CHAPTER I

THE COLLECTIVE TASK OF MANKIND AND THE THREE-FOLD REVERENCE

The social institutions, the family, the organs of education, the vocation, the political organization, the organization of mankind, the ideal religious society are to be treated as a progressive series. The individual is to pass successively through them, advancing from station to station toward ethical personality.

In designating the social institutions as an ethical series, care must be taken not to confound the terms of the series as now existent with the terms as they would be did they conform to their ethical functions. For instance, even the monogamic family is as yet only in part ethically organized. School and university are adrift as to their ethical purpose. The majority of mankind are engaged in occupations which it would be absurd to call vocations, and the international group exists as yet barely in embryo. Hence when we speak of the social institutions as a progressive series through which the individual is to advance towards personality, we are describing the aim of social reconstruction, not the present state of things. The spiritual nature of man must create for itself appropriate social organs. It has been painfully engaged in the attempt to do so since the existence of our race on earth.

In each of the social institutions we are to distinguish between the empirical substratum and the spiritual imprint which it is to receive. We find in each ready to hand some natural non-moral motive or set of motives of which we are to avail ourselves in the endeavor to evoke the spiritual result. Thus in the family the non-moral motive is affection due to consanguinity; in the school sociality, the school society being the first society into which the child enters; in the vocation there is the craving for mental self-expression, in the state, patriotism, or the feeling we have for the larger whole in which we are included on the basis of similarity of language, historic tradition, etc. The natural basis of the international group of society is the empirical, and as yet in no way ethical, fact of the commercial and industrial interdependence of the different countries, a fact used by M. Bloch and his more recent followers as an argument against war.

In popular literature the empirical substratum and the spiritual relation to be produced by means of it are constantly confused. In any genuinely ethical system they must be carefully discriminated.[69]

In each of the social institutions, or, as we may now call them, the phases of life experience through which the individual must pass on the way toward personality, the winning of the ethical result depends on observance of _the three-fold reverence_. What I mean by the three-fold reverence must be explained in some detail, especially as the reader might otherwise be led into identifying my view with that expressed by Goethe in _Wilhelm Meister_. The three modes of reverence mentioned by Goethe in his sketch of the “pedagogical province” have for their background the poet’s pantheism. The view here set forth is based on ethical idealism.

In order to introduce my thought let me go back to the phrase repeatedly used in Book III—“the task of humanity.” Mankind as a whole, the generations past, present and to come, have a certain work to do, a task to accomplish. A collective obligation rests on our race, spanning the generations.

The spiritual conception of the collective task is the basis of the three-fold reverence. The spiritual result, as was said above, is in every instance to be superinduced upon an empirical substratum. The empirical substratum in this case is mankind considered as a developing entity, which partially reproduces in the present the mental and moral acquisitions of ancestors, partially increases the heritage and passes it on to the newcomers. I, as an individual, am also inextricably linked up backward and forward with those who come before and those who are to come after. I cannot take myself out of this web. The task laid upon human society as a whole is also laid upon me. I am a conscious thread in the fabric that is weaving, conscious in a general way of the pattern to be woven.

But viewed empirically the development of humanity is haphazard. Much is preserved from the past that ought to be cast aside. Many traces of past error remain unexpunged in the life of the present. A mixed stream, compounded of good and evil, passes through our veins into our successors’. The empirical fact is simply the fact of partial reproduction, partial augmentation and partial transmission. The ethical conception of progress depends on the view that there is an ideal pattern of the spiritual relation in the mind of man, destined to become more explicit as it is tested out and that the present generation ought to appraise the heritage of the past according to this pattern, preserving and rejecting and adding its own quota in such a way as to enable the succeeding generations to sift the worthful from the worthless more successfully, and to see the ideal pattern more explicitly.

The three-fold reverence has been described as reverence towards superiors, equals and inferiors. For this inadequate description I would substitute the following: In place of reverence towards superiors, reverence for the valid work of ethicizing human relations already accomplished in the past, reverence for the precious permanent achievements and for those who achieved them,—the “Old Masters.” The human race has gained a certain ethical footing in the empirical sphere. The general task has not to be begun _ab initio_. In the act of separating what is worth while from what is worthless, in the very process of revision and reinterpretation, we manifest our reverence for the past. It is thus that true historicity is distinguished from blind conservatism. And besides, by studying the old masters, we acquire a certain standard of excellence. Since those who have contributed epoch-making advances in philosophy, in religion, in science, inspire us by the grandeur of their attack on the great problems; and the spirit of their attack, is unspeakably stimulating to us, even when we reject their solutions. We cannot too humbly sit as disciples at the feet of the great masters if discipleship has this meaning.

Reverence of the first type prescribes the same attitude towards preëminent personalities among our contemporaries. They rank with the great predecessors inasmuch as they are in a way for us predecessors. They are in advance of us. To revere them is to endeavor to come abreast of them, to obtain the advantage of the forward movement which their superior capacity enabled them to initiate, and to start where they leave off, adding our small quota.

The second kind of reverence is directed toward those who are, in respect to their gifts and opportunities, approximately on the same level with us, but whose gifts differ from and are supplementary to ours. In our relation to them we may learn the great lesson of appreciating unlikeness, and working out our own correlative unlikeness by way of reaction.

The third kind of reverence is directed toward the undeveloped, among whom I include the young, the backward groups among civilized peoples, and the uncivilized peoples. We are to reverence that which is potential in all of these individuals and groups, and we do so by fitting ourselves to help them actualize their spiritual possibilities. Reverence of the third kind takes the highest rank among the three. The spiritual life of the world is a deep mine as yet explored only near the surface. The unrealized possibilities of mankind are the chief asset. But in order to effectuate our purpose with respect to the undeveloped, we must have reverence toward the great Old Masters, to gain a certain standard of excellence; and reverence towards unlikeness in others to become ourselves differentiated individualities, and in order to respect the unlikeness which we shall presently likewise find in the backward and the young. So that the three reverences play into one another and are inseparable from one another, the first two being indispensable to the third. They are in truth a “trinity in unity.” But the third reverence is the supreme one. The chief objective must be the undeveloped, because our face must be turned toward the future, because the task of mankind is as yet in its early stages. The third reverence is supreme. Now it is only when we have grasped the meaning of the triple reverence that we can fully appreciate the significance of the family as the first matrix in which the reverential attitudes are to be acquired. It is only then that we can rightly conceive of the organs of education, and of the end upon which the activities of school and university should converge. And similarly we shall find our interpretation of the vocation, the state, and the international society illuminated by this conception of the three-fold reverence.

In popular religious teaching the individual is thrust into the foreground. His salvation as a detached entity is the principal object. In positivism and evolutionalism society in its empirical aspect is exalted, and the individual tends to be regarded as a stepping-stone. In the spiritual interpretation of the collective task as outlined, the individual remains integral and sacrosanct. The spiritual society of which the image is to be imprinted on human society is a society of indefeasible ethical personalities.[70] The individual even now at his station in the present attributes to himself this lofty character and the various obligations which he already recognizes, and which he endeavors to fulfil, afford him ample opportunity to vindicate his spiritual selfhood. If in addition he looks forward longingly to the future, and to the greater spiritual fulfilment that may be expected among posterity, this expectation is founded on the belief that what he already possesses in germ will then be more unfolded, that the ideal of the indefeasible worth of man of which he is already conscious in himself will then be more completely recognized and its infinite implications be more fully understood.[71]

FOOTNOTES:

[69] Thus the interdependence of nations in respect to their material interests is often erroneously expatiated on as if it constituted an actually ethical bond between them.

[70] While at the same time the ethical personality, unlike the “windowless monads” of Leibnitz is effectuated only in the cross-relations which subsist between each one and his spiritual associates.

[71] I may here point out the bearings of this general point of view on the much-mooted and confused question of the value of the study of history. Ranke holds that the aim of the historian should be to reproduce factually the occurrences of the past. Robinson insists on the uses of history. But uses to what end? The history of the past is fragmentary and full of gaps. The data with respect to some of the most important periods are irrecoverable. The attitude of the human race towards its own history, I take it, should be like that of an individual towards his past. I cannot really resuscitate my past. Memory is treacherous. Much has been forgotten. The events of my youth are discolored when seen in the perspective of later years. I should try to know myself as far as I can, but with a view of pressing on and realizing with such light upon myself as I have, the ethical aim. The same applies to mankind. And the important point is in the review to disengage the ideas that controlled the principal social institutions in the past, and to appraise these ideas from the standpoint of our present ethical insight. Thus, in treating the history of the family, we should single out the ideas that controlled the family relation, the idea of the _patria potestas_, the feudal idea, or the connection of the family with landed property. In writing the history of the organs of education, we should bring into view priestly education as among the Brahmins, musical or æsthetic education as among the Greeks, the idea of princely education, the idea of preparation for the government of an empire, which accounts for the system of the English universities, the controlling idea of the German universities. And then at the end of our survey we shall be in a better position to discern what is to be the ideal of school and university education in an ethical democracy. The same applies to the controlling ideas of the state, and of the remaining social institutions.