development behind them. In fact
their opposition expresses the basic conflict of western philosophy.
I stress the fact that it is contemporary, because Valery's view that
poetry is made with words predominates among modern poets
and because some reaction to the statement that 'words are not
things' is implicit in this view. Scholastic thinking implies that
Words are some sort of Things.

The semantically trained inquirer has ceased to ask questions,
anyway while he is functioning as a philosopher, to which
experience shows that he can expect no answer, and lives in the
world of statements. He considers the relation of these statements
to each other and to sensory experience, which may be direct or
which may depend on further statements made by other people.
The acceptability of these further statements will in their turn
depend on their relations to each other. That is, they are accept-
able while other questions do not arise which cannot be resolved
by further resolutions into 'meaning', by finer analysis of the
relations of the statements concerned to someone's sensory
perception. The semantic inquirer lives in a human and historically
determined world of maximum probability. 'Meaning' is in fact
just this 'World', the relations between the tacit or explicit
statements made by visible human beings whose behaviour
implies a social and biological past, itself capable of further and
further analysis and realisation about the perceptions which they
believe themselves to have or their forebears to have had. They
constantly test their beliefs by their very statements and by their
discussion of these statements. It must be remembered that the

POETRY AND TRUTH 205

semantic standard of verification is not perfectionist. There is
inherent, on the other hand, in scholastic thinking a demand for
such an absolute at least from the opposing school. The
scholastic-minded are known, for example, to adduce that history
is unverifiable. In other words, historians expect to work by
collection and comparison of data, by analysis and elimination,
and also by their contemporary understanding of human motive
and conduct, all normal inductive and deductive methods. They
do not work by necromancy, summoning their subjects back to
write their books for them. Scholastic thinkers forget, as good
historians and the semantically trained do not, that history is
about the past. The past, like the future and also the present, is
part of the world of maximum probability. Here pride and
perfectionism, it seems to me, are on the part of the absolutists.
Behind them is the old fantasmal hankering for a universal
knowledge.

In the semantic world of probability there is plenty of room for
error and correction. But many statements, according to the
semantic view, will not be part of this world, this web of human
and historic corroboration. They are 'noise', something like the
radio operator's 'static', they come out of the ether and return to
it, they affect our nerves but not the network of our communica-
tion. This is the semantic classification of most of the terms which
scholasticism (and idealist philosophy) use; for example, God,
Being, Eternity, Sin and Mind (as opposed to Body).

However, just because he recognises another use of words
(which he opposes to direct meaningfulness), the semasiologist
may be tempted to regard poetry as a dumping ground for these
otherwise unemployable 'noises'. I have never found I. A.
Richards's distinction between the communicative and the emotive
uses of language wholly satisfactory. It apparently gives the poet
latitude to use any words he likes (including those mentioned
above) and not only to give them some sort of meaning but to re-
define them within his own poetic context. At the same time it
seems to reveal a curiously absolutist view of language. Words,
after all, are all the time, both in poetry and prose, becoming

206 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

subject to redefinition, for this is the organic behaviour of lan-
guage. Also implicitly, in the very vagueness of this view about
the 'emotive', Richards gives up the attempt to classify poetry,
at a much earlier stage than usual or necessary.

I suggest, on the contrary, that while the relations which he
makes between his words and statements may be special, unusual,
and also circumscribed or even isolated by the poem, the poet is
even more concerned than any other user of words with 'meaning'
in the semasiologist's sense of something which is verifiable.
Certainly it is the experienced fact that the poet works through
emotion. Perhaps we could have even greater certainty on this
point if we were clearer as to what emotion is. But it seems to be
some physiological disturbance accompanying experience, visual
or auditory, or a combination of these and of other forms of
perception, which has not yet been analysed out into conscious
and intellectual statements. Theoretically it would be possible, I
believe, to take any poem, from the intensest lyric to the most
unified drama, and analyse it into a number of statements, no
doubt approaching infinity, which would cover its total meaning.
Of course I have no wish at all to deny that the poem would vanish
in the process. But that is the point. The poem achieves its poetic
effect by choosing its moment of concentration, of 'representation'
of meanings, which are, as it were, visible to the poet at that point,
that moment.

How can we say that the poem's meaning is in any sense
verifiable, especially when we can thus see that by continuing the
analysis too far into verifiable statements we lose the poem
itself?

I think that the poet's relation to the verifiable is certainly never
one of making atomic statements. He is rather like a fisherman
who has caught in his net the poem a shoal of statements
which were swimming towards a verifiable meaning. (This, let me
add, has nothing to do with Richards' 'pseudo-statements'.)
Moreover, to go back to the metaphor, the shoal was naturally
spawned and was proceeding to its natural biological work of
growth, reproduction and participation in biological process. In

POETRY AND TRUTH 207

other words, something with all the complexity of the organic was
'given' in experience and the poet caught it in words. I do not
think that the point of attachment to an external verifiable is
unimportant or that the poem is merely a matter of self-coherence.
That is what Richards' 'pseudo-statements' suggest. I think that
a poem always 'means' something, that it is always trying to
communicate some form of experience, even though in the end,
because the words and the feeling are inseparable, the com-
municated experience may be different from the one which caused
the first stimulation.

In an enormous number of cases, perhaps with the majority of
not overlong poems which have lingered in the world's memory, it
would not occur to us to undertake any verification of the reality
of the poet's emotions, of the accuracy of his references or of the
truth of the general statements which may appear in the structure
of the poem. Doubt does not enter in any more than it does when
a normal acquaintance tells us that he has lost his mother, or
fallen in love, or has just recovered from an operation. I have
deliberately chosen examples which would cause some slight, at
least social, difficulty in verification, so as to make a rough analogy
with the mood in which we 'believe' a poem. We react in each
case with immediate sympathy. There is no visible reason for
believing what is said, there is just no reason for doubting it.

But on the other hand a great many poems, and perhaps the
majority of long poems, include in their structure references to the
'world' of general statement, from opinion to some form of
philosophy, and here there is always the probability, indeed we
may say the inevitability, of contradiction.

I say inevitability of contradiction since it is just because 'truth',
the only truth that we have, is a method of discovery, that it
cannot be completely divorced from historical circumstances. A
long period of intellectual stability giving a static appearance to
'truth' will have clear advantages for some poets and may indeed
provide a comfortable framework in which great poetry may be
written. Another kind of poet of an inquiring (and answering)
turn of mind may work out such a system for himself, though it

208 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

will tend to be less stable and will probably be useless to other
poets. Dante is an example of the first type, and Wordsworth of
the second.

This may seem to suggest the opposite of what I intend : that
truth is so entirely relative to epochs that it does not matter what
beliefs a poet adopts or, much more serious, that he should work
only within a framework of beliefs which has been laid down by
an external authority. If one really believes that there can be an
external 'authority' for truth in the sense, in which the word is used
by the neo-scholastics, it is indeed logical to try to restore the
framework of beliefs as it was at the time when, for the poet's use,
it worked best. Unfortunately we have had in our time plenty of
evidence of the working of authoritarian systems. Authority as
used by the neo-scholastics does not mean merely moral authority,
it means authority with the power of sanctions. Mr. Eliot, in his
various attempts at definition of a 'better' society, always, to my
mind, dodges this issue. It should be clear, however, from
quotations which I have already given that he must favour some
form of 'censorship'. I use this word in a dual sense which
increases rather than splits its significance. The first is practical
and political. A Church cannot work as an intellectual author-
ity without limiting the freedom of intellectual inquiry, either
actively, by some form of 'index', or passively, by a distractive
education. The second meaning is psychological, even Freudian.
By their emphasis on Original Sin, the Fall and other concepts
which are repressive of emotional truth, Mr. Eliot and others are
helping to restore a moral atmosphere which hinders the growth of
sanity and indeed of charity. And, as far as we can see from
contemporary authoritarianism, of poetry also.

The point is not 'authority' but belief. Intellectual authorities
are only valid, and indeed healthy, for poets and everyone else,
when they do not seriously defy belief. The 'authority' of science
is based on probability, not on 'certitude'. For this reason, the
fact that truth is relative makes it more and riot less important
what beliefs a poet adopts. Certainly in a philosophical poem of
any scope, the development of objective truth, which is a method

POETRY AND TRUTH 209

of discovery and therefore historic and progressive, may break
down much that previously seemed acceptable as its poetry.

Mr. Eliot has referred to the Divine Comedy as the finest
structure of emotions that we have ever known. This statement
should be taken in conjunction with the other one made by Mr.
Eliot, that we cannot say definitely that Dante did or did not
believe the Thomist theology and cosmogony.

If we regard the poem as primarily a 'comedy', a single dramatic
presentation of the resolution of the soul's despair and conflict in
a happy vision of order, peace and significance, then we may say
that it is a fine structure of emotion, if not indeed the finest. But
Mr. Eliot says 'emotions'. It is certainly true that in the 'Inferno'
and the Turgatorio' there is recorded the widest variety of human
feelings and passions. These become resolved into the single
predominant emotion, beatitude, of the Taradiso'. The dramatic
presentation is not carried over from the 'Inferno' and the Tara-
diso,' we do not see the resolution of the despair and conflict
of Paolo and Francesca nor even of Belacqua and the other
Purgatorial characters who, though they are certain of eventual
redemption, are too slothful to wait for it in perfect hope:

"Ed elli 'O frate, 1'andar su che porta?
che non mi lascerebbe ire a'martiri
1'angel di Dio che siede in su la porta.' "

(And he said, 'Brother, what is the use of going up? For the Angel
of the Lord who sits at the gate would not let me proceed to
penance'.)

It is true that the poet Statius, an interesting and moving
character, is described as purified and ready to rise up to Paradise,
and he actually accompanies Dante and Virgil on the last Pur-
gatorical stages, and is invited by Beatrice to join Dante in the
final ascent. But after his original introduction he seems to be
intended mainly as a sample of salvation. Apart from Beatrice's
arraignment of Dante for his earthly disloyalty, and Dante's

210 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

confession and repentance, the human interest in the last cantos
fades into beautiful and discarnate abstractions of theology,
which are in continuity with the 'Paradiso'.

The resolution consists entirely in Dante's vision of an under-
lying universal truth or meaning. This resolution is not achieved
by dramatic means internal to character. It is achieved by purely
intellectual means. The 'Paradiso' taken alone is didactic. It is
emotionally satisfying to its readers and I claim must also have
been so to Dante himself in so far as it is intellectually satisfying,
in so far as it answers the questions posed or implied in the
'Inferno' and the Turgatorio'.

I do not see how we can deny that it mattered to Dante whether
he believed or did not believe the philosophy on which his poem is
based. And it matters to us whether we believe or do not believe.

All of us, whether, like Mr. Willey, we believe that truth is an
answer to a demand for emotional satisfaction ; or whether, like
Mr. Gladstone, we regard a preference for the Taradiso' over the
Inferno' and the Turgatorio' as a test of poetic taste; or whether
unlike these two, we believe that the approach to truth is unified
and scientific and that there is not a special order of theological
truth, have still something in common. We are all in fact made
uncomfortable by poetry whose statements challenge verification,
much more when we can discern flat opposition to the truth.

We have reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone* ("Ah, there's
my test!") was much more sensitive to the emotive than to the
scientific use of words, and because of his theological bias it was
comparatively easy for him to confuse poetry with mystical
vision.

Mr, Willey has a more difficult task. The reader will remember
the quotation I have already given :

"The spots on the moon's surface," Mr. Willey wrote, "might
be due, theologically, to the fact that it was God's will that they
should be there; scientifically they might be 'explained' as the
craters of extinct volcanoes."

*Quoted in Morley's 'Life\

POETRY AND TRUTH 211

The spots which vex Mr. Willey's vision are the same as those
which Dante, in Canto II of the Taradiso', asked Beatrice to
explain. It is legitimate to assume that in order to maintain the
feeling of the poem's unity with truth, Mr. Willey would be
willing to revert to Dante's cosmogony and indeed to something
even vaguer and less scientific. Neither Dante nor Beatrice are
satisfied with the 'explanation' that it is God's will the spots
should be on the moon. Both give a 'rational' explanation
according to the lights of Dante's time. But they go a good deal
further, for Beatrice in the process of refuting Dante's explanation
that the spots are caused by relative density or rarity of the moon's
substance, so that the reflected light of the sun has a lesser or
greater distance to travel, suggests that he should undertake an
experiment with mirrors, to settle the point. For, as she justly
observes: "Experiment is the fountain-head from which flow all
your arts." This recognition even if incongruous with the rest
of the Commedia's philosophy, is sufficiently remarkable. Mr.
Willey and others of our generation are less open-minded than
Beatrice. C. S. Lewis has provided us with a notable illus-
tration of a present tendency among theologically-minded men
of letters to keep the door open on an older cosmology which
agrees with the claims of theology rather than with those of
experiment and observation. In his Preface to Paradise Lost he
refers to the medieval account of armed men fighting in the sky.
"I myself have not seen them," he admits, but implies quite clearly
that that is merely his bad luck.

The significance of these examples, in particular the one quoted
from Mr. Willey, is that they show that even those who claim one
sort of truth for theology and another for experimental science
are in fact troubled by this disunity of truth to which they have
committed themselves. They are also aware that poetry cannot
safely detach itself from verifiable meanings. They wish, after all,
that there should be one truth and that it should be theological.

The rest of us, who suffer the same discomfort in the presence of
a philosophical poem whose philosophy we can no longer accept
as true but whose structure is that philosophy, must say that the

212 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Taradiso' is not, after all, 'pure poetry'.* Parts of it which express
a concrete vision are unsurpassed. Parts of it are versification of
outmoded ideas and beliefs, intellectually ingenious but poetically
dull, other parts are simply antiquarian. The purely human
passions and emotions, or rather the emotions which can only be
understood as referring to human experience, are at a much lower
level of intensity than those drawn in the 'Inferno' and the Tur-
gatorio'. Sometimes, when taken in relation to the intellectual
structure, they are unpleasing or even ridiculous. Beatrice
continually and meanly scores off Dante, rebuking instead of
enlightening his ignorance. Since she is wrong quite as often as
not, her assumption of absolute authority becomes insufferable.

We come back at present to Coleridge's view that a poem of
any length cannot be 'all poetry', at least we do so if we cannot
find a better or more useful term for whatever it is which gives its
unity to a poem of great scope than 'structure of emotions'.

Am I claiming that, because the system of thought behind the
Divine Comedy is only archasologically 'true', the poetry itself,
in so far as it is a structure of thought, becomes disintegrated
with the passage of time? In so far as the poem has a philosophical
or didactic intention, I think this claim must be made. We see it at
once in poetry where the philosophy is of private or idiosyncratic
invention and therefore of less durability, for instance, in Blake's
or Wordsworth's long poems. The philosophy behind the Divine
Comedy has been much more ably, carefully and determinedly
preserved and has therefore lasted much better. It is clear however
that Dante has been quite as often read with devotional as with
aesthetic excitement. Many people beside Mr. Gladstone have
preferred the Taradiso' to the 'Inferno', as poetry, on these un-
analysed grounds, and the renewed public interest in Dante, for
which to more than anyone we must be sincerely grateful to Mr.
Eliot, is surely rather more because of his 'orthodoxy' than because
of the unique intensity of his poetic vision?

This lability is the occupational risk which the philosophical
poet must run, and there is no poem 'of any length' which may not
have to be read at some later date, even by its most ardent and

POETRY AND TRUTH 213

specialised students, with more historical than immediate interest.
This is even so with poems whose structure, chosen by the poet
with perhaps greater instinctive wisdom, is dramatic or epic. It
may also be so with quite short poems of lyric intention whose
reference is to a system of thought or to a social code (also
inevitably a system of thought) which is arguable and therefore no
longer intellectually acceptable by anybody. This applies, I should
say, to all the poetry of 'courtly' love. By using this term I do not
confine myself to poems written by the Troubadours or by Dante
and his contemporaries. I mean love poetry written at any period
which conflicts with the naturalistic unconventionalised ex-
perience by one sex of the other. We might compare Alice
Meynell's 'She walks, the lady of my delight' with Wyatt's They
flee from me that sometime did me seek', or with 'The expense of
spirit in a waste of shame'.

My point is still that there is no way by which a poet can
absolutely ignore his relations with objective truth; but that there
are ways by which he can smooth them, by which he can heal 'the
split in sensibility'. At moments of the 'purest' poetic excitement
this is what he does quite naturally. But the relation of a poem to
the various references which constitute its meaning, and therefore
to what is verifiable, and furthermore to any form of philosophy
or belief, is, in so far as it is a poem, never one of direct tran-
scription. To see what this relation really is, we must obviously
consider the agreed moments of the 'purest' poetry. We do this
without prejudice to the 'long' or 'structural' poem simply in
order to see whether those various arrangements of words which
cause the greatest admitted pure excitement have also in common
any residuum of typical meaning.

"It was no dream for I lay broad awaking,
but all is turned now through my gentleness
into a bitter fashion of forsaking."

"Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
had, having and in quest to have, extreme.

214 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe,
before a joy proposed : behind a dream."

"Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part."

"Beauty, truth and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
here enclosed in cinders lie ...
To this urn let those repair
that are either true or fair,
for these dead birds sigh a prayer

"But hark! my pulse, like a soft drum,
beats my approach, tells thee I come;
and slow howe'er my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by thee."

"Helen, thy beauty is to me
like those Nicean barks of yore
that gently o'er a perfumed sea,
the weary wayworn wanderer bore
to his own native shore."

or Gascoigne's 'Lullaby of a Lover' or the ballad of Clerk
Saunders: or Wordsworth's 'A slumber did my spirit seal', or
Yeats 'Sailing to Byzantium'.

All these seem to me to have in common an awareness of the
living, intense moment in the waste of time, dead or gone. This
awareness of intense individual vitality in the midst of or against
an awareness of natural inevitable change, or even destruction,
enters the reader's mind directly as a simple unanalysed excite-
ment. I do not say that this acute awareness of standing on the
shore of time is the only poetic theme, anyway the only conscious
poetic theme. I do say that this awareness is the sine qua non of
poetic experience in general. It is the poetic emotion. This view

POETRY AND TRUTH 215

has something in common with Housman's iuccn about the
'physiological' basis of poetry to which he refers whence is trying
to analyse the effect of such a poem as 'Nymphs and / shepherds
dance no more'. It has nothing in common with the (idea of the
preference for 'infinity' which was a defect of some Ro/mantics, as
pointed out by Hulme. Time is the point, not eternity. (

These extracts however much they differ in period and ex-
pression, have another quality in common which is a/matter of the
use which they all make of language, and which in Sthe view I am
indicating here, is a quality distinguishing poetry fr'om all other
kinds of speech. This is a form of concentration \\yhich I call
representation. I mean this word in the electoral sensp. In all of
these quotations and in all poetry as such, whether we are using
that word in the meaning of one of the high moments? or whether
we are referring to a poem's unity of structure on a*ny scale, the
words mean what they say and they also stand for ^ number of
other meanings more or less directly implied. This is^ to be found
sometimes by actual research and interpretation butt more often
perhaps as possibilities of meanings, as hints and half-joints which
we could follow up, elucidate and exhaust if we carted to, but
which we may well prefer to keep in this prime state o/ exciting
poise, as an initial disturbance of many strata of meaning. This
preference in itself illustrates poetry's essential hovering bet\\ v een
the impulse to creation and the impulse to destruction which J
have referred to above as the poet's instinct for a naturalistic or
biological choice of theme. The completely destructive or
analytic process, the complete elucidation and exhaustion into
single meaning, of course, yields prose. And poetry struggles to
maintain itself in the teeth of prose, as life does against death.
Elucidation, it may be suggested, is always weakening to poetry.
Moreover, if we look historically at poetic imagery, we can, I
think, see how poetry is a resistance movement against the
normal development of language from the synthetic to the
analytic. Poetry moves away from simile (which is diffuse and
elucidatory) towards metaphor, essentially an aid to fusion of
meaning and to the kind of concentration I have mentioned.

216 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

But of cour meta Phors are always getting rubbed away and in

time oblite iQ ^' ^ * s as ^ ^ey * ose t ^ ie ^ r or B an ^ c vitality, which

depends le' even on ^ e mu l t ipl e meaning which we can see in

them as so a as we ras P ^at they are metaphors than on their

unanalysed' )ower to su est further ranges of meaning. We do

not of cour a ^ so ^ ute ly destroy this power, in the case of any

given metat> or> ^Y & s analysis, but the risk of an irreversible

disintegration* 11 * P rose meaning is always there. That some

images retain * e * r P ower a ^ ter indefinite intellectual analysis is

due, I think * t ' ie ^ act t ^ iat ^ e meta phor always establishes a

relation o fSome sort ^ etween conscious mental process and

unconsciou assoc i at i n at different depths, some of these very

hardly wor ^ nto consc i us understanding and easily vanishing

from it.

By metap iOr * ^ not mean on 'y ^ ie ^^ n< ^ f i ma g e i n which
one idea or sense -i m P ress i n is expressed in terms of another
'When to th e sess i ns f sweet silent thought', or 'When that fell
arrest Witl 1011 * a ^ ^ a ^' s ^ a ^ carr y me a ^ay' I mean all kinds
of imagen > anc ^ ^ ^ e ver ^ a ^ economy which is one example of
what I h? ve ca U e d 'representation', where fusion, in any degree,
has tak^ n P^ ace between the terms, so that they affect the mind
w jth oomething like equivalence in meaning.

onakespeare is full of such highly fused imagery one can
-almost pick examples at random:

"You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!"

"That memory, the warder of the brain,
shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
a limbec only : when in swinish sleep
their drenched natures lie as in a death,
what cannot you and I perform upon
the unguarded Duncan? what not put upon
his spongy officers? . . ."

POETRY AND TRUTH 217

"Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing
and like enough thou knowest thine estimate.
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing,
my bonds in thee are all determinate . . ."

Or Donne:

"I wonder by my troth what thou and I
did till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures childishly.
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' Den?
T'was so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see

which I desired and got, t'was but a dream of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking souls . . ."

where the whole of the first part at least of the poem, while being
one extended image, even perhaps a form of 'conceit', yet evokes
another and unlimited world which while, expressing, even
illustrating, the 'idea', is equipollent with it.
Or we have Dylan Thomas:

"Never until the mankind making
bird beast and flower
fathering and all humbling darkness
tells with silence the last light breaking
and the still hour
is come of the sea tumbling in harness,"

"And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
and the synagogue of the ear of corn?
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound,
or sow my salt seed

in the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
the majesty and burning of the child's death?"

218 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Or Mr. Eliot, the superb poet, himself in such a passage as:

"In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of the interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homeing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking loitering and unhurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn- wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk . . ."

This is almost beyond imagery, the fusion of all the sensuous
elements which compose the total poetic meaning is almost
complete, the purity at which I am sure Mr. Eliot aims, and which
is perhaps always the aim of the poet in his manage of his images,
is nearly attained. And of course at the moment of this intense
synthesis, language is ripe to fall back again into prose. It seems
to me that, in our generation, Kafka at his best has, with his
allegories whose surface meaning is so well digested, attained this
point of synthesis more perfectly than any verse-poet.

What decides the degree of fusion in imagery is not grammatical
structure. I have chosen examples which do not employ the word
'like' in the images giving the particular effect to the lines, because
'like' is the grammatical sign of the simile. Some similes however,
in this grammatical shape, are also highly fused imagery, metaphor
in the sense I am trying to indicate here. We can quote Mr. Eliot
again in the well-known lines :

"Where the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table."

This, although its sensuous quality is far-fetched, is an orthodox

POETRY AND TRUTH 219

simile, that, is it is a kind of analogue in the natural historian's
sense, where a single functional characteristic is selected from
two natures or organisms essentially different. But I think that
this is all the same, in my sense, more of a metaphor, an example
of fused or focused meanings. The likeness is not a mere bridge
between an abstract and a concrete meaning; the impressions
exist upon the same plane of apperception and the meanings have
the reflexive quality of highly-fused metaphor, presenting us,
even as the Donne quotation does, with a whole evoked world, in
this case the roofs and the high buildings, which may be public
ones, including hospitals where life and death go on although the
offices are shut.

Mr. Eliot's tendency, with a few startling exceptions such as I
have quoted, has been to avoid metaphor. Now, in the later
poetry which includes Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets, he
goes in much more for stock images, turning more than ever
away from individual imagery based on unconscious primitive
association. But this is not really a new thing. In spite of many
forms of verbal incantation, the repetitions, the half-punning and
almost obsessive internal rhymes and assonances, Mr. Eliot's
poetic method is still what it always has been very near to prose,
his most striking qualities as a writer being particularisation,
selection, wit, avoidance of metaphor. All these qualities of good
prose in verse were most obvious in the poems from Trufrock'
to The Waste Land'. We certainly needed him at that time as a
corrective. Such verse plus such good prose were perhaps the best
combination against bad verse and ce qui rfest pas prose, the
post-Swinburnian hangover, the various forms of automatic
writing, although of course there were a number of other people
doing their best to keep the language awake and sharp and bright,
both before and after the published Hopkins. And not only
Yeats, but Wilfred Owen, Harold Munro and de la Mare, being
perhaps less afflicted than Mr. Eliot with a sense of sin, did not so
much fear the inevitable fall of their poetic nature into imagery.

Not all of these poets have Mr. Eliot's importance. Especially
when the literary histories are being written in a hundred years'

220 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

time and assessments are being made, some of them may be
classified as minors, while Mr. Eliot will probably have the
minimal chapter due to a great innovator whether anyone then
reads him or not.

But if we analyse the distinction between Mr. Eliot's charac-
teristic diction and imagery and theirs, we may come to think
that in 'purifying the language of the tribe', Mr. Eliot has become
something of a martyr for poetry's sake. He has sacrificed, or is
trying to sacrifice, too many of the naturalistic advantages of
poetry. For choice of imagery indicates a whole intellectual and
emotional outlook or use of the poet's total capacity of attention,
and highly metaphoric language of an individual or original kind
indicates the process of freeing emotion from its imprisonment in
the unconscious. In Mr. Eliot's case we can speak rather of
avoidance of imagery, and this again is not fortuitous.

T. E. Hulme's anti-Renaissance manifesto was a demand for
the return to the ideology of scholasticism and to something which
Hulme called Classicism. Mr. Eliot's For Lancelot Andrewes,
which followed this, was another anti-Renaissance manifesto,
anti-humanistic and implicitly anti-scientific, and in favour of
'Royalism, Anglo-Catholicism and Classicism'. To many people
the Christian conversion of the author of The Waste Land was the
most striking feature of his career, especially as testified by the
poem-sequence Ash Wednesday. But Mr. Eliot's conception of
classicism bears even more directly on the development of poetry,
his own and other people's, and more perniciously than Hulme's,
which was positive, though limited. For Hulme had not developed
as Mr. Eliot has done a merely guarded and indeed puritanical
attitude towards imagery. For practical poetic purposes, Hulme
meant by classicism merely dryness, wit, and fidelity to per-
ception, and this demands the help of new and precise imagery.
In romanticism Hulme disliked the vagueness, abstraction and
woolliness which characterise any bad poetry; and there is no
necessary connection between his views on poetry, which were
shared by the Imagists, and the body of his philosophy. Mr.
Eliot's classicism, as we have seen, contains the same core as

POETRY AND TRUTH 221

his theology and is inseparable from his political and social
philosophy.

With his followers, classicism has become a posthumous title
conferred on the products of a bygone age which is seen for
various reasons, including romantic nostalgia as more unified,
peaceful and orderly than our own. But unity so often results
merely from the selective view of the observer. And there is no
special merit in being past and dead. By implication, Mr. Eliot
often suggests that there is such merit. Rebuking the opinion that
there is any advance, even in knowledge, he says that the past
and dead poets are 'that which we know' (Tradition and the
Individual Talent'). This ignores the fact that good contemporary
scholars do actually know more about the times and conditions
in which the dead poets worked than the poets did themselves.
A poet often speaks more forcibly and originally, says Mr. Eliot,
when the voice of his dead poetic ancestors speaks through him.
I will not stress the opinion, which may be merely personal, that
when we decipher, as we so often do, another piece of Mr. Eliot's
deliberate mosaic of quotation, we experience some, no doubt
irrational, disappointment, because after all we were unconsciously
looking for Eliot. But I do say that what we want from these poets
is their reincarnation. What remains interesting in them is
precisely that which is still living, not that which was capable of
death. This living quality, whatever else it may be, relates
directly to the awareness of natural law, and not to the awareness
of the laws of any society, past or present, of God or Man. And it
is common with the quality which the best Romantic poetry was
trying to reinstate. What this is I shall try to show.

Coming down against the 'Modern Side' in public-school
education, Mr. Eliot stated, as I have already mentioned:

"If Christianity is not to survive, I shall not mind if the texts
of the Latin and Greek languages become more obscure and
forgotten than the language of the Etruscans."

One of the best ways, surely, of 'healing the split', as far as
education affects it, would be to increase the higher criticism of

222 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

the classics. Never let the young, from the very begininng of
literacy in Greek and Latin, be allowed to conceive them un-
historically; that is, without regard to at least the rudiments of
economics, politics and even anthropology. The effort to link
classicism with Christianity is over-strained. The Church helped
to re-discover and preserve the classics. It did not invent them.
What the Renaissance discoverers found in them was the human,
men like themselves. If we are to achieve in education any of the
aims which Mr. Eliot sees as desirable, in particular if we are to
preserve the tradition, that is, the continuous life of poetry, we
must behave more and not less like the discoverers of the Renais-
sance. We must, for one thing, teach the young, not that the
classics are models to emulate, but living poetry written by people
like ourselves. The classics are alive because we are alive, not the
other way round.

The older way of teaching classical literature, after which Mr.
Eliot seems to hanker, taught Greek or Roman history as a mere
parallel without causative influence. Men have only lately begun
to think historically, and therefore this chance of bridging the gap
between scientific method and imaginative sensibility could not
have been earlier seized. But we can see that the upholders of
'Classicism', including Mr. Eliot, do not wish it to be seized. In
particular, they do not wish the adjective 'classical' to be limited
to a historical meaning denoting at best a special kind of virtue
in composition or outlook, because that would imply something
temporary and conditioned. They wish, as usual, to hypostatise
the classics, to give them an absolute status and value. Hence their
attempts to link classical teaching indissolubly with Christianity.

In fact, 'Classicism' manifests itself in relation to recognisable
historical epochs, often short. In the case of European poetry,
the genuinely 'classic', in a sense which would be accepted, I
suppose, by Mr. Eliot as well as by myself, has been a few drops in
the ocean of time. With Western music, the only one which is on a
sufficiently macroscopic scale for verifiable generalisations to be
made about it, the classical was surely a peak, almost a moment,
which emerged only to disintegrate.

POETRY AND TRUTH 223

In all arts, change seems to be of the essence, because, apart
from anything else, the avoidance of imitation and a contribution
of novelty are, for the creator, also of the essence, whatever his
unconscious relation to sources and influences, and whatever Mr.
Eliot, who has sought to cover this point in After Strange Gods,
has against originality. Artists seldom know they are being
classical, when they are. 'Classicism' is generally an epipheno-
menal concept for the use of critics.

What then are the neo-classicists trying to pin and restore? In
this case I think restoration as such is also of the essence, and in
hypostatising the 'classics' they are really trying to restore certain
conventions and a certain agreement about values on which they
believe a secure and ordered society (secure for whom?) has been
based and could be based again. Underneath everything, what the
neo-classicist wishes to restore is authority, as opposed to free
discussion and opinion. Hence the attempt to by-pass or at least
to undermine the whole of the modern development of philosophy
and retire on the old base of scholasticism. No such absolutism
is really possible, as I have already said, without, for one thing, a
censorship which would be as unmanageable as it would be
monstrous. In using the word 'unmanageable' I do not mean that
it could not be imposed, for, alas, we see that it can. I mean that it
would never achieve what I must believe would be the sole
deliberate aim of those despots who, like Mr. Eliot, would remain
in a conscious sense benevolent the mere selection and pre-
servation of the agreed best human values. For freedom and the
preference for it, both for ourselves and other people is also of
the essence. Without it, all genuine mental creation fails even in
those aspects which manifest the real classical or Christian
contribution; let us say, proportion or charity. By freedom I do
not mean license or anarchy; I mean that the creator in any
sphere, artistic or social, must not be at all coerced and should not
be interfered with in the process of finding his necessary elbow-
room within the limits of his proper material. Since we are all, in
proportion to our enlightenment, responsible for the education of
our fellows, the propagation of irrelevant dogma by those who are

224 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

able to know better counts as interference. Humanly speaking, it
may be said that the most blowsy mistakes of the liberal-minded
have done less harm, since they do not inherently propagate
hatred, than the thin-lipped disciplinary solemnities of the
formalist who mistakes his repressions for classicism.

In fact, by classicism the neo-scholastics mean an arbitrary
and fixated definition of poetry and spiritual and mental creation,
and by this selection imply that the great main stream of art has
followed a largely mistaken course through history. It is just
because the periods of recognisable order and authority have been
in the minority that we can state with some confidence the
contrary although at present less reputable, view that poetry, and
artistic creation in general, have on the whole expressed an
impulse which can be loosely but more readily classified as
'romantic', at least humanistic. When T. E. Hulme, we may note,
expressed dislike of the 'Renaissance' spirit he is referring to
qualities and views which reached a peak of expression in the
Romantic movement.

What we call classical art and we call it so, as I have said,
after the event may be said to depend on agreed and therefore
largely conscious conventions about values and also about the
rules of artistic production. I do not imply any kind of con-
tractual state. Rather I mean that what we now call the Un-
conscious played relatively little part. It is also true that the rules
have often been extracted from practice by later thinkers, for
example Aristotle and Boileau, but that fact merely gives point to
the generalisation that classical art has been the product of small
societies (small either as cities or in caste) where the rules of
behaviour, both social and artistic, were immediately visible and
did not have to be made explicit. This single fact of the inevitable
association of classicism with the small community (in one of
the senses mentioned above) is of prime importance if we wish
to understand whether we can or ought to restore a new
classicism.

Mr. Eliot has a good deal to say on this subject of regionalism
in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. There is much to be said

POETRY AND TRUTH 225

for a sane regionalism, and Sir George Stapledon* has said it well
enough in practical terms which have nothing to do with our sin
but only with our idiocy. A 'sane' regionalism, as I mean it here,
would be one which grasped, through the concrete idiosyncrasies
and environmental activities of men, that sense of universal man
which we have in fact gained, through many conditioning forces,
including what we call the Romantic impulse, in its essential
humanism.

We must, however, never forget that regionalism, with the
movements allied to it, including craft and brotherhood move-
ments, is not necessarily sane or does not necessary remain so. It
readily loses the real advantage of the universal and become
exclusive and what we may call Luddite towards those forms of
universal communication, spiritual and technical, which, as one
must maintain, do confer a real benefit on the human race. The
Pope at least knows that you must use the radio to combat those
uses of radio which you deem undesirable. Similarly, regional
cultivation requires a central production of tractors. If we do not
tolerate what I have called the blowsy mistakes of liberalism, if we
deny real value to the increase of general knowledge, mistaking its
at present inadequate and partial character for a kind of inherent
evil or impossibility, we, or those who may come to power as the
representatives of this illusion, will do as the Nazis and as the
Russian Communists have done; simply impose a limitation on
human development which has the rudeness without the natural-
ness of savagery. Truth, because it lives and grows, dies of any
arbitrary amputation. The 'limits', the nothing-too-much,
which neo-classicism wishes to impose, if we are to take the
imposition as more than a technical corrective, imply this real
danger. After all, it is very important that the 'limitation' of the
Greek City State was not merely a product of the regionalism
which was inevitable at the time, but also, and more significantly,
a product of caste and therefore of oppression, social and sexual.
I do not wish to believe that the neo-scholastic opponents of
'progress' would reject the real advantages which we have gained

*In The Land.

226 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

from the spread of knowledge and techniques. By this I mean
that they should be glad, not only that they can catch an aeroplane
when they are in haste to get to some desirable and moral goal of
their personal choice, but also that the same aeroplane can be
used to be more humane and more intelligent about human
relations in general. The aeroplane will, in fact, as we all know,
be monstrously abused in too many instances. But it is the
opponents of 'progress', at least in recent times, who have erected
that idea into a dogma and at the same time identified it with The
Machine. Christopher Dawson, for example, writes as if a hope
for some kind of 'progress' were always the same as a belief in its
inevitability. D. H. Lawrence, with a distaste for the automobile,
implied a similar hypostatical view of the idea of progress when he
described the horse as the optimum human means of absorbing
a change of scenery. Lawrence had a peculiar mystique of flesh.
If the problem were only one of relative speed, one sees no valid
objection to the bicycle.

The fact is that The Machine', whatever that may be, is not to
be identified with progress. On the other hand, machines have
been necessary for any advances, including moral ones, which
human beings have made. A machine, in the technical sense, is
something calculable and exactly reproducible. But all the ways,
since the beginning of human history, in which we have organised
and passed on our handling of any part of nature are essentially
machines. A church is a machine for worship. The Church is a
machine for the unification of human living. Like other machines,
it was a good machine while it worked. And, like other machines,
it worked while it conformed to the laws of its material. But
'human nature' is never a raw material in the same way as
electricity or steel. The conception is always partly a convention,
an artifice. Not to recognise this is the first step towards becoming
a mechanist. The doctrine of Original Sin based on a fixed
conception of human nature is certainly at least as mechanical as
many of the more liberal attempts to organise human relations.
Churchmen can point to the period of cultural and psychological
unification when the Church produced a common language of

POETRY AND TRUTH 227

conceptions, as Greece and Rome had done, so that the great
dramatic case-book, represented by such extremes as the Divine
Comedy and the Elizabethan drama, still only proved the rules.
No one can fairly deny the immense value which this unification
once had, nor that humanity paid a high price for it, as we pay for
all the steps of our devious human progress today we may say
for the advances of technology. But that must be looked at also as
a step in our history, that is, as a conditioned choice among our
human evils.

At the back of all was this agreement about Sin and therefore
about the nature and definition of Man. The concept worked
because it was agreed, because it was a convention, not because it
was Original, not because it was an absolute description of
human nature. In seeking 'classicism' the neo-scholastics are
seeking the convention, without regard to the fact that the
classicism of Greek and Rome were based on quite different
conventions about sin. What the neo-scholastics will not accept is
that we cannot really know about Man until we know about men
and women. Art has to maintain a balance between the abstract
and the concrete, the universal and the particular. In one sense
poetry is just this balance, or rather this fusion. What we vaguely
indicate as classicism, in either its pagan or its Christian form
and this is something real in so far as the movement is spontaneous
and not artificial is valuable as a corrective to romanticism run
wild, the romanticism which makes a virtue of formlessness. This
wild romanticism may be either an insane realism or an un-
controlled fantasy, these terms covering exaggerated stream-of-
consciousness literature, unlimited surrealism, utterly free verse
and Udolfan thrillers. But the classical corrective has been and
should be of relatively brief application in human history, and it
has been applied best when it has been applied casually, in-
dividually and not too consciously; above all, wittily and
humorously. Jane Austen was a classical corrective, in this light
and casual sense, to the Udolfan and other mysteries in which
fiction had entangled itself, but we do not have to limit the novel
to her neat framework. Jane Austen's method was by no means

228 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

satirical chiefly it was limited, by the natural limits of its chosen
material, and it was 'dry'; but the possibility that the typical
classical genre is Satire is perhaps worth considering.

In fact what we call classicism has been a benefit of limitation
based not merely on men's unconscious acceptance of a set of
conventionalised beliefs about the behaviour of mankind and its
significance, but on men's real ignorance of their actual fellows.
The great dramas of the past have blazed against a brutish,
somnolent and superstitious background. They were a type of
education without general literacy. That I believe we ought not
again to demand the privilege of the 'classical' at the social price of
obscurantism does not mean that I claim any great virtue for
literacy as such. It is too easy for Mr. Eliot in Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture, to ask an implicit question That education
makes people happier' pointing out an Idol of the County
Council Chamber, and making an Aunt Sally of it. That our
education today is still largely wrong means in practice that we
still want more of a different kind. Roughly, we need to educate
people to know about people. We must begin to do this, not only
in the nursery, but at the breast and before that.

If we had education in this true and fundamental form, an
education of the emotions, we should not need to worry much
about the advantages or disadvantages of literacy, still less about
the classics, and not at all about the evils of state interference. By
this I mean that if a few basic biological and psychological laws of
an intellectually rather simple character were to be accepted by the
practical authorities, even as far as they accept the rulings of
scientific workers in the fields of the inanimate, the state could
automatically limit its interference to removing barriers.

Those who dislike and habitually misconceive the nature of all
sciences are also those who often tell us that psychology is not yet
a science. For this belief they commonly give two main reasons:
that psychologists cannot reduce the description of a human being
to exact mathematical formulae, and that medical psychologists do
not succeed in curing neurotic illness as often as patient, doctor or
general public could wish. The basis of scientific method however

POETRY AND TRUTH 229

is the observation and verification of laws. In this sense psy-
chology as well as sociology in all its branches are sciences like any
other. The insistence on the quantitative or mathematical is an
example of a valuable technique of attack on the views of our
adversaries. The shocked disapproval of anti-Marxists for any
deviation from Stalinism is another: the attempt to counter
Church theology with the actual statements of Christ is one more.

The real reason for neo-scholastic attacks on contemporary
psychology is a wish to preserve the theological view of human
nature, in particular the doctrine of Original Sin, with its im-
plication that the one thing which human beings inherently cannot
learn is the one thing they most need to learn: the truth about
other human beings and therefore about themselves. I see no
reason for supposing that human beings are radically unteachable
in this respect. Mankind as a whole seems to have an unlimited
capacity for learning. As far as medical psychology is concerned
we have no right to draw absolute conclusions of disappointment
from the rate of 'cure' any more than the majority of us do from
the present results of cancer research.

In psychology there is even now an agreement over simple and
yet revolutionary fundamentals which is quite sufficient to
provide us with a working conception of the child who is father to
the man, a conception moreover which flatly gives the lie to the
scholastic conception of the original sinner.

In a way which should indeed gratify our neo-scholastic battlers
for the idea of a continuous 'Christian' heritage, the beliefs of our
public and social authorities, whether Protestant or agnostic, are
still unconsciously dominated by a conception of the child as a
pocket adult, a forlorn being who is born wearing his father's
psychological trousers already cut down. This conception, by
whomsoever it is held, denies in effect the existence and role of
unconscious mind. But all learning, by which I mean all change of
character and capacities, takes place partly in the unconscious
mind and the unconscious nervous processes. And unless un-
conscious process is affected, learning, however useful and desira-
ble, even from the individual's point of view, does not take place.

230 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Different schools of psychological thought do differ profoundly
about the contents at any given moment of unconscious mind,
about their aetiology also, and about their ultimate social
orientation. But they agree that these unconscious processes are
our instrument of education, the means by which we absorb and
also make available for change, our learning of all kinds. It is not
surprising that the Catholic priesthood is faced by a mass of
recalcitrants and recidivists. An absolute dogmatic morality taught
as a science of human nature is totally indigestible by our real
mental organs.

This role of the unconscious is precisely one, and the most
important, of these fundamental points of agreement among all
psychological observers who have not themselves been too deeply
touched by the dogma of Original Sin which in some form infects
us all, and who therefore can think of unconscious mentation as
something other than a static sump of wickedness. But the
temptation to think of the infantile mind as not merely aggressive
but knowingly sadistic, and of the child merely as a bad adult,
who wants at best licking, at worst bludgeoning, into shape, is
still strong with all of us. Those who have been driven out of their
childhood by a rain of either intellectual or physical blows will
not willingly return to it in imagination. They will naturally
prefer the view that the way they now are obliged to deal with their
'adult* fellows is and always has been the best. From this static
view of human beings we learn only one method of dealing with
them, to counter their aggression with aggression. It implicitly
denies the observable fact that a human being develops from a
more primitive condition and, having clearly some original
principle of growth in him, is also clearly educable. The dogma
of a static 'Nature' which is also the basis of the dogma of
Original Sin is an intellectual resting-place and a big comfort,
like all absolutes. It is, however, observably wrong, therefore
socially immensely dangerous and, like many ecclesiastical
dogmas, singularly opposed to the meaning of Christ.

To deny the dogma of Original Sin does not mean that one
has fallen into the Pelagian fallacy. I use this term to indicate

POETRY AND TRUTH 231

a distinction from the Pelagian heresy, which has a definite
meaning in theological history. The Pelagian fallacy is the
form of a charge levelled by neo-scholastics against romanticism
that all romantics believe with Rousseau that 'man is born
good' and in this form it is important for the slight survey
I am trying to make of some of the unconscious assumptions
behind the neo-scholastic criticism of poetry and art. Rousseau
certainly said that man was born good, but romanticism is
not precisely described, nor is the nature of the romantic impulse
exhausted, by lumping them altogether with the ideas of Rousseau,
nor indeed by making them out to be a mere contrary to
'orthodoxy' or classicism.

The essential feature of the romantic impulse is its humanism,
and humanism is essentially the belief that men and women
have the right and the duty to ask what questions they please,
to question the state of society and the state of their own emotions,
the starry heavens and anything that appears to be a moral
law within them. But such an exploratory attitude is not usually
so unnaturally and obligingly simple as to be a mere contradiction
of any 'orthodoxy'. Several of the most discussed poets of
the Romantic Movement were recognisable Pelagians, for
instance Keats with his belief in the holiness of the heart's
affections and probably Wordsworth with his belief in the
unwillingness of Nature to betray the heart that trusts her.
But Coleridge was not a Pelagian. The Ancient Mariner's
sense of guilt attached to a wickedness which was not absolutely
redeemable in any human terms. Baudelaire, a poet with many
romantic affinities, was certainly no Pelagian. On the contrary
he shared, and is applauded by Eliot for so doing, our neo-
scholastics' unctuousness about Sin. In passing it is worth our
while to note the ripe moral flavour on their tongues every
time they open their mouths to pronounce the words 'good'
and 'bad' or conceptions associated with these. Whatever the
orthodox view may be, there is no doubt that, for example,
Eliot and C. S. Lewis weight their conception of Sin with a
curious sexual obsession. Lewis, oddly troubled about male

232 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

domination, knows, like Paul in this respect, much better than his
Master. Eliot, as I have already pointed out, is concerned lest
lack of a sufficiently puritanical morality should cause poets to die
of sexual boredom.

But poets and artists if we take the sum of them through
history, have not been dominated by the obsession of this
puritanical moral flavour and, whatever they became in the
course of their lives, they were certainly not, as a majority,
cradled into poetry by the notions of sin or of other-worldly
redemption. Most of them, especially dramatic poets and
all poets have the dramatic instinct have been more interested
in showing a pattern of behaviour, which is sometimes biological
or even social error, than in Sin. Christian poetry is certainly
often cautionary, and so is some 'classical' drama, Corneille's,
for instance, and the Spanish 'honour' drama. Certain defined
rules have been broken and the defined penalties must be paid.
But this very definition is a ruling of a society, whether of men
or of the Church. The biological penalties, on the other hand,
are for the undefined error, the error which is one fruit of trial
or discovery. It is this process of discovery, of living by trial
and error, that most poetry has been written about. There
have been many Christian poets, and the Christian, mystical
and theological pattern of Sin, Atonement and Redemption
(or Damnation) has penetrated into many literary fields, including
that of the popular novel. But not by any means all, even of
those poets and writers who regarded themselves as belonging
to a Christian society and philosophy, have been predominantly
preoccupied with this pattern. Far more have been naturalistically
concerned, let us say, with the brevity of life and love, of happiness
and worldly blessedness, with the conditions of mortality as
such. This seems to have been quite as true of the bulk of the
Greek and Latin poets who were rediscovered at the time of
the Renaissance as of the eager Renaissance poets who studied
them. In particular the tragic flaw in the Greek dramatists is
much more comprehensible if we think of it as biological error, or
even social error, than if we try to equate it with Sin.

CHAPTER VIII

Poetry and Truth (continued)
II. Romanticism and Classicism

IF those among the Renaissance poets who were Christians, for
example the Pleiade, had been better theologians, they might
have been troubled by the pagan flavour of their more naturalistic
passages. I have never been able to understand how the neo-
scholastics, particularly Hulme and Eliot, have been able to feel
satisfied with the kind of identification they have made for
themselves between classicism and Christianity. Christian
monasticism certainly had a practical hand in helping to produce
the materials for classical study, but what the poets did with this
material can only be understood in terms of poetry, of what poets
are usually doing with their material. Ronsard and the Pleiade
were notably humanistic and man-centred, even mortality-
centred. If we merely studied the works of these poets, who helped
so indispensably to bring 'classicism' to Europe, I doubt if we
should ever discover any indissoluble connection with Christianity
in the theological sense of that term. They were, however, pas-
sionately interested in trying to reform their own poetic language
and so of course they produced books of rules whose significance
and value could as usual be misunderstood by later, more
pedestrian minds. It seems to me possible that when our neo-
scholastics think of 'classicism' they think first and foremost of
'rules' and oppose these to the supposed 'licence' of romanticism.

233

234 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

This was done before by Boileau, who ignored the genuine
Renaissance humanists and also misinterpreted what Aristotle
was trying to do, in his Poetics that was, of course, to under-
stand, not to legislate.

It seems to me inescapable that both Hulme and Eliot, what-
ever other theories they may hold, and whatever they may say
which appears to be inconsistent with this view, really believe that
'rules' are a good thing in themselves, because rules are like dogma
and because they give us the feeling of an absolute authority,
stern but reassuring.

I believe that both Classicism and Romanticism, as applied
by the neo-scholastics to poetry, are false and arbitrary abstrac-
tions. There is a health of poetic language which flourished
in the times of the great Greek and Latin poets and which
flourished when Christian cosmogony was dominant in Europe
and may equally well flourish when a more scientific view
prevails. And there is a disease of poetic language which might
have appeared, and sometimes did appear, at any of these
periods.

What looks like highly individualised mannerisms among
contemporary poets may sometimes be merely a symptom of this
absolutely stock failing, which is a form of hypostasis.

Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton wrote an acute essay on the
high incidence of the definite article in Auden and other
contemporary poets, pointing out that Eliot is by no means free
from the disease. For example, 'The infirm glory of the positive
hour'.

The 'the' in this line and many others confers a pseudo-concrete-
ness on an abstract and even artificial conception; it is in fact a
piece of hypostasis. A symptom of the same disease in Mr.
Eliot's later work is that he builds his more emotional passages so
often out of auditory imagery, and that the visual images are much
nearer to stock, apart from being redolent of Time Past. The
roses are fallen or about to fall, a dust of memory to be swept up;
they are quite different from the roses of the Renaissance which
poets so often wished they had gathered.

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 235

"My words echo
Thus in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know."

. Then there was the passage in Ash Wednesday:

"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent ;
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;"

Even the theology and philosophy (not his own indeed but part
of his piety) do not in general read boldly out from the page.
When they are not like a piece on a parchment lampshade which
we have to twist ourselves to read, he has turned them again into
a sort of tune in his head.

"I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of

ignorance . . .

And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

Let us remember that this insistence on the auditory is often a
disease which implies a dislike of meanings, of which, after all, our
world is made up, and which are in inception, concrete and given.
For underneath all the qualities I have mentioned as characteristic
of poetry there is the natural and passive use of sensibility, which
Keats called 'negative capability'. The Romantics, like others,

236 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

often failed to be poets. Ideas, as such, in poetry, are always seen
sooner or later to be partially false, for one thing because, like
anxiety, they are so often an illusion of activity, a feeling that we
can do something direct about the given material of our sensibility
and experience. Ideas in their general form are always somebody
else's, and the poet cannot seize the general except through the
particular, through the idiosyncrasy of his own physical and
nervous nature.

Shelley suffered, in a way which, far from classifying him with
the Romantics, sharply distinguishes him from them at their best,
from this afflation of ideas. He found it very difficult to keep his
eye on the object, not to lose the skylark in the diffusion of light.
Much of his work suffered from the disease of hypostasis which
has so infected the philosophy of our neo-scholastics, the disease
of multiplying entities, of mistaking words for things. Shelley
probably suffered from an ill-conceived Platonic education. The
Church in our day, through Aquinas, refers to Aristotle as an
original secular authority, so that no one quite knows why he does
not accept an honorary canonisation, but not even the Church
through Aristotle or any of its present theologians could have
taught Shelley to solve the problem of universals. Yet this
problem, if it exists, can be solved by poets. They solve it con-
tinually. When we discuss whiteness or blackness, or snow or
pitch, we are always losing either the abstract or the concrete.
But a prime characteristic of the poet is that he can make us
experience whiteness or blackness.

Our view of the problem of universals decides where we belong
philosophically. When we have decided that our poetic taste can
be labelled Romantic or Classical, the fault which we impute to
the opposite party's language is always that it is a form of false
abstraction that it is emptily generalised, or that it is freakishly
individualised.

For myself, I find that those poets who are generally called The
Romantics' were, when they were being poets, as pure and
precise, as faithful to the object, internal or external, as any the
world has seen.

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 237

In their general opinions, moreover, systematic or scattered,
they produced many of the essentials of a 'scientific' aesthetic,
because they observed the facts of mental life and of poetic
behaviour with unusual fidelity. The test is that their comments on
each other were so often on the mark. However Germanic
Coleridge might be in his metaphysics, however Platonic Keats
became when he talked about Beauty, the opinions of the one on
Wordsworth, and of the other on Shakespeare or Shelley, were
based on the given poetic material.

If we look at the work of the poets who preceded them, Collins
and Gray, for example, since, at least in the school-books, these
two are held to be 'Romantic' precursors, the quality of vivid
precision which characterises the Romantics strikes us with the
most forcible contrast.

How many, in these two poets I have just mentioned, are the
'rosy-bosomed hours', the 'gilded swarms', the 'purple light(s) of
Love', the 'incense-breathing morns', 'the pensive pleasures' and
the 'wanton gales', compared to the few, the very few, lines such as
'Her conscious tail her joy declared', 'Cold is her breast like
flowers that drink the dew', or 'the weak-eyed bat With short
shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing' in which it looks as if the
poet were paying the slightest attention to what he was talking
about.

If we compare some of the poems of Blake, who certainly had a
more intellectual conception of experience, as well as a commoner
gnomic habit, than the other 'Romantics', we can see the point of
the Imagist classification of poetic accuracy into fidelity either to
an external or to an internal object.

Compare for instance Blake's poem The Prince of Love with
Gray's 'In vain to me the smiling mornings shine'. The difference
lies, I think, in this. We can say not only that Blake's experience
strikes us as real whereas Gray's does not, but, much more im-
portantly, that Blake has told us all we need to know about his
experience. That is remarkable enough, since nobody really
knows quite certainly and distinctly what Blake's objective
experience was, whereas we can presumably check the dates of

238 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Richard West's death, which Gray mourns. In Blake's poem
the words are the experience. He has found a form of words
which, as nearly as it is possible to guess, recreate in our minds the
experience in his. The only test we have of this is of course the
fact that it is not possible to think of other or further words which
would give us a better or more precise experience within the
limits of thought imposed by the kind of words. The Gray poem
on the other hand is at best notes for a poem, if that, and the last
two lines might come out of a rather stilted letter to a friend. But
with its cliches, its blurred and swollen imagery, its purely verbal
abstractions, it can only lead us to inquire, if our curiosity is not
totally enervated by it, what on earth, if there, it is talking about.
The experience, if any, remains incommunicado, and the words
are nothing.

Am I saying then that poetry is just this vividness of precision?
If I were I should not be saying very much more or other than
T. E. Hulme with his 'accurate curve' which the artist is trying to
express. At least I am saying that this quality is always present in
true poetry if we include fidelity to an internal as well as an
external object. At the moment, however, what I chiefly wish to
point out is, first, that this quality is present even more obviously
in those poets who have been described as The Romantics' than
in the rather more vaguely indicated 'Classicals' ; and, second, that
it is much more characteristic of them, it defines them much more
recognisably than the qualities for which they are generally
and loosely labelled 'Romantic'; for instance, as being Pelagian,
rationalistic, liberalistic, humanistic, emotionally 'wet' rather than
'dry', loose in conception or in living, imaginative rather than
fanciful, subjective, wild, and preferring their architecture ruined.
Further I want to point out that this is in no way accidental. The
quality of poetic precision is related to these other vague qualities
which, in friendship or hostility, we discern in them and, for good
or bad, although probably for bad, lump together as 'Romantic'.
It is true of course that if Virgil or Pindar can at all meaningfully
be described as 'Classical' poets, then there is not much sense in
describing .Gray as such. His use of the language, the verbal

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 239

tricks rather, which he picked up from his Greek and Latin
education is largely negative. It does not indicate a positive
Classical point of view which is, as I have said, anepiphenomenon
but is a way of avoiding direct experience and therefore
meanings which were dangerous, indecorous and certainly not
acceptable by his contemporaries, anxious for stability. I do not
see any reason to suppose that Gray could not have communicated
these experiences and meanings if he had been able to allow him-
self to have them. What is worthy of note is that his world of
classical verbiage is highly subjective. His diction is really in the
main a trick of quotation not so very different from Mr. Eliot's
although rather more generalised. But the aim in each case is the
same, the evocation of authority and the exclusion of the world of
direct sense. That it is possible to retain some of both the virtues
and vices of the Latin and Greek poets and even to retain a
Latinised diction while still writing good verse, even recognisable
poetry, and without excluding the external world, is shown of
course, not only by Milton, but also by Pope and Thomson. But
what makes these poets great or good poets is what makes The
Romantics' also great or good poets and what makes Mr. Eliot
often a good poet: to have one's eye on the object, to labour
continually to release the exact, the true word, which is knocking
about all the time in the poet's unconscious. To have this un-
conscious verbal preparation for experience is to be a poet.

Now I have used the word 'release' and earlier I referred to
'freedom' as a poetic essential. These words here relate to a
mental process, but I must note that it is just this accent on
freedom (in all its manifestations) for which the Romantics are
accorded, by the neo-scholastics, various adjectives of pejorative
intent. The Romantic resistance to mere convention is only the
negative side of a continual effort to formulate experiences and to
know in so doing what these are. Again I refer to Keats's
'negative capability'. But I must add that, though a certain
passivity towards the given is a mark of the poet, his is not a mere
formless passivity. He waits, but he waits with a kind of words, and
of rhythms conditioning and conditioned by these words, which

240 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

he has inherited and accumulated. These words are the way in
which he receives his experience. A transmutation happens in his
mind Mr. Eliot has described this process very well and later
the poem is born. It is a reproductive process, and one thing that
cannot be reproduced by such a process is any book of rules.

The rules which Boileau or Pope or Dr. Johnson have implied
or explicitly stated, and which are as good a handbook of classical
composition as any with meaning for modern writers, cannot
possibly teach anyone how to produce a poem (unless it were
entirely a patchwork of quotations from a poet's 'dead ancestors',
and that would be indeed a very 'superior' example of Mr. Eliot's
'superior amusement'). In other words, a definite and recognisable
psychological process, what formerly with necessary vagueness
was called 'inspiration', has always been at work whenever a
poem is produced. One quite valid definition of the poem, which
is not more vague than any other attempt at definition, is just the
account, as precise as possible, of this psychological process in
the given case.

Naturally the mere transcription of psychological states is not
poetry. States are not the process; and the free associations of an
analysand upon his couch can hardly be confused with poetic
creation, although many modern poets write as if they were not
clear about the distinction. A poem always exhibits the signs of
some sort of unified vision and some sort of control, but, on the
other hand, we can still say that there is a kind of psychological
intuition, an experience of the mind on the hop between its
unconscious and its conscious conditions, which is exciting in a
way we can hardly distinguish, if at all, from the purest 'poetic'
excitement.

I mean that the 'poetic moment', the isolable line or lines which
make us catch our breath and say "That's it", are a final statement
of a psychological truth, as it is being perceived. We feel that it is
being said to us by a living person in a state of unusual wholeness,
that is, of awareness of himself and of the universe, about what he
himself sees and feels at that moment, however often the moment
may be repeated. This psychological peculiarity is what is

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 241

responsible for the dual character of poetry, as at once universal,
and concrete and particular.

Many of Shakespeare's characters speak to us in this bare, true,
universal but concrete and living form Tray you, undo this
button', 'Look, look, her lips'. 'She should have died hereafter,
there would have been a time for such a word'. Even 'Never,
never, never, never, never'.

It is significant that these lines are directed towards, even if they
do not absolutely require, dramatic performance. The 're-
presentation' is a visible and audible organisation of human
relations. It is essentially economic, a marshalling of experience
for the maximum avoidance of the explicit, as though the very
aim of poetry were to supersede speech.

These lines are nodal unifications of the formless data of
psychological behaviour. What causes the excitement is the
feeling of our own minds leaping with the poet's from an in-
stantaneous visual survey of the whole factual truth of the
emotional situation into a form of conscious speech which is its
plenipotentiary representative. It gives us at one and the same
time the feeling that it is so accurate that we could pass back again
into the elaborated total emotional situation, and the feeling that
we do not need to try. This looks as if poets might still be only the
most convincing liars. But in fact they have to stand up to
unending generations of the feelings they have grown and altered
in ourselves. It is the lies which die in poetry, and its truth is
discovery, within the limitations of those emotional acceptances
which are biologically possible.

A bridgehead from the remote unknown part of the mind into
the conscious; the available, the free and powerful, has been
secured, a victory of experience won. But though we can, at least
in theory, find out what a poem 'means', we can analyse the poem
out into discursive prose, the poem disappears in the process.

A good poem exactly opposes itself to the discursive in so far as
it is a unified poem and not a collection of poetic 'moments'. I
have laid emphasis on the poetic process, on the shift of experience
between the poet's unconscious and conscious, his sleeping and

242 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

waking mind, because I believe not only that this shift of ex-
perience is the way in which poetry is written, but also that there is
no other way in which poetry can be written. In other words, I
would go as far as to say that if the human mind were other than
it is, if the human brain and nervous system had developed in
such a way that we did not function dynamically between con-
scious and unconscious processes, we should not write poetry at
all. Because a race of beings, if that were conceivable, which
functioned always on a flat level of consciousness could not
write poetry, we may say that the purely discursive is always bad
for poetry, or anyway strictly useless. 'Ideas' as such, it has often
been noted, are bad for poetry, and this is the reason. While they
are still recognisable as 'ideas' which can be described equally
validly in common conscious and discursive language, the most
they will do is float upon the top of the poem (in so far as it is
otherwise a poem). They cannot become part of a poem till they
have been broken down by the enzymes of the poet's unconscious
associations. All concepts, and this is true also of the Christian
and Classical conceptions of Man, are thus liable, from the point
of view of poetry, to be pre-conceptions. Even those poets who
have joined themselves consciously to the neo-scholastic, neo-
classical conception may find that they can only go to church or
the temple on Sundays. Their poetic working-week, if it is a
repaying one, is spent being humanistic, concerned with the
habits of man on his planet. This is true even of Mr. Eliot, though
as a kind of literary deacon he may have to attend more lip-
services in his poems. I am not saying that religion cannot be a
whole way of apperception. Indeed, where it exists, it must and
ought to be so. I do say that this for poets has nothing to do with
orthodoxy as such. It is, as always, a question of the personal
attempt to discern truth.

I have been trying in this chapter to do two related things:
to establish a connection between poetry and what we ought
to call 'truth', that is, verifiable apperception, and also to
show how the poets who are, although so roughly, classified
as Romantic may be said to have revived and developed

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 243

an exploratory character of poetry which is its real nature.

I must now explain more fully my use of the word 'repre-
sentative', which is somewhat specialised and has occurred in
various contexts.

The poet when he is not engaged upon a poem becomes, as
Wordsworth said, "an ordinary man again". His mind, relaxed
from the special concentration of writing a poem, is occupied with
a variety of words and images, sometimes disconnected, sometimes
in process of arranging themselves, with the aid of another kind of
concentration, for discursive speech or writing. Potential dis-
course always implies an audience in some form or another, and is
therefore in close touch with an objective external reality, some-
thing, that is, which can at once be realised as common by a
number of persons, and which is thus at a high level of con-
sciousness. Certainly there are unconscious formulations in
words, since people talk in their sleep and under anaesthetics, but
by the time that any given human being is ready to record the
words which are passing through his mind we can hardly doubt
that he is conscious in a way which we recognise as referring at
least in part to the ordinary world of sense around us all.

From his general behaviour we may or may not be able to infer
that very much more is going on in his mind than his words alone
account for, but every individual person, and the poet too, while he
is being an 'ordinary man' can be aware of many other charac-
teristics of his ordinary passive mind. He knows that thoughts
and images trail off into infinity like a crowd along a dusty road;
that he can spend hours in mental immobility or absence, while his
hands or feet can be busily employed and then receive some
relatively clear formulation in words which proves to him that he
has all along been occupied in a mute and even perhaps imageless
kind of thinking. Or his own actions may reveal this to him,
although by the time that is possible they will do so in some
verbal formulation. In the course of his life, if he becomes
mature, he will also recognise, fleetingly or unmistakeably, that
there is a pattern in his experience and behaviour which makes
him resemble everybody he knows, but which at the same time is

244 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

peculiar to himself. He may also come to see that this pattern is
deposited from the circuit of judgments which runs endlessly
between the mute and the verbal, giving our human behaviour
its special potentialities for subtlety and error. I have used these
rather laboured substitutes for the terms 'conscious' and 'un-
conscious' because Freud and his followers have made these too
topographical and I wish to describe a normal mind in its cir-
cumscribed but sea-like restlessness.

There seems no reason to doubt the contemporary psychological
view that the normal mind is continually at work. When I have
used the word 'passive* I have still referred to this normal activity
which is automatic and continues when the mind is detached from
concentration on the self or on some object. What then is this
normal and continual activity? I have said that the mind lives on,
or rather is, a circuit of experience which runs from the outer
world (extending from a given immediacy to a wider and wider
abstraction) to an inner world, individually private but never,
probably even in insanity, totally disorganised. There is always
some pattern which can be, even if fleetingly, recognised in overt
conduct, some fragment of a law to be observed. Indeed I think
we can say that this 'unconscious' behaviour, whether it is also
verbal or not, is much more wholly law-bound, more circum-
scribed, more predictable than the very wide range of behaviours
which we call conscious.

By these I mean those which are in the closest relation to the
objective world and which we can most readily subject to classi-
fication. Those behaviours may seem in some cases for example,
the more exact sciences to be circumscribed only by the objective
conditions among which they move. It may appear that the
scientist's mind, while he is being a scientist, no longer lives on
the eternal circuit between outer and inner experience. To the
extent that he is wholly concentrated on the object and on
operations which are needed for its elucidation, that is a practical
truth. But as soon as he passes more fully into theory, as soon as
he begins visibly to relate his object to the rest of the world, even
to the purely objective world, the rest of the circuit reveals that it

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 245

is at work. This automatic mental process is the means by which,
throughout his lifetime, he has learnt his very spontaneity from
interpretation of other people's behaviour and of their precepts,
and if it has done nothing else it has conditioned the choice and
emphasis of his interest. He is an extreme and specialised example
of the normal mental activity which continues all the time in
everyone at all levels of intellect, consciousness and sanity. This
activity is a continual interpretation of what appears to be given
both from inside and from outside. We shall see more clearly
how it compares with other more deliberate or more specialised
mental activities if we call it a kind of myth-making.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines myth as 'purely
fictitious narrative describing supernatural personages and
embodying popular ideas on natural phenomena, etc.' The most
revealing part of this definition is the second half. For myth-
making is an attempt at interpretation of given experience, and,
like all such interpretation, it is also an attempt to hold the
experience in some recognisable pattern for future use: in the case
of primitive myth, for the chief use of all, for continuing to live.
It is therefore implicit theorisation. Primitive myth-making,
continually interpreting the outer and forming the inner world, is
clearly a way of living on the circuit of continual mental activity
which I have described as characteristically human. From the
most primitive level upwards, a human mind is all the time at
work on this dual and reflexive organisation of its inner and outer
worlds. The inner criterion is satisfaction (that is, the reduction of
the tensions of anxiety) ; the outer criterion is survival. There is no
form of judgment which is wholly objective, which is an im-
mediate unconditioned response to an external impression. It is
not possible for me to say That is a cat' or 'a tree' or 'a man', in
pure detachment from my own emotional matrix. That is re-
presented, at the very least, by some final conditioning of my
interest or the direction of my attention. As a human being, it is
my profoundest emotional need to be satisfied about the nature of
my given world. As I become only gradually acquainted with the
external and its complications, the more inwardly-orientated

246 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

emotional criterion of satisfaction lasts me a long time, throughout
my early formative years. But the criterion of satisfaction must
pass over into that of survival. We confuse ourselves about this
and sometimes talk about 'mere' survival as though that were the
cruder, more primitive and baser aim, simply because we forget
that during the defenceless dream-life of our infancy our surviving
is done for us by other people. Growing up means assuming
individual responsibility for our own survival and therefore
learning to put a greater emphasis upon it than upon mere
satisfaction. To put it another way, each individual, as he becomes
aware of the growth of his own powers and of the objective
conditions of continuing to develop them, re-defines survival for
himself. To survive as an individual, which means with harmony
between the inner and outer worlds, becomes a more and more
complex and co-operative endeavour. In my immaturity I have
to become satisfied about the existence of my human powers, and
in my growth and ripeness about the nature of the outer world on
which they operate.

We can see this, for example, in the case of emotional drives
conditioning choice of profession. A girl may live without harm
as the heroine of her own inward drama, but if she decides to go on
the stage, she must sooner or later learn to act. If she does not
she will fail to survive. Even if she marries into the peerage, as a
whole and continuous personality she will have failed to survive.
In adult life the inner criterion of satisfaction can only be met by
mastering the conditions of survival. Mastering the conditions of
survival, in this case and others, may mean learning for oneself
exactly why the original demand for satisfaction was an impossible
one. This in the chorus girl's case might well be the realistic fruit
of trying to learn to act. This would probably work by clarifying
the original demand for satisfaction, which may have been merely
confused, not wholly fantastic.

However, it would have been impossible for the chorus girl to
make her choice of entrance into common and outer experience if
she had not lived first in this world of fore-evaluation, if she had
not first constructed her interpretative myth.

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 247

The mental circuit, if left to work automatically, is roughly self-
corrective. As far as our interpretations of the world, referring to
its possible fulfilment of our own needs, are concerned, Freud's
reality-principle works for us over a great range of them, rather
like the cat's cuff on the ear for her kittens. Where the criterion of
survival, moreover, is immediately dominant for us, words are
much less necessary and the possibilities of error and deception are
thus reduced. Where there are words, there must be, if not lies, at
least always inadequacies. Perhaps more than any other single
factor, words are responsible for the successes and the failures of
the human being as compared with the rest of animal kind. Words
are always abstractions from experience, abstraction is progressive
and is always on the way to hypostasis, which, when we follow this
course of its development, reveals itself as a disease.

I said that the individual myth-maker, the human being who
from the earliest times has been trying to give himself some
pictured account of the external world which shall result in mental
satisfaction, cannot do much harm to anyone, even himself, unless
he feels compelled to test his vision and the vision proves un-
acceptably false.

A myth begins generally at a very low level of abstraction. It is
a name or an image which is an attempt at precision, at making
one's percept clear so that it can be held in the mind. But myths, of
all things, tempt the organisers of power; and there is always a
priestcraft waiting for man the myth-maker.

Where the criterion of satisfaction is dominant in the con-
tinual human circuit of interpretation, and where therefore the
test of experience is not immediate, the priests who are, at any
time in history, any organisers of abstraction for the purposes of
power, can always take charge with their hypostatical magic.

For it is in the hypostatical dictionary that myth is split from
science. It is the hypostatising definers who claim that we are
living in a purely scientific age (and ought to be ashamed of it) ;
that science is the great killer of myth, poetry and religion; or
alternatively that dogmatic and/or mystical religion is the psy-
chological counter-force which heals the wounds caused by a

248 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

killing science. But in fact it is not religion, but myth or poetry,
which is the necessary pole to science. We continue to need myth
just as much as science and the poet at least as much as the
scientist, because myth is part of science and the scientist exists
potentially in the poet. Just because the criterion is progressively
one of survival, because all human labours of any kind become
more and more divided and co-operative, we need to know more
and more about the source of our satisfactions and why and how
they create a human world, and themselves survive, not by
protecting and fixating themselves but by developing and spread-
ing their range and subtlety. This we shall discover rather by
looking into ourselves and at each other than at the sky or into
the dusty works of the Church Fathers, or even into the sibylline
leaves of Mr. Eliot.

Both poet and scientist are specialists. The poet was the
primitive physicist and later the primitive psychologist. But
the fact that both physics and psychology became more objective,
exact and generalised does not mean that poetry and science
have split and have no further use or need for each other. They
represent the poles of the natural mental circuit. The poet or
myth-maker discovers or receives the given material of experience,
charged with its natural interest; the scientist examines and relates
it to all other experience. Both poet and scientist are potentialities
of the same creative outlook.

Both are primarily concerned with how and why we live on this
planet, and, for survival, the adult criterion, the scientist must
protect the poet from the priests and the poet must protect the
scientist from the politicians. In the perversion of language, one
of our most necessary tools of survival, priest and politician are
not very different from one another.

The poet has been historically the discoverer of the myths, of
the intuitive interpretations of reality which are later analysed and
expanded in the particular sciences. What then is the poet's
speciality in polar relation to that of the scientist?

I have said already in this chapter that far more poets have
been humanistic in their choice of subject than otherwise. I will

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 249

go further and suggest that the natural choice of poetic theme is
something to do with love or death. The poet may pick his images
from here, there and everywhere, and indeed may write a great
deal of verse which is strictly 'occasional', but what is spon-
taneously poetic in his work, what is given, will be in some way
about the natural biological drama implied by these central
themes. He lives on the normal circuit of mental activity, he is
always, like everyone else, interpreting his experience at one level
or another. On the poetic level he is always particularly engaged
in discovering a pattern of experience which, while keeping them
in indissoluble connection, will take his inner world and his outer
world, respectively, as deep and as wide as his perception and
expression allow. The inner world of imagery and rhythm is, not
private, but very much his own, individualised in the continual
restless circulation of mental life and, in his case, unusually
available to consciousness, partly as the result of practice. He
remains the individual myth-maker whose meanings, in so far as
he is a poet, are never organised for him passively by priests,
professors or pressmen. As a myth-maker his job is the organisa-
tion of his own multiple meanings this is where mythopoeia and
poetry coincide. In this respect we can say that poetry is a
development of language as the eye is a development of the skin.
It is a higher degree of organisation of the original creative and
synthesising activity of language. In poetry this mythopoeia, this
primitive synthesising capacity, may reveal itself in a variety of
ways of using language which have this in common, that they are
all a form of what I have called 'representation'.

This quality of the poetic is one which distinguishes it from
prose expression, the intention of which is to say everything, to
exhaust meaning and arrive at a conclusion, but to do so by
referring or alluding to experience, rather than by recreating it or
creating some equivalent for it. (On this basis, imaginative prose
cannot be sharply distinguished from poetry.) The poet, on the
other hand, in his poem, always remains standing on the circuit of
his experience between the inner and outer worlds of apper-
ception, he remains in the presence of his total relevant experience

250 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

and continually, in the poem, demonstrates it to us. His poem is
not an abstract but a concentration of experience. Moreover this
concentration is not at all a disadvantage, it is not a faute de
mieux, it is inherent in the nature of the poem. As I said earlier, I
use the word 'representation' in something like an electoral sense,
meaning that the technique or method of employing words
represents, stands for, or does duty for a number of other possible
uses or meanings. These 'representatives' can be, for example: a
single word (although usually in a specialised context) 'in-
carnadine', 'Forlorn, the very word is like a bell', etc. ; the image
or symbol; what used to be called w/Y; verbal music, which
represents ranges of implicit experience; and, importantly, story
or action.

The value of a dramatic or narrative action is not merely that it
holds one's attention, but that by selection of events (a form of
representation) it universalises experience. The drama or narrative
is revealed as a unity within the unity of experience and as an
example of that awareness of law or pattern which is the most
necessary condition for poetic receptivity. That the action is a
mythopceic and representative element in my use of the term is
illustrated by the fact that we don't really need a story to be new
and surprising, in fact the most enduring dramatic poets have
certainly borrowed their stories, whatever they may have done
about their philosophies. Aristotle was right when he spoke of
the importance of 'recognition'. The more surprising, the further
from the normal mental circuit with its dip into the symbolising
organisation of the unconscious, the further then from poetry
and the nearer to farce, which has been the historic degeneration
of the drama. In fact, the real value of the 'surprise ending', when
it comes, is seen to be that, surprisingly, it reveals itself, after the
whole of the work, as inevitably implied. This is an example of
the way in which action, one representative element, stands
in relation to experiential reality, to the verifiable. We may take
the farcical as the example of a disease which affects and atrophies
poetic comedy. Similarly, with the other examples of represen-
tation, we can diagnose their corresponding diseases. With the

POETRY AND TRUTH (CONT.) 251

Georgians there was hypertrophy of the single word (e.g.
'opalescent') ; with the religious Metaphysicals especially, a divorce
of wit and metaphor from apperception which certainly meant that
the poet too often was not living on the circuit of experience;
while the disease of audilism is what smites verbal music, as with
much of Swinburne and in Mr. Eliot's incantatory passages.
They are all examples of a dislike of meanings* and they are
analogous to hypostasis in philosophy.

The poets who are called by the neo-classicists Romantic, as if
that were necessarily a term of abuse, may certainly be subject to
this hypostatical disease, particularly Shelley, and Wordsworth
too, when his voice is that of the old half-witted sheep. But when
these, or when Keats, Coleridge and Blake, stayed on the circuit
of the given, when their meanings retained normal contact with
the verifiable, however indirect, and when they did not, as
business men, politicians and idealistic philosophers do,
organise their words, consciously or unconsciously, for an
interested use of power, the poetry they wrote was as pure as
any that has been written before or since. The important con-
dition for this was freedom or release so that the poet could look
at the object with his own eye, one which had grown from the
habit of such looking, which was radically individual but which
also, since at every stage it had been true to given experience, was
also human and universal. That was the real Romantic con-
tribution.

Cleanth Brooks* thinks that the Romantic (as he defines
Romanticism) weakened poetry by trying to limit its choice of
subject to the 'high serious' or the 'specifically poetic'. I think he
was right when he insisted that poetry ought to be able to digest
any theme. But I should also say that the quest for the 'high
serious', when it produces bad poetry, reveals itself as only another
example of the hypostatic disease to which all uses and all kinds
of language are liable. I see no reason why the Christian and
orthodox spectacles which Mr. Eliot must want to put on the
poet's nose should not make him see only another and worse set

* Modern Poetry and the Tradition.

252 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

of distortions. Poetry, on the other hand, whatever its choice of
techniques of expression, is naturally tragic; concerned, that is,
with the laws of life as they are given in the poet's experience. He
does not have to look for the 'high serious' as if his job were a
self-persuasion that life is strange and terrible, but at the same
time rhythmical, symbolic and significant. He is naturally and
intimately concerned with love and death, the basic biological
themes.

CHAPTER IX

Lord Peter Views the Soul

THIS book is an attempt to isolate and criticise a philo-
sophical tendency which is common to a number of con-
temporary writers. Most of them are poets or critics of poetry.
They are concerned with what is generally called creative writing
and they are laymen in theology as well as science. As a rule, they
do not attack science directly, only the humanism to which science
lends, by implication, support. They may even have a temperate
respect for what they call 'exact' science, by which too often they
mean a science which keeps to the limited place they have pre-
scribed for it. This is true even of T. E. Hulme, whose 'exact'
science had to toe a line clear of the 'muddy mixed zone' of the
sociological sciences. This terrain he wished to preserve for later
development by his equally 'exact' theology.

The overt attempt of these writers, unlike, for instance, Maritain,
has not been to restore theology to its medieval status as 'Queen
of the Sciences'. They aim rather at a royal equivalence like that
of William and Mary. For the purposes of discussion they have in
general been content with expressing or implying the doctrine of
the Two Truths, the view that the fields of Science and of Theology
are distinct and that each is paramount within its own field. Since
they are commonly motivated by a moral and eschatological
anxiety which the results of scientific method certainly do nothing
to relieve, they behave as if the reticences of science were
admissions of invincible ignorance, and were also an implicit
support of their own Dual System. Thus they refrain from

253

254 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

asking some of the more obvious questions, for instance: How
can one admit the primacy of science even in its own specialised
fields, since theology, if it is independent of ordinary obser-
vational method, must claim to include all original causation and
the whole ground of knowledge, everything that philosophers
have called the self-subsistent? They deal with this only by a
verbal usage which implies that all science is quantitative; by
ignoring that science is a method of concrete investigation, not a
framework of abstract generalisation; and by abstracting every-
thing which they call 'value' and putting that under the primary of
religion.

The two writers whom I wish to consider here are in a rather
different class. C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers are both lay
theologians ; but, giving the term a specialised slant, they may both
be described as fundamentalists, and this distinguishes them from
most of the other writers I have mentioned. By this I mean that
they do not dodge any of the theological issues, but are ready to
give all the answers. If we wish we may regard this as courageous
and therefore creditable, but I am not sure that it is in fact so. In
both may be discerned again and again a wish to discredit
scientific thinking which springs from a profounder wish to make
theology paramount again. They are both writers and broad-
casters with considerable popular appeal; and if, as I hope to
show, their apparent willingness to probe the most fundamental
intellectual issues merely masks this underlying wish, their
distractive performances serve to put objective and verifiable
thought in greater popular danger than it generally is in. They
both serve themselves and their cause by a variety of tricks. One
which is employed by Dorothy Sayers I will mention here as an
example. She refers in one of her Unpopular Essays to a dis-
cussion between a scientist and a theologian, in which the scientist
seemed to be quite unaware that the word 'substance' had a
special technical meaning in theology, and she implies that the
discussion from the scientist's angle was by this ignorance rendered
null and void. Now one may say without exaggeration that all
and every discussion which may go on between theologians and

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 255

adherents of a scientific discipline is basically about the question
whether any meaning can be attributed to the theological usage of
such terms as 'substance'. The underlying argument is precisely
about the right of theologians to regard theology as a special
discipline with an existent subject-matter and therefore about
their right to coin special technical terms or to use terms with a
special definition in order to classify this subject-matter. The
truth is that a philosophy which bases itself on scientific thinking
must challenge this right.

Mr. Lewis, while no less thorough-paced in his determination
and his efforts to re-establish the intellectual sovereignty of
theology, is in general less blunt and less detailed in his attacks on
'science' than Miss Sayers, who sounds, when standing up to
Fred Hoyle, as if she were lecturing him through spiritual pince-
nez. Her equipment and armament is often more up-to-date than
Lewis's ; he is generally content, on the positive side, with sneers
at science and scientists, and rarely specifies their kind. He relies
on the negative approach in this respect, for instance, in the
example already given of the spectacle of armed men fighting in
the sky which was 'commonly seen' during the sixteenth century.
His comment, "I have not seen them myself," is not an admission
but a disingenuous insinuation, whose purpose is to maintain
anti-scientific emotion.

Though both may be described as 'literary', they have ap-
proached the theology which now governs and organises their
whole output from very different careers. This, with the difference
of sex, may account for the differences, if not oppositions, in some
of the practical applications which they favour. Lewis, more
Pauline perhaps, who is continually troubled about something
which he calls Hierarchy [which means in practice the submission
of the female to the male] thinks it would be better if these two
sexes had respectively more babies and more beards. Miss
Sayers, who often still disarms one with her common sense, never,
to my knowledge, hypostatises the wearing of trousers, and
thinks that women may in some circumstances wear slacks.

Though Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Willey, is academic, there are some

256 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

respects in which his literary status may be compared to that of
Miss Sayers rather than to that of any of the other writers whom I
have discussed. They are both of course interested in what is
generally thought of as creative writing and have written about it
and evolved theories about it. Whether Mr. Lewis regards
himself as a serious creative writer I do not know. Miss Sayers
certainly so regards herself; and this not only on the basis of her
religious plays, but also of her detective fiction which, as I have
earlier pointed out, she uses as the material of her aesthetic theory,
with insufficient attention (though in this field alone) to the other
creative productions of mankind. She seems to be well versed in
the Divine Comedy, and if she had chosen this work, let us say,
instead of her own novel Gaudy Night as the material for her
analysis of the creative process (e.g. in The Mind of the Maker)
such objectivity might have saved her from the great risk of
confusing the introspective and the creative, which always besets
the writer of projected fantasies. Mr. Lewis writes, quite well, a
kind of scientifiction. There is no reason why he should not;
just as there is no reason why Miss Sayers should not write
detective fiction. There is a legitimate market for competent
entertainment. But since there is no doubt that Miss Sayers at
least takes her Wimsey phase rather too seriously, we have some
ground for suspecting that the preference of both these writers for
abstraction is significant. Their later theological development
illuminates an incapacity or a dislike for analysing and com-
prehending concrete individual human character, which was
always characteristic of them. I do not say that all poets and
novelists who substitute the theological generalisations for a
sound psychology will be led absolutely away from wisdom and
knowledge of the human heart, although to my mind there is
evidence in the later work of Graham Greene that he is be-
ginning to substitute generalised case-histories and the lives of the
saints for observed people. This is only an illustrative disquisition
on the actual literary and critical status of two writers who
certainly do what Mr. Eliot tells all writers and readers to do that
is, subject literary creation and criticism to theological standards.

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 257

Their importance for this book is, however, something quite
different: that they are popularisers of kinds of glaringly fallacious
thinking which more subtle creators often have the good sense to
avoid, and that they reproduce all the stock arguments in an
unusually explicit form. Through them the B.B.C. in particular
has given the Two Truths theory a kind of real presence. They
are allowed to criticise the theories of scientists particularly
Miss Sayers as if on the same level of expertise. On the other
hand, while the B.B.C. allows a certain amount of free discussion
as between Bertrand Russell and Father Coplestone, it is very
niggardly in the time it allows to convinced and competent
scientific agnostics who may wish to present a considered attack
on theological pretensions. There is a distinction here which it is
important to notice. The philosophical conclusions of a specialised
scientist such as Fred Hoyle are seldom a direct attack on religion
or even on theology. Yet how often they are given an 'answer'
from the theological angle from speakers such as Mr. Lewis and
Miss Sayers who are not even of comparable standing in their own
field, and how seldom they are encouraged to initiate any positive
statement of their own views unless these are directed towards
harmonising religion and science. As far as most of the organs of
publicity in this country are concerned, the lay public can easily
escape noting that agnosticism is a positive belief about the
universe, and may well conclude that it is just an unreasoned or
even accidental lack of religion.

As a result of this state of public discussion, Mr. Lewis and Miss
Sayers have been allowed to appear in the common mind as
interpreters of something which is supposed to be, more than
anything, intellectually and technically difficult. Their im-
plication is that, if understood, it would, while retaining its
original authority of sanctity, be also as convincing as scientific
demonstration.

Finally I have chosen these two because of their general
emotional tone. They both have that knowing quality of elected-
ness historically common to those communities of saints which
have been preoccupied with sin rather than with charity. Often

258 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

their proposals of salvation look more like a threat than a
promise. Mr. Lewis in particular has a bias of interest towards the
devil, as readers of his Screwtape Letters will realise. I do not
mean that he approves of the devil's existence except for other
people. Nor do I suppose that he has ever 'seen' the cleft foot and
the tail any more than he has 'seen' the armed men fighting in the
sky. This is only interesting here as an illustration of his bold
fundamentalism and of his method.

Since this book is a discussion of the philosophical validity of
the revived scholasticism which is being used to provide an
intellectual structure for much contemporary literature, we can
now go straight to the unusually explicit statements which these
two have given of their theoretical beliefs.

In Mr. Lewis's case, we find this in a book called Miracles, 'on
which Mr. Lewis has been engaged for several years' and which is
'a study preliminary to any historical inquiry into the actual
occurrence of miracles'. He proposes to discover whether
miracles are or are not 'intrinsically probable', and claims that
most historians decide against the probability of miracles un-
consciously before they begin their investigations into evidence.

Mr. Lewis's basic argument is contained in the following
propositions :

The word 'Miracle' means an interference with Nature by
supernatural power. There is a distinction between the meanings
attached to the word Nature by those (the Supernaturalists) who
believe that something else exists, and by those (the Naturalists)
who believe that nothing else exists. For the latter, Nature is a
great process of 'becoming', which exists on its own in space and
time, and in which all events are interlocked. For the former,
Nature is something dependent, a mere filling to the framework of
space and time, which has been produced by some One Thing
else which alone is self-subsistent. For the Supernaturalist, there
is no difficulty in believing that miracles are possible, since there
is no reason why the Something Else, which exists for him
'outside Nature', should not interfere with the Nature that
deoends uoon it. On the other hand, if it can be shown to the

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 259

Naturalist that Nature is not, as he claims, a totally closed
system, the 'whole show', but that we have experience of
phenomena which in principle are independent, which cannot
be totally explained in terms of the whole interlocking system,
then we have to abandon Naturalism.

Such an independent phenomenon Mr. Lewis finds in rational
thought. All possible knowledge depends on the validity of
reasoning or thought (he uses these words interchangeably).
No thought is valid if it can be explained fully as the result of
irrational causes.

A rational belief, says Mr. Lewis, is caused by argument from
observed facts. So far so good, but we shall see that Mr. Lewis at
once begins to abstract from his own definition and to put all the
practical stress on causation and argument, leaving the con-
tribution of observed facts in the air. We shall also see that the
idea of causation, in his usage, is narrowly mechanistic. For
irrational belief, on the other hand, he gives a variety of causes,
for example, association of ideas (causing, for instance, fear of
black dogs), a bad liver, a complex or one's class-situation,
lunacy, or a bit of bone pressing on one's brain: or more im-
portantly, the Total System or Nature. What these have in
common is that they do not argue or infer. Whatever does not
argue or infer is, not merely other than rational, it is irrational,
and the irrational cannot cause the rational. "A train of thought,"
he says, "loses all rational credentials, as soon as it can be shown
to be wholly the result of irrational causes."

Accepting, though only for the moment, Mr. Lewis's account of
Nature, just given, as irrational, we must suppose that this
statement means that a logical or rational train of thought cannot
arise from the mere contemplation of Nature. It is clear that Mr.
Lewis, although he claims to be a Monist, is troubled enough by
the old difficulty of Cartesian dualism a question which has been
sharply worded by Professor Ryle:* How does the Ghost actually
work the Machine? to sheer away from re-examining it. He
deals with this by expressly stating that he is not discussing

*The Concept of Mind.

260 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

consciousness or mental life as a whole. Of many of our mental
effects, he says: "No absurdity would follow from regarding
them as parts of Nature. The distinction we have to make is not
one between 'Mind' and 'Matter' . . . but between Reason and
Nature." It should be clear that he has made an arbitrary ab-
straction of something which he calls Reason, and thus put
himself in a position of extreme dualism where natural causation,
as he implicitly defines it, certainly cannot operate. For causation,
to Mr. Lewis, is either mechanical (natural and irrational),
it consists of shunting operations by which a train of behaviour is
pushed into some depot, or it is rational, it is a train of thought
which is not at any point, either beginning or end, composed of
mechanical contiguities. One would like to know more of its
provenance and destination what, in fact, any such train of
thought is about. Mr. Lewis says categorically that rational
thought means valid inference or the capacity for valid inference.
He also says that to be thus valid it must give us a genuine insight
into realities beyond our own minds. But in practice he has
completely lost sight of the real structure of a valid inference. One
cannot see how Mr. Lewis's 'Rational Causation' could cause
anything at all. It seems that he must follow Berkeley and believe
that our ideas are rational because and if they are directly im-
planted in our minds by God, but this in Lewis's case is certainly
to beg the question at issue in his book. On his definition and in
his usage, Reason could not have any causal connection with the
rest of mental life, whether rational or irrational, it could not
have any connection with observed facts at all. In practice, Mr.
Lewis ought to confine rational argument, Reason therefore, to the
illustrative syllogisms in the text-books of classical logic, which
certainly in themselves do not give us 'genuine insight into realities
beyond' our own minds. It is only when the realities can be
accepted as first existing, as 'given', that a syllogism or any other
piece of formal logic will provide us with new knowledge, that we
can use them for valid inference.

We might concede that Mr. Lewis does mean just this, that he is
referring to the syllogism or to our ability to make and instantly

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 261

comprehend other more mathematical abstractions; that he
means that it is the human capacity for purely formal abstraction,
without necessary or particular concrete content, which is
uniquely independent of all other phenomena, mental or physical.
But this view could only be maintained if the human formal
capacity could be shown to be directly implanted in us in a final
shape and if it were not in fact always found inextricably entwined
with our other mental capacities, and these at very different levels
of development.

On the contrary we can say that the formal or abstracting
capacity is present in some degree in all mentalities, even those
below the adult human. It can be observed to grow; and even
mathematics has a history from primitive counting and from land
surveying and astronomy. And if we are talking of individual
mental development, the higher forms of abstraction are not
absolutely distinct from the lowest. For instance the attaching of
denotative names, which we witness in infancy, is a form of
abstraction or formalisation. In this bare form it is of course
association of ideas, which Lewis wrongly describes as irrational.
Finally, our formal capacity is abstraction, and that word by
itself implies that something (Nature, the observable, etc.) is
abstracted from, and is an essential part of, the operation.

Lewis says that we can describe an inference or an argument as
valid only if it does not arise from wholly irrational (by which he
means natural) causes. This is putting the cart before the horse.
For can Lewis or anyone else show us an argument or inference
which arises from wholly 'rational' causes? I have suggested tjhat
for purposes of discussion he might use some of the more abstract
generalisations of higher mathematics, especially in those branches
which have so far found no practical application. He does not
appear to claim this possible advantage. The language of mathe-
matics, however, exemplifies our abstracting or formalising
capacity at its highest level, it is our most rational variety of
thought and, in its later developments particularly, it can be
considered as independent of immediate experience. But mathe-
matics in fact is only the perception of logical relations. Since

262 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

moreover Mr. Lewis has been talking all along about origins, how
our capacity for rational thought gets into the universe, we are
entitled to point out that, as a mental capacity mathematics is not
distinct from all the other forms of abstraction by which we do all
our thinking. The fact that the higher developments of ab-
straction can take place without immediate empirical reference
does not mean that they have arisen in total independence of
experience, either the experience of the human race or of the
individual. We are abstracters, perceivers of relations and
oppositions. That we can abstract at higher and higher levels tells
us nothing about the source of Human Reason, it only tells us that
as animals we have characteristics which by practice become
accomplishments. 'Reason' of course is not found in the universe,
only people behaving or thinking rationally. Even mathematics,
in its most detached formulations, arises in a human (natural)
context, the body of a mathematician and a special learning or
environment. Such 'gifts' are all greater or more specialised
refinements of relation-perceiving.

But we can see that valid inference of the sort we continually
use in leading our lives on the level of speech or below it, is
attached to experience at both ends. There is no such thing as a
valid inference in complete abstraction from anybody's ex-
perience. Inference is an arc which is afferent from Nature (Mr.
Lewis's 'irrational') and efferent to Nature again. Nature is the
given and observable which provides our inferences and argu-
ments with a final court of validity. Many of our most rational
arguments do begin in some form of association of ideas (classified
by Lewis as irrational); for instance, those of the astronomer
which result in logical predictions but which would never have
originated at all if someone somewhere in history had not noted a
constant association of two or more natural events. To say this is
not to ignore the role of hypothesis, including intuition or even
hunch, in the work of scientific observers. But a hypothesis which
leads to a significant perception of new relations arises in a
context of trained experience. Einstein may have felt convinced of
the validity of the theory of relativity without waiting for the

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 263

experiments of Michelson and Morley, but the thought of Newton,
among other experiences, had taught him where to look, even if
after looking he discovered a different set of relations. At any
level of consciousness, we hardly ever observe an isolated fact,
there is nearly always some beginning of theory. But no hypo-
thesis ever came right out of the blue. Because the layman finds it
difficult to follow scientific process in its totality and complexity,
he should not think that it does not exist, immensely co-operative,
and inextricable, at its roots, from all human experience. In short,
he should not be misled by Mr. Lewis and others into hypo-
statising Reason. This may lead him into thinking of The
Scientist as an embodiment of Rationality, and inevitably hating
this figment of his own imagination.

For the validity and the rationality of an inference are shown
at the point where the efferent arc arises, upon its return, that is,
to the Nature of observed and observable facts, which Mr. Lewis
stigmatises as 'irrational', and which does often consist for us in
the more or less passive observation of associated ideas. Some
associations of ideas, like that of danger and the black dog which
once bit us in childhood, given as an example by Mr. Lewis,
would be called irrational by most of us, but not by any means all
associations of ideas which occur without logical argument
result in invalid inference. I do not believe that Mr. Lewis would
say that a real dog, black or otherwise, argues rationally. Such a
claim would certainly involve him in trouble with the Church
Fathers and their views on the soul. But he must admit that when
the dog hears the dinner-bell and runs straight to a piece of real
meat, it may truly be said to have inferred correctly. With all of us
the actual bringing home of the bacon is the only test of our
rationality or irrationality.

It should not be difficult to see that Mr. Lewis is, no doubt
unconsciously, playing on the meanings of the words 'rational'
and 'irrational'. He is confusing the two commonest meanings of
the words 'rational' that which can either reason or results from
reasoning, and that which can be reasoned about. Hence, I
suppose, it is possible for him to say:

264 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

"This (the belief that God created Nature), and perhaps this
alone, fits in with the fact that Nature, although not apparently
intelligent, is intelligible that events in the remotest parts of
space appear to obey the laws of rational thought."

The confusion is responsible for most of the other unconscious
puns in that sentence. Nature does not 'obey' any 'laws' of
rational thought or otherwise. The laws are the ways in which we
are obliged to perceive nature because they are the given structure
of nature. It is no wonder therefore that nature is intelligible.
This trick, one of the common forms of hypostasis, is charac-
teristic of Mr. Lewis's thought. There is an interesting and
instructive illustration in his Preface to Milton. Mr. Lewis, as I
said, is much concerned with the notion of an hierarchic order in
the universe. It is true that this notion was also interesting to
Milton and his contemporaries. According to Mr. Lewis, Milton
looks on his characters as obeying or disobeying the 'rules of the
game' and it is clear in the context that Mr. Lewis has an emotional
and abstractive attitude towards the word 'rules' as he has towards
'Laws'. He has not understood that rules in a game are matters
of pure organisation, not of degree or dominance and that even
leadership is the spearhead of structure.

As far as the word 'irrational' is concerned, Mr. Lewis has
converted a mere negative into a positive. If, as he does, we mean
by 'rational', capable of arguing or inferring, all that we can
justifiably say about Nature is that Nature is non-rational. A
rational (logical) inference is based on our observation of the
regularity of our experience, of the statistical laws of nature: all
men are mortal, Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates was
mortal. The fact that we do observe these regularities, that
nature is intelligible, gives us no ground for supposing that nature
is influenced by any abstract rational procedure, our own or that
of some Higher Reason. The word 'irrational' has however a
positive and valid meaning. It refers when meaningfully used to
behaviour which cannot be brought under a law of observation
objectively discovered. The irrationality of the conclusion about

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 265

the dangerousness of black dogs used by Lewis as an illustration,
is due to the fact that the sufferer is unable to observe the actual
behaviour of real black dogs. He is not looking at real black dogs
but at a private mental image of a black dog. That his reaction is
based, not on logical argument, but on association of ideas, is
irrelevant. If he were able to attend to his actual experience that
most black dogs wag their tails at him, he would, without thinking
consciously at all, most probably pat their heads. He would
generally infer, though not necessarily consciously, on the basis of
associating the ideas of black dogs and friendliness.

Another part of Mr. Lewis's mental furniture is the image of
Nature as the mute slave attending the rational will of her Lord,
not only of God, but even of Man as far as he is rational. Com-
mon language is liable to mislead all of us here, and does so with
Mr. Lewis when he tries to make Nature's intelligibility depend on
her 'obedience' to law. Nature, he says, is colonised by Reason.
"When Nature . . . attempts to do things to Rational Thoughts,
she only succeeds in killing them . . . but . . . every object you
see before you at the moment the walls, ceiling . . . your own
washed hands and cut finger-nails, bears witness to the colonisa-
tion of Nature by Reason . . ."

How far the various skills by which we make use of or, in some
cases, interfere with the normal operation of the 'laws of Nature',
the 'going-on of Nature on its own', result from or employ logical
argument or conscious reasoning, may be a little difficult to
determine. But it is certain that a great many skills, even those
which are complex, operate by copying a pattern or by obeying an
authority. A number of our biggest and most striking inter-
ferences with Nature, let us say the Forth Bridge or a Comet
aircraft, are the work of a community of detail- operatives who
may have no clear comprehension of the whole nor therefore of
what Mr. Lewis would call its rationality. Mr. Lewis would say
that the whole is the fruit of the rational calculations of the
engineer who planned the work. If we adopted Mr. Lewis's use of
the word 'rational', or what seems to be the commonest of these
uses, we might say that this is true, but in fact the engineer works

266 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

by finding out about, or by being instructed in, stresses and
strains, the laws of his given material, of observed and regular
Nature. He masters Nature (or 'colonises' her) by first obeying
her. This is no more than to say that we are all living beings with a
capacity for learning and for creating in a material.

Mr. Lewis has expressly stated that he is not trying to tell us
anything about the mental or the conscious as a whole. But I do
not see what meaning we can give to the word Reason, as he uses
it, if we try to dissociate it from the concepts of mentality or
consciousness as a whole. I do not see what other basis Mr. Lewis
can use if and when he examines the communal operations by
which we change the face of Nature to distinguish between the
learned and later reflex skills, and the planning and analysing
operations of Reason. The fact is of course that I do things of
greatly varying complexity, from cutting my finger-nails to playing
the piano, without being conscious that I am using my reason at
all, if indeed it can be supposed that I am actually doing so. If I
continue consciously to 'use my reason' after reaching a certain
degree of learning or proficiency in these accomplishments, I shall
have to give them up because I shall become inhibited from
performance. Certainly in the intervals of performance I can
think about more efficient ways of doing them, but this 'use of my
reason' is necessarily conscious. In short, everything that is not
conscious abstract thought must, on Lewis's definition, be
indistinguishable from 'Nature'. He may seem to have covered
himself by saying that 'No harm' would come from regarding
certain aspects of the mind, for instance emotion or mental
images, as 'parts of Nature', but it is obvious that this limits
reason to conscious ideas or abstractions which are either about
physical Nature or about our remaining mental operations.

It is in fact very difficult to find a definition of the ideas of
reason which distinguishes them from what Mr. Lewis defines as
Nature, other than our consciousness that we have them. Our
capacity for valid inference is not sufficiently exclusive in itself to
fit what Mr. Lewis apparently means. And this leaves his argu-
ment in a very unsatisfactory state. For if the rest of conscious-

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 267

ness may 'without harm' be regarded as part of Nature, this must
mean that it is not necessary that reason, which we are to regard
as totally distinct from Nature, should be dependent on con-
sciousness. And indeed it is true that we can 'act reasonably' in
the conscious judgment of others, without being ourselves
conscious that we are doing so. But in that case how does Mr.
Lewis draw any distinction between our reason and our learned
skills, which may be unconscious; or between the animal and the
human; or indeed between the animal and the automatic machine?
Whether he means to or not, he seems to be making too much of
the fact that we can think and of course talk about ourselves,
unlike the 'mute' creation awaiting the will of her Lord.

Colonised Nature, the objective world of manufactured or
cultivated objects, gives us no precise information about the parts
played respectively by reason and Nature in their production.
The product, whether it is regarded from the angle of the one who
designs or of the one who copies the design, results from a learned
skill. Again we can say that Mr. Lewis has erected an impassable
Cartesian barrier between his 'reason' and his Nature, and might
have saved himself the trouble, and even perhaps the trouble of
writing his book, if he had noticed that he was doing so. When we
'reason', what do we reason about? If by 'reason' and 'being
Rational' we really mean nothing but the capacity to make valid
inferences, then reason cannot arise without Nature. Nature,
from this point of view, is the sum of things we reason about. The
trouble is that by reason and the rational Mr. Lewis means too
many other things as well, many of them mutually exclusive.

We can now produce machines which will make valid in-
ferences of high complexity. To be consistent, Mr. Lewis would
surely have to admit that the inferences of the grocer's adding
machine, which result in a correct price-ticket, are valid and
therefore rational. There seems to be no particular point in
describing even the original design of the machine as a colonisation
of Nature by reason, since it was not produced by someone who
sat down and took his conscious abstract thought out of the blue.
It can only be understood as the result of the whole development

268 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

of mathematics; and mathematics began as one of the tools
stumbled upon by a tool-making animal in the course of his trials
and errors.

The ectypal machines are certainly the products of particular
skills, not of repeated inferences. But the grocer's machine, once
it has been manufactured, and as long as it is in working order,
goes on making valid inferences without any assistance from our
reason or even the grocer's; while it is highly improbable that the
original designer will be asked to come down and make it behave
rationally. We trust it because it comes from a reputable firm and
because it does not in practice add up to our disadvantage, as the
grocer has been known to do. We would much prefer that the
grocer kept out of the situation. Here we may borrow Mr. Lewis's
phrase and say that, in relation to the Nature represented by the
till, the grocer's reason could only 'raid to kill'.

If the machine goes wrong and its inferences become invalid,
that is never because the grocer's reason or ours or anybody's has
been withdrawn from it, but because it has somehow fallen to
pieces and reverted, not to chaos, not to the irrational, but to the
laws of the raw materials of which it is composed. Intelligence or
rational thought or reason (or any such term which you prefer,
to describe the conscious application of a learned skill) can
understand or repair it only by obeying those laws, which are a
description of the way that Nature has been found to behave.

In Mr. Lewis's use of the word 'rational' there are implied two
other common meanings which he repeatedly confuses the
'mental' and the 'trustworthy'. It is only by thus confusing them
that he can arrive at his conclusions about the relation or
opposition between Reason and Nature.

Reason does not 'colonise' Nature maybe it is Mr. Lewis's
passionate wish to discern hierarchy in the universe which makes
him use this expression but we continually succeed in changing
Nature, not merely by thinking out what we should like and
telling her to get on with it, but by a hardly separable process of
thinking out what we should like and by discovering what we can
actually achieve within the framework of existing natural law.

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 269

The two processes are perhaps always present, but as thought only
produces an object or a change by submitting to a material which
regularly produces objects and changes of its own, whether we are
there to interfere or not, we must conclude that, of the two, it is
Reason rather than Nature, in so far as we can validly distinguish
them, which is in the expectant and subservient role.

The opposition which Mr. Lewis makes between Reason and
'irrational' Nature, is not only the basis of his whole argument, it
also leads him, as I have said at the beginning of this chapter, to
a position which is much more extreme than that of the other
literary philosophers whom this book discusses. He certainly
does not operate from the Two Truths theory, and he claims to be
a Monist. That means here that he regards the rational, the
mental, the ideal, as the real and primary, and the physical, the
mechanical, the 'irrational', as secondary and dependent. This
does not mean that he has solved the awkward form of dualism in
which Descartes involved philosophy, only that he has evaded it.
The only solution of the difficulty which we might take him as
suggesting, the only account he gives of the way in which the
Ghost really does 'operate the machine', depends on a double use
of the expression the 'Laws of Nature', which is nothing but the
old hypostatical trick in one of its commoner disguises. To this I
shall shortly refer.

His uncompromising view of the primacy of reason, which
leads to a depreciation of 'Nature' and so of experiment and
observation, is responsible for statements that "We may be
nearer the end of the Scientific Age than we think," and that
scientists have already surrendered the claim that science is true.
We may ask which of them have in fact surrendered this claim; and
I think we shall find that these are speaking, not as scientists
engaged in their special investigations, but as amateur philosophers
often influenced by more personal considerations, and surrender-
ing for the moment the methods by which they otherwise obtain
true results. This last statement of Lewis's is in the context of a
reference to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which he does
not understand. The Heisenberg principle, whose misinter-

270 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

pretations are already of philosophical ill-repute, is so constantly
misused by literary philosophers trying to make out a case against
scientific law that I refer to it here at length, in a footnote.*

The statements I have just given from Lewis are useful as
examples of the extreme right-wing position which he takes up in
the controversy about the nature of knowledge, and also as
conveying his emotional tone. For myself, I can believe that we
might be at the end of the first great Scientific Age, but I do not
find that an occasion for rejoicing, since the end would be brought
on by historical and political events whose operation would
destroy the only principles which have given us any genuine
understanding and enlargement of our human condition. Mr.
Lewis however shows signs of rejoicing.

Before leaving the basic verbalism on which Mr. Lewis erects
this extreme attitude, to discuss some of his secondary misuses of
language, I shall quote the type of argument, as commonplace and
even journalistic as it is misleading, by which he illustrates it. The

* Human Conduct and the Uncertainty Principle.

1. There are persistent attempts to smuggle a Cartesian 'mind' into a
Cartesian 'machine* through the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg.
Behind these attempts is the urge to prove 'free will' as a necessary step to
having 'a soul to save'.

2. (a) In one way the whole controversy is outdated, for we now see
that an infinitely predictable universe even in its non-living parts is
not the goal of science.

(b) In another way the controversy is unscientific, or what is equiva-
lent dishonest in scientific terms, for it consists of an obstinate attempt
to bring back the landlady's ornaments.

(c) The persistence of the landlady's mentality leads one to suspect her
when she comes in dressed in laboratory overalls, produces the objects
and says diffidently "Now let's just see if there's room for them."

(d) Nevertheless, human actions of the sort important for 'saving
one's soul' are, if nothing else, massive and sudden enough to warrant
their enclosure in the frame of a scientific theory. It is therefore pertinent
to ask whether a twelve-stone man will walk into a brothel or a mission-
hall, depending on unpredictable variations in the configuration of his
brain haying the order of magnitude of Planck's Quantum of Action.

3. First it must be admitted that contemporary knowledge is far from
any such statement of the causes and effects of change in the human brain,
regarded entirely as a part of Nature, as would determine whether a given
human action was predictable or inexplicable by scientific theory. Dr. Grey
Walters has constructed some animal-like artefacts, his 'tortoises', which
have the simplest powers of observation, learning and action. These have

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 271

basic statement, a verbalism as I have shown, was that Reason,
including the human capacity for logical inference, cannot arise
from Nature, since rational thought cannot arise from causes
which are wholly irrational.

To illustrate this he quotes the popular and superficial ac-
counts, which he accepts, of the Marxian and Freudian theories.
The Marxian, according to Mr. Lewis, says that all thoughts arise
from class-conditioning, the Freudian that all thoughts are merely
due to complexes. Confronted with this popular abstraction, Mr.
Lewis very pertinently asks: How then could either Marx or
Freud attribute any rational validity whatsoever to their own
theories? The answer is, fortunately, fairly simple. It is a factual
denial. The Freudian and the Marxian, in so far as they under-
stand the theories thus called, do not say what Mr. Lewis (and the
daily press) attribute to them. They do not say that all thoughts
are caused by 'irrational' causes. They say that men's thoughts,
by which they mean the interests and pre-occupations which men

no soul, no free will; yet the pattern of behaviour of two of them in a room
full of obstacles is too complex to predict. Thus there is no need at this
stage to look for atomic phenomena in the study of human behaviour.

4. (a) Besides the random behaviour of particles within the frame of the
Uncertainty Principle there is another cause of practical randomness:
the shaking and chattering of all material at the temperature of our
planet, the vibrations of heat. When these appear as noise in the physi-
cist's delicate amplifiers, or as a slow swing in the galvanometer with
which he measures the energy of a muscle fibre, he calls them 'random*
and finds it inconvenient to examine them further. But in detail such
thermal motions are subject to exact study and verification; they are
separable in principle from the 'uncertainty' of the quantum theory.
They are even expressed in a different unit of measure.

(b) Nevertheless, it is difficult to devise or postulate mechanisms which,
at normal temperatures, show mass effects due to the Uncertainty
Principle variations which are not totally masked by thermal randomness.
The Uncertainty Principle typically comes into the open with mass
effects, at the temperature of liquid helium, seventy times colder, on the
absolute scale, than any animal brain can function. To bring out the
effects of the Uncertainty Principle to a significant degree, we appear to
need an artefact.

5. Therefore if 4 a soul to save' is equated with free will, and both are
postulated as the magnified effects of variations within the limits of the
Uncertainty Principle, one can answer "Perhaps human beings may have
a soul to save, but at present the evidence seems against it. However, I can
certainly make robots with free will, if that's what you want,'

272 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

will select to think about and the emphasis they will give to
them, are conditioned by their complexes or their class-position.
The complexes and the class-position exert pressure on thought.
The point for both of them is that the internal stimulating causes
of thinking may be unconscious whether they are irrational or
not is beside the point. We see however that Mr. Lewis has
slipped in a new meaning for 'irrational'. Also whether inten-
tionally or not, Mr. Lewis has attributed his own usual misuse of
the word 'irrational' to followers of Marx and Freud. This is one
sense in which they do not use it. Since both, in very different
ways, are concerned with what has gone wrong with human
society (Lewis's 'colonised Nature'), it is highly unlikely that either
party would conceive of Nature as irrational. It may be true that
parts of the unconscious complexes are irrational in a meaningful
sense, that they partially relate to forgotten fantasies, for instance,
the black dog, and not to past or present realities. But it is doubt-
ful whether a Marxist would regard the automatic service of one's
class-interests as 'irrational'.

We may not agree with either the Marxist or the Freudian in
their conclusions as to what the preoccupations of a fully and
correctly developed consciousness should be and the kinds of
action and co-operation which would follow from these. But we
may reasonably agree in principle that it is possible, even if
difficult, to apply our consciousness to the examination and
correction of our automatic assumptions, so that rational thought
may begin to operate. The efferent direction of the arc towards
external reality can be discovered or resumed. It is precisely on
this possibility, and on no other, that both Marx and Freud base
their treatments, the one of society and the other of the individual.
In whatever mistakes and practical misapplications of their own
theories both Marx and Freud may have involved themselves,
there is no question that both of them thought that the initial step
towards the changes which they advocated was an attempt at
extension of consciousness. To both of them, people's thoughts, as
well as the observable facts of physical nature, were among the
given phenomena of which we had to become more conscious.

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 273

When Mr. Lewis chooses to call these given phenomena
'irrational' he is merely opposing them to others which he has
already chosen to classify as 'rational'. Strictly, it is only our
behaviour which can be judged finally as rational or irrational.
The thoughts, images or ideas which drift through my mind at a
lower or higher intensity of consciousness cannot be said to be
rational or irrational before I have begun to communicate them.
By the time they have reached the degree of consciousness at
which I am able to communicate them, even to myself, I have
already begun to act. For to state that they exist at all, even to
myself, and even more to attach any emotion to them, a fortiori to
judge them as rational or irrational, is initial action, in which it is
fair to include refraining from action. No action at all, however
trivial or reflex, appears without some preceding train of in-
ferences, whether they are valid or invalid. And whether they are
valid or invalid is shown by their relation to external circum-
stances. My previous examples of the Pavlovian dog and of the
employment of learned skills will illustrate this. Moreover,
inferences always result in some degree of action, some involve-
ment of myself in the general activity of people and things outside
myself, of the given and observable, some general conditioning of
my behaviour, however slight. If images of pink elephants pass
through my mind, this is in itself neither rational nor irrational.
Countless images of all kinds pass through my mind, to which I
attach hardly any emotion, to which I in fact pay no particular
attention, and from which no action results. This is mindstuff,
part of the given (what Mr. Lewis likes to call Nature). As soon as
I do pay the slightest attention, even from curiosity, I have begun
to judge and therefore to act. I have begun implicitly to decide
what sort of person I am, and therefore, in some degree, what is
my relation to the rest of humanity, and of the given world. It is
here that the question of rationality or irrationality arises.

This becomes obvious if I am indeed haunted or obsessed by
ideas of pink elephants. The degree of activity which may result is
not relevant. It does not matter if I run up the garden or climb the
curtains or just quietly take to drink without mentioning, or

274 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

asking anyone else to investigate, my inconvenient retinue. The
point is that to be 'haunted' or obsessed by an idea or image is to
have begun to judge, to have drawn conclusions about the status
of this idea in the general world of phenomena and thus necessarily
to have conditioned my own course of action. I may look at the
world from the top of a tree, with the false serenity of an imaginary
mahout. Whether this behaviour is rational or irrational, its
meaning, in short, can be judged only in relation to those who
climb or sit for more visible or communicable reasons, by myself
perhaps in lucid intervals, or by my next-door neighbours when
they have had time to witness several repeated performances. It
is only as a phenomenon, as part of the observable, that I can be
found rational or irrational.

I have already referred to the subsidiary verbalisms by which
Mr. Lewis supports his illusions about the nature and relations of
the rational and irrational. Perhaps the most important of these
can be detected in his use of the terms 'producing', 'causing' or
'arising from'.

The most useful example of Mr. Lewis's handling of this
concept of causation or of 'production' which I can find is the
following:

"There is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract and
general could itself produce concrete reality."

This is part of an argument to show that God, if he exists, must
be concrete and individual, but it is also basic and general for the
whole of Mr. Lewis's case.

As stated it is hardly more than a truism. Since abstraction is
essentially an operation by which we classify, compare and make
concrete judgments about the concrete phenomena given to us in
experience, we should hardly expect it to produce them, to cause
them. This statement then is Mr. Lewis's way of saying that God
is not any kind of pure abstraction, such as pure Rationality or
the Immanent Infinite or the Superpersonal, and it is necessary, I
suppose, because otherwise Mr. Lewis would not have been able to
go on with explaining how God could have been the actual
Creator, how he could be said to have caused or 'produced'

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 275

anything. The difficulty of explaining how he has in fact done so
still remains, because it is Mr. Lewis's own unresolved and un-
conscious dualistic difficulty to which I have already referred.
Mr. Lewis has himself so sharply sundered the 'rational' and the
'irrational' or 'Natural' that he can hardly be expected to conceive
of any means other than divine intervention by which they can be
joined together again. Indeed on his view it is difficult to see how
any causation or production, rational or natural, can go on at all;
or any change, continuity or creation for all of these are implied
in his concept of 'production'. His God is 'out' of the machine,
with a vengeance. His concrete individual God is a question-
begging mechanism, and the statement 'There is no conceivable
means by which an abstraction can produce concrete reality' is
simply the converse of the statement in the first chapter that the
Rational cannot arise from, cannot be produced by the Irrational
(or Natural).

In order to be able* to use his own definition of miracle as a
supernatural intervention with ordinary Nature (something
coming in from the 'outside') Mr. Lewis has had to adopt, per-
haps unconsciously, a view of causation which is mechanistic in a
surprisingly crude sense. It is much more mechanistic than the
view held by many philosophers who were far from being idealists,
for instance Hume, or than that which is used or implied by the
modern scientist, who has long ago scrapped the pushing tactics
of billiard-ball atoms. Mr. Lewis says rightly that it is impossible
to avoid metaphor; language natural language at least is meta-
phor, living, decomposing or dead. But it is possible to avoid con-
fusing metaphor with argument. Thinkers who work on the basis
of the observed unity and regularity of natural change are those
who learn most readily to think behind their own symbols to the
observations for which these stand. The idealist or the dualist, on
the other hand, usually have far greater difficulty in thinking in
any other terms than those of spatial contiguities and gaps. If we
hypostatise at all, if we attribute Substance to the totally un-
observable, we are liable in referring to Nature, to the physical
universe, to suffer from a crude and primitive form of mechanism

276 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

which betrays us as inverted animists. We have unconsciously
abstracted all the life, all that is also spontaneous and given, from
what goes on around us, and put it up on some great Shelf which
we call God or Spirit. No wonder that what remains is conceived
of as a Machine, even the parts of a machine, of not much more
use than a car which no one can start. To the Spiritualist, or
the Supernaturalist as Lewis calls him, the mechanical, even if
he has to use it or to rely on it for some philosophical and
practical purposes, can only be thought of as a kind of insult.
Hence perhaps the extreme Manichasan idea of the flesh as
essentially evil. The 'orthodox' view differs only in degree from
this heresy.

Whether Mr. Lewis himself is or is not unconsciously in-
fluenced by metaphors of birth and begetting when he talks of
'production', or causation, whether or not he really means
'reproduction', it is certain that he uses the terms metaphorically
and has fairly distinct images of spatial contiguities in his mind.
This is well illustrated in Chapter VII ('Miracles and the Laws of
Nature'). His aim here is to assure or reassure the reader that
miracles do not break the laws of nature. But the assurance turns
out to be based on nothing more truly reassuring than a verbal
confusion of that abstract and concrete which Mr. Lewis has
himself already divorced. The "laws of nature," he says, are one
such abstraction "made by the human mind and human
operations." As he justly says, they do not "cause anything to
be," they state the pattern of events. On the next page, however,
he goes on to talk of them as though they were indeed part of the
causal chain, the sequence of concrete events, of things which
shove and are themselves shoved as though Nature were one
great hold-up in the trams.

"It is ... inaccurate," he says, "to define a miracle as
something which breaks the laws of nature. It doesn't. If I knock
out my pipe, I alter the position of a great many atoms in the
long run and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there
are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease, and

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 277

harmonises it in a twinkling with all the other events. It is one
more bit of raw material for the laws (of nature) to apply to, and
they apply."

Now it is no wonder that 'Nature digests' or assimilates not
only Mr. Lewis's pipe-knocking, but all his other activities,
including the writing of his book about miracles, and the causes for
doing so, no doubt classified by himself as rigidly 'rational' in his
own restricted use of the term. 'Nature' in the context means the
same as the laws of nature. In using the expression The laws of
nature are an abstraction' we must be careful not to imagine that
this means that the laws of nature are anybody's airy abstraction.
It is true that they are our classification of regularities observed in
concrete phenomena. But even if we adopt the extreme Edding-
tonian view that they are finally indistinguishable from the laws of
human perception, we must still remember that they are the way
in which, after due information, we are compelled to perceive.
There is no way of thinking behind the laws of nature to some-
thing we can call 'Nature'. Mr. Lewis, still doing the splits
between the Rational and the Irrational, sometimes treats the
laws of nature as if they were just this type of human mental
abstraction. But when it suits his argument he treats them as if
they were in fact part of observed (and 'irrational') Nature. The
pipe-knocking is "One more bit of raw material for the laws to
apply to, and they apply" or 'take over'.

Mr. Lewis now proceeds to list some miraculous items which
once they have made their appearance, are 'taken over' by the
laws of nature. At Nazareth the miraculous spermatozoon
impregnates, and at Cana the miraculous wine intoxicates. Does
Mr. Lewis mean that a miracle ceases to be a miracle as soon as it
has happened? What does a miracle mean except an event which
the laws of nature cannot 'take over' (cannot account for or
explain, if we may use language which while still necessarily
metaphorical, has become more disinfected of anthropomorphism
that Mr. Lewis's Christian muscularity of speech?) If a
phenomenon arises which appears to be unaccountable but which,

278 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

after due and competent investigation, can be regarded as 'taken
over' in any meaningful sense by the laws of nature, then the
phenomenon was after all a natural one and not miraculous. If
the spermatazoon really impregnates, if the wine really intoxicates,
they were not miraculous. Since it is not possible to apply the
appropriate physical tests to those who participated at Nazareth
and Cana, this statement means that we have elected the party of
those who regard miracles, on the basis of general human ex-
perience, as intrinsically improbable. But it was only by classifying
the 'Rational' as distinct from the 'Natural' that Mr. Lewis was
able to find an analogy for miraculous interference, and that
argument has been disposed of.

Therefore we must turn to his views on the nature of probability
in general, to which he has devoted a chapter. This chapter is
mostly about David Hume, whose sceptical conclusions on
'probable' or inferential knowledge have, according to Russell,
never been adequately refuted, and do not seem to have been
refuted even now by Mr. Lewis. There is the main body of Hume's
work to be considered (The Treatise of Human Nature, and The
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), and there is also the
Essay on Miracles (which was a later inclusion in the collection
known as the Enquiry). Mr. Lewis gives nearly all his attention to
this last essay. That would have been both natural and correct, if
its basic propositions were not in fact inconsistent with those of
the sceptical views on probability expressed in the main body of
Hume's work.

"The odd thing," says Mr. Lewis himself . . . "is that . . .
his (Hume's) Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more
radical and honourable scepticism of his main work." But here
the odd thing is that, having noticed that Hume is in effect
corrected by Hume himself, Mr. Lewis finds it necessary to go on
arguing with the minor and inconsistent view. Flogging a dead
horse, as here, may be more than an academic exercise. It may
stop people putting their money on one which may still win
philosophic races. Certainly Russell regards Hume as quite a live
horse.

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 279

Hume's theory in the Essay on Miracles, to which Lewis
gives all his attention, is described as follows:

"Probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of
our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to
happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and
the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature's
course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the
majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their un-
animous vote, or ... 'by firm and unalterable experience'.
There is in fact 'uniform experience against Miracle'; otherwise,
says Hume, it would not be Miracle. A Miracle is therefore the
most improbable of all events. 'It is always more probable that
the witnesses are lying or mistaken than that a Miracle occurred.' "

Now there are good reasons for saying that this view is in-
correct, although they are not necessarily the ones which Mr.
Lewis gives, and there are better reasons for saying that it is also
inconsistent with the main body of Hume's work. Probability
cannot be adequately or even correctly described as it is here
described. The scientific conception of probability can be found in
the text-books. But it is not true to say that probability depends
on a majority vote, nor is it by any means always true that the
frequency with which a thing has been known to happen has any
bearing, one way or the other, on the frequency with which it will
happen again. If out of fifty tossings of a coin we get fifty heads,
that tells us strictly nothing about the number of times we shall
get tails in the course of the next fifty tosses. Similarly "the
majority vote of our past experiences" is meaningless unless we
know more about the kind and bearing of the experiences.
Probability, in short, is meaningless without reference to the
complexity and context of the events which are or are not
probable.

Further, Hume was mistaken and inconsistent in abstracting an
absolute or unanimous vote of experience in relation to the
Uniformity of Nature and suggesting that that was philosophically
in a different class from other probable experiences. Our belief

280 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

in the uniformity of Nature does not depend for its validity on any
kind of party-membership. If we allow ourselves to adopt Mr.
Lewis's loose and misleading expression, which, incidentally, is
not Hume's, we can only say that the 'majority vote' must be the
verdict of an informed majority, who are capable of observing,
recording and understanding the real complexity of those things
which are classified as events, and also as scientific generalisations,
On more and more subjects scientists give us short cuts. We may
hope that, when all the facts are assembled and available, the
Village will not indefinitely Vote that the Earth is Flat. But Mr.
Lewis's individualistic non-conformism alone would be enough
to prevent us having any confident assumptions on that point.

Even if Hume was mistaken in setting up an absolute of
experience which he called the regularity or uniformity of Nature,
we do not have to agree with Mr. Lewis that he had made up his
mind about the improbability of miracle on an a priori basis.
When he appealed to more common or immediate experience, he
said something with which most of us are bound to agree that it
is always more probable that witnesses are mistaken or lying.
It is not necessary on this basis to consider miracles in a special
class. With the most ordinary events, even those with the lowest
emotional interest, the majority of witnesses are inaccurate
(mistaken). Where there is any emotional bias (there mostly is)
the majority of witnesses are concerned to tell a story or give an
impression rather than the bare facts (are lying).

There are, however, good reasons why Mr. Lewis chooses to
analyse the Essay on Miracles rather than Hume's main work.
In the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume analyses the causal
connections on which our probable or inferential knowledge is
based. The result of the analysis, as we have seen, was a complete
philosophical scepticism. Since Hume it has really been clear that
whatever causal connections may be, they cannot meaningfully
be described in terms of shoving and being shoved. Nor should it
now be possible for any mind's ear to hear, as Mr. Lewis's still
does, the brisk click of atoms as they cannon off each other.
According to Hume, when events of the kind A are found in

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 281

conjunction with events of the kind B, A leads us to infer B, by
which he means that the sight of A causes the expectation of B and
so leads us to believe that there is a necessary connection between
them. 'Perhaps the necessary connection depends on the in-
ference' and not vice versa. He says that the inference is not
determined by Reason, since that would require us to assume the
uniformity of nature, which itself is not necessary but only
inferred from experience. This last statement, while inconsistent
with the view quoted by Mr. Lewis from the Essay on Miracles,
is strictly in accordance with Hume's sceptical empiricism. Mr.
Lewis himself says that Hume 'knew better'. Surely then it is
disingenuous to spend time in demolishing a view which the
consistent expression of the philosopher's mind contradicts? If
we are concerned with truth, we normally seek the best and most
considered enlightenment and information an expert can give us,
and argue only with his approximations to that truth. We are
interested to know whether an astronomer has or has not dis-
covered a new star. We do not wait to ask him till he is drunk and
we can be sure that he is pointing the telescope the wrong way.
In the Essay, Hume was perhaps a little eager to confute miracles,
a philosophical blindness in him just as Mr. Lewis is a little eager
to see them, a braver and more Nelsonian gesture.

If in the Essay Hume had used the sceptical arguments of the
Treatise, the case against miracles would have been covered. For
if all our probable knowledge can only be described in terms of the
constant associations of experience, and not at all in terms of any
absolute connection or form of substance (such as Reason), then
though we have no certain ground for supposing that the sun will
rise tomorrow, we have even less for supposing that there will ever
be a miracle. A miracle is by definition (Mr. Lewis's definition
too) the rarest of all events. But it is not intrinsically excluded
from the investigations of probability. It is only at an extreme
degree of improbability compared with the rest of history or
report, because it especially resists the techniques by which
probability is normally established. We must repeat that the
probability of anything is not 'normally' established by a majority

282 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

verdict, but by a verdict of those qualified to judge in what the
actual event consists. Miracles especially resist investigation by
being too long or too far away from objective-minded experts.
The consistent view which is based on Hume is that all knowledge
can only be described in terms of probabilities, and this is true of
events which will be almost exactly repeated and events which
have vanished irrevocably into the past.

It seems to me doubtful that Mr. Lewis really knows what he
means when he refers to 'intrinsic probability' and therefore when
he says that Hume has been followed by most historians in
regarding miracles as 'intrinsically improbable'. To be sceptical
as Hume was, in his main work, means to agree that you cannot
decide, of any event, miraculous or otherwise, that it is in-
trinsically probable. The modern historian tries to make his
probabilities approximate more and more to the concept used by
the other scientists. It is the special difficulty of writing history
that important parts of its data are irrecoverably lost. On the
other hand more and more data are continually discovered by the
other sciences and made available for the historian.

Even if miracles do occur, the instinct of the historian to prefer
any 'natural' explanation', anything that is based on a wider and
more detailed, recorded classification of human behaviour, is
sound, since improbability ought to be the criterion of historical
science. We ought in fact to reflect that modern psychological
investigation and discovery about crowd-behaviour, mass-
hallucination, and the effect of unconscious wishes upon sense-
perception in general are an important part of the growing body of
scientific data which are continually fed into the historical sense
and technique.

As Lewis himself says: "Most stories about miraculous events
are probably false: if it comes to that, most stories about natural
events are false. Lies, exaggeration, misunderstandings and
hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and
written in the world."

The historian's job is precisely to be sceptical, to start from the
basis that nothing is intrinsically probable. In so far as he is

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 283

dealing with the unrepeated, that which cannot be made subject
to control, his method, like that of Sherlock Holmes, is elimina-
tion. He is like a judge trying to root out evidence from opinion.
The better the historian, the less he will allow opinion, including
his own opinions, to obtrude upon his work.

Even an extreme rationalist like Gibbon, with the weakness of
enjoying satirical emotion, tries to let the facts give an account of
themselves. But though we may never cease to enjoy him, or the
opinionated Macaulay, as literature, we turn, if we are looking for
precise knowledge of the past, more and more to drier and more
co-operative, that is, less individualistic, documentation, and to
monographs where the material is more limited and more micro-
scopic, and the scope for whimsy and opinion is less. Lewis
confuses the philosopher who appeals to historical evidence with
the historian whose job it is to bring it to light.

Even in spite of his admission that most of the 'evidence'
circulating in the world is false and that only those stories (of the
miraculous) are to be accepted for which the historical evidence is
sufficiently good, Lewis will not be parted from his conception of
'intrinsic probability'.

By limiting his study of Hume's views on probability to the
Essay on Miracles, he falsifies, as we have seen, Hume's main
position. According to Lewis, Hume made the whole idea of
probability depend on the uniformity (or regularity) of Nature.
This is misleading. In the chapter in the Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding which he devotes to the study of prob-
ability, Hume makes it clear that by uniformity of Nature he
understands causes or laws which have 'hitherto admitted of no
exception'. To Hume therefore, in his main work, the uniformity
of Nature is not a 'necessary connection', not a principle which
can be abstracted to provide a certain basis of prediction about
the future; it is a description of what has been found to happen in
experience, it is the sum of the most reliable accounts of the past.
Probability, in this sense, is to be distinguished from numerical or
calculable probability, it is simply a natural assumption, a state of
normal expectation. Numerical or mathematical probability, on

284 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

the other hand, which is less subjective, is also less individualised,
but can tell us something which approximates to extreme pre-
cision about what is likely to happen with various classes of events.
We cannot forecast with any certainty that John Smith will enter
an A.B.C. in the middle of next June and sit down and eat an ice-
cream, but we can work out with surprising accuracy how many
people in the whole of London will enter A.B.C.s on that day to
eat ice-cream, according to the number of degrees upon the
thermometer.

But both these conceptions of probability are apparently
different from Lewis's criterion of 'intrinsic probability'. This, on
the one hand, obliges us to believe in the general uniformity or
regularity of nature, but also permits us to think it possible that
that uniformity will from time to time be broken by miracle (that
rarest of all events, as Mr. Lewis agrees).

The ground of this belief must be something quite different
from anything Hume meant or the mathematicians mean. It is
simply, as Mr. Lewis puts it, our 'sense of the fitness of things'.
But the further logical ground for this view is our belief in the
rationality of the Creator. This belief, in turn, is based on our own
rationality which the Creator, according to Mr. Lewis, must have
implanted in us, otherwise we can find no explanation of how it got
into us. The argument, we see, has come full circle.

The illustration and elaboration which he gives, however, of the
general operation of our 'sense of fitness' gives us a little more
insight into the fundamental nature of this argument, which is
interesting because it is also the dominant type employed by
Lewis's fellow-thinker, Miss Dorothy Sayers. He says that it is not
only 'we', the lay public, whose quest for regularity or uniformity
in nature is based on this sense of fitness, but also the scientists.
Scientists too, when faced, like all the rest of us, with a mass of
irregularities in their experience of Nature, cannot rest till they
have found a new regularity, that is, a new hypothesis which
appears to reduce the irregularities to order. According to Mr.
Lewis, this means that we are all 'already enlisted on the side of
Uniformity in advance of experience 9 . But a glance at the history

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 285

of the race or at the history of our own individual mental history
will show that this statement is nonsense. Primitive mankind did
not expect uniformity or regularity. Neither do infants. They
both start off with a strong presumption in favour of arbitrary
power or magical interference with their own affairs and those of
'Nature'. The notion of regularity is gradually impressed upon us
by experience; our own, in the case of our more obvious and
limited affairs, and that of trained observers and recorders, in the
case of more universal events.

What Mr. Lewis finally comes down to, therefore, in his ex-
planation of the 'sense of fitness' is a purely analogical argument
which he has already borrowed with acknowledgements and
handsome compliments, from Miss Dorothy Sayers. This
aesthetic view is the real substance of their contention in both
cases. I have alluded to it briefly in an earlier chapter, but since
this is a book about a certain misalliance which has taken place
between philosophy and the literary mind, and since the argument
is really a description of what one literary mind, Miss Sayers's,
viewing its own operations, supposes to be the process of Creation
as a whole, it is worth considering here.

In her introduction to The Mind of the Maker Miss Sayers tells
us that she does not intend to discuss the truth of the Christian
theological dogmas, which depends on historical evidence outside
her scope. Nor does she intend to discuss her own opinion on this
question. Her object in this book is to select certain doctrines, in
particular that of the Trinity, which claim to be statements of fact
about the nature of God, and to show that these are, indeed,
exact statements about the only kind of creativity known to us,
that of the human mind. She mentions parenthetically that,
according to orthodox Christian belief, it is not only the mind of
man, in its creative aspects, which shows a Trinitarian structure,
but this is also the structure of the universe as a whole. Whether
this view of the universe is objectively true or merely anthro-
pomorphic is a theme which in her introduction she sets aside
as irrelevant. And the essential part of the book which follows
is indeed simply an account of the process of creating a

286 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

book as Miss Sayers conceives it to go on in her own mind.

Whether the account of creative process, given either by Miss
Sayers or the Church Fathers, is accurate or not, we are obliged
to begin by asking if the anthropomorphic view can indeed be
irrelevant. Is it possible to make statements of fact about the
nature of anything at all unless we have ground for supposing that
it exists? It seems to me obvious that if those who drew up the
doctrine of the Trinity claimed to be making statements of fact
about the nature of God, they were also claiming that God exists.
We can afford however to do as Miss Sayers wishes, and leave this
question aside. But then the whole book is seen to be solely a
discussion of human mental creation which, like any other
aesthetic treatise may be considered on its merits, but which, like
any other aesthetic treatise, has no bearing on theology. According
to Miss Sayers, her purpose is only to illuminate theological
dogmas by integrating them with a normal human experience.
But unless her analogy from human experience is also intended
to be in some way a proof of the validity of theological dogmas,
she cannot be said to have illuminated them at all. Unless we can
start with the doctrine of the Trinity and show that it is a true and
essential description of the structure of the whole universe
without which human creativity, with all other processes, is
unintelligible, the two subjects, theology and aesthetics, remain in
departmental obscurity, until we can illuminate them by some
more scientific examination.

Miss Sayers is not likely to be frightened by the suggestion that
she is arguing from analogy. Her view of language, that it not only
always is metaphorical but ought to remain so, for all purposes, is
integral to her whole discussion. Her attack on the scientists for
trying to control the metaphorical twists of language and to use
within their special fields a language of greater precision than
common speech, must be discussed separately. Her conception
of this is purely negative. She does not seem to understand that a
striving for the utmost precision may be a duty, and a positive one
in scientific work. To the non-mathematical, the use of a mathe-
matical language often looks like sheer perversity, if not the

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 287

deliberate wickedness of the old black magic. Mathematics is of
course a foreign language to those who have not learnt it, and all
foreigners are wicked. My justification for these remarks is that
Miss Sayers uses the strongly emotive expression, the scientists'
'flight into formulae'. Let us leave the scientists out of the question.
Miss Sayers tells us again and again that she is a creative writer.
Did any creative writer worthy of the name ever think that the
metaphorical force of language should be allowed to overwhelm
us? Surely even poets do not wallow in metaphor. They use
metaphor for greater precision, and they regard language as a
horse to be ridden, a force to be disciplined for their special and
immediate purposes.

We must, as 1 said, look upon Miss Sayers's book as an
aesthetic treatise, an attempt to give some account of human
psychology in its creative aspect. Miss Sayers has debarred
herself from really illuminating the theological dogma of the
Trinity. The question remains whether or not the Trinity really
illuminates her understanding of the artistic process, or ours. In
my opinion it does not. It is very easy to see trinities or multiples
of trinities all over the place, and it is even characteristic of some
forms of mental pathology to do so. Poets like doing it. Dante
did it with great eifect in the Vita Nuova and elsewhere. It was for
Dante reasonable and not even anti-scientific to do so. But he
would probably have found it agreeable in any case. What I mean
is that Miss Sayers uses the Trinity as a metaphor of human
creative process. But surely what she meant to do was precisely
the opposite.

She tells us that her whole book is an expansion of the speech of
St. Michael in her own play, The Zeal of Thy House. This speech
is an account of creative activity as symbolised by the doctrine of
the Trinity. The three relations of the Trinity can be expressed,
she says, as Creative Idea, Creative Energy, or Activity, and
Creative Power. As I understand her, the Creative Idea means the
original conception or intimation of the work, the Creative
Energy or Activity means the actual working out or materialisa-
tion of the Idea, its expression in concrete form with all the labour

288 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

and implicit criticism which that involves. The Creative Power is,
to me at least, the most difficult of the three relations. It shares the
obscurity and the transcendental quality which characterises the
Third Person of the theological Trinity. I wonder if the reason
for that may not possibly be that Miss Sayers is too determinedly
Trinitarian and that this section of her pattern is simply ad hoc.
The Creative Power is described by Miss Sayers as the readers'
response to the book, which includes their awareness of the book as
existing in all the concrete detail of its particular kind and also at
one and the same time as an aesthetic whole. It is normal for
aesthetic theories to make some attempt at accounting for the
possibility of communication. Moreover Miss Sayers expressly
allows for the case when the author is the sole reader of his book
and communicates it only to himself. But, for Miss Sayers, the
three relations or manifestations, like the persons of the Trinity,
are inseparable, are all implied in each other. We must have all
three of them or none. When we find further that the book does
not actually have to be written but may remain entirely in what
Miss Sayers calls the heaven of the imagination, we are hard put to
it to assign any meaning at all to the Creative Power. An
aesthetic theory which bases itself on the examination of particular
works may very well try to tell us what an ideal reader's reaction
ought to be, what possibilities of communication therefore we can
find in a book after it has come into existence. But the author
conceiving and writing his book can certainly have no fore-
knowledge on this point, otherwise the world would not be so full
of works which have failed to please or have pleased the wrong
people for the wrong reasons, wrong at least from the author's
point of view. An aesthetic theory, moreover, which does try to
account for the phenomenon of communication may be and often
is wrong. Communication, readers' response, Creative Power
or whatever you like to call it, is something which we discover and
judge in experience. It is not something which can be immanent
in the Idea of a book, written or unwritten. We are obliged there-
fore to lop off the third member of Miss Sayers's Trinity. It looks
as if the trinitarian structure which she has discovered in her own

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 289

mind has refused to reveal either its own mystery or that of the
theological dogma.

If we simply peel off the theological metaphor, we discover that
those parts of Miss Sayers's aesthetic which at all resemble
genuine psychological description have been stated before, rather
more simply, by Shelley and others. Shelley, for instance,
commenting on the unconscious character of inspiration, says that
''Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as awhole before he executed
it in portions."

It is not unnatural that Shelley's conception of inspiration
should be in keeping with his Platonic outlook; but on the other
hand in his frequent and interested references to the operations of
the mind in composing poetry there is much that is in harmony
with modern psychological theories, and nothing, as far as I know,
which is opposed to them. In his own practice, Shelley was well
aware of the role of unconscious mental activity in the com-
position of poetry. Miss Sayers's choice of terms for the three
phases of her creative process suggests to me that she is in-
sufficiently aware of it. For Shelley the "mind in creation is as a
fading coal ... the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the
original conceptions of the poet". I do not say this is a strictly
scientific account, I only say that it gives us a truthful glimpse of the
dynamic and daedal nature of unconscious process, on which most
psychologists are agreed. For Shelley, the 'Idea' of the book is
certainly not without parts and passions, it is not 'known to the
writer as a complete and timeless whole' which 'is not changed or
affected by the toils and troubles of composition', as it is for Miss
Sayers. Since Miss Sayers says that the writer cannot know his
Idea except by the working of the Energy or Activity which
formulates it to himself, how does she know that it exists as a
timeless whole? Indeed she asks this question herself, but answers
it by saying that the Energy is in fact conscious of referring its
acts to this existing and complete whole. I do not see how the
Energy is conscious if the writer does not know how he is con-
scious. Both Shelley and Miss Sayers are Platonic, but Shelley

290 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

does not let his Platonism interfere unduly with his observational
description of his own activity.

If we wish to see a triadic relation in the creative process we can
do so without harm by adopting the classification of M. Ernest
Dimnet and others. This is a description of what does actually
appear to go on in an author's mind: that there is a period of
intimation, a period of gestation when the work simmers in the
unconscious, and a period of production. The work establishes a
reaction and a re-adjustment between the author's experience and
his individual mental capacities. One advantage of this view is
that it agrees with the introspective observation of most writers
and does not involve us with any near-mystical implications about
pre-existing wholes nor with the unpredictable responses of
readers. It also agrees with observation about all kinds of mental
activity, the process of learning and even moral learning or
changing one's character included.

Elsewhere (Creed or Chaos), in discussing Original Sin, Miss
Sayers allows that the biologists and the psychologists may have
something worth listening to, to say on this subject (and therefore,
one must assume, on all matters connected with the human mind,
including creative processes). But she allows these sciences only
an ancillary status. Their job will be to 'restate' the doctrine in
terms which the ordinary modern man can understand. For in
her view what these sciences have done is a considerable work of
exposure of the nature and mechanism of 'man's inner dislocation*
by which she means Sin. Their reward ought to be that they
should become 'powerful weapons in the hands of the Church'.
Many psycho-therapists, probably the majority, see their functions
differently. They think they have also done something to expose
the origins of 'man's inner dislocation'. They do not accept the
concept of a pre-existent and inherent sinfulness, and therefore do
not use it as a basis for their work. They see that the notion of sin
is at least as inseparable from the notion of punishment as it is
from that of forgiveness, and they do not think that punishment is
remedial. In other words, they do not want to be weapons
in the hands of anyone. If we wish to find out how knots

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 291

have been tied, we try to untie them, we do not use a sword.
Miss Sayers can maintain her somewhat patronising attitude
towards psychology because the field of its inquiry coincides with
that which was formerly occupied by theological concepts. But
(and this is typical of her attitude to all the sciences) she does not
seem to understand that there is nothing arbitrary about the
psychological attempt to find a new terminology. Any science
changes its language under the pressure of real changing ob-
servation. Psychology does not merely have to speak to modern
man in language which he can understand. In so far as he wants
to know anything about himself, it provides him with a language,
new only because it embodies genuinely new concepts, which he
has to learn. Every new science has to invent a new language, and
it is not necessarily a jargon because it appears alien and cumber-
some. Jargon is an attitude of mind even more than a habit of
speech. In psychological matters it chiefly characterises those who
are trying to turn the new terms into metaphors of old and in-
sufficient concepts. These people, whatever their relation to
religion, are generally dominated, though often unconsciously, by
a view of human experience which is at least derived from
theology. The linguistic result is jargon at the newspaper level.
We may even agree with Miss Sayers that, at one time, some of the
theological dogmas were an attempt at framing precise definitions
of the facts of human feeling and behaviour. This does not mean
that we should agree with the jargoneers, unconsciously dominated
by theology, that Libido is only old Lust writ large; nor even that
the idea is worth discussing. But a similar attempt is often made
with other pairs of terms to equate, for instance, Sin with the
Freudian concept of basic aggression, or with egocentrism. Many
psychologists do in fact take what the theologians would call a
much more Pelagian view of human character than Freud's. They
believe that aggression, the impulse towards hate and destruction,
is not innate but acquired. But it is not on theological grounds
that they argue with Freud. And for the theologian it does not
much matter who turns out to be right, because all psychologists
admit that even in early infancy there is an observable phenomenon

292 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

which is at present better described by the term 'aggression' than
by any other. No psycho-therapist can allow himself to be in-
fluenced, in his practice, by a concept such as Sin. It would not
only undermine his relation with his patient, and therefore his
treatment, but invalidate any claim that the treatment was
scientific.

The two terms, in fact, Sin and Aggression, provide us with one
of the most instructive and practical proofs of the fundamental
importance of terminology. Before Freud began his observations
and treatment of the insane at La Salpetriere, which provided the
basis for many of his later theories, lunatics were still generally
regarded as wicked, and were often punished by being chained
and ill-treated. The treatment of mental illness was, in short, still
subject to the theological dogma of Sin. Since that time there has
been progress in the treatment even of severe psychoses. Whether
this has been achieved by methods akin to Freud's or by physical
methods does not matter. The point is that in one field theology
was exchanged for science, the concept of blameworthiness for that
of mental illness. For Sin is a theological notion, related to God
at one end, but of course to punishment at the other. If Freud
had not been able to see behind Sin to observable and often
automatic reactions such as aggression and its repression, it is
doubtful that our undeniable progress in the understanding and
treatment of insanity would have yet begun. One very obvious
practical reason is that it may always be necessary to use some
force in the handling of violent madmen. Unless we understand
the meaning and the actual necessity of force we always come to
associate it with blame for the victim. Dogma of any kind never
helps us to disentangle and limit this necessity of civilisation.

The psychology of the unconscious is a relatively young science.
For that reason its basic concepts are still wide open to discussion
and even to conflict among informed opinions; and the meaning
of its terms inevitably fluctuates according to experience. This
condition makes it possible for Miss Sayers, I have said, to award
the science a status ancillary to theology. Her mode of attack on
the more quantitative sciences has to be rather different. Her view

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 293

is like Mr. Eliot's, that the present importance of a return to
Christianity, by which she means the dogmas of the Church, is not
so much that Christianity is ethically helpful or pleasant, but that
it is true. The dogmas tell us the observational facts about
human nature. Between two sentences referring to these dogmatic
statements about our nature, our sinfulness and our inability to
progress, she inserts a rhetorical question asking whether the
increase of scientific knowledge has made us any happier, a
question expecting the answer No. The question is not only in
itself misleading but is also in its context significantly irrelevant.
She is talking about truth and she expressly asserts that the aim of
the dogmas is truth, not happiness. Most people would agree that
the same can be said about scientific inquiry. If Miss Sayers
blames the scientists, as by imputation she does, for the fact that
the pursuit of truth does not directly and inevitably lead to
happiness, she should logically also blame the theologians. There
is a sense in which we can reasonably hold that the knowledge of
truth does lead us, though slowly and painfully, to the only
happiness of which we are capable. The statements of Christ were
in general sound observational truths. Their overriding motive
was the reduction of anxiety by love. Therefore we can say that
they were concerned with the actual conditions of happiness. But
the dogmatic theologians ever since have paid less attention to the
subject. In this context Miss Sayers is not really concerned with
it at all. Recognising the necessary opposition between scientific
inquiry and dogma, what she means is that if dogma leads to the
truth, then science does not.

What she further implies and this is the essence of her whole
discussion is that the sciences in their necessary attempt to evolve
precise languages and to avoid metaphor and analogy are in fact
struggling to escape from our necessary conditions of truthful
expression. If scientists do take 'flight into formulae' they must
also be fleeing from something. What can Miss Sayers mean by
this except a flight from the truth, since she holds that language is
always and necessarily analogical or metaphorical? She tells us
that we must think by analogy or refrain from thinking at all, and

294 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

that thinking about God is merely no exception to this rule. To
sceptics who complain that man has made God in his own image,
she answers that man has made all existence in his own image. If
we can be charged with anthropomorphism in our thoughts about
God, we are equally guilty of it in our thoughts about 'light,
oysters and battleships'. But of course what sceptics complain of
in anthropomorphism is not the personal qualities which men
attribute to God they would not mind if he had a long white
beard or not but men's attribution of existence based only on
their experience of their own. On the other hand we experience
the existence of light and oysters as at least something given,
while we are even partially responsible for the existence of battle-
ships. At the back of this particular section of Miss Sayers's
metaphors lurks the ontological proof of the existence of God,
demolished by Kant and not even greatly favoured by Aquinas.
However, Miss Sayers assures us that even the physicist:

"struggling to interpret the alien structure of the atom, finds
himself obliged to consider it sometimes as a 'wave' and some-
times as a 'particle'. He knows very well that both these terms
are analogical . . . and, as pictures, they are incompatible and
mutually contradictory. But he need not on that account refrain
from using them for what they are worth. If he were to wait till he
could have immediate experience of the atom, he would have to
wait until he was set free from the structure of the universe."

But, in fact, the physicist was obliged to consider the structure of
the atom in this opposing, unsatisfactory and metaphorical
fashion only while he was developing the mathematics which
enabled him to communicate this experience precisely, to those of
the same level of training. And though his experience of the atom
may be rather less immediate than that of eating an apple, it is
about as immediate as his experience of a flying bullet (one which
does not hit him), or rather more so. He can see its path and he
can see a single object such as an oil-drop being knocked aside
by an electron.

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 295

Miss Sayers's statement that the difficulty of communication
which confronts the scientists is the result of their failure to
understand or to accept the analogical nature of language, inverts
the actual situation and is aimed at discouraging the rest of us
from thinking observationally, impartially and precisely. We can
accept the usefulness of metaphor. But we must not believe that
the two terms of the metaphor are necessarily on the same level of
reality or that analogy is in any way identity. Behind both
common and scientific experience, which we are trying to com-
municate in signs or metaphors, there is always something which
we are talking about. Or there should be. Otherwise there is no
satisfactory way of choosing between metaphors. It is certainly
natural and proper to use metaphors to maintain life and interest
in our statements, but when we are trying to maintain or dis-
entangle truth, we have for long periods, common man, artist and
scientist alike, to avoid metaphor, especially those metaphors or
signs which have been used by our forebears in very different
applications. A new metaphor probably always lights something
up. An old one often draws a veil or even brings down a thick
fog.

My new metaphor is my attempt to say precisely what I mean
about something which is a new experience and may therefore,
as yet, not be totally clear to me. But to make new metaphor I
generally have to break with the old. Thus we are all trying to
escape from metaphor as well as to create it, every time we try to
be faithful in description of some object, external or internal.

Miss Sayers expressly states, and it is essential to her case, that
the theological dogmas are truths or statements of fact; they were
drawn up as defences against heresy. But by heresy she does not
mean opinions which were merely objectionable to a vested body
of speculative belief. The dogmas "would never have been drawn
up at all but for the urgent practical necessity of finding a formula
to define experienced truth under pressure of misapprehension
and criticism". The expression 'and criticism' can hardly be
pleonastic with 'misapprehension'. Thought that is concerned
only with truth and is confident of its capacity for verification, for

296 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

instance a scientific theory soundly based on investigation of
observable facts, looks on criticism as an aid to development, a
welcome corrective. In the Albigensian Crusades and in the
Inquisition, the Church, we lament to recall, 'defended' its dogmas
only too vigorously. No genuinely scientific theory ever did or
could maintain its truth by force. The truth prevails because it is
great, or inherently powerful, not because it has developed the
biceps of a secular arm.

Ecclesiastical Christianity, however, becomes muscular in this
sense whenever our liberalism and humanism are weak enough to
give it a chance. They are so today. As a faith and a way of living
they have allowed themselves to be defeated by totalitarianism, no
matter who won the last war and no matter how much the western
nations square up to Russia. They are weak because they have
allowed themselves to become nothing much more than a political
and therefore abstract philosophy. In other words, they are the
literary thinker's substitute for going to church. The liberal and
the humanistic too often forget that their business, which should
occupy them all the days of the week, is precisely personal
relations, that if they are to do any good, they must do it in the
minute particulars of everyday living. This hopeful, but naturally
imperfect and small-scale, activity is based on the genuine ex-
perience of human possibility, which is their common stock with
the teaching of Christ, and also with any other form of religion
and philosophy which has faithfully and realistically concerned
itself with the business of living on this planet. We are continually
told, especially by the advocates of theological dogmatism, that
the liberal and the humanistic in Europe are very small and rather
decayed rentiers living on the dividends accumulated for them by
Christianity. But this is totally misleading. No one can say that
'the Church' as a whole has ever stood for truth and charity
(which are the essentials of the teaching of Christ, of liberalism
and humanism when they are a practical way of living), for the
very good reason that the Church has never been a whole.
Throughout the last two thousand years, various sections of the
Church, more or less powerful, have had to be reminded, more or

LORD PETER VIEWS THE SOUL 297

less forcibly, by other sections, of truth and charity, of essential
Christianity, liberalism and humanism. Generally other motives
beside truth and charity precipitated the reminder.

Thus faced today with the threat of bigger and more successful
forms of totalitarianism, the Churches have united so far as to
claim that they are and always have been the guardian of the
sacredness of human personality. But that is not the evidence of
history. As a successful organisation, no longer in opposition, no
Church has cared for human personality. The aim of Churches is
and always has been to become successful organisations and to
perpetuate themselves as such. Human personality, on the other
hand, is a phenomenon which we only begin to observe when we
are trying to approach our immediate and concrete relations with
truth and charity. And charity depends on truth or knowledge.
This fact is the common stock which makes a joint tradition of the
teaching of Christ, of liberalism and humanism.

But if truth is the way to charity, if our ability to care for other
personalities depends on our understanding of ourselves and of
them, we can say that scientific inquiry, moving steadily if slowly
into the field of human relations, is the heir of the essential and
valuable in Christian teaching. It is our real tradition. One
cannot say whether 'Science' considered as an abstraction has
'made us any happier' or not. But very few serious scientists seem
to be unhappy men, whereas the floundering and fantastic among
the literary who prefer, with the Churches, to maintain the
essential 'mystery' of human nature too often exemplify that
ignorance is misery.

We must indeed ask ourselves why the literary revivalists,
including Mr. Lewis and Miss Sayers, put so little stress on the
joys of salvation (a state of blessedness which has certainly been
experienced, by those who claim it, as immediate and not deferred)
and so much on the despairing doctrines of our fallen state and
inescapable sinfulness. I do not think that this fact is sufficiently
accounted for by the doctrinal compensations of the Incarnation
or of Grace; nor as a reaction to the mistaken (and dogmatic)
notion of inevitable progress, a partial eupepsia with which the

298 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Victorians consoled their frequent gloom; nor even oy tne
horrors and confusion of the present world.

The noteworthy fact is that the writers whom I have discussed
in this book really dislike science and its developing tradition
(which is behind all genuine liberalism and humanism) more than
they dislike any form of totalitarianism. The worst enemy of
dogmatism is, not another dogmatism, which can be physically
attacked and with luck overthrown, but open-minded inquiry. If
one's nature demands authority, one cannot live with hypothesis.
These writers pay the price for the kind of emotional security they
prefer in their obvious preoccupation with Sin and their more
obscure eschatological preoccupation with various forms of
punishment they call it anything from damnation to eternal
values. But there is no reason why the rest of us should foot the
bill.

CHAPTER X

Augustinian Novelists

FROM the Screwtape Letters as well as from references in
other works, we can see that Mr. Lewis, for one, has at least as
much interest in the Devil as in God. Perhaps it is difficult for
those who believe in an absolute Original Sin to abstain in-
definitely from this final personification, and it may not be long
before they try to commit us to the belief that the Devil also is
what Mr. Eliot calls Original Sin, 'a very real and terrible thing'.
Although Mr. Eliot discounts the theatricality in Baudelaire's
Satanism, he seems also to have a certain nostalgia for it:

"Satanism itself, so far as not merely an affectation, was an
attempt to get into Christianity by the back door."

"The possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world
of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that
damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation of salvation
from the ennui of modern life, because it at least gives some
significance to living."

Thefin-de-siecle frivolity of this view is due, I think, to the fact
that Mr. Eliot is here living in a world of words which have
displeasing emotional associations for him. I am not sure that any
of his ideas about damnation are orthodox. Indeed I believe that
he and most of his fellow lay-theologians whom I have discussed
in this book would be hard put to it to state clearly in what their
orthodoxy consists. There is, as I have said, the basic question of

299

300 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

the schism between the Churches. Most of the writers I have
discussed are not Roman Catholics. If they were, the issue would
be clarified. On the major dogmas such as the Virgin Birth and the
Incarnation, apart from Hell and Damnation and the Miracles,
the Church of England is by now officially flexible, if not vague.
Those with an ideological imagination, such as Mr. Lewis and Miss
Sayers, can produce a theological cosmos which is as far from
theological orthodoxy, if that now exists, as the fiction of Jules
Verne is from observational science. All the other more subtle
litterateurs are, wisely, very vague. The only test which they
would all impose, as far as I can see, is belief in Original Sin and
the Fall. The belief in the Devil is an extrapolation from this with
which the sado-masochistic imagination may like to toy. What
we must all believe is that human nature is originally and
essentially bad.

I have tried in this book to analyse and to illustrate this con-
ception. In this chapter I want to touch on its spread into a more
secular form which is markedly affecting the novel and the
contemporary criticism of it. I shall suggest that, in this form
particularly, it is a disguised emotional reaction which can best be
understood in relation to the Anglo-Saxon literary prudery of the
nineteenth century.

We remember, to begin with, that we have always found it very
difficult to come across a clear statement of what exactly was (and
is) the Original Sin. Though we are often given to understand, by
those who will commit themselves at all, that the evil state of this
world results from being cut off from the presence of God, and
that Original Sin arises from our having been born into this evil,
we are still not told with final clarity what it is that, either
historically or spiritually, actually did so cut us off. I have never
met anyone over the age often who thought it was actually due to
eating an apple and have not met anyone else of that age or over
who seems quite certain what the apple symbolises. We are still
left with the half-hearted understanding that the sin by which
Adam fell, and in which we are all born, is either sexuality or
curiosity.

AUGUSTINIAN NOVELISTS 301

Moving now into the world of the novel and of the criticism of
the novel, we find that the still mostly secular reviewers often try to
purvey a new literary value which is based on the conception of an
absolute Good and Evil. Henry James had this sense of an
absolute Good and Evil, and Graham Greene has it pre-eminently.
A few sentences from Mr. Walter Allen will delimit this theme:

"It would be generally agreed, I think, by his fellow-writers,
that Graham Greene is the leading male novelist of his generation,
and the purpose of this essay is to attempt to isolate and examine
certain aspects of his art. Of these the first and most important is
his deep-rooted and profound sense of evil, which is unique among
contemporary novelists in this country.

"Broadly it seems there are two possible attitudes towards
evil . . . Augustinianism and Pelagianism, after St. Augustine
and the Irish monk Pelagius, who was his contemporary and
opponent."

In Chapter II I made some attempt to distinguish between these
two attitudes and some allusion to the modern critical attitudes
which may be said broadly to represent them. Hulme was one of
the first who equated Romanticism in art with Pelagianism in
theology or ethics. The neo-scholastics in literature and criticism
who have succeeded him could perhaps be both more deeply
and more widely defined as Augustinians. What exactly this
Augustinian belief in an Absolute Evil amounts to in the practical
literary field still remains to be determined. It seems, in our own
day at least, to be a virtue, since Mr. Greene, according even to
secular admirers such as Walter Allen, owes his distinction to it.
Good and Evil are distinct from Right and Wrong ("Mr. Howard
Spring," says Allen . . . "did not see any difference between good
and evil on the one hand and right and wrong on the other", when
he reviewed Brighton Rock).

I cannot understand why Mr. Allen does not tell us what the
difference is. He is a secular critic, therefore he is unlikely to be
referring merely to the theologically orthodox view. But his main
duty as a critic is to discuss common experience which can be

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imaginatively conceived. To accept, without examining, this
clichd-dichotomy into Good-Evil on the one hand and Right-
Wrong on the other, is to impute an overriding value to one kind
of imaginative experience, the religious, and therefore to beg the
question of the particular value of Mr. Greene's work. Con-
ceivably an 'orthodox' critic may evaluate works of literature by
'precise theological standards', as Mr. Eliot wishes him to do.
But then he cannot care very precisely about the literature itself.
To evaluate by imprecise, because unexamined, theological
standards, as Mr. Allen is doing, makes the worst of both worlds.

'Good' and 'Evil', as practically everyone now refers to them in
literary contexts, seem to have no analysable content and nothing
much that you can say about them except that they are Absolute.
But both in life and literature we meet what is called good and evil
in men and women and their actions and intentions doing and
thinking what, in a certain social or imaginative context, we judge
to be right or wrong.

I do not deny that, in their imaginative self-deployment, those
writers who, like Greene, are orthodox, or, like Henry James, are
haunted, powerfully and often beautifully, in one wing of their
minds, do provide a content for this Absolute. But then, as soon
as it appears upon their pages, it is at least an implied judgment
about what they think ought to have been done or not done, in the
given circumstances, about right and wrong. By examining their
works then we can hope to find, not what we never will what
is Absolute Evil, but what they feel that people ought or ought
not t<^ do, what they judge to be relative evil.

We shall find that, though they may deal with a variety of
'crimes' and misdemeanours, what provides their feeling with the
Absolute in the Evil, what makes them guilty men who in describ-
ing and projecting their guilt feel that they have described essential
humanity, is basically the sensual, the sense of the flesh. It feels
evil to them because it feels absolute and it feels absolute because
it is ineluctable and it feels ineluctable because it is a natural,
given, human impulse which cannot be totally defeated but can
only be understood. F. O. Matthiessen clearly thinks that Henry

AUGUSTINIAN NOVELISTS 303

James's story The Turn of the Screw cannot be described in
'merely Freudian' terms. I am not sure how far it is necessary to
bring Freud into it. The sense of the Absolute or supernatural
Evil in this story seems to spring rather obviously from James's
characteristic unwillingness to accept the particular facts of the
life of the flesh, whether infantile or not, which is especially
noticeable in his later work, and which can be observed by any
reader who troubles to compare James's attitude with that of his
French contemporaries.

The guilt of the flesh is not at all new in Anglo-Saxon literature.
The interest for this study, of writers who have this flair for
Absolute Evil and so have been enrolled in this odd order of merit,
consists in the fact that they have simply inherited, in whatever
mutation, a disease which infected the whole of English nine-
teenth-century fiction. This was the unconscious belief that
women had no bodies at all below the neck, and men none, except
for the athletic use of the legs, below the waist; and therefore, a
natural consequence, that bodily enjoyment between men and
women was out of the question. When this belief broke down, as
we are often told that it did, with Hardy, and still further, and to
an extreme, with Lawrence, it broke no further than the
Augustinian phase of consciousness. Men and women actually
got into bed, and Lawrence tells us so in considerable detail. But
that any of Lawrence's characters ever enjoyed themselves, I
gravely doubt. The results were still, in however disguised a form,
sin and punishment.

1 do not think we should cease to remark how absolutely
astonishing this all is. If we look back, not merely at Boccaccio
and the continent, but at Chaucer and most of the Elizabethans,
we can easily remind ourselves that it is so. It is not sufficient to
repeat that the Puritans did this to us. Most of us have gone on
doing it to ourselves ever since. They made morality miserable, no
doubt. The answer continually given by many, even at the worst of
times, was to evade their morality. Their victory consisted in
making misery moral. In the case of the novel, English or
continental, I am not referring to the wider aspects of the sexual

304 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

relation, psychological or social, which must often provide us with
studies of pain and maladjustment. I am simply stating that
physical sexual relations normally cause intense enjoyment and
that no person, otherwise ignorant, would learn this fact from the
works of our most influential novelists from the early nineteenth
century to the present day. I do not suggest that writers ought to
dwell on this mere fact. I only say that it is strange that none of
them know how to imply its immense significance in the matrix of
their work.* There seem to be still in general only two possible
attitudes towards the fact of enjoyment, which both reflect its
relegation to the pornographic. One has been revealingly, if not
sensitively, described by Mr. Eliot as the Kruschen salts attitude.
The other is the pursuit of damnation a la Baudelaire. We may
agree with Eliot that damnation is the more dignified. Perhaps
dignity is of interest to writers. It may be historically and socially
more graceful to write about something which you associate with
damnation than something which puts you in mind of a purge. It
still seems strange that writers of normal critical liveliness can rest
in either fantasy.

For a paragraph or more I must go into the question of the
disguised Augustinians. They include some who on other
ideological or aesthetic grounds might scorn one another's
company.

The important distinction between the Augustinians and the
Pelagians, referred to by Mr. Walter Allen, lies in the attitude
towards Original Sin. The terms are useful for a broad classifica-
tion only, and it should not be assumed that those who are not
Augustinians, believers, that is, in the inherent damnableness
of human nature, must necessarily be Pelagians in the strict
theological sense. Those who are not Augustinians may simply
hold a purely secular view that the efforts of men and women to
understand and influence their own bents may have meaning and
use. On the other hand, even strict theological followers of St.
Augustine can hardly deny that his theory of human nature and

To this Mr. Joyce Gary, who in his Jimson novels is trying to re-estab-
lish the tradition of Defoe, is an important and honourable exception.

AUGUSTINIAN NOVELISTS 305

its capacities was affected by his own prolonged struggle with his
sensual impulses, nor indeed that the theological view of sin in
general has been coloured by this strongly personal experience.
To say that it was personal certainly does not mean that it was
unique or even uncommon.

None of the Christian bodies gives the same express importance
to sensuality in their theory of sin as it received by implication in
St. Augustine's account of his own religious experiences. On the
other hand, as we have constantly seen, they are not precise about
the nature of Original Sin, in the life of the individual or in the
history of mankind. One therefore has to deduce its real nature
from a convergence of the theoretical implications and of the
actual possibilities. The actual possibilities are not so many, by
the time we get down to observation of the human infant in its
cradle, and its relative feebleness and immobility. Faults, apart
from being mostly potential, are necessarily classifiable in few,
broad classes multiple sensuality and disobedience to discipline
or authority; or, to put it into the most elementary description,
rage against the ill-comprehended will of the parent. In effect, the
infant, squalling or cooing, if we take a moral view of his situation,
is occupied with what Arnold called 'faults of sensuality and
faults of temper'.

Let us leave aside, just for the moment, the name 'Sin' and also
those emotional implications which we call 'sinfulness' or the
sense of sin, and it becomes much easier for all of us to see
Augustine's picture of original instinctive behaviour, and also to
see Freud's, and to notice that as direct observation they have
even much in common. If again one could rely on leaving out the
emotional implications, one might, for the purposes of discussion,
adopt Augustine's term 'concupiscence' as describing both the lust
of the flesh and the lust of the world, or for power. Freud's terms
were infantile sexuality and aggression.

As we might expect, when we remember the attempts that have
been made in this century to enlist the Uncertainty of the physicists
to the cause of the theological concept of freedom, Freud's
psychology has also been adduced as evidence of Original Sin. It

306 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

is quite possible that Freud had unconscious roots in the older
philosophy which he did not sufficiently examine; but this has no
important bearing on the value and meaning of his work, the
whole conscious direction of which was towards releasing human
beings from the burden of childish and fantastic guilt and anxiety.
Even though Freud did apparently consider sensuality (which he
perhaps misleadingly calls sexuality) and aggression to be in-
stinctively basic in human mental life, this gives us no ground for
equating aggression, as we can observe it in the human infant,
with wickedness. The infant comes into the world equipped to
seize the nipple and thereby to get food and sensual satisfaction.
This in its direct form could be described as gusto. We can call it
aggression if we please, provided that we remember that it is
morally as neutral as digging the garden, blowing the ground up to
build a road, or playing tennis for health and pleasure. What we
in practice find shocking is thwarted instinctive aggression, which
manifests itself in hate, guilt and fear. The incidence of the
thwarting, and who instigates it, and why, is what we have to
consider if we wish to regress to 'origins'.

The only question then which holds any real interest is: 'What
is the sinfulness of sin?' I think it will be agreed by most
theologians that Sin is a purely religious concept, it has no
meaning without God, and therefore, whatever else it may or may
not imply, it is inherently disobedience to God's will. On the
other hand, the difficulty of knowing God's will in particular
circumstances and especially before the age of reason does not
seem to be met in any theology. The more clearly defined and
agreed the body of theological rules, the greater the emphasis on
the sinfulness of disobedience; as in the Roman Catholic Church,
and as we might expect. The greater the emphasis on private judg-
ment, on the individual conscience, the greater also the emphasis
on puritanism, on the sinfulness of sensuality. God and Sin alike
are more public in the Roman Church and more private in the
various Protestant Churches. The Roman Catholic Church allows
for sensuality; the unallowable sin is defiance of the Church's
authority.

AUGUST1NIAN NOVELISTS 307

It was /\ugustine who drew our attention, in discussing Original
Sin, to the observable origins of sin in infancy. It is therefore
logical that we should also seek to observe the origins of the sense
of sin. But the observable sense of sin is a feeling and we have, in
degree, many irrational feelings. Even theologians have been
known to rebuke penitents for over-niceness of conscience.

Now whether in adult life we are more troubled about our
sensuality or about our general disobedience, our resistance to
God's will, our preference of our power to his, the observable fact
is that in infancy we were thwarted both in our sensuality and in
our lust for power by our human parents. It seems certain that
this human thwarting must still colour our imaginations and be
responsible for at least some part of our sense of sin. We need not
discuss how far we can learn to decide what is rational and what is
irrational in this feeling which most of us experience. I do not
indeed wish to labour this merely psychological explanation of
sinfulness, of the subjective sense of sin, because of the useless
emotional reaction this provokes in those who resist all psy-
chological explanations whatever. I use it to illustrate that the
emotional quality we attribute to the concept Sin does vary with
time and place, and therefore presumably with different educations
and disciplines. On this basis we can draw an instructive com-
parison between the novel in some European countries, parti-
cularly in France, and in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly in
England, as it developed throughout the nineteenth century, and
can also refer to its newest manifestations. This may lead us to
ask whether the recent theological development which has
affected this form of literature is really new or whether it is not
really a different disguise for an old psychological pattern.

Let us take Alphonse Daudet's Sapho as an illustration. This
book was published in French in 1895, and later in an English
translation. In France the book was received as an important
work of literature. In England it made its way, via the Curiosa
sections of the catalogues, to the Art Bookshops of the Charing
Cross Road. It was generally understood to be a pornographic
work. Those who read the book further understood that it was

308 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

pornographic about heterosexual relations; those, the majority,
who were so unfortunate as to be able to read only the title
thought that it was pornographic about homosexual relations.

There is nothing surprising about this. I refer to this one book
because its fate illustrates the diverging development of French
and English literary and psychological history, during the
nineteenth century. Briefly, the French remained adult in their
understanding and treatment of the relations between the sexes,
while the English (and the Anglo-Saxons generally) had become
infantile. French fiction in general started from the basis of
acceptance of sexuality and the French novelist therefore was able
to use his sensibility within a framework of reality. Daudet said
that the book was meant for the benefit of his son, when the boy
became a man. It is of course not an immoral book, but the
contrary. But it is a moral book simply because it is an adult and
true book. It was dedicated to his son, not as a warning but as an
education. It does not seem possible for us, in our present
conditions in England, to reach this common adult attitude.
Guarded scientific discussion is allowed to the public, and plays
and books may be produced about the more unusual kinds of
sexual behaviour, provided that such behaviour is always treated
as a problem, provided, that is, that the morality and the public
attitude which should have been criticised by the writer before he
began to write are really taken for granted. Our general education
is certainly not yet anywhere near the point when children can
receive the facts of sexual behaviour at the same level of accept-
ability as other facts. The facts of life are still taught as if expect-
ing the answer No. So the unusual becomes classified as the
abnormal and hence excluded from general comprehension. But
in an adult community, authority, either of Church or State,
would have no say in public discussions of the whole range of
these themes or indeed in any verbal statements about them.

None of the great English Victorian novelists achieved an adult
attitude in this respect. Acceptance of sensuality was impossible
for them. Basically they treated sex through the antithetical and
abstract symbols of marriage and illegitimacy. Illegitimacy was

AUGUSTINIAN NOVELISTS 309

the crudor symbol of the illicit. Some of the great women writers,
and also more 'feminine' writers such as Henry James, achieved a
faithful emotional exploration of the sexual relationship, but only
through the same curious elliptical peep-hole.

In the twentieth century some English writers, notably D. H.
Lawrence, apparently realised that English fiction was not moving
in an adult world. But the plant in this case must grow again from
the seed. In literature we have seen no reflection of real progress
in understanding, only a variety of reactions. Lawrence and others
were able in part to diagnose their own and the contemporary
problem, but they could not in their single life- times both com-
pensate for their own mal-education and lay the foundation of
acceptance on which other novelists could make free use of their
sensibility. By different routes, Lawrence and Huxley both went
psychologically back to square nought.

Their most influential successors, both in poetry and fiction,
have often gone back even further and in a disguised form have
compounded with the nineteenth-century view. The framework of
absolute Catholic theory employed by Greene, for instance, in his
serious novels, really implies that sexuality is sinful and is not
more than condoned by marriage. When Greene is writing about
a real psychological situation he writes powerfully and movingly.
Such a situation may well be one in which the particular actions of
a character result from the reaction between a certain type of
education and his concrete circumstances. This applies to the
priest in The Power and the Glory. Compared with this the
psychological situations of the policeman in The Heart of the
Matter, and the novelist in The End of the Affair, seem factitious,
even ad hoc.

To be artistically satisfying the situation must be objectively
described. The author must not imply that, for esoteric reasons,
he knows more about the answers to the problem than the
characters do. You can write a human book about a Catholic if
you do not at the same time write a book about Catholic theories
of human nature.

The Power and the Glory is about the effect of Catholic belief

310 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

and dogma on someone for whom that belief affords his whole
raison d*etre. We are allowed to concentrate our attention on the
priest as a suffering human being. In The Heart of the Matter and
The End of the Affair, which are about sexual and marital relations,
the problems, while they are not less specialised and also peculiar
to those who have had a Catholic education, are not resolved
in their own terms, that is, also, in human and therefore artistic
terms. The priest, a minor character in each of these two later
books, is yet of major importance to Greene. He is a deus ex
machina. He supplies the answers, dogmatic ones, not artistic.

The End of the Affair, for instance, is a book about sexual
sin and about a superstitious bargain to evade punishment.
The main 'answer' seems to be 'Catholicism is right, for look
what happened' (some of it very odd). One of the concrete
forms of the answer is that superstition is a good idea because
anything is better than trying to resolve one's problems in
rational terms. This is the answer given to the main character,
who seems to be impressed by it, although not himself a Catholic.

Greene never shows the effects of Catholicism on the tem-
peramentally cheerful and balanced, yet some of these people
must surely exist without being too insensitive to merit either
attention or salvation. In his books, moreover, the refined
agonies of conscience which Catholicism may induce in the
more sensitive do not bear impressive fruit of charity or even
greater understanding of fellow-sufferers and fellow-sinners.
For pathological types like Pinky in Brighton Rock, it only
provides a certain security of vaingloriousness and self-satis-
faction which is deeply offensive to a merely humane and ethical
conscience.

When Evelyn Waugh writes as a Catholic, e.g. in Brideshead
Revisited and Helena, he also writes about Catholic theory. His
satirical novels are artistically successful because they are written
outside the scope of Catholic dogmatism. It seems to be much
easier for Catholic writers who are born Catholic, for instance
Mauriac, to stick to psychological truth than it is for converts.
This may be because it is much easier to ignore Catholic theory

AUGUST1NIAN NOVELISTS 311

when it 1 is acquired below the age of reason. Anglo-Saxon
writers probably have a special disadvantage in this respect.
Certainly continental writers more usually and readily retain
warmth and kindliness in relation to the flesh than those who are
continually obliged to maintain intellectual assent to dogma
which merely rationalises their own sense of guilt about normal
human impulse.

CHAPTER XI

The New Philistinism

THIS book might be regarded by some people as a defence of
liberal and humanistic philosophy and faith, against the
attempt to involve us in a return to dogmatic orthodoxy. But that
has not been its special purpose. Certainly I have tried to con-
tradict, wherever I have met it in discussion, the neo-scholastic
claim that humanism is dead. I have done this to counter the
view that humanism was always in error and has therefore merely
died for its sins. This view implies that the true cultural tradition
of Europe was based on the philosophy of dogmatic theology; that
round about the seventeenth century this tradition fell victim to
an unfortunate accident, the rapid development of the physical
and mathematical sciences; that, granted a sudden and un-
expected enhancement of his practical powers, Man became
inflated with pride; and that humanism, a man-centred philosophy,
is simply the expression of this pride, this hubris.

More or less directly, it has been to this pride that the dis-
sociation of sensibility which befell imaginative literature has been
attributed by those critics who have discussed the subject. In
their conception, the imagination or heart made a forced sur-
render of its 'felt truth' to the intellect which was proud,
apparently, because its own truths could be demonstrated in
material objects by means of measuring-rods.

I have accepted the fact of a 'dissociation of sensibility' but I
have tried to show that the interpretation of the fact has been
mistaken. Faced with an apparent opposition between thinking

312

THE NEW PHILISTINISM 313

and feeling, we are often strongly tempted to try and give up one
or the other. This to a mind which remains sane is not only un-
necessary, it is impossible. If the 'thoughts', the intellectual
conclusions, the working abstractions which we are obliged to
make, in any case, so that we can understand, organise and
communicate our experiences, happen to come in conflict with our
present feelings and wishes, we do not in practice give up any
attempt to 'think', to abstract and generalise. But we often do
look round for another and substitute set of abstractions, another
kind of intellectual framework, one which also appears to account
for the observed phenomena and therefore to have a like validity
of law, but which has the advantage of not conflicting too gravely
with our present wishes and feelings.

This is what we are being asked to do today: to give up the
philosophy, or the general conclusions, which are based on the
observational techniques of scientific method, and to revert to
the abstractions of dogmatism. For example, the necessary
abstractions or generalisations of psychology, especially the
psychology of the unconscious, do not present us with an im-
mediately or totally agreeable picture of human wishes and
behaviour. But these abstractions are based on observation of
concrete and individual cases and if we fairly examine the data it is
very difficult not to be convinced of the working truth of the main
generalisations.

The abstractions of dogmatism also claim to tell us the truth,
not less unpleasant, about the human mind and behaviour. But
these abstractions are at a further remove from observation. They
are essentially involved with another abstraction, the concept of
Sin. This concept is not, as I have said, obviously agreeable. But
it is inseparably associated with the consoling idea of an all-wise
and all-powerful Father, an authority which, though it may
certainly punish, can also forgive, and it is therefore a profound
security.

I accept that a divorce or opposition between poetry and
science, or, more widely, between imagination and intelligence, has
vexed us during the past two and a half centuries; but I believe that

314 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

the opposition is factitious. We can understand that some poets
lose their nerve if they are continually told, as they were during
the seventeenth century, that their subject-matter is mainly
fictional, when this is taken to mean that imagination is no help
towards understanding our real conditions. But this is not and
cannot be the view of genuine working scientists. This particular
attempt to put poets in their place put poets in the wrong place,
and was made chiefly by those who philosophised falsely and in a
hurry, about the nature of scientific method by those, in short,
who made bad abstractions, ones based on insufficient evidence.
The trouble was, as usual, not too much science, but too little.
Too little was known, before our own day, about the laws of
mental operation and the functioning of imaginative and creative
power.

I must not for one moment be understood as saying that this
particular extension of scientific investigation has made or will
make it possible for us to produce 'better' poetry and art. I only
say that it will do something to extend our knowledge of the way
in which we do actually understand reality, and perhaps to
convince us finally that there is no real split between 'imagination'
and 'intellect'. The faculties which we have been used to describ-
ing by these names stand in a different relation to the objects of
experience, or they relate to different objects of experience. But to
experience they do both relate, since experience is all that we have;
and they are both employed in any production either of scientific
or artistic thinking.

We certainly need to reunify our sensibility. But we can do this
only by understanding our sensibility, by finding out and obeying
its laws, by discovering what is psychologically possible for us
and what is not; in other words, by an extension of scientific
method. By this I indeed mean that poets must come to terms
with science. But I do not mean that 'Science is wonderful'. In
general when people speak of Science they are speaking of an
abstraction, and we should not worship abstractions. All I mean
is that what we call scientific method is the way we discover
reality; that discovering reality is our most important business as

THE NEW PHILISTINISM 315

human beings; and that poets will write bad poetryVif they neglect
or misconstrue our most important business.

That is the limit of my present interest in humanism. Humanism
and liberalism are valuable and lasting attitudes in so far as they
are erected on the belief in intellectual freedom, on the idea of our
right and duty to find out about our internal and external con-
ditions upon this planet; in so far as they are in harmony with the
methods of science.

I have laid emphasis on the 'unification of sensibility', and I
have limited my attack in this book to those who produce
literature, especially poetry, and those who criticise it; and I have
done this for one and the same reason. The reason is that it is
peculiarly disgraceful that those whose professed concern is with
the purity and precision of language should be doing so much to
misuse it, by making statements and building theses which have no
relation to reality. This lack of concern with what they are talking
about is, I should say, more characteristic of the literary nowa-
days than of any other group which claims to have a disinterested
intellectual standing. Out of this meaninglessness comes the main
attack on scientific work and thinking. There is in fact a new
Philistinism abroad in the intellectual world whose typical mani-
festations would be piquant if they were not shocking. Since
the twenties, the old literary Philistines have been on the retreat,
cowed by Mr. Eliot's obvious learning and respectability, if not
by his poetry, and badly mauled by those wicked defensive
animals, the Sitwells. Very few critics dare to admit that they do
not understand a poem. Obscurity is not now made a major
charge against poets except by those who obviously do not read
any poetry at all. But the literary are now beginning to accuse the
scientists of obscurantism. (Miss Sayers's expression, 'a flight
into formulae,' which I discussed in an earlier chapter contains this
implication of a wilful obscurity.) In the discussions of the new
Philistinism, it is not so much poetry or art, as Science, which is
'this modern stuff' which 'I don't understand' and (hardly sotto
voce) 'don't want to'. No one need be ashamed of an ignorance
which he admits and is trying to master; but the level of scientific

316 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

and philosophical understanding and appreciation is at present
disgracefully low among the literary, while literary discussions
parade this ignorance and in their tone one can too often detect
the inflexions of pride. The fact that a subject is 'above one's head'
does not automatically imply that one speaks of it, with purer
knowledge, from the heart. Mr. Eliot, among others, has sighed
for the time when a man might have universal learning before
the opposition between science and the humanities appeared. But
of course, knowledge, universal or short of universal, is only
obtained by pursuing the one method by which we do in fact
achieve knowledge.

Until about the time of Milton a major poet would certainly
expect to be making progress towards universal learning, and
intellectual curiosity was certainly a requisite poetic virtue.
Admittedly knowledge is too extensive and too specialised today
for the most gifted amateur to master, but with the poet it is the
attitude which counts. Intellectual curiosity is still an essential
poetic virtue. Moreover it is not impossibly difficult for poets to
have a good working conception of the new knowledge which has
been produced by methodical and patient investigators about 'the
human heart'.

Dealing with the subject of obscurity in poetry, Mr. Eliot has
justly observed that we should be glad that the obscure poet has
'been able to express himself at all'. This attitude of charity should
be extended to the scientists. Not all scientific knowledge can be
made popularly accessible, at least at present. We should not
accuse the scientists of wilful obscurity. Rather we should improve
the teaching of mathematics in schools. The 'flight into formulae'
is an emotional imputation. The 'flight into dogmatism', alas,
describes a real fugue. Scientists use mathematical formulae, not
to be hierophantic, but to make themselves clear to those who
have also taken the trouble to learn a precise language. This is
really obvious, and so is the fact that no one should complain at
being asked to take just so much trouble to obtain a piece of
precise knowledge as that piece of knowledge does really take to
obtain. The suggestion of wilful obscurity is linked with another

THE NEW PHILISTINISM 317

common accusation that scientists are mainly motivated by love
of power. Analysis of the depth psychology of most scientists
would almost certainly reveal fantasies of power. So would the
depth psychology of artists, priests and all other human beings.
But impersonal sublimation with submission to the domination
of experience is probably the least harmful use we can make of
the power-drive.

The question of a precise language, whether mathematical or
not, is, however, real and significant. It is partly because psy-
chology and anthropology do not express themselves in mathe-
matics, that some dogmatic thinkers believe and hope that they
can come to terms, their own terms, with these sciences. They
claim that psychologists are often saying the same things as
themselves, in the language of a different technique. This, as I
have tried to show, is a profound illusion. Where the psy-
chologists are talking sense, they are talking about something
quite different from the dogmatic concepts of human nature
about different concepts and different observations.

But lack of precision and lack of agreement in terminology is
certainly one of the gravest weaknesses of contemporary psy-
chology. The vagueness of many of its concepts and their
liability to misinterpretation can often be traced to the fact that
the psychologist's language is still overshadowed by unconscious
theological assumptions. The opposition which Freud makes
between a reality-principle and a pleasure-principle is a case in
point. One cannot miss the implication that Reality is somehow
right, and Pleasure is somehow wrong that Freud has not quite
eradicated from his own mind the theological notion that our
instinctive drives are sinful. The point is that not all our in-
stinctive drives are directly pleasure-seeking. Freud's pleasure-
principle, to my mind, has put an obstacle in the way of account-
ing for the actual suffering which characterises all psycho-neurotic
situations. It is far more significant and obvious that the neurotic
is punishing himself and sacrificing his pleasure than that he is
obtaining indirect satisfaction by his sufferings although this
is probably also true. Fear and propitiation by sacrifice is what is

318 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

always most observable in his conduct. In short, by infantile,
fantastic and useless means, he is trying to preserve himself, not
please himself.

The psychologists too have not been careful enough to avoid a
topographical terminology. This is another weakness which
favours the dogmatic offer of a united front. If the psychologists
had not allowed us to go on thinking of The Unconscious'
as a receptacle, it would have been easier for us to avoid the
association of the bottomless pit. I give these examples only to
illustrate my view that psychology and dogmatism should not
come to terms there is a real opposition between them, as
between dogmatism and all science. The risk of infiltration is,
however, grave, and psychologists should do all they can to
purify the language of their tribe from theological associations,
conscious and unconscious.

Scientists, including Eddington, who have written works of
popular exposition are not altogether blameless for another mis-
interpretation which has given comfort to the new Philistines.
This is the 'aesthetic' view of science and mathematics. In one
sense what Dr. Lewis says may be true that the scientist decides
by his 'sense of fitness' ; or it may be true that faced with alternative
proofs of equal validity, the mathematician chooses the most
pleasing. But we must remember that neither in art or science is
the aesthetic to be identified with the arbitrary or even with
individual taste. The 'sense of fitness' decides by what fits, by
what is most fit. In other words, there exists something given to
fit into. Many correct estimates are based on a total body of
experience and do not require and cannot even make use of
measuring-rods. In these cases your guess, however, is not as good
as mine, if I am the scientist or the mathematician and you are
not.

However, this 'aesthetic' view is so valuable, because so easily
misunderstood, to the new Philistines that one may soon expect
to hear some of them saying of the unsettled hypotheses of
contemporary biology, psychology and physics 'I don't know
anything about it, but I know what I like.' This statement,

THE NEW PHILISTINISM 319

however*, in any context, probably does not mean what it says.
Really to know what one likes is not distinct in kind from really
knowing anything else. Its main clause contains the truth, a truth
which invalidates the subsidiary. In matters of poetry and art, it is
usually painfully clear that those who merely claim to 'know what
they like' are not only extremely ill-informed about the main body
of the subject, they do not want to know about it. Further, they
in general cannot or will not grasp that the subject is one about
which any genuine knowledge can be had.

Behind all such attitudes, when they are erected into any kind
of philosophy, lurks what I have called the Two Truths theory.
This the majority of the literary dogmatics, uneasily aware that
they are only ridiculous if they do not come to some sort of
modus vivendi with the scientific approach to experience, have
made their base. They will allow scientists to experiment and
measure, even to observe and record, to analyse and to write
things up in notebooks and on graph-paper. In exchange, they
make, though often tacitly, an astonishing claim to what is in fact
the whole field of the non-measurable, on behalf of some authority,
the Church, inherited wisdom, tradition, whatever they please to
call it. Most of them appear dominated by a fantasy, perhaps
unconscious, of 'Science' interfering with material bodies with
more or less sharp instruments; and of Scientists as directly
motivated by ideas of inevitable progress and by an arrogant
Pelagian belief in the essential goodness of all men and especially
of themselves.

The point that they miss is that the scientific is a mode of
perception and our fundamental one. 'Science' is not an isolated
nor essentially a specialised activity. It cannot be confined to
special fields of inquiry. Whenever we approach our experience
with the intention of trying to understand it, we are acting
scientifically. Understanding our experience always involves us
in relating it to other fields of experience. The methods of science
and theology can never converge. Theology might conceivably be
called a science if it erected its generalisations upon the experience
of mystics. But this it is not able to do. In fact theologians treat

320 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

mystical experience as nothing more than an interesting
commentary upon revelation and authority. Conversely, scientific
fnethod can treat mystical experience only as a department of
psychological experience.

The literary neo-scholastics, led by Mr. Eliot, are greatly
concerned with the idea of a western Christian tradition and with
the importance of a return to it. Mr. Eliot, in particular, in all his
works, has drawn attention to the necessary connection between
culture and tradition, and in Notes Towards the Definition of Cul-
ture, he makes it clear that the essential kind of tradition which he
has in mind is a religious one. No one ought to under-estimate
the part which ecclesiastical Christianity has played for good and
bad, in developing our European tradition. What is striking is
that one can read the whole of Mr. Eliot's works, including the
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, without finding any
indication that he understands that scientific method and activity
have had anything positive to do with the development of
European culture or with the tradition which has nourished it. In
the works of the literary scholastics I have not yet found any
conception of the fact that science is a tradition. Yet the tradition
of science is as old as any form of religion, and modern European
science comes from sources which are as wide as, if not wider
than, Christianity.

Mr. Eliot gives lists of cultural activities, including the barque-
construction of the Dyaks, and others characteristic of the
contemporary British for instance Derby Day, the dog races,
Wensleydale cheese, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the
music of Elgar. From this list he goes straight to the statement
that what is part of our culture is also part of our lived religion.
He makes it clear that the moral, social and aesthetic values in his
list are deliberately mixed and that therefore he wishes to avoid
the suggestion that a nominally orthodox religious attitude will
necessarily provide us with cultural objects and activities of a high
value. This exonerates one, on the other hand, from any impulse
to prove that the part which scientific activity has played in the
development of culture and tradition has been or ought to have

THE NEW PHILISTINISM 321

been wholly desirable or estimable. What is profoundly interesting
is that Mr. Eliot does not think it worth mentioning that in all the
cultural activities, and objects, desirable or undesirable, which he
enumerates, the role of what is basically a scientific activity is very
much more immediately obvious than that of a religious one. All
the practical and useful arts belong to the same human tradition
which stems from the first flint-makers and inventors of wheels.
Any craft, however rudimentary, implies that the craftsman has
discovered and submitted to the rules of his material sufficiently
to body them forth in an object which works. And this attitude
contains the essence of science.

That is fairly obvious in the case of most of the objects and
activities of Mr. Eliot's cultural list. Music is one of the more
interesting examples. No one would trouble to deny that the
religious tradition of Europe has had a profound and stimulating
effect on European music, on its themes, on its opportunities for
performance and on its communal value. But those communal
opportunities have generally been quite as important to the
composer as the orthodox significance of the themes he has used.
On the other hand, no one who has anything to say about the
subject of culture and tradition in Europe can ignore the
connection between the singular development of western music
and that of various crafts and techniques.

A strong feature of Elgar's music is his use of horns: necessarily
valve-horns, not hand-stopped horns. The valve-horn was
invented and produced by those who profited from acoustic
theory, and from the availability of accurate lathes and boring-
tools. To say this is not to advance the absurd theory that Elgar's
music is in 'a scientific tradition' (nor even that it is in any
exclusive tradition). Tradition is manifold. But if we are con-
sidering all the arts, fine and useful, which we include in our
conception of culture, and which reflect traditions, the one
tradition which we cannot afford to neglect is that of science and
technology. For it is in the matrix of this tradition that the most
striking and irreversible changes in these arts have been produced.

Mr. Eliot has tried to cover himself by suggesting that though ail

322 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

cultural activities are lived religion, the religion which t&ey live
may be debased or primitive, that is, not purely Christian. "We
must not think of our culture as completely unified my list . . .
was designed to avoid that suggestion". This statement implies,
nevertheless, that some of the listed activities do express
Christianity. Which, one wonders? There is no visible source of
arbitration except Mr. Eliot's own personal taste I believe that
he approves of Wensleydale cheese; I surmise that he does not
approve of boiled cabbage, cut into sections or not. But Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture is surely an attempt to further
the task adumbrated in After Strange Gods where the identification
of aesthetic and orthodox evaluation was first proposed. If this is
so, it is difficult to believe that Mr. Eliot's list deliberately reflects
his personal tastes or distastes.

"To judge a work of art by artistic or religious standards, to
judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in
the end to the same thing: though it is an end at which no in-
dividual can arrive."

As Mr. Eliot revealingly says: "The way of looking at culture
and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult
that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I
comprehend all its implications."

I suggest to him that he has made understanding more difficult
for himself than it need be, by neglecting the real basis of the
tradition in which aesthetic objects and activities bud and flourish.
In Mr. Eliot's vague sense, all cultural objects and activities may
express religious values. But practically all of them one can say
all of them, if one thinks of the entelechy of poetry as the drama
are inextricably involved with the laws of material nature, living or
inorganic. Our oldest tradition on this planet is the endeavour to
understand the conditions for our continuing to live on it. This
may blossom into religion and art. It must develop into science.

If one is concentrating on religion and poetry, one may, if one
likes, continue to say that a tradition was broken in the seven-
teenth century. But if one is talking of human psychological
history in general, it is much more reasonable and informative to

THE NEW PHILISTINISM 323

say that {he tradition of science, of obtaining real knowledge, was
rediscovered in the seventeenth century. We might also reverse
Miss Sayers's statement that the dogmas were framed to rescue
Christian truth from heretical misstatement and misinterpretation.
The attempt to formulate the inductive method, and many of the
statements of particular scientists, were made to rescue knowledge
from dogmatic and orthodox misrepresentation.

Mr. Eliot and many of his school are all for the teaching of the
Classics. They not only allow the immense literary and artistic
influence of the Greeks but even demand that it should be
perpetuated and over-emphasised at the cost of the natural
development of education. But they have nothing to say about
Greek science, for instance, Greek astronomy, which was based on
ages of observational work among the Babylonians and Egyptians
and which also, in important respects, anticipated the discoveries
of the Renaissance. It is worth remembering that the work of
Aristarchus of Samos, who actually put forward the main
hypothesis which we attribute to Copernicus, was deprived of its
due historical effect by contemporary religious prejudice.

Science can be regarded as our fundamental human tradition,
because any genuine attempt to describe and classify experience is
the germ of a scientific attitude. The confusions and errors of
dogmatism arise when we try, as we repeatedly do, to hypostatise
the language of description into prophecy and prescription.
Aristotle in the Poetics was being scientific. He was describing,
classifying and analysing the actual works of the Greek poets and
dramatists. His 'Rules' were laws in the scientific sense, they were
descriptions of what had worked in the past, not authoritarian
prescriptions for future performances. An important part of
literary history is concerned with a natural but probably wasteful
rebellion against the dogmatism which was promptly built on the
rediscovered Aristotle.

I believe that our contemporary dogmatics are doing something
similar, and of course much more dangerous, with the teaching of
Christ, the bulk of which consists of remarkably exact and vivid
statements about human psychological laws and human relations.

324 THE EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Most of them reveal their meaning and use only when regarded in
this way, and not as commands or prophecies. 'Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself is a statement of the discovered law of
survival. It tells us what is not only possible but necessary if we
are to continue to live on this planet. It contains an implied
observation which by now we are used, or we should be used, to
seeing in the longhand of contemporary psychology that we
cannot love our neighbours if we hate ourselves. But when we
subscribe to the obstinate dogmatic insistence on the concept of
Sin, we are hating ourselves. We oppose another abstraction to
the abstraction which centuries of theological dogmatism have
taught us to make out of the idea of Love, and forget that we take
the first and essential step towards charity only when we clarify
our understanding of our own needs and possibilities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author acknowledges, with thanks, permission to quote
from the undermentioned works, which has been granted by the
following publishers:

George Allen and Unwin Ltd. (Bertrand Russell: History of
Western Philosophy, Human Knowledge and The Scientific Out-
look).

Geoffrey Bles (C. S. Lewis: Miracles).

Cambridge University Press (Eddington: Nature of the Physical
World, and New Pathways in Science).

S.C.M. Press (Norman Nicholson: Man and Literature).

Chatto and Windus (Basil Willey: The Seventeenth Century
Background).

Eyre and Spottiswoode (D. S. Savage: The Withered Branch).

Faber and Faber (T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, After Strange
Gods, Essays Ancient and Modern, Selected Essays, The Idea of a
Christian Society, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Points
of View).

Heinemann Ltd. (J. Bronowski: The Common Sense of Science).

Journal of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, No. 6 (Herbert
Dingle: The Scientific Outlook in 1851 and in 1951').

The New Statesman and Nation and Mr. Walter Allen, June
9th, 1951 (Review of The Common Sense of Science by J.
Bronowski).

Phoenix House, Ltd. (Walter Allen: Reading a Novel).

Poetry London (Cleanth Brooks: Modern Poetry and the
Tradition).

Routledge and Kegan Paul (T. E. Hulme: Speculations).

The Times Literary Supplement, June 8th, 1951 (Review of a
book by John Nef, War and Human Progress).

INDEX

Works are listed under their authors' names.

When a reference occurs on a series of pages, the first of these is given in
italics.

ALBIGENSES, Crusade against, 25
Allen, Walter, 18, 23, 301
Anceschi, Luciano, 187
Anti-Pelagianism (see Pelagian

heresy)
Aquinas, Thomas, 46, 188, 195, 236,

294

Archimedes, 86

Aristotle, 78, 180, 224, 236, 250, 323
Arnold, Matthew, 26, 29, 36, 40,

109, 122

Culture and Anarchy, 56
God and the Bible, 30, 33, 36
Literature and Dogma, 30, 33, 36,

42
Augustine, St. (Augustinism), 69,

107, 304

Augustinians, 23, 299
Austen, Jane, 115,227
Ayer, A. J., 49

BABBITT, Irving, 36, 109, 123

Bacon, 59, 142, 149, 168

Banville, Theodore de, 151, 187

Baudelaire, 109, 231

Being, 148

Bergson, 11,20, 75

Bible, 34, 35, 40, 115, 182

Old Testament, 34, 39, 41, 176, 178
New Testament, 34, 176, 178

Blake, William, 33, 170,237

Bradley, F. H., 34, 109
Ethical Studies, 36, 41

Bradshaw, 89

Bramhall, 119

Bronowski, Dr. J. (The Common
Sense of Science), 18

Brooks, Cleanth, 59, 161, 164, 166,
168, 251

Browne, Sir Thomas, 57, 142

Browning, Robert, 187

GARY, Joyce, 304
Causality, 63, 65

Christ, 24, 50, 52, 54, 177, 293, 323
Churchill, Sir Winston (then Mr.),

24

Classicism, 57, 74, 220, 232
Clausewitz, 25
Coleridge, S. T., 237
Copernicus, 145, 156
Coplestone, Fr., 257

DANTE, 109, 168, 188, 190, 197, 208

Daudet, Alphonse, 307

Dawson, Christopher, 146, 149, 226

Defoe, Daniel, 304

Demant, Canon, 59

Descartes (Cartesianism), 44, 98,

160, 259, 267, 269
Dimnet, Ernest, 290
Dingle, Professor Herbert, 64
Dogma, dogmatism, 6 passim
Donne, John, 53, 194, 217

EDDINGTON, Sir Arthur, 12, 15, 58,

318

Hypothetico - observational
method, 15, 21, 58, 59, 62, 155
New Pathways in Science, 63
Einstein, Albert, 24
Elephants, pink (rats, ditto), 273,

(66)

Elgar, Sir Edward, 320
Eliot, George, 29, 34, 38, 116
Eliot, T. S., passim
After Strange Gods, 6, 9, 33, 107,

117,223

Ash Wednesday, 1, 219, 235
Cocktail Party, The, 53, 153, 154
Essays Ancient and Modern, 1
For Lancelot Andrewes, 1, 109, 220
Four Quartets, 53, 219
Idea of a Christian Society, 31,

117 ,125

Notes towards the Definition of
Culture, 56, 125, 130, 135, 224,
228, 320

INDEX

327

Sacreu Wood, The, 117

Selected Essays, 109

Sweeney Agonist es, 53

Tradition and the Individual
Talent, 221

Waste Land, The, 53, 220
Existentialism, Existentialists, 19,

51,79

Experimentalism, 5 passim
Explication, 80

FAITH, 1, 35

Fall, the, 47, 52, 57, 69, 176, 208,

300

Fancy, 161, 167
France, Anatole, 88
Frazer, Sir J. G., 171
Free Will, 62, 75, 83, 101, 270
Freud, 48, 83, 84, 96, 158, 244, 247,

271, 291, 305

GALILEO, 16, 145
Galton, Francis, 81
Gladstone, W. E., 210
God, 16,41,45,274,294
Goethe, 152
Graves, Robert, 151
Gray, Thomas, 237
Greene, Graham, 8, 108, 115, 153,
256, 301, 309

HAMILTON, G. R., 234

Heisenberg (see Indeterminacy,

Principle of)
Heresy, 7 passim

Hobbes, T., 119, 148, 160, 168, 180
Honour, Spanish conception of,

152, 232

Housman, A. E., 215
Hoyle, Fred, 255, 257
Horizon, 96
Hulme, T. E., 5, 11, 41, 56, 105, 141,

146, 157, 167, 181, 215, 233,

238, 253

Human Nature, 75
Humanism, 4 passim
Hume, David, 3, 79, 278
Essay on Miracles, 279
Huxley, T. H., 79
Hypostasis, 1 1 passim

IDEALISM, Idealists, 61, 65, 67, 85, 86
Imagists, 73

Incarnation, The, 32, 47, 57, 68, 101
Indeterminacy, Principle of, 17, 62,

86, 269
Induction, 77

Inference, 5, Ch. IX passim
Intellect, 80, Ch. Ill passim
Intuition, 82

JAMES, Henry, 303, 309

Janet, 83

Jansenists, 71

Jeans, Sir James, 62, 155

Joyce, James, 9, 113

Judgment, 161

Jung, 96, 171

KAFKA, 218

Kant, 3, 42, 78, 122, 294

Korzybski, Alfred, 203

LAWRENCE, D. H., 9, 58, 94, 96, 113,

226, 309

Lewis, C. S., 2, 8, 43, 48, 59, 68, 76,
106, 175,211,231,254

Miracles, 48, 258

The Screwtape Letters, 258, 299
Liberalism, 4, 21, 108, 126, 137
Locke, John, 165
Lucretius, 78, 145, 198
Luddites (Luddism), 16, 225

MACAULAY, Rose, 29

Manifold, Extensive and Intensive,

82
Mann, Ida (The Science of Seeing),

100

Mansfield, Katherine, 9, 113
Maritain, 8, 59, 79, 146, 148, 253
Marx, Marxism, 271
Materialism, 17, 59, 65, 67
Mauriac, 8, 310
Meynell, Alice, 213
Milton, 70, 140, 159, 167, 169, 172,

264
Miracles (see also Miracles under

Lewis, C. S.), 258

NAPIER, John, 23

Nazis (Hitler), 2, 94, 134

Neo-scholastics, neo-scholasticism,
4, 12, 15, 21, 62 passim, 106

Nef, John (War and Human Pro-
gress), 23,

328

INDEX

Newman, Cardinal, 32, 35
Newton, 23, 62, 145
Nietzsche, 78

Nicholson, Norman, 62, 172
Man and Literature, 59, 78

OGDEN, 45

Original Sin, 6, 22, 25, 28, 48, 52,

55, 57, 68, 74, 90, 104, 106, 176,

196, 208, 299
Orthodoxy, 5 passim

PAUL, St., 177, 232

Pacifism, 24

Pelagian heresy (Pelagianism) 40,

49, 57, 70, 230, 291, 301
Anti-Pelagianism, 22, 26, 50
Plato, Platonism, 89, 201
Pope, The, 126, 152
Progress, 6, 22, 71, 150
Psycho-analysis, 60
Psychology, psychologists, 15, 69,

152

Punishment, 176
Puritanism, 175, 179, 183

REASON, 1

Renaissance, 72, 74, 147, 157, 220,

224, 232

Rats, pink see Elephants, pink
Read, Sir Herbert, 72, 101
Russell, Bertrand, 15, 47, 62, 120,

156, 169,257
Human Knowledge, 157
The Scientific Outlook, 18
Ryle, Prof. Gilbert (The Concept of

Mind), 259

SAURAT, Denis, 175
Savage, D. S., 114, 154
Sayers, Dorothy, 8, 43, 48, 59, 68,
76, 106,254,284,315

Creed or Chaos, 290

Gaudy Night, 256

The Mind of the Maker, 48, 256,

285

The Zeal of Thy House, 287
Scholasticism, 57, 149
Science, 10, 16, 68, 150, 159
Self: Superficial, Fundamental, 82
Semantics, 56
Sensibility, dissociation of, 9, 29,

159
Shakespeare, 74, 78, 112, 170, 197,

216, 241
Shaw, G. B., 55
Shelley, 167, 195, 236, 251, 289
Sprat, Thomas, 170
Stapledon, Sir George (The Land},
225

TILL YARD, Dr., 141, 175

Theology, 5, 41 passim

Thomas, Dylan, 217

Times Literary Supplement, The, 23,

25

Truman, Harry, 24
Two Clocks Theory, 99
Two Truths Theory, 58, 61, 64, 71,

74,88, 102, JW, 253, 257, 319

UNCERTAINTY Principle (see In-
determinacy Principle)
Unconscious, The, 84, 224

VALRY, 201
Visualisation, 81

WAUGH, Evelyn, 310

Willey, Basil, 2, 11, 16, 141, 159,

210

The Seventeenth Century Back-
ground, 2, 36, 141, 159
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 213