Part 9

But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely with the aid of images--recovered images of something seen, heard, felt, or tasted--and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought in which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus needed concrete images with which to think about the personal powers of the external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and human shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness between a Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated the two, and recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete means of mental recovery when he wished to think of the abstract Nature power. Or, associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, or king with the Nature force--an association which would be greatly strengthened by belief in the survival of the soul after death--he gradually confounded the disembodied human power with the soul of the Nature power, and through the law of least effort, used the concrete image of the departed human being to stand in his mental processes for the much more difficult thought of the Nature force. But, whatever the process, animal shapes were obviously needed to reduce the Nature powers to such a degree of concreteness as would make it possible for primitive man to deal with them as objects of thought. And it is not less certain that while, for some races, the earliest shapes thus utilized were those of the lower animals, the final form for all races was that of man himself.

In the anthropomorphic stage, then, there is the same effort to understand the external system by assimilating it to something with which man is already familiar. The worshiped deities may be many or few, numberless as the Nature forces, polytheistic as among the Greeks and Romans, or one as in the monotheism of the Semite. Man likens them to himself, attributes to them not only his outward shape, but also his failings and virtues, making his Pantheon resemble not only the social order, but also the political system under which he happens to live. It is the completeness of this assimilation which made anthropomorphism the most persistent aspect of man's intellectual growth the world has known. Yet the view could linger only as the possession of the intellectually slothful and immature. The inadequacy, the crudeness, of the conception in which Deity was imaged as a gigantic man gradually forced itself upon the attention of the more thoughtful. Increased mental activity, a better acquaintance with natural processes, brought the idea of a power above Nature rather than merely superior to man; and as the human mind passed from the conception of the superhuman to that of the supernatural--as, moreover, the thought of merely local gods gave way to the idea of gods not limited in their functions to particular areas--the anthropomorphic shapes naturally fell away from the powers they could no longer adequately represent.

Then other changes, strictly correlated with man's advancing knowledge of himself, ushered in the latest stage of his attitude toward the external system. For in the same mind which had been compelled to reject crude anthropomorphism, there had been growing the consciousness of man as something more than a mere compound of vitality, consciousness, and will--something more than a set of bodily and mental capacities essential to the work of self-maintenance--the thought that man was the sum of his higher, not of his lower qualities, that henceforth he must be measured by the activities which he carried on in the domain of pure thought. And this recognition of mental attributes as the most worthy, the most exalted characters of human personality, could not fail to impress itself upon the conception of deity already undergoing deanthropomorphization. More and more, therefore, in the higher mind of the race, the Divine Being, not only losing his former bodily form, but yielding even the grosser attributes of personality with which he has been invested, becomes for the thought of man a psychical being in the deepest sense of that term. Anthropomorphism, or man-likening, passes away, and in its place comes psychomorphism, or mind-likening.

Two aspects are thus recognizable in the mental interpretation of the environment: on the one hand an aspect which may be called causal, since it seeks the source of the power exerted by Nature forces and objects; on the other, an aspect which is obviously formal, its main significance being that it condenses, so to speak, groups of qualities into a single mental sign. The causal aspect yields, in howsoever simple or complex a form, a theory of the cosmos or of its parts; the formal aspect is no more than a means, ready at hand, in the visible bodies of animals and men for facilitating the use of that theory in processes of thought. Hence we may regard vitalism, animism, psychomorphism as so many stages of man's attitude toward the external system, corresponding with the degree of his power to apprehend the more abstract as distinguished from the more particular and superficial characters of things that come within the range of his knowledge. In the first, he explicitly recognizes vitality, the most obvious character of Nature force; in the second, subsuming vitalism, he raises the soul life to the place of honor; in the third, subsuming both vitalism and animism, he emphasizes in psychomorphism the highest human qualities which his mind enables him to recognize.

The passage from the idea of multiplicity to that of unity is itself an inseparable part of the total process. As at the beginning man reads vitality into the separate objects and forces of Nature, without any thought of their underlying unity, so he regards as discrete, unconnected, objectively unrelated, the multifarious souls with which, in his thought, these various powers of the environment have come to be animated. But in course of time, by an inner necessity of intellectual growth, relations come to be perceived between the forces of Nature, likenesses are recognized between the functions of spirits and deities--between the powers put forth and the results achieved. The result is a process of coalescence which, to describe it in the briefest way, first merges a large number of spirit-evolved gods into a smaller number of relatively independent divinities, forms these into pantheons of gods each subordinated to a superior, and finally unites all beings regarded as divine in the single, all-comprehending, omniscient and omnipotent Deity of monotheism.

In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustrated by the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward Nature also holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, in seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been forced to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to be living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect the indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an analogous transformation. The divine selfishness--the "_remota ab nostris rebus_"--long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously correlated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient characters of the later phases of monotheism. The original indifference of Deity toward ethical issues--a widespread feature of the earlier religious conceptions--could not but pass away with the moral stagnation of the ancient communities out of which it had arisen. So the comparatively new thought of a God definitely identified in his aims and activities with the cause of moral reform is no less obviously a result of the new attitude of man himself toward problems of social improvement; while the persistence with which, in human thought, morals remain associated with religion sufficiently illustrates the extent to which man's view of each has been determined by the self-knowledge which underlies his attitude toward both. Note also, finally, the manifest relation in which our human thought regarding mind and body has always stood toward conceptions of a world-soul, and then the dependence of man's view of the relation of God to the world upon the knowledge of his own planet and of its place in the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the old geocentric theory of the cosmos--regarded the heavens as a set of spheres revolving around a flat earth--the thought of a deity outside the world related to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly devised piece of clockwork which he had brought into existence, was inevitable. But when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth century co-operated with the revelations of Galilei to secure the final triumph of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the world-order, the ancient view of Deity as external to his creation gave place to the essentially modern conception of his immanence.

If now we attentively examine the progress above described, we shall find that the earliest attitude of the human mind toward the external system tends in the latest to repeat itself on a higher plane and with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unification and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, while animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism. These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, or, at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world; while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern forms of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The intellectual outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism, since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic characters--the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given way to the process of mind-likening. On the subjective side of mental inquiry we get psychomorphic monotheism, or what may be called theological pantheism; while on the objective side we reach scientific pantheism, or monism. It is true that the psychomorphism of scientific monism is reached by a process different from that which has culminated in the mind-likening of theological pantheism. Yet in both cases there is the same projection of intelligence into the external system as a means of comprehending it. And as the intelligence of atoms implies their vitality, we really return in scientific monism to the vitalistic attitude of the primitive observer of Nature. The salient difference between the two views is this: that while early man subsumed under his concept of vitality only the rudest characters thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist connotes in all their richness the ideas associated with mind.

Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos.

At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved in the process here described. If man can not know the external system to which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to himself--save by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he discovers between his own body and its activities, and the world with its activities--are we not committed by our very nature as organisms to all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other words, every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, be rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, with what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic and psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process as its very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon us no such dilemma. Man is the helpless "measure of the universe" only to the extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That knowledge must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but that man must always mistake the subjective vesture with which things are clothed by the senses for the things themselves is an inference which the whole history of thought negatives. While his life remained simple, primitive man could regard appearances as realities without prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his knowledge. Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew in complexity, the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto power over the deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At first accepted with little or no demur, these deliverances came more and more to be challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and finally, by expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the beginning, there was developed that way of dealing with the testimony of appearances which we call the objective method. The evidence previously accepted had been, though on the whole useful, in large measure misleading. For in appearances men saw and felt mainly what Nature was for them, and only to a minor degree what the external world was for and in itself. The great need of the investigator of Nature is to know what things are independently of man, in order to know how they act on one another, as a means of knowing how they will act on the human organism, and how that organism may react on them in the interest of its own life. The prejudice done by implicit reliance on sense testimony arose out of the fact that it presented objects as largely unrelated to each other--as so much being, rather than as so much doing, acting and interacting, determining and interdetermining. It became the function of reason to develop, out of the material furnished by the senses, a knowledge of the true nature of the system external to man and involving him in its scope which we call universe. In the carrying out of this function the analogical process has remained, but the analogies utilized, from being likenesses between what things seem to be to the senses, have more and more become analogies between propositions made regarding what things do, regarding how things act upon, are related to and determine each other.

Our knowledge of Nature, therefore, illustrates progress from a stage in which external objects are viewed as so much doing--from a stage in which they seem more or less isolated, more or less independent of each other--to a stage in which we know them as acting and interacting, and therefore, by virtue of this action and interaction, as interrelated and interdependent. It was because man had to begin with the thought of the world around him as a series of unconnected aspects that he fell into the error of regarding every object as containing within itself the powers which it put forth; it was by gradually progressing to the knowledge of the external system as a process that he discovered how inextricably the smallest "flower in the crannied wall" is linked to its vastest environment, and how dependent must be the mechanism of the molecule, as well as of the solar system, upon the whole universe Power which we call cosmos.

Thus also is it with man's method of interpreting the external world system. At first unable to fully perceive his own relation to that system, as part of his inability to perceive general cosmic relations, and therefore viewing himself as more or less independent of Nature--as something imposed upon it rather than as something arising out of it--he naturally sought to force it for purposes of explanation into the narrow limits of his knowledge of himself, of his feelings, his thoughts, his institutions. But as he grew in the power to comprehend his place in the system of things--to understand the way in which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other, together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related to the universe--he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate himself to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole method and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the universe. That he has come at last, wielding the objective method, to be its measurer, is the culmination of a struggle between false and true ways of interpreting Nature which has had the whole history of human thought for its arena, and for its final triumph the establishment of the objective or scientific method of investigation upon impregnable foundations.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Codrington. The Melanesian Languages.

[B] See Henle. Poetische Personification.

[C] Contributions to the Ethnology and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley. Dr. F. V. Hayden, 1862.

[D] The Native Calendars of Central America and Mexico. Daniel G. Brinton.

[E] Popular Science Monthly, vol. xlv, article Astronomy of the Incas.

[F] Les Origines Indo-Européennes. Pictet, p. 568.

[G] See a paper by G. K. Schneider in vol. ii of Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie.

FROM SERFDOM TO FREEDOM.

BY EDWARD BICKNELL.

However keen our interest in the problems arising out of the recent Spanish war, and however earnest our study of the policy to be pursued toward our new dependencies, we should not forget that the problems pressing for a solution before the war are still with us. The labor question, which then commanded so much of our thought, is still unsettled, and is by no means dwarfed by the subjects now upon every lip. Rather, as has been shown in an article in a recent number of this magazine, this question really forms one of the most important elements of the present situation, and should not be lost sight of in shaping public policy. We are entering upon an untilled field as far as our institutions are concerned, and we have the opportunity to start on a higher level in treating the relations of capital and labor in our new possessions, if we have the wisdom to know how, and the courage to do as well as we know.

It will help us in a consideration of the present status of the laborer and of his future if we study his past, beginning, if not with Adam, at least with the laborer's entrance into English history as a distinct class. Any one at all familiar with Green's Short History of the English People will see how much use I have made of that instructive and fascinating work. And if I tell only an old story, it may still be of value to many of us in recalling facts almost forgotten, and a help to others whose vision into the past is limited. Brushing away the cobwebs in the old attic of our father's house usually brings to light treasures the recollection of which had slipped from our minds.

The free laborer, the man who works for wages, for whom and where he chooses, did not exist as a class until within about six hundred years. In the early days the laborer was tied to the soil where he was born. Such a thing as a laborer going about to seek work where he would, or having much to say about his master or his wages, was usually out of the question.

At a very early day the towns or boroughs of England had preserved old rights, or regained them, which the rural part of England had lost, and in general serfage could not exist there as it did in the country round them. Trade and manufacture, such as they were in that day, did not make the demand for labor which was made by the agricultural pursuits of the country or in the castles of the nobility. So we do not find in the towns of the eleventh or twelfth century the large labor class we do to-day. In general we may fairly say that the labor class began in the country.

The manorial system had divided the rural part of England for cultivation and general order into large estates. The lord of the manor occupied a part of the estate for his own demesne and divided the rest among his villeins or serfs, who in return were obliged to render services to him. It is not necessary for my purpose to enter into any long description or discussion of the different relations existing between different tenants and their overlord, or the differences existing under Saxon or Norman rule. The general relation of lord of the manor and his tenants or villeins or serfs is the main point to be observed. The villeins or serfs of the manor cultivated the lord's home farm or demesne, filled his barn, cut his wood, and did all his work. "These services were the labor rent by which they held their lands." Some of these tenants, the villeins, were obliged to work on the lord's demesne at harvest only and to help plow and sow, while the others, the serfs, to speak in general terms, were obliged to help on the home farm or in the castle the year round.

In course of time the use of a certain parcel of land by the tenant and a right to pasturage and so forth on the one hand, and the amount and kind of service required on the other, became definitely regulated by custom; and instead of the use of the land being a mere indulgence given to the tenant to be taken away from him on any whim of his lord, it became a definite right in the land which must be respected and could be pleaded at law.

"The number of teams," and so forth, "the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be entered on the court roll of the manor, a copy of which became the title deed of the villein." So after a while instead of "villein" he became a "copyholder."