Part 54

The answer to be given to the first question is plain. The instructors are to be considered the experts, if anybody can claim the title. Upon them, therefore, devolves the duty to take the lead. This they have already commenced to do. The very existence of a National Educational (Teacher’s) Association is in itself irrefutable proof that the opinions advanced by me, have, in some way and to some extent, asserted themselves for some time. How this has been done and what has been effected, I do not feel called upon to discuss. I merely state that while I appreciate what it has done and expect from it still more in the future, I am firmly convinced that the goal can never be reached if we are to content ourselves with what this organisation is capable of achieving. This will be deemed the less disparaging, if I furthermore state that, in my opinion, the end could no more be attained by any other organisation acting singlehanded. Hunting for any one device which will as certainly effect a cure as patent medicines claim to cure bodily ailments, is but to waste time. The evil has to be attacked from many points and in many ways, if sanitation is to set in.

While I am fully persuaded of this, I am, however, on the other hand as firmly convinced that nothing will be of avail if the Universities do not step forward, heading the column of attack and adding compulsion to suasion. The reform has to be worked from the top downward. At present the law is, to a great extent, dictated by the schools of the lower grade to those of the higher. This must be reversed. The Universities must insist upon getting the proper material for doing what in their judgment is the proper work. They must cease fitting themselves to what the schools are pleased to send them. By closing their doors against all applicants whom they do not really deem adequately prepared, they must compel the schools, either to take down from their portals the inscription “fitting school,” or to mend their ways and furnish their pupils the kind and the amount of instruction they ought. A University that meekly submits to travel on whatever roads some hundreds of schools, which all more or less follow their own notions, happen to think good enough, never can be a University except in name. No institution has a moral right to the proud name of University that does not, consciously and determinately, do all that is in its power to direct its educational policy solely by what the civilisation of the age and the true interests of the nation require.

I wish the old maxim _ultra posse nemo obligatur_ did not compel me to say “to do all that is in its power,” for I am but too well aware how deplorably little that is in many cases. State Universities are subject to another will, and this other will is apt to have very much its own notions as to how much a University may be allowed to cost, and to determine the standard of the University entirely by the local standard of schools. Other Universities, though legally their own masters, are practically restrained as much or even more by implacable facts. No University can entirely dispense with students, and the endowment of more than one University forbids its making light of the number of students it can secure. Being to some extent dependent upon the students for their maintenance, they cannot afford to be very fastidious in regard to the standard of schools they try to enlist into their constituency. But there is also a goodly number of Universities whose position is in absolutely every respect so strong that they can enter the lists without any risk whatever to themselves. Whether they stop growing for a while or even decline in numbers for some years does not affect their future in the least. They are so much in quest by students that the fitting schools are sure to make haste to meet their requirements, if these rise above their curriculum. To move on in wild leaps would, of course, be foolish. But so long as these Universities do not do that they never need to look backward in their onward march; their whole constituency of schools must follow close upon their heels, because they cannot afford to bolt and drop out. The more the leading Universities proceed upon a concerted plan, the larger the circle would grow, within which their joint pressure would be irresistible: the strength of each would be doubled by pressing on, shoulder to shoulder with the others, on the same lines. At the same time it will make it correspondingly easier for the weaker ones to follow in their wake. How could it fail to make an impression upon those on whom they depend, if they can back their pleas by urging the practical unanimity of all the foremost institutions of the country as to the right course to take? The more the leading Universities are united, not only as to the scope and method of their own work, but also as to what is to be considered the proper preparation for University work, the more will deviations from the rules laid down by them come to imply to public opinion inferiority of standard; and if there is a whip under which American communities smart, it is this. As to this would be added the missionary influences of the alumni sent from the leading Universities into all parts of the republic, it would be strange indeed, if the idea were not constantly to spread and to cast deeper root, that to adequately provide for the educational needs of the country, it is necessary consciously to create and systematically to foster a tendency, by the free action of public opinion, more and more to harmonise education, in developing it everywhere and in all its ramifications into a thoroughly organic structure.

I am prepared to hear the opinions I have ventured to advance strenuously contested and, perhaps, even mercilessly ridiculed by many. The open antagonists, however, cause me but little uneasiness. I fear only one thing, i. e. that those who more or less endorse my criticisms and agree with me as to what is desirable, will be induced by the arduousness of the work to persuade themselves that it is impossible to bring about such a reform. To them I should say: Where there is a will, there is a way, and the American people _must_ be brought to will this reform, because every year a portentous word is becoming more true and of greater import: “the age of perils is past, but the age of difficulties has set it.”

H. VON HOLST.

FOOTNOTES:

[88] Commencement address at the Nebraska State University, June 7, 1893.

MEANING AND METAPHOR.

Professor Huxley supposes[89] “that so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions.” He finds that “the science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages.” The difference he sees is “that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality.” He then goes on to warn us against dealing with symbols as though they were “real existences.”

Few indeed are free from reproach in this matter, so far as reproach is deserved at all in the general unconsciousness of what constitutes the danger. Few see the question to be vital or the danger to be urgent; and even those who do are apt to deny that the search for a remedy can be a crusade worth attempting; the very idea seems Utopian or pedantic. On the one hand, teachers as a rule do not take their own analogies and metaphors seriously. Both the literary and scientific, as well as the philosophic and historical instinct tell against their doing so. In their eyes figures have either faded into indifferent abstractions, or they are obviously pictorial and merely rhetorical. But the average reader is apt to take them at the foot of the letter. He is usually unaware both of the extent to which he literalises and of the curious inconsistencies which his literalising involves. So he makes his inferences with alight heart, and wonders, perhaps, at the resulting confusion without suspecting its true cause.

Would that the real state of the case and its practical consequences could be pressed home to all with such force, that whatever be our line of work or thought or expression we should strive in earnest to mend matters. At least, we might begin by learning better what part symbolism plays in the rituals of expression, and ask ourselves what else is language itself but symbolism, and what it symbolises. We should then examine anew the relations of the “symbolic” to the “real”; of image, figure, metaphor, to what we call literal or actual. For this concerns us all. Imagery runs in and out, so to speak, from the symbolic to the real world and back again. As matters stand, we never know where we are because we know so little where our phrases or our words are; indeed, perhaps they and we are “neither here nor there.” Or, if we do know where we are, we cannot be sure that our hearer or reader knows where he is. He, too, is probably “neither here nor there.” He often praises or agrees with us in the wrong place or the wrong manner. That is worse than being complained of or differed from; it is difficult to repudiate approval. Nor can we take refuge in lucidity and fancy that the clear must be the true. In the long run and in the cases which _signify_ most, there is no escape through merely lucid style or method. The “luminous” speaker or writer, the “forcible” orator or essayist, the moment he tries to convey to the public mind a thought which is really new, will find himself hampered by his very clearness itself. His ideas are controverted on assumptions not really his; or he himself is misled in subtle ways by what he assumes in others.

Thus, by an instructive paradox, the clearest writer is often the most controversial; and he wonders at our perverseness as, while we admire his power and his “style,” we wonder at the perverseness in him. We possibly agree with him in ways we do not suspect; he possibly agrees with us in senses he ignores. Such a writer may pride himself on a chary use of metaphor, or on a carefully sharp distinction between “image” and “thing” or “object.” But he is liable to forget the danger dogging him even here. One is tempted to say that there is only one term more figurative as well as more ambiguous than “metaphorical,” and that is “literal.” Most certainly much that is called “literal” is tinged with the figurative in varying degrees, not always easy to distinguish, even with the help of context. The word “literal” itself is indeed a case in point. It has rarely, if ever, any reference to writing.

The question is, whether this state of things is quite so inevitable as most of us seem to think. Certainly, so long as we are content to live in the fool’s paradise of supposing that only the perverse, the prejudiced, the stupid, or the ignorant can possibly mistake our meaning, and that our misreadings of others are simply due to their “obscurity,” or “quibbling,” or literary incapacity, we shall ourselves contribute to the hopelessness of the situation. But this is a subject which cannot be dealt with in an incidental way; it is rather a hope for the future, that one of the most practically serviceable of subjects—that of Meaning, its conditions and its changes—shall be seriously taken up. Then, indeed, we may get back to the first of all questions, and that which is most pregnant of helpful answers; that which needs asking more than any other if good work is to be done in this day of universal “unsettlement”:—What do we really mean? On all sides dead calms are stirred and ruffled, dead levels upheaved or depressed; nothing (happily) can hope to escape the wave of quickening force. So before long we may well be asking this question in good earnest; and when we do we can but be the better, even if we must needs submit in some cases where we may have been prematurely positive, to be content (for the moment) with the answer: We do not really know.

The fact is, that we have been postulating an absolute Plain Meaning to be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have been virtually assuming that our hearers and readers all share the same mental background and atmosphere. We have practically supposed that they all look through the same inferential eyes, that their attention waxes and wanes at the same points, that their associations, their halos of memory and circumstance, their congenital tendencies to symbolise or picture, are all on one pattern. Verily, we need a “Critique of Plain Meaning”!

Again we _quote_ on the same assumption. Unless the language of our author is obviously archaic; unless his allusions unmistakably betray a different life-context, a different social “milieu,” in short, a different mental world, we claim him or we repudiate him on the same principle. We take his words, we take his phrases, we fill them out with the same content as our own, we make him mean precisely what we ourselves mean. And be it noted that it is always what we mean _now_. That this in any way varies from what we meant at some time when, e. g., our attention was differently focussed, rarely enters our heads.

We shall, I suppose, admit that until lately there was one very good reason for this state of things. Only the exceptional mind (if any); only the mind which could not make itself fully understood by its contemporaries, and would risk being reckoned crazy or criminal if it spoke “plainly,” had any suspicion that this way of looking at things was being gradually invalidated by the general extension of the critical domain. The history of language, its relation to thought; the scope of expression and representation, the function of the figurative and symbolic; the growth of all means of mental communion from the simplest rudiments of gesture or cry to the highest point of intellectual complexity,—all this was either ignored or taken for granted on radically insecure bases.

Again, while the underlying conditions of language must be looked for in the domain of psycho-physics, that science had not yet come into existence. Even now it is but feeling its way and putting forth tentative hypotheses, warning us, as it does, so that they are liable to be constantly modified and occasionally revolutionised. And what does it realise, first and foremost? That our difficulties on the very threshold of the inquiry are, as usual, largely those of language. On all sides we have to use, as best we may, modes of expression that inevitably convey ambiguous meanings even to the thoughtful, even to the trained mind, which cannot but carry with them a background of outgrown or disproved premises, vitiating more or less every conclusion that we draw from them. The very phrases which are our only shorthand for the vast oratory of nature and experience betray us in the using. We have taken them as though they were like numerals invariable in meaning, thus supposing them subject to a permanent uniformity. We have taken them as though they were without a history, merely fortuitous labels or symbols of unanimous consent; the accepted sense, we think, being easily ascertainable, always persistent, and wholly sufficient for practical purposes. In any case we strangely assume that we may safely play upon all the chords of imagery, reserving without difficulty for serious use a body of terms which are direct expressions of “fact.”

But the suggestion now made is that this is precisely one of the most dangerous of presuppositions. It is not the man who has mystified himself, or who wishes to mystify others; it is not the man who confounds the reality of the logical with that of the actual; it is not the man who takes emotion for proof and notion for fact; it is none of these, but the man who is clear on such points and sees that they must be drawn out into clues and followed up to the uttermost, if we would know where we are—who is beginning to see that the paramount need of the moment is the “torpedo-shock” of the question, What do we really mean? He knows that the off-hand vagueness and ready-made confusion, which too often from sheer ignorance usurp the name of common-sense, are in the long run its most deadly enemies.

We may look forward then with a new hope to the rise of a systematic inquiry on the subject of meaning and its changes. This would entail the much-needed work of classifying metaphor, and might even be found to point to the existence of a third value, neither wholly literal, nor wholly figurative, as that of a large proportion of ordinary expression. From this and like causes, in this age of rapid changes due mainly to scientific conquest, we can all readily put to each other questions to which either a “yes” or a “no” must be equally misleading. And men of science have specially realised this, since many a time they have been unjustly credited with evasion, or with untenable or immoral views, because they either answered to a “plain question”: “In one sense, yes; in another, no,” or else gave an answer which could not fail to be misunderstood by a mind which was governed by unconscious survivals. So far as we are in touch with modern culture, we no longer mean what we must have meant in the days before Copernicus, when we say, for instance, “the sun rises.” When we speak of infection, we no longer mean what we used to mean before microbes had been heard of. When we talk of “heat,” we no longer mean what we used to mean even fifty years ago. And when a man says that he believes in the sun, the planets, the cosmos, in the heavens and the earth, in mind and matter, in soul and body, in spirit and flesh, he cannot, if he would, mean just what his forefathers meant, or indeed anything at all absolutely and finally. Whether we will or no, the meaning of such terms is changing on our very tongues, and ever swaying between the extremes which we call literal and metaphorical; “heaven,” e. g., ranging in value from sky to human destiny; “earth,” from soil to the visible Home of Man. We may appeal, and are right to appeal to “hard, dry” facts; but we perforce put something out of ourselves even into these. They become “facts” under the quickening touch of “mind,” while that emerges from a dim world of prepossession, bequeathing us many a primitive legacy from pre-intelligent sentience, and perhaps from little-suspected sources lying yet further back. For instance, primitive terror in its “superstitious” forms tended to represent man as inferior to and dependent on powers of some sort;—and this was true to natural order in the fact that his very world was not self-centred and was dependent for its best boons upon a greater than itself. As language advanced, he began quite naturally to express his meaning in “appropriate metaphors”; to use, e. g., the figures of light and then of sight to describe what he had, as we now say, “in his mind,” or what sense-messages, as we now say, had “put into his head.” For “something told him” that light, as it had been the first pleasure, was also the great means of life.[90] And he “saw,” in however grotesque a guise, the unbroken continuity of the organic and the inorganic, and perhaps even more clearly than most of us yet do, that of so-called “matter” and so-called “mind.” Perhaps in some cases, therefore, he chose his imagery better than (after long ages of dualism carried to the splitting-point) we generally do now.

He knew again that the senses after all, stern masters though they were while life was so hard to live, had very narrow limits; and that the world was in some sense fuller and richer of life than it had seemed to be as known directly through them.[91] And then he wondered,—and began to ask. He was the first Questioner. As Prof. Max Müller says,[92] “the greater the savagery, the dullness, the stupidity with which _Homo sapiens_ began, the greater the marvel at what must have been from the first, though undeveloped, in him, and made him in the end what we find him to be in the men of light and leading of our own age.” The mere fact of the question is the riddle to be solved. For certainly the beasts had not taught him either to wonder or to ask. And not merely insatiable questioning but something more here rises to challenge our attention and to demand reflection. Man is the first critic because he is the first idealist; the first to be discontented, to protest, to see life as a “ravelled end,” as something which is incomplete and speaks of something more. Surely in any case the step of all steps, the deepest yet the narrowest line to cross is the step from something noticed or found, from something which happens or appears, from something which somehow affects us, excites us, to its significance.

Of course in one sense it is impossible to fix any definite moment as that of the advent of this “significance.” Animals interpret each other’s aspect and gestures, often indeed with a subtle precision which to some extent we have lost. But interpretation in the intellectual sense becomes, from our present point of view, that which makes us really human. Our progress, our ascent, is mainly marked in this. The root-question to ask in gauging levels of humanity is, how much can a given man interpret or translate, of a world that teems with meaning? How much can he truly classify and relate, how much can he rightly infer and conclude, how much can he account for, explain, and fruitfully apply? For after all, results must be our tests. Claims and credentials are nothing, unless they can show this warrant; whereas truth which can use all facts alike is the very means of survival. Man begins by doing, by acting out impulse; then he learns to “think” little by little, observing, questioning, pondering, testing his way onward and upward. And throughout his patient, often painful journey, he is himself perpetually challenged. Nature’s stimulating appeals rain upon him ceaselessly from every side; she orders him to master all her meanings. He responds:—at first again, “blindly,” but ever rising to higher grades of answer. Both deficiency and error are no doubt more or less present in all mental response to actual fact—that is, in all experience. But the essence of sanity from the first lies in corrective power. Everywhere there is either absence of notice, absence of response, or there is experimental activity (broadly speaking) corrected at once; automatically or by the combined effect of the related organic activities. For instance, in health, if in using the hand, one finger accidentally goes astray, the coördinating muscles promptly recall it to a “sense of duty.” We know how the same rule works in speech and writing. Therefore, unless “voluntary” and “capricious” (or “willing” and “wilful”) are synonyms, the advent of volition ought not to mean the abrogation of this rule.

It is, however, obvious that “natural selection” can only operate in cases where death or sterility is the consequence of failure in adaptation and appropriate reaction, or segregation the consequence of excessive variation. But the point here is, why does not a tendency to correction, thus established, survive automatically in incipient imagination and therefore in language? It seems almost a burlesque of popular notions of “free will” to suppose that the moment the death-penalty is taken off, the new-born intelligence, unique in adapting power, should go astray persistently without let or hindrance. Many now merely formal or even jocular customs still prevailing[93] testify, as legacies from a remote time of danger needing to be averted, to the strength of tendencies organised during myriads of generations under the pressure of the struggle for life. Why does not this apply to language?